Episode #42

Episode #42: Jamie Wheal Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Length: 2:11:26

Laura Dawn: Alright, without any further ado, here is my fascinating conversation with Jamie Wheal. Hi Jamie, it’s so nice to have you on the show here, thank you so much for taking the time to join me here today.

Jamie Wheal: Sure.

Laura Dawn: Alright, so I thought we would dive into this topic of what we need to pay attention to especially right now as the Psychedelic Movement is moving quite rapidly. I’m curious just to get at your sentiment, if you were to take the pulse of the psychedelic movement at this moment in time, what’s your read on the situation right now?

Jamie Wheal: Well, it’s showing up precisely as you would expect it to and if anybody’s curious, there’s few books or few ideas that I’ve gotten more repeat mileage out of as far as a frame or a lens delay over reality and have it pop into helpful shorthand then Tim Wu’s book, The Master Switch. Tim Wu was the coiner of the Tim net neutrality, he was an advisor to a couple of white houses, he’s a law professor at Columbia, I believe and his whole idea was information technologies, whether it’s the telegraph, to the radio, to TV, to the internet and you can make a case that psychedelics are information technology. They provide access to non-ordinary states of making perception information, et cetera and so they follow a super-duper predictable path.

They start utopian and decentralized, this is going to revolutionize everything and they end up hegemonic and centrally controlled. The Facebook’s from the home-brew computer club back in the day, so the question here is; almost have to falsify that statement, if that’s been proven out time after time, over centuries across industries, you’re like, well, what if anything would make the psychedelic quote/unquote Renaissance, any different from following that trend? And so far, we’re not seeing a ton that’s different, we are seeing a consolidation move, and let’s not forget, the Psychedelic Renaissance is taking place entirely within neoliberal, Quasi open-market, consumer society. So we would expect the old wines and new bottles, we would expect that old wine of epiphany, of initiation, of access to the mysteries or whatever it has been in the past to conform to the bottle it’s in, the container it’s in which is late-stage capitalism and consumer society. I’ve got an itch, I’ve got a scratch, I’ve got a pain, I’ve got a diagnosis; give me the pill, give me the hit, give me the fixed, coded illness, reimbursements, copays, venture capital, return on IP, you know that stuff.

So while that stuff I think is far more inevitable and has far more nurture and just fundamentally mass momentum going for it, than you would ever read in the Buzzfeed, Huff Post, Wired Magazine, Fasco coverage of Psychedelic Renaissance-like it’s going to fix everybody, heal everybody. Look at these split, which has real truth to it, the studies are amazing, super encouraging way addressing our worried well status; on the other hand, it’s a stitch-up. We are moving towards centralized edgenuity quickly and predictably and the big companies that have giant billion-dollar market caps, and you see their boards, and you see their IP, and patent strategies and you see where this goes and it’s fairly straightforward. But for me, I’m not especially ambivalent about that, like dharma’s going to do what dharma does, VCs are going to do what VCs do.

And even though at the center of the Psychedelic Renaissance, is this supposedly profound, inevitable, transformative, personal experience that reorganizes our orientation to life, the universe, and everything. This morning I was reading, I just was scrolling through my newsfeed and I saw an article in town and country no less, and a hop, skipping, a jump, a jump-jump from Vanity Fair. And it was like, why all the rich people are spoken to, and you’re just like for fuck sake if you ever needed a marker, when did late-stage capitalism jump the shark? When did we know we were well and truly cooked? You could have said it was this morning when Town & Country published a piece on how 5 hao was the hit thing in the Hamptons.

So let’s just be super, I would say unemotional realistic, and pragmatic about the sociopolitical and economic forces that are coming to bear and what was formally this underground tradition. But it’s specifically that underground tradition and arguably even the initiatory mystery school, traditions surrounding these things, that’s what gives me long-term hope. So I think it’s without a doubt, I would take it to Vegas that we will end up with Prozac Nation 2.0, we will end up with denature Fast-Acting Psychedelics that strip out as much of the misto as they can while still getting the clinical efficacy. You’ll have the businessman strip that used to be the joke about DMT, you will also have the businessmen fill in the blank Ayahuasca psilocybin LSD, and many of those are already in either study, trials, or patent applications.

So we know that’s coming down the pike and I would also expect this to follow, if not chapter and verse certainly have rhyming echoes of the move to smuggle meditation into the corporate world via mindfulness-based stress reduction because on the one hand, those were original lineage traditions that were designed to dissolve the ego and provide one abiding connection to the non-dual suchness of the world, depending on the tradition and where they sent you. And on the other hand, became 15-minute apps to help stressed-out knowledge workers stay at their desks a little longer, call in sick a little less often and quit more infrequently, that was the business case ROI for MBS [inaudible 24:20].

