That’s not quite the slogan of Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind.

Hassabis famously argues we should ‘solve intelligence’ - meaning, create AGI - ‘and then use artificial intelligence to solve everything else,’ where ‘everything else’ includes climate change, disease, fusion, etc. DeepMind is the corporate articulation of that mission.

I have to admit, it’s a seductive idea - that the only thing between us and utopia is smarts, that we could live in paradise if we could only see how to build it.

I hope he’s right. I fear he’s wrong.

I fear that we are in fact easily intelligent enough to stop warming our planet - if only we actually wanted to. That the we fight wars not because we’re too dumb, but that we’re too scared and angry - and that poverty is a consequence of our greed rather than our short-sightedness.

Isn’t it just as possible that we solve Artificial Intelligence, and use it to exacerbate everything else - to go faster in the wrong direction?

Most of our problems seem to stem not from a lack of intelligence, but a shortage of empathy for those we don’t (or can’t) know. Perhaps if we solved for caring enough to do the right thing, then we could really could create an AI utopia.

But I wear mass-produced clothes, and use an iPhone, and eat the occasional burger, knowing that they were all likely made in conditions that I could probably never tolerate. I’m usually able to do all of this without thinking - because even though I think I care, I’m not actually confronted by those realities. And would more intelligence - artificial, or my own - change that?

I doubt it, and even the sadness you might detect in these confessions isn’t for others, but grief for my own flaws.

I obviously don’t think we can actually ‘solve empathy’. Like, what would we build?

A Large Listening Model? Or MDMAi?

Who knows. Perhaps we’re just messy primates doing the best we can with our Dunbar’s number.

Psychonauts — I need your help.

I’m nearing the end of the first draft of my first book, Psychedelics: The Essential Knowledge (MIT Press, forthcoming). It unpacks the long history, weird culture, varied uses, and strange science behind drugs like LSD, mescaline, ketamine, and MDMA — and asks why we’re all talking about them again.

Each chapter opens with a short quote or reference showing how psychedelics have shaped the world around us in surprising ways. There’s no shortage of profound lines to choose from — but it doesn’t take long to notice that most of them come from white men…

Don’t get me wrong: I love white men. Some of my best friends are white guys. But Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, and Richard Alpert Ram Dass don’t exactly need my help for more airtime.

So I’m looking for other voices — lines that are insightful, surprising, funny, or grounding. They don’t need to be about psychedelics, just relevant to the terrain of perception, consciousness, or knowledge. Here are a few I’ve been considering:

“We have drunk Soma, we have become immortal; we have obtained the light; we have found the gods.”

Rig Veda, ca. 2000–1000 BCE

“Everyone thought I was crazy, I bit this guy’s ear off… Once I got introduced to the shrooms, my whole life changed. To think where I was – almost suicidal – to this now. Isn’t life a trip, man? It’s amazing medicine.”

Mike Tyson, 2021

“You ever have that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake, or still dreaming?”

“All the time. It’s called mescaline; it’s the only way to fly.”

The Matrix, 1999

“What comes … is not always a revelation of something new; you’re more liable to find yourself reminded of simple things you know and forgot. Truths that long ago became clichés, so you stopped paying attention.”

Ann & Sasha Shulgin, 1990

“Normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

William James, 1902

If you have a favourite line that captures the wonder, confusion, or comedy of altered consciousness — from any tradition, era, or culture — I’d love to hear it. Drop it in the comments or send me a note, and if I use it I’d love to acknowledge you in the book!

Some are charming, some are seductive… and some quietly warp research, policy, expectations — and even public safety.

While working on my forthcoming MIT Press book (Psychedelics: The Essential Knowledge), I’ve been thinking about the ones I hear most often.

But I really want to know - which have you come across? Which are you not sure about?

1. “Psychedelics are safe.”

Some psychedelics have no known lethal dose and aren’t habit-forming — unlike certain legal drugs. But low toxicity isn’t the same as safe: they can trigger mental health crises, catalyze accidents, or facilitate abuse.

