The local time here in the cloud forest of Costa Rica is 11 a.m., and today is November 11, which means that in a little over 11 minutes, the full time and date will be 11:11:11 on 11/11—a cosmic alignment so conspicuous I can’t help but feel like I’ve arrived in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. A resonant note of reassurance helps when you’re contemplating a plateful of magic mushrooms in a circle of 10 mostly strangers and about to go on your first psychedelic journey, already far from home.
As for the place itself, I’m at Holos retreat center, part wellness destination, part incubator for plant medicine startups, a sensorial staging ground for a growing list of entrepreneurs who are building retreat programs around specific themes (leadership, in our case) for specific clientele, with the help of specific psychoactive medicines. The center is perched atop a high ridgeline that peers over the Diamante Valley. When you unzip your tent flaps in the morning, you see the 200-foot Nauyaca Waterfall, the tallest in Costa Rica, a mile away across the valley, a slow-motion strip of alabaster painted onto the cliffside. Breathtaking. Another type of reassurance, though not strictly necessary for the therapeutic process we’re about to undergo.
In fact, the only reason I’ve come all this way is that I’d been disinvited from a psychedelic therapy retreat in upstate New York, hosted by a founder, because at least one of the guests— entrepreneurs, politicians, athletes, corporate executives, and the like—had vetoed my presence. The vote had to be unanimous for me to attend, and it’s easy to understand why.
Aside from the obvious risk to your professional reputation, there’s also the strong likelihood of snot-crying around people you’ve just met. We were about to dive into the deepest recesses of our minds and bodies with the aid of a powerful plant medicine, psilocybin, a hallucinogenic chemical found in scores of mushrooms that has been used in healing traditions dating back thousands of years, across multiple cultures and continents. I’d read enough Aldous Huxley and Michael Pollan to know that we would all be rendered about as vulnerable—as open—as a human can be. And let’s not skip this technical detail: It remains a serious crime in the U.S. to possess psilocybin. Many people with the means and drive for transformative self-reflection are taking the risk anyway, though they may not wish to do so around someone who would be taking notes.
The taboo, however, is starting to relax. Psychedelic therapy is creeping toward legitimacy—scientifically, socially, and legally—after having gone underground 50-plus years ago, when psilocybin, LSD, and peyote got added to Schedule I, the DEA’s list of substances deemed to have “no currently accepted medical use … and a high potential for abuse.” In January, the supervised use of psilocybin became legal in Oregon, and researchers expect that MDMA (a.k.a. ecstasy) will soon be shifted into the medical treatment column. Clinics that administer ketamine to treat depression have cropped up in New York, Chicago, Houston, and other cities. Mindbloom, an early leader in the space, adopted a telehealth model in which patients guided by a clinician over a video call take ketamine, in pill form, at home. But they have bigger plans. “I named the company Mindbloom, and not Ketabloom, for a reason,” says founder and CEO Dylan Beynon. “I thought that ketamine would be a wedge into the market to help us build out our protocols, tools, a provider network—build a brand—so that we would be prepared to add these other medicines.”
Psychedelic trips have been a form of social currency among entrepreneurs at least since Steve Jobs declared that LSD changed his life. Now a number of indicators suggest that the role of psychedelics in business, on the supply side and the demand side, is primed to take off. What that means for founders, in particular, is a wide-open question. “How psychedelics can help facilitate leadership is still a novel thing to look at,” says Paul F. Austin, founder of Third Wave, a psychedelics literacy