Laura Dawn: But can’t we make a case that these apps especially in the context of microdosing for productivity, I’m so over this line of, how can we work with microdosing to improve focus? And you made reference to that for the meditation apps, but what about using technology and these meditation apps and these lineages to bring them into the corporate space and plant medicines too, to help reorient people towards greater meaning and purpose, isn’t that still possible?

Jamie Wheal: No, it’s a fools fucking errand, it’s not possible, it’s not happening, it’s never happened and all we do is anybody who’s on the progressive edge here of whatever they do, whether it’s a management consulting to life coaching, to like change the world into psychedelic advocacy, everybody’s just making a deal with the devil. How do I look myself in the mirror and say, I’m still doing the Lord’s work and what I tell myself is that I can go into the bowels of capitalism and I can collect better paychecks there and I can tell myself that I’m going to change the system from within and that’s how we’re going to get our ROI and that’s how I can look baby Jesus in the face the next time I see him in my higher trip. It’s not a fucking real deal because I’ve told this story infrequently, but I’ll tell it again.

Because for me it was one of those pivot points and to keep in mind, I spent a decade in the conscious capitalism movement beside John Mackey and the Whole Foods and all the good guys and the body shop and Ben & Jerry’s and all the good guys; the supposedly good guys. And trying to talk about triple bottom line people, purpose profits, and planet, what fill in the blank that you want and was working with the CEO in the YPO organization, which is one of the largest executive organizations on the planet. They control $9 trillion in collective market cap and one of them went with Lynne Twist in the Pachamama Alliance down to the river Amazon, took his son, sailed up the little boat; helicopters to boats, to planes, to canoes, up to the untouched indigenous folks who then shared their plant medicine wisdom with him and his son.

So lineage healing, all meaningful stuff and then at the end the predictable is asked, which was if you have had your life impacted by this and had your life changed, please consider donating and protecting some of this sacred rainforest land for these indigenous folks that have been holding it down for us for eons before we were born, would you? And he went back to his forum of YPO business executives and said, I have torn fellas, this is a quarter of a million bucks. I could spend to save the rainforest and the experience I just had with my boys or I’ve just got a Ferrari Italia on pre-order and I’ve always wanted a Ferrari Italia ever since I was a little boy and a unanimous recommendation of his YPO forum, his band of brothers dedicated to keeping each other and raising each other to the highest possibility of their inner selves and purpose and impact in the world said, bro, you deserve the Italia.

That thing sat in his driveway, sat in his enamel floored garage for three fucking years with less than a thousand miles driven on it; it eventually got sold as a recoup investment because they had depreciated it. Meanwhile, the rainforest is burning and we’ve spent time with all the big boys in Silicon Valley, we’ve gone into those organizations, we’ve done our level best to change them unless you change the cap table unless you change Milton Friedman’s fiduciary responsibility unless you change the operating agreements and the investor agreements and the governance stacks, people will continue to crank out the widgets that make them rich.

And I have seen precious few people with the balls, the sack, the integrity, the backbone, the heart, and the clarity to honor that, which they’ve been shown on the other side of the veil via the psychedelic initiatory experience unless they’re having a flaky midlife crisis and decide to check it out. And then they go off and become a massage therapist or life coaches themselves, which decouples them from any of the power and influence they would’ve had got into the system. Now they’re just one more talking point slash cringe event on Instagram, so I know that’s a long-winded, seemingly cynical summation of the impossibility of changing the system from within but trust me, I’ve been there, I’ve tried and I’m not buying it.

Laura Dawn: This is why I wanted to have you on here, Jamie and when I first met you at Horizons, that’s one of the first things I said to you, I was like, you have a pretty cynical perspective on things, let’s bring you on and have this discussion and bring it to a wider audience here because these are important things to be talking about. And I still believe in the goodness of humanity, I do and I believe that I have seen people go down and have these transformative experiences and then completely reorient their lives towards a different pathway that serves a greater purpose. Now, keeping in mind that we have this cultural framework, this system that’s rooted in capitalism, we have a monetary system, so we’re all playing this game within this very outdated structure and so I’m curious, do you think that not going down and having these experiences or not having psychedelics, it’s like, do we stay unconscious? Do we stay unaware? Or do we at least try to crack that open just a little bit at a time that can potentially support us on the evolutionary process of waking up?

Jamie Wheal: Well, I want to be clear, my cynicism and at times even outright contempt is not for the deeper human project, consciousness project, cosmos project at all, I have a deep commitment to that work and none of these things leave me remotely tempted to abandon it or give in to despair or anything else. So I think there’s an interesting question we can hopefully come back to which is, if all that’s for naught then what on earth gets you up in the morning because to me, that’s hopefully the Wendell Berry thing would be joyful though you had considered all the facts. Most of us are not considering all the facts, most of us are settling for platitude and nostrums, just happy little things that let me get through the night that I was thinking whistling past the graveyard.

