Ego Death for the 1%?

Ever since Apple co-founder Steve Jobs enthusiastically and very publicly praised LSD for his business success — saying that taking the drug was one of the most important things he’d ever done in his life — it’s been widely understood that Silicon Valley and psychedelics often go hand in hand. Though the original LSD explosion of the 60s is now a long time ago, the microdosing trend of the last decade harkens back to those OG heady days of drug experimentation in the valley. By 2016, every tech entrepreneur, or so it seemed, was singing the praises of psychedelics.

Now, as psilocybin and other drugs, like MDMA and ketamine, are newly explored for their mental health benefits, and the public conversation around these substances (not to mention the legal landscape) has changed, we seem to be in a second contemporary wave; Silicon Valley is once again all about the mind-altering substances. But whose minds, exactly, are they trying to alter?

In December 2024, the New York Times breathlessly reported on “the Psychedelic C.E.O”, Murray Rodgers, a former oil and gas executive who had a crisis ten years ago when his marriage fell apart, and his business’s stock launch was a failure. At 60 years old, he found himself single, alone, and without the easy millions that come from a successful initial public offering (IPO). Seeking change, he turned to psychedelics, namely an ayahuasca experience in Costa Rica, followed by a series of psilocybin trips and other “ceremonies” that left him “spiritually, psychologically and professionally transfigured.”

The daily health habit you’ll actually stick with…

This time of year, it’s SO hard to stay healthy.

That’s why you need a daily habit that’s easy.

Meet AG1: With just one quick scoop, you’ll support your immune health, gut health, energy, and fill nutrient gaps.

Give AG1 a try today to unlock their best offer ever.

Give AG1 a try today

Now, Rodgers runs retreats tailored to CEOs like him, where business leaders fly up to Canada to do yoga, breathwork, and take prodigious amounts of mushrooms while listening to Coldplay and the Beatles. After tripping, attendees are encouraged to figure out how they can relate their experiences to the business world, with some saying that the retreat changed how they saw their roles, how they ran their teams, and how they approached he world of work as a whole.

As a long-time psychonaut, it’s impossible to read such articles and not notice the difference between your own experiences and how these business leaders' experiences are reported. Though the retreat has all the trappings of the hippy culture it is attempting to tap into — wood huts, acoustic guitars, vaguely eastern carpets and wall hangings furnishing the rooms — there is very little of the real spiritual engagement that marked the psychedelic movement of the 1960s: no questioning of the wider systems we work under, no giving up of power, no connecting to our fellow humans. No criticism of society allowed, it seems.

Not a single attendee featured in the article mentioned capitalism, nature, the environment, or any reflection on how their businesses affected the planet, the population, or even the people who toil under them to build their enormous wealth. They spoke a lot about ego death and not much about other people at all. One attendee mentioned to the New York Times that he felt “a new sense of ease about items he couldn’t accomplish on his daily to-do lists.” This is psychedelics, then, in the service of capitalist productivity: short-term peacefulness for long-term financial gain.

Is this what a search for ego death has come to?

There are many feelings that come up, as long-time lovers of psychedelics, when we read the NYT article. The first and most prominent is the ease with which these rich people not only access these substances but parade their drug use in front of the world, making a profit from selling and taking them, in countries where many others are criminalized and imprisoned for taking them in their own homes. The use, supply, and purchasing of psilocybin-containing mushrooms remains illegal in Canada, with dispensaries that operate on the edge of the law forced to close, and those who worked there, however briefly, are saddled with permanent criminal records.

If you are a tech CEO, however, not only can you fly into the country with the express intent of taking these substances, you can also run a business supplying the drug and talk about it in the New York Times afterwards, promoting your business to a wide audience. This is the very definition of two-tier policing. None of us wants people to be criminalized for taking mushrooms — and yet none of these people seem to be actively engaged in changing the laws that punish people who do exactly what they do, but end up in jail for it.

The second feeling that comes up, for us at least, is disgust. There is something perverse about this attempt to buy cultural legitimacy, or spiritual enlightenment, expressly for the purpose of applying it to a business world that furthers economic disparity and environmental collapse. The pioneers of the psychedelic renaissance were not preaching better leadership strategies within a capitalist system; they were preaching a rejection of those very structures, in order for us as a culture to come to something better: Turn on, tune in, drop out. If these CEOs and business leaders had really experienced ego death, had really understood the impact of their actions on the world, wouldn’t the first thing they do be to go back to their companies and raise everyone’s wages? If you have truly put your ego aside, how would you go on, operating in a system that prioritized you, the richest member of your company, above all the others who work for you? Perhaps some of them have had this sort of insight and have gone back and handed the means of production to the workers in their companies; if so, it hasn’t been reported anywhere thus far.

Substances like psilocybin-containing mushrooms have come to be known by many adherents as “entheogens” in the last few years, specifically to highlight their ability to further our togetherness and interdependence. Murray Rodgers advertises his psychedelic retreats on Instagram as for “CEOs on a path of self-discovery and with a commitment to being Conscious Empathetic and Open leaders in business and life.” But who are they being encouraged to be empathetic towards? Where does this openness and consciousness lead, if not to humanity as a whole?

Perhaps it was always going to end up this way. When any substance reaches towards legalization and therefore the mainstream, as psilocybin is now doing alongside such substances as ketamine and MDMA, its use, production, and distribution will always be subsumed into the capitalist system. Sometimes this is overt, and sometimes it is covert, but it always, always seems to happen.

There is something unique to psychedelics, though, which adds another element to this process. For 60 years now, psychedelics have had a counter-cultural reputation, which doesn’t seem to shift, no matter how close to the mainstream they get. In the time we’re living in, when everything is about presentation, and nothing is about substance or meaning, this offers the loudest, most public people a way to exhibit their perceived counter-cultural tendencies — even when they are in the most extreme seats of political and cultural power. Not only are these people failing to challenge the way society is run— the inequality, the extraction from the environment, the oppression of regular folks; everything the counter-culture of the ‘60s stood against — they are actively exploiting it for massive personal, political, and financial gain.

Elon Musk famously has managed to get a ketamine prescription from a doctor (not a difficult feat when you are one of the richest men alive), which he says he uses once every couple of weeks to “manage his depression.” His net worth is reported to be upwards of $400 billion. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, has spoken of his enjoyment of ‘shrooms. His reported net worth stands at $156 billion. A 2023 study of 20 of the world’s billionaires found that “the richest 1 percent of the world’s population produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 than the five billion people who made up the poorest two-thirds of humanity.” These climate effects are not abstract; they will lead to the deaths of millions of people. To quote Oxfam directly:

As Los Angeles burned in the deadliest wildfire season in California’s history at the beginning of 2025 — and the city’s wealthiest tweeted requests for $10,000-a-day private firefighting crews while poorer neighborhoods went up in flames — it became impossible to ignore the bigger picture: Environmental catastrophe is inseparable from the industries profiting off the very conditions that leave the rest of us exposed. We must stop falling for the attempts of these people to appear counter-cultural and spiritually-minded, as they continue to act in a way that will cause the planet to become uninhabitable, all for their personal financial gain. It’s time we take psychedelics — and a whole lot more — back from these people.

This post is a syndication from “A Quickly Changing Kaleidoscope,” written by Dr. K. Mandrake and Virginia Haze, the authors of the critically acclaimed The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible and The Psilocybin Chef Cookbook.

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

Editorial Process

DoubleBlind is a trusted resource for news, evidence-based education, and reporting on psychedelics. We work with leading medical professionals, scientific researchers, journalists, mycologists, indigenous stewards, and cultural pioneers. Read about our editorial policy and fact-checking process here.