Leonard Pickard
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William Leonard Pickard
Leonard Pickard
The Future of Cognitive Freedom with Nick Gillespie
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🎙️ JLS Podcast: Hosted by William Leonard Pickard
🚀 About Nick Gillespie
Nick Gillespie is one of the most influential voices in modern libertarian thought. As Editor-at-Large of Reason Magazine, author, filmmaker, and cultural commentator, he has spent decades exploring the intersection of freedom, individuality, culture, economics, and public policy. Equally comfortable discussing politics, psychedelics, technology, or personal transformation, Gillespie brings a deeply human perspective to questions of autonomy and the future of society.
🗽 Freedom, Responsibility, and Cognitive Liberty
At the heart of Gillespie’s philosophy is a belief in individual autonomy. Whether discussing politics, culture, or drug policy, he argues that human beings should have the freedom to make informed choices about their own lives, bodies, and consciousness. For Gillespie, responsibility and freedom are inseparable; genuine responsibility only exists when individuals are trusted to make meaningful choices for themselves.
🧪 Better Living Through Chemistry
Gillespie discusses his upcoming documentary, Better Living Through Chemistry, which explores humanity’s growing relationship with pharmaceuticals, psychoactive substances, and the deliberate modification of consciousness. He argues that society has already entered an age of neurochemistry, where people increasingly use substances—from coffee and cannabis to Ozempic and psychedelics—to shape mood, performance, focus, health, and identity.
🌿 The Failure of the Drug War
Drawing on decades of observation and research, Gillespie argues that prohibition has consistently failed to achieve its stated goals. Rather than eliminating drug use, prohibition often increases violence, misinformation, black markets, and human suffering. He advocates replacing fear-based narratives with open conversations grounded in education, transparency, personal responsibility, and harm reduction.
🍄 Psychedelics, Transformation, and Personal Growth
Reflecting on his own experiences with psychedelics, Gillespie describes how these substances helped dissolve rigid structures of identity, challenge old assumptions, and create space for personal transformation. He explores the historical role psychedelics played in shaping culture, technology, creativity, and even the early computing revolution, while emphasizing the importance of thoughtful and intentional use.
⚖️ Markets, Discovery, and Human Experimentation
One of Gillespie’s central themes is the idea that free societies function as discovery processes. Just as markets allow innovation to emerge through experimentation, individuals should be free to explore different paths toward meaning, well-being, and self-actualization. Progress, he argues, often comes from unexpected places, and societies flourish when people are allowed to explore rather than conform.
🧠 The Age of Designed Selves
As new compounds, peptides, therapies, and AI-driven drug discoveries emerge, Gillespie believes humanity is entering an era of increasingly personalized self-creation. Rather than seeing this as something unnatural, he views it as a continuation of a long historical trend in which individuals seek greater agency over their bodies, minds, emotions, and identities.
🌐 The Internet, Technology, and Expanding Human Possibility
Gillespie reflects on the revolutionary impact of the internet, describing it as the discovery of an entirely new social space where ideas, communities, and identities could flourish beyond traditional institutions. He sees technology as a powerful force for expanding human freedom, enabling people to connect, learn, create, and build lives that would have been unimaginable in previous generations.
🏛️ Institutions, Authority, and the Future of Freedom
Throughout the conversation, Gillespie warns against the recurring temptation to centralize authority and restrict individual choice. Whether discussing governments, cultural institutions, or medical gatekeepers, he argues that history consistently demonstrates the dangers of excessive control. The future, he believes, will be healthiest when built upon voluntary communities, open information, and trust in individuals rather than top-down management.
🌅 Optimism, Purpose, and the Human Journey
Despite acknowledging the risks associated with technological and cultural change, Gillespie remains profoundly optimistic. He believes humanity is living through one of the most extraordinary periods in history—a time when more people than ever possess the resources, freedom, and opportunity to shape meaningful lives. The challenge is not merely surviving change, but learning how to navigate abundance, choice, and possibility with wisdom.
🏆 Final Takeaways
A fascinating conversation about freedom, consciousness, personal transformation, and the future of human flourishing. Nick Gillespie offers a thoughtful and deeply optimistic vision of a world where individuals are trusted to explore, experiment, and discover who they truly are. His message is ultimately one of empowerment: a freer society is not only more prosperous—it is more creative, more compassionate, and more fully human.
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Good morning and welcome to The Last Alchemist. Today I'm speaking with a dear friend, Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason Magazine, and arguably the most thoughtful voice in American libertarian thought. Nick has spent decades examining how institutions grow, how they overreach, how individuals navigate systems of power. In a movement today where technology and policy and culture are all shifting at once from psychedelics to AI. We're especially interested in how Nick thinks about uh freedom, responsibility, and the future of governance. Nick, great to have you this morning.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, thank you so much. It's uh you know, just it's a a real honor to uh be talking with you in this format, Leonard.
SPEAKER_00Well, I hope to be on your podcast soon. So you're doing a film on drug policy, a very interesting one, which is something I really didn't suspect. Uh uh coming out of a strongly political individual uh such as Shelf. Your film argues for radical individualism uh and drug use.
SPEAKER_03Well, uh radical uh, you know, individual cognitive liberty, maybe, or um, you know, autonomy is a big part of my uh kind of larger philosophical social, cultural, political program. And the idea behind this documentary, which is in transit, we have a rough first rough cut. It it'll be out towards the end of the year. Um, but we're calling it Better Living Through Chemistry, and it is uh, you know, it's a nod to essentially a dynamic that I think has been going on for you know all of my lifetime. I'm 62, I was born in 1963. But you know, it it seems to me that over the course of that period, and certainly the you know, just say the last 50 years, um, we have had more and more drugs come online, both you know, pharmaceutical and street drugs, licit, illicit, legal, illegal, uh, and other means of kind of intervening in our chemistry, you know, our individual chemistry as well as a kind of cultural one. Um, and uh, you know, we we need to take that seriously and become more intentional in what we're doing with our lives, what we're doing with our bodies and minds.
