The Hallucinogenic Elite [Text]

The following is a transcript from an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where Tim interviews Eric Weinstein. My guest this episode is my friend, Eric Weinstein (@ericrweinstein), managing director of Thiel Capital, a Ph.D in mathematical physics from Harvard, and a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. We recorded at my house after Eric emailed me this question: “Wanna try a podcast on… psychedelics, theories of everything, and the need to destroy education in order to save it?” Tim: I’m gonna I’m just gonna throw out a teaser here because we don’t have time to get into it today but you and I have privately spoken quite a bit about psychedelics. I am, either by the time people hear this or very shortly, going to be helping to raise funds for a very interesting study that Johns Hopkins is putting together. You said to me not too long ago something along the lines of you’d be amazed or you wouldn’t believe how straight and narrow I was for so long. When was the first time that you tried psychedelics? Eric: Relatively recently and it was because I had been propagandized so thoroughly that even to this day I don’t like the association, I don’t like the word cloud around them. There were all sorts of confusions that the power of one of these substances must come from killing brain cells like pouring acid on your brain and leaving it as Swiss cheese. It wasn’t until I started meeting some of the most intellectually gifted people in the sciences and beyond and I realized that this was sort of the open secret of what I call the hallucinogenic elite, whether it’s billionaires or Nobel laureates or inventors and coders. A lot of these people were using these agents either for creativity or to gain access to the things that are so difficult to get access to through therapy and other conventional means.