The CEOs Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?

Burrowed in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies is a wooden house, a retreat center made of pine and spruce and filled with mushroom carvings, tapestries of periwinkle and indigo paisley, books about “The Indoctrinated Brain” and other paraphernalia nodding to the promised transformation: Enter as a chief executive, emerge as an enlightened one.

When a group of executives wearing hoodies and leggings arrived on a Tuesday evening in October, they vibrated with the nervous energy of summer camp drop-off. They were gathered for a retreat called “The Psychedelic CEO,” which they had agreed to let me observe.

Their guide, Murray Rodgers, used to be a hard-charging oil and gas executive. About a decade ago, he underwent a process of self-discovery. It began after a divorce and a failed company initial public offering that left him alone on his 60th birthday. He became a yoga instructor and then went to Costa Rica to try ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew. This started a sequence of mushroom trips and psychedelic ceremonies that left Rodgers, now 69, spiritually, psychologically and professionally transfigured.

It was as if he had thrown his ego into a dryer and watched it shrink, and he became intent on helping others with that same kind of cosmic laundering.

He wrote a book, “The Psychedelic CEO,” and began hosting retreats. On that day in October, he welcomed five business leaders – Adam, Adam, Jill, Chris and Ajay – most of whom requested to use only their first names so as not to alarm their investors, employees or children with their unconventional approach to professional development. All run small businesses in the Calgary area.

After their arrival, they settled on couches in a downstairs den, waiting for Rodgers to introduce the agenda.

The first order of business was a microdose, 0.25 milligrams, of psilocybin (the main psychedelic substance found in hallucinogenic mushrooms), which was child’s play compared with the dosages they would take the next day. After handing out the psilocybin pills, Rodgers brought out a map of consciousness, which displayed a range of mental states the entrepreneurs might be experiencing. He used a marker to jot down each entrepreneur’s current state of being.

Rainbow people enter the office

In the early 1960s, psychedelic drugs arrived in Silicon Valley (though it wasn’t yet called that). A technology executive named Myron Stolaroff created a psychedelic research center in Menlo Park, California, which he and his colleagues gave a deceptively generic name: the International Foundation for Advanced Study. Eager to know whether tripping could help solve creative problems, the center brought in dozens of engineers and executives for guided drug trips.

James Fadiman, a researcher who helped run the trials, told me that this operation, carried out in a nondescript office, was in no way considered illicit. “Sometimes it was the bosses who came in,” Fadiman said. “This wasn’t sneaking off into the mountains with the rainbow people.”

It’s not hard to discern how the love affair between business and psychedelics came screeching to a halt. Psychedelics became associated with beatniks and hippies. Psilocybin, LSD and some other psychedelic drugs were prohibited by the federal government by the early 1970s.

But business leaders never completely lost interest in the substances. Some continued using them for pleasure; others attested to their life-changing influence. Steve Jobs declared taking LSD a critical life event, one that “shows you that there’s another side to the coin.” Sam Altman said psychedelic trips could be “totally incredible.”

There is now a growing cottage industry of psychedelic retreats for business leaders. Guides sell curated experiences, with names like “The Journeymen Collective,” where stifled executives go on mushroom trips that promise a spiritual makeover.

Psychiatrists note that using psychedelics in an environment that isn’t medically supervised can be risky, especially for people with family histories of psychiatric disorders, who could experience psychosis. “If you have a loaded family history of either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, I would be cautious about taking psychedelics,” said Dr. Charles Nemeroff, chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School.

(Rodgers said he interviewed prospective retreat participants about their psychiatric and medical histories in order to help ensure they would have safe experiences.)

‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’

“I want to experience ego death.” “I want to get my company through a public offering.” “I want to find God.”

Rodgers has heard every strain of intention that propels business people toward his psychedelic retreats. He cautions them to reset their expectations. “The key word is surrender,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much you’ve read, how much you think you know – none of it will be true.”