SPEAKER_00Certainly the age of neurochemistry, Nick, uh, you know, and the and the well, goodness, you were six years old or so during its 60s, the revolution. Yeah. But you know, even after that, for for many years, um uh the only thing available is the legacy compounds, uh cannabis, D, uh meth, what have you, heroin. And suddenly around 2000, 2010, we begin to see all these different analogs appear. And now we've got nitrazines and fentanyl and Kratom uh analogs of every description. Uh it's uh new neurochemical world. So yeah. Oh, and and what's what does freedom look like in practice to you? Uh well drug use.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you know, uh part of it, part of it comes from, you know, a basic acknowledgement. And I I was happy to see um an article in the New York Times by Roland Fryer, uh economist at Harvard, uh, where he was talking about how you know the drug war hasn't worked to for a variety of reasons. It doesn't work to stop people from doing drugs, often in destructive ways, but it increases all the costs of uh, you know, a black when when something is illegal, uh you create a black market, and black markets are enforced through violence. Uh, there is lack of information, lack of trust, lack of regul, you know, of both external regulation by something like a government, but also the internal regulations that are more important in every kind of uh economic system or or uh you know cultural system of exchange. And he was, you know, in in the New York Times, which only a couple of weeks ago before Roland Fryer's piece had run a piece about how, you know, the legalizing marijuana was like a big problem. You know, it's a big problem. It was actually, it's probably a bad idea. There aren't that many benefits to it. So, you know, to see this kind of debate being played out in public, you know, in in the most kind of august institutions around is fascinating to me. Um, and I think it's important that we start talking about drug use as something that's on a continuum with all other kinds of uh, you know, things we do to change our consciousness, ultimately to change our chemistry. But I'm, you know, I'm a I'm a literary guy, I'm not a I'm not a scientist. So I I think about it more in terms of how do how do we change our moods, how do we focus our our attention, how do we maximize the performances that we need in a particular moment. And that can come from you know, taking Adderall, or it can come from taking speed, it can come, you know, from having a whiskey or you know, a joint or an edible at the end of the day. Uh, in the in Better Living Through Chemistry, one of the things that we're trying to do is to put drug use on a continuum, uh, kind of from the um uh the Andrew Weil, Winifred Rosen book from Chocolate to Morphine, which I read when I was in college. And that was the uh first book that kind of said, okay, you know, everything is everything that's psychoactive is on a continuum. And let's start looking at that, taking it seriously, and getting good information about what are the effects of this particular compound at this particular dose. And then how do you, you as an individual, figure out what works for you to get you to be the person that you want to be when you need to be that person?
SPEAKER_00Well, Andy has just moved to Santa Fe. We were both uh at the um Lindsay Auditorium uh presenting here a few months ago. I'll probably interview him in this podcast, but uh I was also uh brought up on uh from chocolate and morphine, and that was a seminal act on that. Uh but you beg the question. Uh we've we've long accepted to drink responsibly.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_00Uh the question is, why has that philosophy been so um oddly applied to other substances?
SPEAKER_03Uh yeah, and by oddly applied, you mean not applied.
SPEAKER_00Well, sometimes for better or worse, right?
SPEAKER_03I mean, yeah, because I, you know, I I think this was um, you know, broadly speaking, um, and I and I still talk to a lot of people. I live in New York City, you'll hear, you know, various street sounds in the background, probably, because that's the way the the city is. Um, but um I know a lot of people who are like, well, alcohol has been part of human society, you know, since time immemorial, and we built up a whole series of structures that's deeply enmeshed in our society. And so, you know, we know we can't get rid of it. We tried that with alcohol prohibition, and while it did reduce consumption, it increased harms uh in a pretty dramatic and obvious way. And so many of the people who called for alcohol prohibition, uh, you know, actually called for the end of uh prohibition as well in a you know, in a in like less than 20 years. But then people will say, well, it's different with drugs, uh, you know, and it's different with marijuana because you know, marijuana is now in you know intense and it's in all different forms, things like heroin, things like LST, these are much more powerful compounds, and there's no kind of social knowledge or restraint built into our cultural interactions with them. And you know, there's some truth to that, but it's also, you know, you can say the same thing about the car, and people did. You can say the same thing about computers, you can say the same thing about every technology that has improved or radically transformed human life, typically for the better. I think technologies that tend to stick around, whether we're talking about automobiles or LSD, the ones that stick around tend to benefit people or society in ways that we're not always willing to grant. But so there's that fear of the other uh that comes up in all discussions of drug policy. And and the other is two. One is the substance, the molecule. LSD is something weird. Heroin is uh, you know, is is off the charts. You can't compare it to chocolate. You know, from chocolate amorphine is a is a confusing way to think about these things. People will say these are other substances, and then the other thing is more historical and sociological, which is that you know, the the people who use these substances are the other. Um, and I think a lot about this in the context of alcohol prohibition. And when you, you know, the I think the best read of looking at why did alcohol prohibition in the 20th century happen, how it did and when it did. And it is inextricable from mass migration of Catholics and Jews from Europe. And Catholics and Jews, unlike Protestants who were here, used, you know, they they drank, they drank openly, they used wine in their religious services that were spoken in different secret languages, Latin or Yiddish or Hebrew or whatever. Um, and you know, if you read books like The Guarded Gate by Daniel O'Crint, he explains how the fusing, you know, the the desire among the the people who were in power in America to shut off the flow of newcomers who who they felt were taking over their country. Um, it it was a kind of all-out attack. So you try to squelch the religion, you try to squelch the clothing, you try to squelch the food, and you try to squelch the intoxicants. Uh, and I think these are dynamics that have always, you know, have always undergirded drug fears, uh and drug and then ultimately drug laws, which are always uh incredibly arbitrarily applied.
SPEAKER_00Um course the Scott Irish are heavily into uh alcohol uh for generations and uh brought that great tradition uh to the West. Uh but really uh you know this new world of increasingly personal personalized molecules and AI-driven drug discovery. Uh who should guide individual choices, the self, the market or institutions?
