This is a post from the Ecstatic Integration Substack. To sign up for all our weekly posts, go here When I was 18, I took LSD at a rave, and had a bad trip. I felt irrationally afraid and self-conscious for hours, and went to bed feeling I had permanently…

This January, the World Economic Forum reconvened in Davos. The annual gathering has been criticized as a place where the globalist elite gather to conspire against the rest of us. But Malcolm Collins scoffs at the idea anything important happens there. ‘Davos is where lower-level elites go to be told…

This is a free essay from my Ecstatic Integration substack, which explores how western cultures are going to re-integrate ecstatic and psychedelic experiences after four centuries of marginalization and pathologization. You can sign up for the newsletter here. In 2012, when I was researching a book on ecstatic experiences, I…

Back in 2015, when I was struggling to be a Christian, I interviewed Nicky Gumbel of the Alpha course about the psychology and ethics of ecstatic experiences in Christian churches. Nicky Gumbel is one of the most successful evangelists of his generation. A former barrister, he was until last year…

This is the first interview I did for the Stoic Registry’s monthly newsletter. It’s an interview with a county sheriff called Jesse, who has used Stoicism to cope with his bad temper when dealing with Chicago’s gang-bangers: “I grew up on the north side of Chicago in the early 80s”…

This is an excerpt from my first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, which explores how people use practices from ancient Greek philosophies in modern life. James Stockdale was a young fighter pilot flying bombing missions over North Vietnam, when his F-8 airplane was hit by anti-aircraft fire…

What do you get if you cross the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual with High School Musical? TikTok! Occasionally some data appears that looks so awful it makes you do a doubletake. That was the case for me this week, when the Centre for Disease Control released data suggesting that American…

It’s every liberal parent’s nightmare. One day they happen to glance at their 14-year-old son’s laptop, and they see he is watching videos by Andrew Tate, the mullah of misogyny. They start to notice red flags in their son’s conversation: ‘bitches’, ‘choke-holds’, ‘feminism is cancer’, ‘Hitler wasn’t all bad’. …

This is a story from our Ecstatic Integration newsletter. If you are interested in psychedelics and other forms of ecstatic experience, and how to integrate them into western cultures, sign up here. Ketamine clinics are booming across the US. According to psychedelic fund PsyMed, there were around 20 ketamine clinics…