Maxim Tvorun-Dunn

And then all of a sudden, drugs that are more associated with the wealthy or the white or the powerful are put on another level. On the other hand, I think a lot of the researchers who do work on psychedelics point out that there's very little evidence of risks associated with them.

A lot of the researchers who study the effects on things like depression or addiction have found that they can be really helpful when they're done safely and in supervised environments. And so I think those two sort of dynamics are both at play here.

There's a big push to decriminalize or to legalize that's going on across the US. And there are a lot of people who really believe in what these drugs can do for people who are struggling with depression or mental health issues, for people who are struggling with addiction, or just for people who want to sort of look at old questions in their lives in new ways. And

What we're seeing is that the wealthy and the powerful are already doing these drugs. They have access to these drugs. So the question from a lot of the researchers who believe in the benefits of them is then, okay, how do we open up access to people who aren't just Silicon Valley CEOs and do so safely and make sure people are getting the advantages of them and not the potential risks?

Thank you so much for having us.

Thanks for having us on.

For a lot of people, I think work and career has almost taken up the place that religious community might have taken in their lives in previous generations. So I think some people do feel this sense of spiritual emptiness and they're casting around for like, how do I give some sort of structure to wanting to ask like deeper questions about spiritual meaning?

Just to like touch on the science for a second, I think it's not surprising some people are turning to psychedelics because... literally of the effect that they have on the brain. Because typically I think what our brains do is it's almost like a zip file. Like they're trying to compress all the information that's coming in and make it digestible for us and like zip it all up and condense it.

And what psychedelics do is basically the opposite. So they like flood our brain with information and make connections within the brain that normally wouldn't happen. And so people might actually come to realizations or ask questions that they wouldn't be able to do without psychedelics.

That being said, I think some people turn to psychedelics instead of climbing this staircase of expanding your consciousness and asking deeper questions. You're just trying to get in an elevator and like zoom right to the top floor.

But that's like missing all the work of like climbing and the exertion that actually comes from grappling with some of the questions that people might be trying to answer.

It's really wild because I did find actually in doing research for this story that actually there is sort of a long history to that kind of corporate, you know, bent to psychedelics, which I found really interesting because in the 1950s when America was first being introduced to psychedelics,

One of the ways they became really popularized was because a high-up executive at JP Morgan took mushrooms and then wrote this big story for Life magazine narrating his mushroom journey. And so many people read it and started getting interested in doing psychedelics. And there were actually psychedelic evangelists who were trying to fly around the U.S.,

with the purpose of introducing high-powered people, including Hollywood stars, including politicians, but also including Fortune 500 CEOs to psychedelics. And all of that, that push kind of stalled once psychedelics became much more associated with the hippies and with 60s counterculture.

Yeah, I think to the corporate CEO who's all ears to this idea of like, I want to be my best self or I want to self-optimize, some people almost start thinking of it as just one more tool in the self-optimization sort of toolbox.

And we saw this even like in the early 1960s, there were actually experiments going on right in Menlo Park. All of these executives were coming in and they were bringing with them like a work problem that they'd been grappling with.

And then they would do psychedelics and then sit there and see if it made them better able to like tackle some of the technological or the engineering or the creative challenges that they were wrestling with at work.

So I think a lot of the tech executives and the researchers who I talked to also pointed out that I think it's geographically this one area, as you're pointing out, it's San Francisco. It's somewhere people have always been really curious about experimenting with sort of new ways of living and being.

But it's also a place where people are wrestling with big existential questions and creative challenges. And so they're looking for things that kind of get their minds into a new state.

It's part of this ethos that's been introduced into the workplace of bring your whole self to work and also make your work your whole self. And there's a very clear reason companies do that.

If you're doing work that's more qualitative, less quantitative, and harder to measure, you basically have to make sure that people feel a sort of existential level of investment in the work that they're doing. Companies get more out of their workers. What has come along with that, especially in the tech industry, is sort of looser norms. more casual and, you know, sort of expressive work culture.

Right. That basically we're seeing workplaces that have ball pits and happy hours and workout classes.

Yeah, in most cases. And that has come along with a lot sort of looser norms around things that even include like psychedelics.

If one of their workers came to the CEOs and said that they had done some kind of drugs, whether psychedelics or something else, would they have been fired or would they have been disciplined? Stick around.

I mean, it's been, I think, one of the reasons that so many people have viewed the kind of emergence of this corporate psychedelic culture with so much skepticism. And I saw this when I reported on the CEOs who went to this psychedelic CEO retreat, that so many...

The people I interviewed in the course of reporting the article were asking, like, wait a minute, if one of their workers came to the CEOs and said that they had done some kind of drugs, whether psychedelics or something else, would they have been fired or would they have been disciplined?

Like, how does it happen that someone just kind of comes to a position of authority where they then suddenly place themselves above the rules? And it's been particularly interesting. devastating in the context of the fact that a lot of people in this country and in this country's history have been imprisoned over really punitive drug laws.