SPEAKER_03Well, uh, you know, there's no reason to choose among those. I think um it will be a mix of all of those things. Uh and I think it starts with the individual um in terms of people know best who, you know, who they are and who they want to be. So it, you know, this type of question becomes uh, you know, it's what what do people want? What do individuals want? Um, and I, you know, I know people who uh friends of mine who were active in the bodybuilding community and uh years ago, and this was before anabolic steroids were necessarily that easy to get, um, and they were like, well, I want more muscle mass and I want to be able to show up for my workouts. And a lot of them took steroids or other things like that. Um, and you know, some of them achieved the results they wanted. There were also costs because they didn't understand everything as trade-offs. This is where I think an economist's perspective uh is helpful in talking not just about drug policy, but kind of on an individual basis. Everything has costs and benefits. So I think we start with the individual and the desire of the individual. You know, I want to be able to show up sexually. I want to show up emotionally, I want to be able to control how I eat. We talked to in Better Living Through Chemistry, we talked to a woman who has a past as a kind of raver in England and Australia, but she's on Ozempic. And the thing that she likes most about Ozempic, besides reducing her weight, is that she feels more in control of all sorts of urges that used to get in the way of her being able to, you know, live her life the way it is.
SPEAKER_00So as opposed to anahedonia as well to uh the peptides, apparently. Uh yeah, the reward system seems to be uh somewhat perturbed. Uh so people have less uh libido, somewhat less libido. And uh you know, and this is PT 141 may cure that.
SPEAKER_03So that's one of the questions that I ask people because you know, we're here, you know, I'm hearing reports of therapists using uh GLPs to reduce problem drinking. And I always ask people I know on them if I know them well enough, like has it changed your sex drive? And most of them say no, it hasn't. And it might be maybe they had a low sex drive to begin with, or it doesn't, or or they're kind of mitigating that outcome as well. But you know, so there's the individual, there are markets. Markets, uh, you know, I I uh as a good libertarian, I like markets a lot. I think the freer they are, the more interesting they are, the more prosperous, the more innovative. And I come from a kind of broad-based Austrian school approach of economics, which focuses on the idea of markets as discovery processes. We don't know uh series of social experiments. That's that's right. And you and you don't know what uh, you know, you don't know what you don't know. And markets oftentimes are good for figuring out here's a product, here's something that gets created, and we put it out there, and people either, you know, they might use it or they might not, or they might use it in unauthorized ways that are really interesting. I wrote years ago for Reason Magazine, I wrote a story about all of the different unauthorized ways that uh, you know, that products get used. And part of it was about there's a a uh cheap uh cigar, you know, uh manufacturer named Havatampa in in uh in America. And one of their brands was Phillies, uh, you know, Phillies. And you know, they're super cheap cigar. They did no advertising, they had bought the brand when they bought some other company or something. And suddenly they noticed in the 90s that you know, sales for Phillies were going through the roof, and Phillies merchandise was flying off the shelf. And they looked into it, and it was because a bunch of rappers had figured out that, like buying Phillies cigars, you know, again, cheap kind of sweet cigars, they would, you know, cut them open and then pack them with weed. And it became you know, this huge you know, subculture within rap to where Phillies merch and to smoke have Phillies blunts, and Havitampa is like, what do we do with this? Because they didn't do they didn't uh kind of create this demand or anything. And they were like, Okay, well, we're not gonna talk about it, but we're gonna keep selling them at high.
SPEAKER_00Buy Phillies, folks, you might get lucky one day. That's right. So, Nick, you're really suggesting that more freedom, not less, is the answer. Oh, of course. What gives you confidence in that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, um, you know, uh a number of things, including my own uh my own experience with drugs, um, which I'm always hesitant, you know, one should not leap from the uh anecdotal or the autobiographical to anything uh, you know, earth shattering. But, you know, to talk about this, part of it is institutions, the other um kind of regulatory aspect that you put into place. And institutions, you know, can be official or unofficial, they can be cultural or legal and things like that. And what happens is that when you have a new kind of uh scene crop up, a new market, a new set of communities, you find the institutions cre come up to kind of inform, guide, restrain, direct people to more uh I don't responsible might not be the the right word for this, but more informed choices. I see this in the psychedelic community. Um, and you know, I I've been taking psychedelics since sometime in the late 70s, and there was not much of a community then. If you found something that was called a psychedelic and somebody said, Hey, you do you want to take this? You'd be like, Yeah, sure. Because you've seen, you know, you saw the news reels of hippies dancing in the hate ashberry and things like that, and you wanted that. Um, but there wasn't much of a community. There were there was not a regular supply, there was not really good information, etc. If you hang out with people who are into psychedelics now, if anything, you have too much information and too many choices of communities to join where you will get guidance, where you will get information, where you will get support, where you will get, you know, both serious people and fun-seeking people helping you figure out what, you know, what are these substances and how do you use them. The flip side of that is we have institutions to stop drug use, um, you know, that are harsh or and uh or to stop alcohol. Um, I I don't drink anymore. I am a a good Irish American on my father and mother's side, and as I can only trace my family tree back to my grandfather, who was a boozer, my father was a boozer, I have a drinking problem. Um, you know, uh so I I don't drink anymore. And I did that in spite of legal prohibitions against alcohol in various places, social prohibitions against, you know, uh problems, legal sanctions against drinking, which makes sense, um, you know, in a profound way. Um, and it was only in the 80s. I mean, I, you know, when you talk to younger people, and you and I, Leonard, are, you know, now officially old, but when you talk to younger people and you say, you know, drunk driving was not only not really illegal, it was in many times it was an exculpatory factor in legal proceedings. Um, you know, through sometime in the 70s, really, people are like, what are you talking about?
SPEAKER_00Um, but exculpatory seems uh difficult to imagine.