And then there are drugs like ketamine, MDMA, and ibogaine — which some classify as psychedelics — that can be habit-forming, toxic, or both.

2. “Natural psychedelics are better.”

Psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca aren’t automatically “gentler” or “better” than LSD or MDMA. There’s no evidence that synthetics as a class are more harmful to the brain; some natural plants are outright deadly.

That said, the stories we tell about a substance can shape set and setting — and that can matter as much as the actual chemistry.

3. “Magic mushrooms helped humans evolve.”

Terrence McKenna’s ‘Stoned Ape’ theory says early humans tripped their way to bigger brains and sharper eyesight. It’s fun to tell — but there’s zero substantive evidence.

4. “Psychedelics dissolve your ego.”

Sometimes. But many people don’t experience ego dissolution, and some come out with an ego boost. You might even meet a self-appointed messiahs of the “psychedelic ego-system.”

5. “Psychedelics can save the world.”

Can they solve climate change, political divides, or war? No.

They can shift perspectives, but often in the direction someone was already leaning — and not always for the better.

Even if epiphanies were universally pro-social, lasting change requires coordinated action at scale — something psychedelics can’t deliver alone.

6. “The right way to do psychedelics is…”

Five-ish grams of shrooms in the forest? 137.6mg of MDMA with your therapist? Ayahuasca in the Amazon? At home with mail-order ketamine?

There’s no one-size-fits-all “best.” Even clinical trials haven’t settled on a single ideal. New models are emerging, old ones are being revived.

The wrong way? Anything that ignores risk and safety.

And again… this whole post was a cheeky way to ask you, dear reader, which psychedelic myths do the rounds in your circles. Shoot me a line or comment below!

The Health Secretary is dangerously wrong about a lot. He seems wilfully blind to the kind of basic high-school science people should know for their own health - nevermind for looking after 250 million others.

But he understands something that too many science advocates under-value: the importance of empathy. And that’s what makes him so persuasive to so many.

RFK’s vaccine skepticism, for instance, taps into something important about modern medicine - it’s often wildly counterintuitive. 

Despite being arguably the most effective public health intervention in human history, childhood vaccines can sometimes sound weird.

Imagine you hadn’t learned to take them for granted, hadn’t been shown how they work, and here’s what you heard when someone explained them to you:

“We’re going to take your healthy toddler and protect them from a disease - one that they’ve actually never had - by sticking this metal needle in their arm and injecting them with some mysterious fluid.”

“Yeah, I know it might hurt and scare them, but don’t worry - we made the liquid out of a fragment of a bug that can kill you, and maybe some eggs. Okay that sounds strange, but I promise it’ll be fine. After they get a bit ill first.”

“What’s that - you want to know what happens if the vaccine works? Well here’s the thing, this is more about *stopping* something from happening, and in science we don’t prove negatives, obviously…”

Decades of modern science have shown that, despite their weirdness, vaccines are astonishingly safe and effective. They save around 4 million lives a year - that’s almost eight every minute. But if you didn’t know that, or didn’t have the time or privilege to engage with it, your common sense might tell you that vaccines just feel like a bad idea. 

They would feel like an even worse idea if the messenger was a health system that’s repeatedly failed your community.

Or a government you don’t trust. 

Or an ‘expert’ who calls you dumb.

To be clear, many scientists and public health workers are already working hard to build trust. But as a culture, we still often lead with authority, instead of care. Too often, mainstream science responds to fear with facts, and to mistrust with moral superiority. 

We’ve ended up in a place where expressing concern about your kids’ health can get you lumped in with the tin-foil hat brigade. And when that happens, Health Secretary RFK Jr doesn’t even need to understand high-school science, let alone vaccines (lucky for him…). 

He just needs to understand that people are worried - and to show he cares about those worries more than science does. And guess who wins in a political fight between condescending expertise and (what looks like) empathic ignorance?

We should keep educating people about vaccines, modern medicine, and the strange grandeur of science. We should keep countering misinformation, and calling out deliberate lies. 

