I’m a practical philosopher - I research wisdom practices from different eras and cultures, explore them in my life, and interview others to see how they helped or harmed them. I’ve written and edited four books, and co-write a weekly newsletter on psychedelic and ecstatic ethics and harm reduction, which you can sign up for below.

I am director of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which researches challenging psychedelic experiences, and what helps people who have them. Find out more here: https://challengingpsychedelicexperiences.com/

‘Jules reminds us philosophy is not just about analysis. It’s also about the good life.’ Matthew Syed

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Stoicism and the ancient art of memorization
Stoicism and the ancient art of memorization

This is an excerpt from my first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, which explores how people use practices from ancient Greek philosophies in modern life.

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Tics, TikTok and the teen mental health crisis
Tics, TikTok and the teen mental health crisis

What do you get if you cross the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual with High School Musical? TikTok! Occasionally some data appears that looks so awful it makes you do a doubletake. That was the case for me this week, when the Centre for Disease Control released data suggesting that American teen girls are ‘engulged in a wave of despair and violence’. Apparently 59% of teenage girls felt persistently sad or hopeless, and one in three considered suicide.

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Want to counter Andrew Tate? Reclaim the BMW (basic moral wisdom)
Want to counter Andrew Tate? Reclaim the BMW (basic moral wisdom)

It’s every liberal parent’s nightmare. One day they happen to glance at their 14-year-old son’s laptop, and they see he is watching videos by Andrew Tate, the mullah of misogyny. They start to notice red flags in their son’s conversation: ‘bitches’, ‘choke-holds’, ‘feminism is cancer’, ‘Hitler wasn’t all bad’. Could their sweet little Quentin have been radicalized by the online far-right manosphere?

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Ketamine: psychedelics meet hyper-capitalism
Ketamine: psychedelics meet hyper-capitalism

Ketamine clinics are booming across the US. According to psychedelic fund PsyMed, there were around 20 ketamine clinics in 2019. By the end of last year, there were reportedly over 600 independent ketamine clinics, as well as chains like Mindbloom, Field Trip and Delic with multiple clinics and home delivery services.

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Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip
Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip

This is a story about dangerous ideas, and words’ magical power to heal and to harm. It’s about AI, Charles Manson, dubstep, Neo-Nazis, occultism, and a lot of amphetamine, but it’s mainly about Nicholas Land.


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Have we reached peak ‘entrepreneur’?
Have we reached peak ‘entrepreneur’?

Being an entrepreneur is arguably the highest status job in the world at the moment. In the 1960s, it was the rock star. In the 1980s-1990s, investment bankers were the ‘masters of the universe’, the object of cultural fascination (and loathing), depicted in books like Bonfire of the Vanities or American Psycho. Now? No one could give a crap about investment bankers — they’re souped-up traders who bet with other people’s money and the only thing they invent are bullshit derivatives. But the entrepreneur? The ‘founder’? All kneel before their genius.

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Are Digital Nomads harming our host countries?
Are Digital Nomads harming our host countries?

At the moment I live in a town in Costa Rica called La Fortuna. There was nothing much here apart from farming until the 1980s, when the nearby volcano of Arenal erupted, and it kept on erupting for the next 20 years. Suddenly all the springs and rivers around Arenal warmed up and became thermal baths. There was a thermal bath boom, a spa-rush, as hotels and spas scrambled to grab access to the springs and sell it to tourists. Today, La Fortuna is one of the most popular towns in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. Everything is booming, until the volcano erupts again.

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The Religion of the Future Police
The Religion of the Future Police

In 2015, Google engineer Anthony Levandowski started The Way of the Future, a church to worship super-intelligent AI. And now we have the Religion of the Future Police, began by former Google manager Malcolm Collins and his wife Simone.

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Huge trial finds mindfulness makes some teenagers’ mental health worse
Huge trial finds mindfulness makes some teenagers’ mental health worse

Anyone hoping to ‘solve’ the mental health crisis should think very carefully: am I going to make it worse? Unfortunately, every decade a new intervention becomes the hot new thing, the magic bullet that is going to save the world, and the people promoting it become wide-eyed evangelists. ‘We are saving the world! We are doing such important work!’ Such is their enthusiasm, they never stop to ask, ‘is it possible this intervention will harm some people?’

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