SPEAKER_03Well, I I I had a girlfriend in college whose whose uncle was killed by a drunk driver, um, and the person got a lesser sentence because they were drunk, so they were not responsible.
SPEAKER_00Wasn't homicide. Um so no saying all that, where do you think the current uh drug war mindset still quietly shapes how how we think? Uh yeah, even among reformers.
SPEAKER_03Uh oh absolutely. Well, yeah, I mean, uh it in in obvious ways, and then I think in more subtle ways. And in the obvious ways, it's you know, there is a fight always to say who controls these drugs. Um, you know, is it the medical establishment and that you know that uh drugs that have profound psychological impact or you know, that really change the mind, that these need to be um overseen by uh, you know, priests, priests slash psychologists or psychiatrists who will meter them out. You may have to even go to their office and sit in their rooms while you take them. I mean, this is what the United States does with methadone, essentially, which is bizarre and and probably counterproductive. Um, but you know, you you have, you know, there are people who think that way. There are still people um who believe these drugs need to be banned again or or really pushed underground. Um, you see that a lot with discussions of marijuana uh legalization now that you know California passed recreation or medical marijuana in 1996. Um at this point, most people in America, I think it's something like 85% of uh people in America live in a state where recreational or medical marijuana is legal, still illegal at the federal level. Donald Trump, weirdly enough, you know, the least psychedelic, the least drugish kind of guy, the least pleasure drug guy imaginable, has always talked about you know rescheduling marijuana, um, hasn't really done much about it. So there's still people who want to control it that way. Um, and then, you know, on more subtle levels, there are people who will, you know, who will say you can only use these substances for these specific purposes. Uh, and that might take the form of we need to respect indigenous practices. So if you're going to do ayahuasca or something that is based off of that, you have to, you have to go to the Amazon or you have to do it in the right, you know, in right settings with natural fiber serapes in Brooklyn or something. Classical settings. And I'm not, I I I don't dismiss any of those things because peep this is one of the ways that you make community and you make meaning and you with these substances, etc. But there's a lot of people who want to say there is only one way to do these things, and I should be the one who is kind of telling people how to do that. And that can that can be on a profound kind of international politics, where you know, uh, I mean, we supposedly, you know, decapitated the regime in Venezuela, or we arrested Maduro because he was sending the wrong drugs to the wrong places. Um, but it can also be somebody who was telling you, like, you're smoking weed all wrong.
SPEAKER_00And I think when it's volunteer who had a marvelous experience in ayahuasca and suddenly uh want to tell the world about its healing properties, and they are the central source. Of uh truth. So we see that quite a lot. So you're seeing psychedelics moving into therapy. Well, like no. Yes. Well, you mentioned earlier Zimbabwe bodies. Uh so we're entering an era of designed uh cells.
SPEAKER_03Yes. And I I mean more to the point, we have been in one for both of our lives entirely. I mean, and and by that I'll say, you know, the the post-war era, at least in the United States, and I think this is true of uh you know much of the world, and much of the world is catching up, which is that as you um as you know really wretched poverty and repression um f you know fades away. And I'm not saying you know things are great, but in more parts of the world, and certainly in the United States, more people are capable of spending a lot of their time on the higher rungs of Maslow's hierarchy. We're not uh, you know, we are not looking for the next meal and that's it. We are not looking barely to stay alive. Um in the post-war era, what we have seen is you know more and more people trying to create uh a you know a sense of meaning and a sense of purpose out of a world not of finite choices, but almost unlimited choices. And this is the thing that is an amazing kind of moment in human history where now the mass number of people, according to a um a demographer at the Brookings Institution named Homie Caras, are at middle class living standards or above, meaning that after they pay their basic expenses, they have disposable income and you have dishes how do I want to live? What makes what gives me purpose? At the same time, and I think these things are probably connected, a lot of the older ways of creating that community and that meaning, you know, religion, politics, uh, tribal identity are breaking down. So we've been in this glorious moment really of unfolding increased individual life choices. And now, you know, to paraphrase Stuart Brand in the whole earth catalog, we are as gods and we might as well get good at it. Um, and I think the the thing that is different about the current moment, and particularly as it relates to things like drugs and chemicals, is there are so many more good things that are available or about to become available, as well as a recognition that coffee and Ozempic and you know uh Viagra are all on a continuum, and we we can constantly be modulating our chemistry to help us have the energy, the moods, the drive to discover and invent ourselves.