If there was a spooky monster in the graveyard, you think your whistling going to fix it and if there’s probably not, then why are you fucking whistling? So, we do an awful lot right now of crossing our fingers and hoping and leaning on fundamentally soft denialism, and by that I mean, an area that we might be predisposed to be an advocate for whether that’s climate or psychedelic run or whatever it was. But then just again, settling for platitudes and going cross-eyed and fuzzy and therefore not acting with clarity and agency and urgency now which amount to the opposite of the very thing we say we value. So if, for instance, if you’re like, I think the Psychedelic Renaissance is going to work out and it’s such a beautiful experience and there are so many good people doing good things, then you know, that everyone from Compass Pathways to Pfizer to whomever else is going to stitch this thing up while all the happy-go-lucky people are burning their Palo Santo and hoping for the best and the same with environmental stuff. If you’re like, I think the Paris Accords going to work or Cop 26 in Glasgow were like, and maybe I still recycle and we’ve all got to do our part.

And I got to Tesla-like that is soft denialism weirdly because it removes us from acting at the levers of power that are going to call the ball game make the difference. So for me, that’s the interesting thing, at least on the level of Psychedelic Renaissance it’s going to bleed out and do its goofy thing, and it’s going to get medicalized and standardized homogenized and all of that stuff. And in some respects, not only is it inevitable given the inertia, given the market trends, given Tim Wu’s information theory, models, that kind of stuff. But it’s okay because it’s not the whole ball game, never has been and in 99.9% of human experience, the psychedelic experience has always been contextualized as a religious and sacramental and initiatory experience, so it’s super weird to pull it out into a pharmacological medicalized intervention.

That’s never been done desacralized taking that yanked out of any context or explanation of the newness; we now consider access to the numinous, the John’s Hopkins, MEQ30 mystical estate, a state assessment, etc. As you know trattoria excitement as dissociative visions, gets written into the literature like the whole point, the whole shooting match of getting to kneel in front of the burning bush is now marginalized as a side effect to the clinical impact of the compound. So we’ve never done that before and that is doomed to have underwhelming and adverse effects as much as initial studies are showing also promising turnarounds, but it doesn’t get us off the hook for the human experience. And the only thing that gets us quick is the biggest kicker for those initial studies and experiences.

I go from deconditioned zoo animals, living in a socially defined reality tunnel like the Truman Show, or Neo as the computer coder, Mr. Anderson. I go from that world to realizing magic is afoot and that goddess is alive that’s a fucking steep ass and fun, hockey stick part of the curve but the moment that I’ve had that experience, the human condition is still interwoven in that capital and more that I’ve just glimpsed in the same way that the second Harry Potter movie, the second Star Wars, the second Matrix aren’t nearly as cool because they weren’t world-building movies. You already knew the world and now you’re coming back and you need a lot more clout for that story to be even remotely satisfying. Godfather 2, is probably the only film on record that’s done better and they built a new world.

They went back to Janeiro’s childhood and had that origin story woven, so fundamentally initial exposure to psychedelics, especially in a clinical therapeutic setting is world-building events but fourth, fifth, 10th, hundredth times are no longer. And when we realize that we have had in the same way, that there’s the argument for nature deficit disorder these days, like the lost child left in the woods or whatever that book was saying, we are massively denatured humans who have never done that. We should see sunrises and sunsets and we should be really hot and really cold and we should be amongst forest and trees and growing things and we’re not, and we’re suffering because of it. You could also say that we have a mystical, experienced deficit disorder.

So we get this asymmetric boost by having that atrophied muscle or diminished nutrient whatever model we want to think, like put back into our system and get an IV of the misto. And once again, I am alive in a desacralized landscape and that is profound, I don’t want to diminish that experience in the slightest, but that is simply to bring us back to normalized equilibrium as a human living in the wonder of existence. And then what do I do on the rainy cold Tuesday morning in February when my dishes are in the sink and I hate my job and I have to get back in rush hour to go sit chain to a desk, or I’m doom scrolling the news and I see the state of the world, we haven’t solved for any of those things, not even remotely.

And I think to honor psychedelics is also to allow them to be in their appropriate place in the lexicon or the paint palette of human experience and culture versus putting them on a pedestal and hoping that they’re going to be our panacea and the miracle code that gets us out of the pickle we’re in. And so that would be my sense, that’s why I’m not overburdening the medicalized Psychedelic Renaissance, it’s going to do what it does as best as it can with all of these functions and mixed incentives baked into that system. But what gives me the chance of doing something useful is the cultural context surrounding fundamentally spiritualized use, meaning it doesn’t have to be hierarchical religious systems and that kind of thing, but what does it mean to contact the numinous and how do we make sense of it together and what are the ethics and the stories and the guidelines and the context and the interpretations and the ritual and the customs that surround this experience and what ought we do with it. And then that to me is a fascinating deeply needed project and if we get cracking on it, then we have a real chance at creating a Psychedelic Renaissance that has not just double-blind placebo control stats behind it but has the depth and the breadth of being held in an appropriate cultural container.