At the retreat center, Rodgers led the entrepreneurs in some gentle yoga and singing. As they got ready for bed, Rodgers assured them that every person’s journey the next day would be different.

The following morning, we drove to a nearby river for a silent nature walk. Rodgers reminded everyone to focus on their breath.

Back at the house, two women who would serve as trip sitters, supervising the group, showed up. One of them, Lisa Stickle, introduced herself as an acquaintance of Rodgers from his days in the oil and gas industry.

“Did you guys do any breath work?” Stickle asked.

Nodding, Rodgers replied, “These guys are tuned in.” Turning to address the group, he added: “This is about surrendering to what’s in you. This is a day off. This is ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’ ”

The entrepreneurs began to ready their “sacred spaces,” the mattresses where they would spend the next four hours. Next to each mat, Rodgers placed a bucket with a water bottle and toilet paper, in case of tears. He then retreated to the back of the room, where he began to weigh mushrooms on a scale.

Rodgers reminded the group members that in the first few minutes of their trip, they might not feel anything. “Your mind will be like: ‘What’s going on? I don’t feel anything. Why did I pay for this?’ ”

“It’s your ego’s last-ditch effort,” Stickle added.

“Believe me,” Rodgers said. “The switch will go on.”

The unsettled science of ego depletion

There’s little concrete knowledge, yet, of how or whether psychedelics affect leadership and decision making. Since 2022, two associate business professors at the University of Maryland, Bennet Zelner and Rachelle Sampson, have been observing business leaders who gathered for retreats in the Netherlands, where some attendees received executive coaching along with psilocybin trips. Zelner and Sampson are now collecting data on how the experience has affected the executives’ professional lives.

Luther Kitahata, a coach for participants in the Netherlands retreats, said he watched someone who used to lead a bank and now sits on company boards overcome fears about public speaking. This didn’t surprise him.

“The ego is being brought down,” he explained. “The ego is usually what’s thinking, ‘Oh, what if people think badly of me?’ ”

The former chief operating officer of MasterClass, Mark Williamson, has done some 20 guided psychedelic trips since 2020, which he says have yielded professional epiphanies. He started prioritizing mentorship, and also changed his position at MasterClass. “I realized my role was getting too big and the company would be better served if I handed off some responsibilities,” Williamson said.

There are now dozens of studies being done on the effect of psychedelics on mental well-being. But some scientists worry about research being done by scholars who seem to be wedded to finding positive results.

‘Dad did a lot of drugs’

Rodgers played “Here Comes the Sun” to let the entrepreneurs know that their trips were most likely coming to an end. They slowly stirred and left the den, curling up outside to discuss what they had seen. They all agreed on one particularly affecting moment of the day, which was tripping while listening to Coldplay’s “Fix You.”

Rodgers brought out blank canvases and pastels so they could draw what they had seen. The group drew blue and green blobs, yellow streaks and infinity symbols.

“My kids will find this in the attic one day, and they won’t understand,” one entrepreneur, Adam, joked.

“Dad did a lot of drugs that day,” another, also named Adam, replied.

In the moment, the drug-induced experiences didn’t translate into tidy takeaways. But in the month following the retreat, each of the group members found nuggets of meaning.

Jill, who is a partner in an advertising firm, said that the trip prompted her to consider why she was averse to taking risks. This was helpful as she tried to make up her mind between two roles at her company, one sales-focused and the other operational. (She ended up inventing her own job description, combining elements of each.) “There was this low-level anxious hum going away,” she said. “It’s like I’m more chilled out.”

Ajay, who runs a marketing firm, found the trip frightening – for a moment he thought he had died – but in the weeks afterward, he felt that it had helped him better understand his own emotional states. He summed it up as “feel more, care less.” And Adam, who runs small e-commerce businesses, said that the trip had left him with a new sense of ease about items he couldn’t accomplish on his daily to-do lists.

“When you own a business, you start the day with a 15-line checklist,” he said. “What’s happened to me is the subtle reminder that it’s not all a big deal.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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