SPEAKER_00So um, goodness, uh, you know, we are of a certain age, maybe I have you by a couple of decades, but our our own lives have been sort of Mr. Toad's wild ride. Um your own story has been that way up through um uh serious personal changes and then through psychedelics. So how does your your view of control and agency change across all those phases?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, uh it's that's a great question. And you know, I I had a uh serious drinking problem, which I did not understand fully for decades, because I would, you know, when you're younger, I the f I didn't drink until I was uh I guess in college, um, partly because my father had stopped drinking. So I grew up in an absent household. And then when I got to college and it was like, oh, you can drink, you know, you can have cereal for every meal and you could drink all the time if you wanted to. I um, you know, in that sense, I had a lot of drive and a lot of energy, but I was slowly losing uh a sense of control over drinking, which went into abeyance. I got married when I was 29. I got I had my first child when I was 30, and then my career took off and I was able to control a lot of the things I needed to control and other things, you know, the world is always well beyond you. Um, and then um uh uh you know, I ended up having to stop drinking um in order to regain a measure over part of that life. Um nine years ago I met my current wife, uh or my last wife, let me put it that way, uh Sarah uh Rose Siskin, and that we uh started doing a lot of psychedelics together, which I had done when I was younger, but kind of that had gone away. And psychedelics, you know, paradoxically, you lose a certain amount of control over your mind and uh whatnot, but uh you know, it it has given me a much greater sense of okay, I feel like I am in control of the things that matter and I can focus and um you know, and and it also helped lead me to stop drinking, um, you know, which is fascinating. I had always intuited that, and then later when I learned more about the history of how, you know, why LSD was being used to help problem drinkers in the 50s and early 60s before uh it became banned. So I'm not sure I'm getting at your question, but it's you know, I think a big part of you know, boomers and Gen Xers, let's say um the the use of drugs was a way to kind of minimize or or dissolve many systems of control that were on us that we didn't really understand. You know, if you grew up at a certain point in time and you were a guy, you could be um you know, you could be a nerd, a jock, or a hood kind of. If you were a girl, you could be a virgin or a whore. And that was like, you know, there were just things were much more clamped down. There were fewer options, fewer choices in the marketplace for clothing as well as, you know, for identity. And I think drugs helped to dissolve a lot of that in a way and and kind of like recreate a free space where you could try things that were different. Um, and you know, and this is the connection, and I'm probably painting too too easy a picture, but um I mentioned Stuart Brand, but the way that he went from the merry pranksters and the trips festivals and the the drug culture of San Francisco to Xerox Park in Silicon Valley and kind of really helped bring a psychedelic flavor to personal computing, which you know created networks where people were freer to build companies they wanted and to act the way they wanted. That's a huge part of the struggle. What I find interesting now is when I talk to millennials and Gen Z people, younger people, you know, if I took psychedelics to kind of dissolve these systems of control that were almost invisible to us but were ubiquitous, you know, when you talk to millennials and Gen Z, they grew up in a world where they were told, well, you can be anything you want, you can do anything you want. Um, and that creates a different set of pathologies, might be too strong a word, but of of anxieties. Um, you know, for me and I, you know, I I suspect for you in various ways, everything was a struggle to be free so that you could find out who you really were. Younger people oftentimes are presented with a world where it's like here is every option right in front of you. Pick and choose wisely. And that's a that's a devastating kind of uh cornucopia to uh to uh kind of contend with when you're you know 15 years old or 20 years old.
SPEAKER_00Well, overwhelming choices. And folks, uh, for those that are interested in the early days of um psychedelics and computers, the book to read maybe uh John Markov's uh what the door mouse said to explore as uh 71 at uh Stanford Research Institute and the Stanford uh AI lab and the uh swirl of psychedelics and uh 7070 71 in the Palo Alto area. The many programmers that were doing early microdosing while they were writing code so they could stay up for days. It was uh extraordinary period, and both systems, psychedelics and computers, evolved out of it. Although Stuart Brand did make a statement that he was rather embarrassed about his psychedelic enthusiasm in light of the computer revolution uh in the 80s, uh he may have somewhat drifted back to his original premise uh before that. Uh yeah. And before we go on, uh Nick mentioned his marriage to Sarah Rosiskin. Uh uh both are friends in New York City. Uh Sarah Rosiskin is a brilliant uh comedian uh involved in uh so many wonderful projects, incredibly buoyant and upbeat and highly energetic. And uh they are a power couple uh in the intellectual center of New York City and uh a pleasure to know as as as fellow humans. So um uh but Nick, let me ask you, uh based on your your thought, uh if we truly normalize uh open drug-informed use, um what kind of society do you think will emerge? Uh more free, more free?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I do, you know, I I take seriously the idea that most psychedelics are, you know, non-specific amplifiers. So uh in a way, you know, it might just be that we uh you you remember the old TV uh uh TV sets that would have the color and hue buttons on them where you could turn the color and it would just get super garish or bright. Yeah. Um so it might be that's part of it that um I I don't believe, and I think there was probably a time when I believe, like, you know, if you know, if we could just put acid in the water supply, everything would be groovy.
SPEAKER_00Like I grew up new beating.
SPEAKER_03I grew up yeah, I I grew up in the post-groovy era, you know, like I because I'm at the very end of the baby boom in the beginning of Gen X, it was like every time you shut up, people were like, oh man, the party just ended, you know, the economy just ended. Yeah, like it was so great, but good luck with your life. Um, but I wanted to believe, you know, I want to believe the idea that, well, if more people are turned on, you know, the world will just be a better place. I, you know, that is not really how things happen. But what does happen if you have more and more people, you know, first recognizing that we have an enormous amount of choice in our lives and an enormous amount of freedom that if we just acknowledge it and say, you know what, like I have, you know, just by by total luck of being born, you know, and just to keep it to America in the 21st century, we are fucking lucky. And that that it goes across every possible subcategory of people, you know, it's just and it's not that things are perfect, but you have a lot of choices on how to live your life, and then you start taking that seriously. Um, and then you know, and then when you start to add in drugs or substances that can help with that, I think, you know, if we have a freer society in general, where you know, you can dress the way you want, you can eat what you want, you can uh, you know, love who you want, you can say what you want, um, and you can ingest you know the types of pharmaceuticals that you want. I think we will have a more interesting world, I think we will have a better world, a fairer world, a more moral world, because that is what's been happening over you know the past 60 years. I think we have become uh certainly a richer society society materially, but also a more moral society. And again, none of this is I'm not a utopian in saying, okay, we've reached the promised land, now we can just you know till our fields or hang out. Um, it's we never reach where we're trying to go. But there's so much you know, absolute ability to kind of figure out who you are and how to become that person. Um, and I think if we have that a broader cultural conversation that is about that rather than what we are losing, um, or what you know, what the past used to be, um, that we will become a better society. And I think drugs and and drug policy play a huge role in that. Uh, it's amazing when I talk to people who are kind of hesitant about pot legalization. And yeah, I I don't really use THC much. I it I've never found it a particularly compelling chemical, but um, so I'm not invested in it being legal. But when I talk to people who are critical of it, you know, I always ask them, well, you know, how did you feel like uh just a few years ago, a million people a year were being arrested for simple possession of marijuana? Is that a better world? Like is how do you you know, isn't it better that we are arguing over, you know, whether or not the smell of marijuana on a on you know in Times Square should be regulated rather than how many years somebody should go to prison for selling a substance which is arbitrarily classified as a crime? Um, I do think, you know, on a more profound level, and uh I know we have a we know a lot of people in common, when you talk to people who work in pharmaceutical industries and they say, you know, when you go from uh, you know, a uh a study or a trial of a few dozen people who are using psilocybin or ketamine for treatment uh resistant depression, and you scale that up to millions of people, we really have no idea what will happen. Um, you know, it all sorts of odd things might happen.
