My girlfriend Kattya at a bookstore in Porto, Portugal I quite often get asked for advice on bringing a book to market. I’ve written four books so far, and had very different experiences with each of them. My first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, took a long…

In 2016, while working on The Art of Losing Control, I conducted a survey on spiritual experiences. The results were interesting — 85% of participants reported having one or more such experience, but 72% said they thought there was still a taboo around such experiences. One evening in the winter…

Last weekend I took part in the Beyond the Brain conference, run by the Scientific and Medical Network, a venerable organisation to which I’m proud to belong. …

This book was born in March 2020, the month when the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic. I had been researching Aldous Huxley for a year or so, and was curious about his support for eugenics. I noticed other New Age thinkers also promoted eugenics in some form or…

Once upon a time there was an obscure mailing list. It only had about 100 people on it, yet in this digital village was arguably the greatest concentration of brain power since fifth-century Athens. There was Hans Moravec, pioneer in robotics; Eric Drexler, pioneer of nanotechnology; Eliezer Yudkowsky, father of…

The accusation that ‘X is a eugenicist’ is thrown around a lot on Twitter these days, as a way to try and cancel someone. For example, here is AI activist Timnit Gebru trying to de-platform longtermist philosophers Nick Bostom and Will MacAskill: This tweet produced an outraged reaction from…

A new biography has just been published of the Huxleys — Thomas, the great Victorian man of science, and his grandson Julian, the great 20th-century public scientist. The book, by Professor Alison Bashford, is quite sympathetic to Julian, who would be cancelled today for his lifelong support for eugenics, if…

This week the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences project launch our study of difficult psychedelic experiences and what helps people who have them. The first step is this online survey. If you’ve had a difficult psychedelic experience, where the difficulties (cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, spiritual etc) lasted for longer than a day, and…

In the 1970s, Timothy Leary, high priest of LSD, starting preaching a new gospel. He become obsessed with the idea of a hierarchy of different genetic castes spread throughout the Earth, at different levels of evolution, culminating in a super-caste of Californians destined to leave Earth and continue their evolution…