But if we want to counter RFK’s agenda, wringing our hands isn’t enough. We also need to remember what so many brilliant vaccine researchers, health workers, and science communicators know: 

Anxieties aren’t irrational, or post-truth, or anti-science. They’re human.

Humans use psychedelics. But do psychedelics ‘use’ humans too? Or, another way of asking it; how do psychedelics spread, and affect our world?

One of the perks of writing a book on psychedelics is that I get to nerd out with people like Dr Leor Roseman. We zoomed this week; Leor on his houseboat in London, me on my floating home in Sausalito, so Leor dubbed it a “B2B call” - boat-to-boat.

He also reminded me of this line from Yuval Noah Harari:

“It’s not clear whether we domesticated wheat, or wheat domesticated us.”

Harari’s talking about how humans plant wheat, irrigate it, defend it, ship it around the world, sometimes organise our lives around it. We even build religions on it. Wheat gets global dominance; humans get to eat cake. So who’s really winning, y’know?

Leor’s work on what he calls psychedelic diffusion asks a similar question: how does psychedelic use spread, and what are the factors and agents of that spread? Leor explores this question in his provocative ICPR talk. Listening to him, I was reminded of the ongoing dialectic; to what extent are psychedelics just tools we use, versus agents in a co-evolutionary process?

Psychedelic use has shaped rituals, musical and artistic styles, belief systems, startup pitch decks, Substack posts, and more. Some people - especially seasoned psychonauts - will tell you this is partly because plants and fungi are sentient. But you don’t need to go that far to see that these substances shape us. Culture, after all, is full of feedback loops.

Leor’s talk also made me think of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who proposed the concept of the rhizome - a model of culture as a sprawling, mycelium-like network of influence, rather than a neat up-down hierarchy. Unlike a tree, which grows from root to branch in a vertical structure, a rhizome spreads horizontally. In Deleuze’s conception, a rhizome has no center, or authoritative source of hierarchy where someone - or something - is ‘in charge’. 

Deleuze used it as a metaphor for how ideas spread - not from a single source, but through shifting, non-hierarchical connections. It’s a good fit for how psychedelics seem to move through culture; not linearly, but in lateral bursts, across unexpected terrains. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘deterritorialization’ also feels appropriate; psychedelics repeatedly originate in one geography or culture, before detaching from that territory and landing in a new context.

Psychedelics clearly affect humans, and our culture, far beyond an individual trip. From the foundation of the Native American Church to the evolution of Burning Man, from the music of The Beatles to how Stewart Brand’s LSD trip created clamour for the famous ‘Earthrise’ photo, psychedelics have played powerful roles in shaping how we see our selves, our world, and the relationship between the two.

One of the themes I’m exploring in my book is how psychedelics are intertwined with cultures and societies - so, selfishly, I’d love to get your own favourite examples - big or small - of a) how psychedelics have spread, and b) how they’ve affected human societies and cultures.

Feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email!

I’m writing a short book on psychedelics with MIT Press. One of my tasks is to sketch out for the new reader all of the different ways people have used these substances, across different cultures, contexts, and centuries.

Here’s my current working list of psychedelic use-cases:

🧠 Therapeutic & medical

Formal or informal, above-ground or underground, Western or otherwise. Clinical trials, self-treatment, or community/peer-supported healing. Addiction, depression, trauma, and much more.

💡 Creativity & insight

Divergent or unusual thinking, cultural appreciation and expression, new ways of seeing or feeling the world.

🤝 Relational & communitarian

From sacred rites and ceremonies, to couples therapy and group bonding (or mending). In relation, not isolation.

🌌 Spirituality & exploration

Mysticism, religion, and awe. Wondering at the existence of existence, or the nature of nature.

🚀 Productivity & performance

Flow states, confidence boosts, executive retreats. Or just managing to stay sane & on top of things.