SPEAKER_00All sorts of odd things. We may see social phenomena which are unherald because we'll be seeing analogs that have never been dreamed of by humans.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Machine driven, machine invented, things could get much better and things could get much worse simultaneously in some small ways. We may see highly addictive new substances that kind of pharmacological wildfire, we may see enormous healing substances as well. So we try to drive it toward uh the latter.
SPEAKER_03And and I think the best ways to do that are by um having you know a fair amount of faith and optimism in in individuals to uh you know broadly to regulate themselves. Of course, they're always outliers. Yeah. And this this is one of the great fears of modernity. I mean, going back to I uh my ex-wife is a uh literary uh scholar of uh 17th century England, England and colonial America. And it's fascinating, you know, at the beginning of what you know what is now called the early modern period, um, there were these terrifying, you know, everyone was terrified of the idea that, oh, well, people were inventing their own version of Christianity. You know, they were they were not becoming Catholic, much less Jewish or Muslim or atheist, but you know, they wanted to interpret the Bible slightly differently and practice in that faith. And people flipped out because it's like, well, you cannot allow people that much choice to invent their own religions.
SPEAKER_00You might want to do snakes.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. In colonial America, you know, there were law sumptuary laws against people dressing above their station, where you know, certain fabrics were like, no, you can't wear that because I might mistake you for somebody of uh of a higher class.
SPEAKER_00Well, we we've gone from fear the renaissance of dressing in feathers and uh uh knee socks and breeches uh to uh very elaborate costumes down to one black, one blue Armani suit, homogeneous in the corporate world globally. So everybody's sort of on a level playing field.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and it's I mean, part of it is that we are um trying to, you know, there the what I'm getting at is there are always fears of what used to be called masterless men, you know, just pe individuals roaming the countryside who are not accountable to any particular We can't have that, no. No, and and you know, and we need to keep that history in mind because that's what we have to fight against. I think you're right, um, you know, and I I think you are in a particularly strong position to also like hold up, you know, a caution flag or a yellow card and say, we need to take the risk side of all of this seriously, too. And then the question comes, how do how do you mitigate the risk? And I think that is generally more through bottom-up institutions and community and institutions that are built more on voluntary association rather than top-down things that say, okay, you know what, here 10 people get to tell you what substances are good and in what doses.
SPEAKER_00I tend to be a little more on the conservative side, amazingly, other than being a wild hippie from California with an unusual background, I tend to be a little more conservative in terms of uh use. I see a lot of, I know I speak to this publicly, I see lots of young people uh on the net uh taking uh every conceivable analog every week, you know, one propional LSD, uh, this, that. And I I see that as a form of uh polydrug abuse, like constant seeking but never uh subsiding in the moment and uh reaggagating and learning from these experiences and engaging in one's life with them. But just one drug after the next, uh, even over the psychedelics, I think that's a form of abuse uh but I don't know, on a lighter note on a latter note, we typically uh in this podcast go to kind of a little light-hearted stuff. So um let me do that one. And we'll take your uh new film, Better Living through Chemistry. And uh if it had a soundtrack, what would be the opening song?
SPEAKER_03Uh that's a you know, uh now you've you've put me on the spot. I mean, I'm I'm hearing in my head a kind of mishmash of a lot of Robert Streisand?
SPEAKER_00What is it?
SPEAKER_03No, no, it's you know, it's psychedelic uh music, maybe from the mid-60s, from around 1966. I uh very good deal. Uh yeah, no, it was uh fantastic and kind of before psychedelia became a uh, you know, the the next year's fashion. And so you but um you know I love kind of garage band psychedelia, and uh there's a lot of stuff on the old Nuggets compilation that might be like uh that. And uh God, what was the um and I guess this comes later, so I'm already conf confusing things, but because I was raised Catholic, I always have an interest in kind of you know weird ripoffs of you know, kind of old church type music, but the electric prunes did a version of Kiryalisen, which is just bizarre. And I, you know, I think about a lot of this stuff through the eyes of my parents who were the children of immigrants uh from Ireland and Italy, uh born in the 20s, and what their 60s must have been like, because they you know, they were you know they were not educated, they were really happy to be out of grinding poverty and into something uh approaching the lower reaches of middle class life. They, you know, they couldn't believe their luck. And then to see, you know, that when you when you look at pictures, there's a famous image of uh John Lennon from I think it's like from 1965 to 1966, the transformation in him and you know, and and in the wheel, and everything. Yeah, and it's just like wow, that must have freaked the shit out of people who had, you know, who remembered, you know, my father uh liberated uh prisoner.
SPEAKER_00Buddy Holly with a crew cut, yes.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, like and Buddy Holly was already like, what the fuck is this? You know, and then um, so I you know, I find there's these punctuated equilibria where we just go through like a lot of change very quickly, and then you kind of like, okay, let's take this in for a couple of decades and things like that. But with Better Living Through Chemistry, it's definitely that kind of jangly guitar, and it might be the sound uh, you know, what uh Dylan uh you know talked about in his mid-60s records to the thin mercury sound, which is really amphetamine, but it's just when you go from folk music to electrified music to and lyrics.
