Work Trip

Can toxic company culture be cured with mushrooms? There's a growing movement of business leaders willing to give it a shot. We go inside a psychedelic retreat for the corporate elite to find out how altered states are reshaping our working lives.

- By Marisa Meltzer

The vibe at the ketamine ceremony is more business casual than Burning Man. Of the 20 or so people gathered at the airy loft in New York, there’s an even split of women and men, most of them white, ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s. They all look professional, like they could be minor characters on Succession, with their quarter-zip jumpers and Prada sweatpants.

Everyone has congregated for “an evening of self-discovery”. Which means five hours of sound healing, breathwork, qi gong, guided meditation, acupuncture and intention setting. But the most anticipated part of the evening is the ketamine journey.

When the time arrives to partake, it’s dark outside. There’s some small talk as everyone settles onto plastic sleep mats arranged in a circle; to the side of each one is a journal, a face mask, and a dose of ketamine in the form of a pink lozenge.

One participant, Lisa Evia, a blonde-haired, 48-year-old venture capitalist, was in town from Chicago and had some previous experience with ketamine, a dissociative anaesthetic with some hallucinogenic effects. She’d come away from prior experiences that altered for the better some of her personal relationships, such as with her mother. That evening, as she placed the lozenge on her tongue, she had a different set of intentions: she wanted to be a different kind of leader at work. Someone more compassionate, less intense. How could she bring empathy and connectivity into leadership?