I’m delighted to be giving a talk at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. The conference (June 17-20 in Denver) promises to be really fun and stimulating. If you can make it, I’d love to say hi: registration isn’t cheap, but you can use code SPEAKER15 to get 15% off your registration.

I’m especially excited because my talk is really experimental, the kind of broad comparative work that would have got frowned on when I was in grad school. I’m still aiming to exercise scholarly caution to avoid saying anything false, trying to stay reasonably close to what’s in the texts, but I am writing about multiple thinkers whose source languages (classical Chinese and old German) I don’t know well: something which I think one has to do in order to investigate human cultural commonalities, but which would have raised every eyebrow in my PhD program. It’s the kind of project that an aspiring professor only undertakes after getting tenure; in my case, I can do it because I’m no longer trying for a faculty job.