SPEAKER_00Yes, Newport.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, impossibly imagistic, and you still struggle. You know there's you know there's something deeply meaningful there, but you're not sure what it is, and you spend time figuring it out. Which is similar, but you don't know what it is. That's right, exactly, Mr. Jones. And you know, and that kind of moment I think happened in earlier in the 20th century with literary, um, you know, and artistic modernism, too, where just a whole new vernacular comes on to the stage. Um, and you know, and and like you realize, okay, we're in a different world now, let's explore it, let's enjoy it until we ultimately have to move on to the next world. I feel in the 90s there was this flowering, and you know, and it was coincidental with the end of the cold war, which meant that you know, everybody in America at least could relax a little bit more. You didn't you didn't have to go to ROTC, you didn't have to do the presidential fitness tests so that you, you know, when the the twilight struggle began, you would be up to you know fighting the Soviets. We could relax a little from that. Um, there was a wide variety of kind of personal liberation movements, things like gay rights, uh, particularly after the AIDS epidemic. People were More comfortable with more types of sexuality. The feminist movement, women started moving into the workplace on equal status with men. And the internet, you know, the internet opened up, you know, a whole supplemental space that we didn't know existed. If I if I may, this was my I grew up in a tracked home in in suburban New Jersey. And when my parents were moving out, at one point we were fixing stuff, and I moved this uh this mirror that was in. We had a full bathroom upstairs and a partial bathroom downstairs, and then the full bathroom. I removed this mirror that had been there my entire life. And when I did it, there was a whole room behind there that wasn't used for anything. And it was just bad, it was bad planning on the part of the builders. Because if they had thought about a way to access it, you know, a three-bedroom house would become a four-bedroom house and you'd have more space and you'd be paid more. But I felt like the internet was kind of like that, where it it opened up this immense supplemental space where suddenly conversations that just could not be staged before were happening everywhere. And you began to learn more about the world, you know, on the far-flung corners of the earth, as well as all of the strange people who were living next door to you that you shared interests with that you didn't know. Right.
SPEAKER_00Suddenly a million people that you formally had to write a letter to suddenly were instantly online around the globe. And absolutely going on. That was a fantastic.
SPEAKER_03And that sped things up. So and then, you know, and then we I I think by the end of the 90s, we were in a much better place. And you know, and then with 9-11 and uh, you know, it's partly I I do worry about fundamentalist systems of thought, whether they're Islamic or Christian or capitalist or socialist, uh, you know, like these totalizing forces that are always reactionary. We, you know, but we part of what happened in the in the 21st century is you know, the response to 9-11 and everything kind of put us in a holding pattern for a long time that I think we are about to come out of. Um, and part of this, Leonard, I I don't know how you feel about you know the end of the, you know, the it's the end of the ride, right? For for the baby boom generation broadly, which and I don't say this like you know in a in a positive or negative way, but it's like our run is over, you know, we're in the last reel of easy rider.
SPEAKER_00Um, some uh miraculous things in the next few years and are waning, are waning.
SPEAKER_03I I agree, but but something new great new drugs. Something new is struggling to be born, right?
SPEAKER_00I hate to throw you a curveball here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_00What's the what's the most counterintuitive benefit of a substance that you've encountered in your reporting? Something happened that you didn't expect, but positive.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you know, uh bad, right? No, terrible. And uh, you know, I I would say this. What's that?
SPEAKER_00More smiles.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, oh well that is for sure. And it's you know, yeah. I well it and it's interesting for me. I uh, you know, uh uh not to be go full Wilhelm Reich, but I am definitely a very armored personality, and I think drinking alcohol first and then other substances, let me just take the armor off for a while and enjoy myself and kind of feel my body and I smile more.
SPEAKER_00Um experiences will last and uh the armor is gone.
SPEAKER_03So that is no, they dissolve it. And I mean, what I what I will say, and this was before I was really cognizant of you know, decades worth of of of research and of serious inquiry into this. But I remember after a particularly horrible uh moment, I ended up taking a heroic dose of LSD because I was I had I had gotten very drunk and I was just like despondent and disgusted with myself. And I took about 300 micrograms of LSD and I had this intense trip uh where I had conversations with my mother and father who had died years ago and uh everything. But the the most amazing thing is that for six weeks after that, I had no interest in alcohol. And I was like, oh, that is really amazing, and it was totally unexpected, both the kind of intenseness of the trip, because my psychedelic trips um often are you know, they're about life and death, but they tend to be pretty optimistic. But it was really learning the effect of like, oh, that reset some kind of circuit for me where it gave me a little bit of space.
SPEAKER_00And the conversation with the parents, emotional conversation, underlying, you know, whatever trauma it was that led to you know dependency. So um here's one what drug myth do people cling to that you wish would disappear?
SPEAKER_03Uh you know, that um that there are bad substances, um, you know, that uh or or that people who use the wrong substances are bad people.
SPEAKER_00Sounds like Carl Hart uh evangelizing. Yeah, yes.
SPEAKER_03And no, and and I mean I I thought that his uh drug use for grown-ups is is a profound intervention into conversations about drugs. And I I think Carl brings uh you know unique perspectives, both through his experience as an African American, but also as a kind of working or lower class person, particularly to psychedelic conversations, where you know he's a real critic of what he calls psychedelic exceptionalism and the idea, you know, that like Budweiser is bad beer, but if you know, if if it's a micro brew, that's okay, and that there's a lot coded in that kind of ranking of you know the drug set.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and you know, and and I also, you know, and this is something which I should educate myself more on, but I also tend to be um, I guess my my understanding of addiction or substance abuse is very functional. It's it's kind of a functional approach where I think people use whatever is around them to fuck their lives up if they want to do that. And I tend to minimize the unique properties of different drugs because I feel like people use them um to get to where they need to be, and that can be negative or positive. Um, and I um sometimes that that overwhelms my appreciation for the nuance of of different uh chemicals, which needs to be uh I I need to kind of up my game on that, I think.
SPEAKER_00So Nick, if you were speaking to a uh highly conservative parent, how would you explain your philosophy of drug use in one sentence?
SPEAKER_03Um you know, you um if you believe in responsibility, um you need to believe in pharmacological freedom. Um because the two you you only get, and I'm uh going over in sentences, but you only get the bad effects of of um things when you prohibit drugs and discussion of drugs and free information gathering about things like that.
SPEAKER_00Right. If everything's forbidden and you can't experience, then you can't really address who you would be as a result of it.