🧬 Neuroscience, psychology, & consciousness research

Understanding the brain or mind by (gently?) destabilizing it. A tool for studying brain function, subjective experience, or the “mind at large”.

🔁 Microdosing

Any or all of the above, but dialed down.

🎉 Recreational

Admittedly a little fringe, but I should probably include the utterly impractical - beauty, dancing, joy, love - for the sake of completeness nonetheless. Some people even claim to enjoy this.

These aren’t hard categories - plenty of overlap. But I’d love to know if I’ve missed any, or if you’d slice it differently. Drop a comment or send me an email!

“We are the latest of generations of experimenters who, from before the dawn of history, in every part of the world, have sought for means by which man could alter, explore, and control the workings of his own mind, thus enlarging his experience of the universe. Until recently, however, science has shown only sporadic interest in these matters.”

Humphry Osmond, 1957

The story of how British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term psychedelic is relatively well known: his novel portmanteau of the Greek for mind (psyche) and manifesting (delos), first offered up in a playful rhyming couplet to his friend and correspondent Aldous Huxley:

To fathom Hell or soar angelic,

Just take a pinch of psychedelic.

But in researching my upcoming book Psychedelics (MIT Press, forthcoming), I went looking to see what Osmond himself then said about his definition, and what he was actually trying to capture with his new word.

His 1957 paper, A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychomimetic Agents, turned out to be more than I’d bargained for. Despite the title, Osmond’s not just writing a dry, clinical review; he’s offering a eulogy for forgotten experimenters, a lament for science and medicine, a plea on behalf of the ill, and a call to arms for future researchers.

Reading his introduction, I can’t help but be struck by how little Osmond might be surprised by our contemporary debates and searchings when it comes to these mysterious substances. He writes:

“As I list these treasures of 5000 years of perilous and sometimes fatal searching, think upon those nameless discoverers and rediscoverers, Aztec and Assassin, Carib and berserker, Siberian and Red Indian, Brahmin and African, and many others of whose endeavors even scholars do not know. We inherit their secrets and profit by their curiosity, their courage, and even from their errors and excesses. Let us honor them. They do not appear in any list of references.

There are such substances as soma, hashish, cohoba, ololiuqui, peyote, the Syrian rue, the caapi vine, the fungus teonanacatl, the two Amanitas, pantherina and muscaria, the iboga bean, and the fierce virola snuff obtained from a nutmeglike tree in Amazonia. Who knows what other compounds await the keen inquiries of ethnobotanists such as R. E. Schultes or mycologists such as Gordon Wasson?

With our modern synthetics we are a little safer, though the ground quakes beneath us. These synthetics include mescaline, introduced by Heffter in 1896, the first, I believe, of these agents to be synthesized; harmine or telepathine, an alluring name whose significance I have never understood; Hoffman’s astonishing lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), whose great activity has made homeopathy seem less improbable; hashish, whose still-uncertain active principles should surely be ascertained; TMA, synthesized by Scott and his co-workers of Imperial Chemicals Ltd., Manchester, England, a synthetic that lies in an area intermediate between mescaline and amphetamine and has recently been the subject of a report by J. R. Smythies; bufotenin, isolated from cohoba, a West Indian snuff; unstable adrenochrome; and the subtle adrenolutin.

What an array of substances for daring inquiry! What work for generations to come!

We know little enough about the most familiar of these agents, and there are only vague correlations between the physical and mental changes that they cause. Considering their interest to medicine alone, our lack of information is disquieting, but they are of more than medical significance. They reach out to psychology, sociology, philosophy, art, and even to religion. Surely we are woefully ignorant of these agents and this ignorance must be remedied.

To clinicians such as myself who daily encounter those crippling illnesses that confine hundreds of thousands of unhappy people to dismal and obsolete institutions flattered by the name of hospital, publication of a monograph such as this one is heartening.

Perhaps it means that apathy and neglect are ending, and we may have a chance to apply the immense but often unused knowledge that we already possess regarding the care of the mentally ill, and that we shall get encouragement and support to seek for even more.”

Perhaps.