Why psychedelics? Well, why not?

Executives and founders are increasingly turning to psychedelics for a variety of reasons. The New York Times recently reported on CEOs traveling together for psychedelic experiences, seeking everything from spiritual awakening to guidance on IPO strategy. Entrepreneurs are livestreaming their sessions while tracking biomarkers. Centers and programs catering to executives have emerged across the world. A veritable cottage industry has formed on the premise that psychedelics can unlock potential and generate breakthroughs on demand.

That said, researchers at Emory University, who study both leadership and psychedelics, have noticed that the systematic evidence available for meditation, or executive coaching, simply doesn’t exist yet for psychedelics used in professional capacities - including evidence about what happens when they don’t work. There are, however, plenty of testimonials, compelling marketing, and podcast confessions that make for great stories.

What doesn’t exist is the data on what actually occurs when leaders return from these experiences to boardrooms, strategy sessions, and decisions that affect people’s lives. The question isn’t whether business leaders are using psychedelics. It’s what happens next. It does not require much imaginative effort to see why psychedelics would be attractive to the business world. 

Many of the induced traits from psychedelic use - greater empathy, resilience, sense of purpose, and capacity for connection - map directly onto qualities that leadership development programs have long tried to cultivate. There’s only one catch. Nearly all of that evidence comes from clinical settings with trained therapists, careful screening, and structured integration support. The leadership context looks very different, and it’s been largely unexamined.

It is conceivable that psychedelic use in this context could give rise to more empathetic leadership, enhanced capacity to navigate complexity under pressure, and greater willingness to delegate and trust teams. It’s also possible it could amplify less helpful traits: grandiosity, dismissiveness toward dissenting views, or the conviction that a single transformative experience grants special insight that others lack.

Neither outcome is inevitable, but the stakes do matter. When leaders are affected - for better or worse - so are their employees, their consumers, and the communities their organizations serve. Clinical research has shown what psychedelics can do in controlled therapeutic settings. But U.S. survey data shows that only 4% of psychedelic use happens in clinical contexts. Therefore, the following stories bear due consideration.  

Arthur Lawida wrote a book on psychedelic leadership. Once the realm of mystics, he believes that visionary states are available to all of us through the science of psychedelics; and when you connect these states to the science of business what we all get is better leadership, and companies that reflect the highest human values, while maintaining successful outcomes.

He believes that AI is going to force all of us to become leaders and creators at some level and the first step of that is knowing who you are, how you operate and how to turn your ideas into real outcomes. As such, his book has a lot of practical exercises to guide anyone through this process.

Joan Manuel Araujo is a medical researcher and a combat veteran. So, when Eli Lilly announced it was acquiring Atai Beckley for up to $3.8 billion, the largest psychedelics deal in Big Pharma history, he did not want to react reflexively in either direction. The good news was real capital, real trial infrastructure, real regulatory certainty. For people living with treatment-resistant depression, complex PTSD, and addiction, that matters. The concern, only if it actually reaches them in the correct way.

For as long as ancient humans have used these medicines, the container has been the medicine. Preparation. Relationship. Setting. Meaning. The people who hold you afterward. These were never accessories to the compound. They were the treatment, and the psychedelic was one element inside a much larger act of care.

The pharmaceutical model quietly inverts that. It makes the psychedelic, the treatment and the container optional. Atai Beckley calls its pipeline rapid-acting neuroplastogens, compounds meant to help brain cells reorganize neural connections. The promise is real. But the psychedelic can only open a window of plasticity. It cannot decide what gets built while that window is open. That gets decided by everything the business model struggles to pay for. The Western and indigenous dual-trained therapist, who does the pre-engagement, psychedelic assisted therapy and post-engagement integration work.

We cannot let the business model quietly become the entire model of care, where whatever cannot be patented, standardized, or billed gets labelled optional and then disappears. We cannot leave meaning, embodiment, relationship, community, and human dignity outside the clinic door and then call what remains a cure. It is whether we can scale a system of care without shrinking the human being it exists to serve.

Arnaud Beauregard spent fifteen years as an engineer and scientist, optimizing systems, solving complex problems, and pursuing efficiency. He understood burnout intellectually - as a variable to manage, a risk to mitigate. Then he experienced it personally. The relentless pressure, the diminishing returns, the creeping sense that success was costing him his sense of self. 