SPEAKER_03And that's a lot of and and and as important the information about these substances are terrible. I I'm too old to have grown up with DARE uh and similar types of programs, but I meet so many people who say, you know, I I was like an A plus DARE student, and then I tried marijuana and I realized they were lying about marijuana, and what else were they lying about? Like, you know, the the free flow of information, uh, which you know, powers that be, whether they're uh, you know, governments or or instant, you know, uh religions or corporations always want to control the flow of information, and like it just leads to such bad outcomes.
SPEAKER_00So, Nick, uh, you know, we've talked about the uh lengthy arc of our lives and the changes, intense changes we've been through. What is something about your own journey that surprised you most thinking back over the years?
SPEAKER_03So I uh, you know, one is that um getting older, um, I don't feel like I'm wiser, but I feel like I have definitely have more perspective. And one thing that has shocked me, check back in in a couple of weeks, and maybe this won't be, but you know, I have a three-month-old child. I feel more energetic now than I did 25 years ago. Um, I have two adult children, and the um, you know, the uh my first son was born when I was 30, the second when I was 36. And I remember talking with my uh ex-wife, you know, I was like, I am so wiped out at 36. I was like, this, I I didn't expect it to be, you know, this tired, you know, raising a kid and working and everything. And now I feel better. And I and I, you know, I attribute that a lot of that is Sarah's uh influence.
SPEAKER_00Julian nature, yes, super energy.
SPEAKER_03But it is also, but it's also, you know, I have um, you know, I live a um it's certainly not a monastic life, but I I you know I think about things more, I take care of myself more. And you know, aging. Aging. I again, my you know, my parents died relatively young, and they I can remember when they turned 50, that was like everybody in their cohort, my aunts and uncles, they were like, okay, well, we're you know, we're basically done. Um, and you know, when I turned 50, I felt like I was just getting going or I was entering the same. I feel that way in 80s. It's a no, it's impressive. I I mean, and I want to know what you you know, and I know you are a teeth, right? Or yeah. Yeah, no, but I uh but and that's really the thing that I think is most important in contemporary conversations about everything is that everybody is looking for purpose. And we know, you know, what was it in like 1966? I think Life magazine or Time magazine had the big God is dead, you know, cover. It's like we know traditional religion is not going to do it, like you have to choose to believe in a way that in times past you didn't. It was forced on you. But we have, you know, it's really a question of focus and function and desire to be alive and to be living a purposeful life. And that that's enormous.
SPEAKER_00It's you know, Nick, and uh changes, it keeps you young, I think. Yes, I agreed. And uh new new life, like your baby, uh definitely is uh the greatest, nothing greater in life than than a new baby. In the course of you know, my uh God, eight decades. This particular moment is uh I think it's uh certainly in my lifetime has been the most historical, most exciting, uh most glorious uh change in uh human history. Uh uh certainly in the small fraction I've observed. But uh with the advent advent of AI, about the advent of possible superintelligence uh within the soon, um, the permeation of society uh throughout the globe. Uh I agree with you that everyone's uh uh extreme poverty has been pretty much eliminated, at least in the United States and much of Europe. Uh we're at a glorious place in human history, all the future before us, and uh we hope that it remains uh benevolent in terms of our guidance. But a lot the last question for you.
SPEAKER_03Um if the future is uh mass personalized chemistry, what's the one thing you hope doesn't happen um I worry uh about a kind of Luddite mentality or reaction reactionary mentality that is not simply about technology, but about kind of the great classical liberal experiment of giving people more freedom and more autonomy. Uh, you know, we're we're part of a long procession um uh of history. And um I I by dint of having a PhD in in liter literary and cultural studies, as well as being a libertarian, I'm interested in these questions of, you know, how did we get to a point where the the the laces were loosened up that were holding us in place starting, you know, 500 years ago. And part of it is economic innovation, part of it is political innovation. But um Foucault, Michelle Foucault, uh said something a rough translation that we are always governed too much. Um and we happen to be in a very good period where we're governed less than we used to be. We're still over-governed across every possible dimension. But what worries me is that people uh and there's a number of people on the left and on the right who are talking about how liberalism has failed. And by liberalism, I just mean uh, you know, a uh a set of beliefs and institutions that are built around the idea of giving the individual more chances and more options to explore life and who they are, and that has economic and political and cultural implications. And people are like, you know, the problem oftentimes is too much freedom. Uh or, you know, uh and um and I think there are reactionary forces in the United States, in Europe, uh, in other parts of the world, less so actually in other parts of the world, because they're getting their first grasp at what it means to have, you know, money and time and resources to explore um hum, you know, humanity. Uh but that that worries me.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I can see it would worry you uh me as well. Nick, your baby's uh three months old, but it'll be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. What will the world be like when your baby's all grown up? What do you hope it's going to be like? What do you think it's going to be like? Um in terms of neurochemistry, in terms of AI, in terms of the city.
SPEAKER_03I think it will be uh simultaneously unrecognizable and it will make perfect sense to them. Um and uh it I I don't have a clear vision of what it means, um, but I think a lot about my grandparents. All of them were born basically in the 1890s, and then they died in the 70s or 80s. And I I remember um at some point uh I was talking with one of them shortly before they died, but to go to be born into a world without guided flight, you know, controlled flight, and seeing a man land on the moon. Um, you know, it was I mean, it's unimaginable, right? To be able to go that distance in, you know, 60 years or 70 years. And I was like, that must be insane for you. And they were all like, no, you know, it's it's exciting and it's weird, but it kind of made sense. And I feel like that will be, you know, what my son sons actually will be living in is a world that is radically better and more inventive, um, but and uh unrecognizable to me, maybe from this current moment, but it will make absolute sense to them.
SPEAKER_00And part of that world I think will evolve because of good thinkers like you. So thank you, Nick. Thank you for being with us today.
SPEAKER_03Thanks so much, Leonard.
SPEAKER_00Really lovely to see you, and many blessings uh for the baby and to Sarah. And for coming aboard. Uh, love your way you think. It's uh wonderful experience. Thank you for sharing with us.