On September 7, 2025, Elon Musk posted two messages to X. The first: “White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population.” The second, a few hours later: “We cannot understand the true nature of the Universe, unless we question deeply. I want to know what is real, even if the answer is total obliteration of my consciousness.”
Put them together and you get a strange composite. One voice belongs to an old American fear—the fear of being replaced, the defensive crouch that once animated the John Birch Society. The other voice derives from the spiritual imperatives of the 1960s, which often encouraged an obliteration of the ego in search of something purportedly higher.
Ten years ago, if you’d said Rick Perry would stump for MDMA or that Musk would talk about ketamine as if it were a multivitamin, you’d have been accused of writing parody. Psychedelics were supposed to be off-limits to the right—too hairy and wild, too bound up with anti-militarism and free love. And yet here we are. What has changed?
Psychedelics are not exactly craft beer. This isn’t a lifestyle tweak that drifts across the aisle because new packaging looks nice in the fridge. What’s shifting is something far more significant: the effervescence of irrationality. In the 1960s that charge belonged to the left. Now it keeps sparking in places that, not long ago, it would have immediately been put out: the boardroom, where microdosing has become a performance tool; the governor’s office, where “psychedelic therapy for veterans” has been pitched as patriotism with better clinical outcomes.
Musk unashamedly describes his ketamine regimen in the same terms as one might have heard someone a generation ago opening up in public about their SSRI prescription. Thus in a 2024 interview with Don Lemon, he explained that “I have sort of a…negative chemical state in my brain, like depression I guess…and ketamine is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind.” Rick Perry, an avatar of Texas uprightness, was converted to the psychedelic cause after meeting the Navy SEAL veteran Marcus Luttrell in 2006. Luttrell was suffering from PTSD. In June, Perry told the Texas Tribune that the question he gets the most these days is: “What is a right-wing antidrug governor doing associated with psychedelics?” The answer for him is simple: It has everything to do, as he put it elsewhere, with “the mental health problems that we created by being at war for damn near two decades.”
You can call this hypocrisy if you want. It’s true that many of the people now praising psilocybin or ibogaine came up cheering the drug war that tore lives apart for far less. But cultural property does not come with a deed. And the cultural objects that seem to hold the power of radical transformation, transformation beyond the ordinary expectations that attach to our civic roles or our professional identities, typically belong to the political and cultural faction that has historical force and momentum behind it. Only one side gets to hold the fire at any given moment. Only one side can afford to come across as reckless. Recklessness, you might say, is a measure of cultural power.
This time, however, it is a recklessness tempered by utilitarian ends: The veteran must show measurable signs of improvement, the psychedelics must be tested against placebos, and so on. Nowhere is the subordination of the potentially transformative experience of psychedelics to practical aims, to “life-maxxing,” clearer than in Silicon Valley. Bryan Johnson, the ultimate life-maxxer, who is currently waging a personal campaign against death itself, recently took time out of his quest for immortality to document his experiences with psilocybin. “Hey all,” he would later write, on X. “I’m just so happy to be alive.” The experience is supposed to be somehow connected to his supreme goal of longevity, but its effect appears to be more one of existential reconciliation, the sort of equanimity that does not typically characterize the problem-solving ethos of the professional biohacker. “People assume I am fearful of death,” Johnson wrote further. “I’m not.”
Elsewhere in the Valley, the libertarians who once wore out their Atlas Shrugged copies now pass around microdosing protocols as if they were Pomodoro timers: 10 micrograms on Monday, gratitude journal on Tuesday—a disciplined, almost Protestant plan for managing the entirety of one’s conscious life. The hippie took LSD to watch the ego dissolve into the All—the sort of experience we have already seen Musk still claiming, in 2025, to be after. For the most part, however, what we find today is a new practice of psychedelic drug use designed to enhance the same capacities for which we are known professionally, rather than to give us a break from these capacities. Two generations ago there were only a few rare professions that could be enhanced by the right amount of drugs, mostly confined to the creative arts. Today we find added to that list the tech founder whose drug-taking is not at all a break from, but rather an enhancement of, their professional endeavors.
Read more about how conservatives are embracing psychedelics.
