What is the current arc of the psychedelic renaissance in Western society missing? How do psychedelic experiences affect politics? And what are the psychedelic humanities?

To guide us through these questions, I speak with Oliver Davis. He's a professor of French Studies and director of graduate studies at the University of Warwick in the UK, a co-editor of an ongoing series on the psychedelic humanities, is working on a book about the politics of psychedelics, and wrote of a recent paper on the French artist Henri Michaux’s writings on psychedelics, which serve as a guide for our conversation.

By tracing Michaux's writing on psychedelics, we explore how they impact everything from creativity to metaphysics. Using that lens, we get into:

• what is lost in the potential of psychedelic experience when it’s approached exclusively as a therapeutic tool to be used under highly regulated and controlled settings,
• threading the needle between science and mysticism when it comes to making sense of psychedelic experiences,
• psychedelics and politics, where one of the most important implications of psychedelic experience is not what it can teach us about consciousness or the nature of the universe, but how it might help us rethink our social and economic worlds, how psychedelic experiences might help foment a more democratic form of politics.

Enjoy!

As algorithms rise to play larger roles in how we interact with the world, how are they recursively acting upon us to play larger roles in how we experience ourselves? What, in short, does an algorithmic society do to consciousness?

Eran Fisher is a professor of sociology at the Open University of Israel, and has a recent book out titled: Algorithms and Subjectivity: On the Subversion of Critical Knowledge. In it, he digs beneath the more obvious conversation around how algorithms are changing our worlds, to ask how they're changing our-selves.

In the conversation, we discuss:

• How do algorithms change the promise of freedom society offers?
• What does it mean for algorithms to "undermine" subjectivity?
• How do algorithms pose different threats to freedom than mass media of the 20th century?
• How much of the threat of algorithms derives from their for-profit deployment in a world with insufficient mechanisms for democratic data governance?

Plus tangents into psychedelics, the politics of subjectivity, and all that sort of good stuff.

Enjoy!

Christian is an economist whose work can help answer the question: how might economics become an 'emancipatory' social science?

Christian holds a PhD in economics, is a professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, a former advisor to the alternative bank of Switzerland, and was a long-time researcher at the Belgian National Science Foundation. He's the author of Critical Political Economy and Full-Spectrum Economics, among other books on political economy with an existential and ecological focus.

As an economist unafraid to venture into questions around spirituality, or the evolution of consciousness, his works are highly interdisciplinary, including a fusion of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy with post-neoclassical economics, and a dialogue between Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Hayek.

Our conversation is about emancipatory social science. What is it, and how might economics move in its direction. More broadly, we cover:

• What emancipation means in the context of social science
• What Ken Wilber’s philosophy can bring to economics
• Christian’s loving critique of complexity economics
• The idea of a society’s "critical spirit", which functions as a parallel to price signals
• The role that greater variety can play in changing the course of the economy as a complex system
• And the role that actual policies, like a basic income, or a job guarantee, or empowering people to work fewer hours, might play in making that kind of deep existential variety, variety in our forms of life, actually viable

Enjoy!