Andrea Chalupa call tomorrow noon EST

Join us on Zoom or Substack Live

Hi Folks,

Tomorrow at noon EST I will have a live Zoom with Andrea Chalupa from Gaslit Nation. You can register for it here:

Andrea Chalupa is the host of the Gaslit Nation podcast. Support her on Patreon. You can follow her on Twitter. Here is her Bio:

Andrea Chalupa is a journalist, filmmaker, and activist living in Brooklyn, New York. She studied Soviet history at the University of California at Davis and Ukrainian at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is the author of Orwell and the Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm, the co-author of the graphic novel Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think, and the writer-producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones, directed by three-time Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland and starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, and Peter Sarsgaard. Andrea hosts and produces the popular civic action podcast Gaslit Nation, about the threat of fascism in America and around the world. She regularly speaks about global affairs.

I reached out to Chalupa after watching this Youtube video where she explores how to adapt to life under a dictatorship: How to build local community resilience, and so on:

I am not going to write a long essay today, but I wanted to consider a few different areas quickly":

Psychedelic Kerfuffle

The New York Times just published “How a Leftist Activist Group Helped Torpedo a Psychedelic Therapy”: A must-read if you are interested in this area. The article focuses on the psychedelic magazine Psymposia, which has relentlessly attacked MAPS and other parts of the emergent psychedelic movement. I was among many targeted by these fanatics in the past, and I appreciate they are getting pushback. Ironically, I am probably more sympathetic than most to their Leftist critique of the contemporary psychedelic movement. Perhaps we can see, in retrospect, that the movement to remove these visionary compounds from their original contexts, to turn them into therapy tools for a hyper-individualist Neoliberal consumer culture, hasn't worked well. I intend to write more about this soon.

When I published Breaking Open the Head, I had hoped that psychedelics — the new movement including ayahuasca — would be tools for helping to bring about a positive systems change. If we could awaken consciousness, we could build a more empathic, equitable, ecologically regenerative society. Instead, they eventually got absorbed into Neoliberal therapy culture as well as the crypto-Libertarian (Burning Man) paradigm. Having failed in its FDA bid, Lykos, the for-profit company created by the nonprofit MAPS.org, may be taken over by Antonio Gracias, an early Tesla investor and Elon Musk ally who supported Musk’s Twitter takeover, according to The Financial Times. If this happens, it would be a sad legacy for Psymposia, which was relentless in its attacks on Rick Doblin and other MAPS staff.

AI, the Social Contract, and the End of Cream Cheese

On her Youtube channel, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has been one of any considering the near-term implications of AGI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been speaking, again, about the need to change the “social contract” as AI agents eliminate millions or hundreds of millions or even all jobs in the next decade. “"The entire structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration,” Altman says.