Traditional approaches - more vacation days, meditation apps, executive coaching - offered temporary relief but no lasting transformation. Then he discovered psychedelic assisted therapy. It wasn't just relief. It was a revelation. Now he witnesses high-performing executives, entrepreneurs, and leaders increasingly turning to psychedelic wellness not as an escape, but as a strategic tool for sustainable performance and authentic leadership.

We're facing an unprecedented burnout epidemic in the C-suite. Recent data shows that over 60% of executives report high levels of stress and exhaustion, with many feeling trapped between performance expectations and personal wellbeing. We're optimizing for productivity while ignoring the deeper questions: Optimizing for what? At what cost? And becoming who? Performers don't need incremental improvement, but fundamental recalibration.

Psychedelic assisted therapy operates on a different level than conventional interventions. Recent studies from Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, and other leading institutions demonstrate that it: Disrupts rigid thought patterns, enhances cognitive flexibility and creative problem-solving, reduce activity in the default mode network, increases neuroplasticity, and creates lasting changes in outlook and behaviour persisting for months or years.

Agnès Horry provides the marketing angle on the fast changing psychedelic conversation. It is no longer only about whether these medicines work. It is about who owns them. The proof: Behavioral Wire, a biotech news desk, is sourcing named experts for a psychedelic market analysis. On-record and attributed. When journalists start asking about IP and deal structure, a field has crossed from movement to market.

They want direct expertise in: Life-sciences patent law and pharmaceutical IP strategy, biotech M&A and licensing, drug-development finance and healthcare investment banking, pharmaceutical business development and corporate strategy, as well as psychedelic drug development and commercialization.

For a world renowned opinion on the mystical aspects of psychedelics look no further than Jeff Kripal. Kripal is a prominent historian of religions at Rice University whose work extensively engages with altered states of consciousness, mysticism, the "psychedelic renaissance", and what he terms the "impossible" or "superhumanities".

Kripal emphasizes that individuals should understand philosophy and metaphysics before taking psychedelics. According to him it will give you a vocabulary to talk about your altered state. The whole idea of it is to explore non-ordinary states of consciousness, and then to return back to ordinary functional awareness. It's not just there to make you a better leader, but to show you the truth of reality. This is the non-dual aspect. People who are highly educated, and who've had some altered state or some experience of the truth, are way better professional people.

Compared to other methods, of achieving altered states, psychedelics are more reliable. This is the attraction of psychedelics for these individuals. The chances are extremely high, in the 90 some percent, that they're going to have such an altered state. But we do need to develop sophistication around these altered states. Currently, we’re using them essentially as ways to treat problems, and not for metaphysical or sociological purposes. 

For example, early in the 1960s an anthropologists had this incredible experience on a South American psychedelic, and he met these beings who basically controlled all of space and time and they were shaped like red dragons. So, he comes back to his shaman and the shaman says, "Yeah, yeah, they're always saying that." That's sophistication. In other words, don't believe literally what you see in a psychedelic state. You need someone who guides you.

So, if you want you to be really interesting. In other words, if you want to not fit in, not to be integrated into society, because health and happiness are often your true potential, you can discover it’s higher than you can possibly imagine. Whether it's the materialists, the religious, or the technologists that've trapped you squarely as a herd animal. This is the seductive invitation of Kripal.

He personally thinks some of the strongest empirical evidence for these paranormal phenomena is precognition. It's knowing what's going to happen before it happens. Well, it's impossible you might say, if you only recognize causality as something that happens in the past and moves to the present. The future hasn't even happened yet right? What if we have no psychedelic explanation now, but we’ll likely have an explanation in the future?

Yet, telepathy is one of the things people experience with psychedelics, emotional entanglement at a distance. It's this deep emotional bonding, not to be mistakes for clairvoyance. Queue the filter thesis. The filter thesis basically says that the brain in particular doesn't produce consciousness. It filters it. It mediates it. It languages it. It enculturates it. It embodies it. But it actually doesn't produce it. Consciousness exists outside of time and space. 

It's everywhere. So the brain is a radio. The signal is not produced by the radio. The radio receives the signal. So, how do you get that cosmic signal? You with the radio, you do things like take a psychedelic. To break open the ego. More to the point, psychedelic don’t alter our reality, they actually demonstrate how we construct reality. And it leaves an open the door to what we mean by reality. A reality to explore endlessly. The superhumans are coming.