Laura Dawn: And it seems though that some people are engaging in it that way, that it’s not necessarily this mainstream massive medicalized movement, there are also these people who are holding it in a certain way that does tend to the sacred. So, I do think that is simultaneously happening and so I’m hearing you say a few things; one, it sounds like we need to find other ways to connect to the mystical in our everyday lives and reorient our lives towards tending to the sacred that don’t necessarily require psychedelics at all because we can have peak experiences and awe-inspiring moments. And it also sounds like a very real, tangible thing that someone can take away from this conversation is to readjust our expectations around what psychedelics can do with us and for us. And you quoted Chogyam Trungpa in your book Recapture the Rapture, which I loved reading that book.

And a big part of that lineage of Tibetan Buddhism talks about cultivating a daily practice and it takes lifetimes to step out of the rigidity of mind, this is the way it is, this is who I am, and we know that psychedelics catalyze change. So to me, it seems we need to reorient a slow and steady win the race narrative, and that psychedelics can help us change, they can catalyze change, but the adjustment towards how much we’re embodying this radical expectation of transformation. You said that in your book, there was a story about you being a child and that you were still that same little kid that your personality didn’t change that much, but what if it changed a fraction in a healthier direction than it was like when Pema Chodron or trogon talk about you can spend a whole lifetime of practice. And if you create a moment’s pause between stimulus and reaction, then that’s a worthy path to take, so it’s readjusting these narratives that we’re not going for the big transformation, but if they do help us change a little bit step-by-step, isn’t that good and necessary, especially right now?

Jamie Wheal: Well, I don’t disagree but I’m just going to play the devil’s advocate for a fun conversation but no, totally inadequate and this is just the nature of our beast right now. So these aren’t disconnected thoughts, so we’ve laid a couple of foundational planks coming into this point here, which is, that we are still in late-stage capital neoliberal, fractured individualistic, consumer society, producing the latest and greatest hits for our mixed spirituality, which is well documented from the fifties onwards had this seemingly Revolutionary pairing, which ultimately got entirely co-opted of Eastern mysticism non-dual thought, et cetera. So, now that whole notion and Adam Curtis, the British documentarian, who does all those wacky ass documentaries on the nature of self and all these things. One of his most recent points was that stuff like that upwelling of consciousness and you can throw it back to Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman and the psychedelic revolution back then you can weave in all those elements.

But they were also directly connected to social justice at the time, specifically civil rights and Vietnam, and the then-nascent environmental movement. And that in 1968, that shit was popping off, there were revolutions and that’s summer from Prague, to Paris, to London, to Detroit, all over things were happening and young people on the ground were convinced that this was the moment it was all going to change to goodness, truth, and beauty. And then they all got shut down and between those MLK and RFCs assassinations dragging into Watergate and the utter dissolution like that, there was an inward cynical turn and that went from we’re marching on the streets and changing civilization to we’re going back to the land and we’re withdrawing and change, wouldn’t, you know it, nicely, conveniently now comes from within.

The New Age Movement, began self-absorption like Gordon Gekko, greed is good coexisted with new age, change comes from within and they were doppelgangers of the same cultural substrate and that’s a hard one for progressive to accept, acknowledge, and wrap our heads around. We are ultimately complicit and the same thing with the secret, the same thing with prosperity, gospel, the same thing I deserve what I can manifest for myself and it’s the big Air B&B mansion, it’s the Lambo, here I am in Bali or Fuji or [inaudible42:35] the whole lifestyle branding, all that stuff snuck in and lured us back to sleep. So my sense is, and this goes back to, let the medicalized Renaissance do what it’s going to do, it can only do so much because it has no cultural context at this point, but the religion mystical one, like go back to the Eleusinian mysteries, go back to any of the old school traditions.

There was always a sense of you’re about to be initiated in something, you’re in no way the first and you won’t be the last. There is this fucking lineage, including the priest, the hierophant that you’re in a relationship with, but who had one before them back to the beginnings of time, this is who we are, this is what this is about, these are who our gods are. And crucially, these are your duties and obligations as an initiate, this is what you’re supposed to do to serve, so this notion of like, if it just changes me and makes me a little happier isn’t that enough, don’t we have to do this one person at a time. No, the idea is an obligation and a duty serve is arguably the critical element that has been missing from the DNA of personal growth in the west in the last half-century to 75 years now.

And we positively have to put that back in because if it just becomes this solipsistic narcissistic, when you crawl out my household with new improved twinkly lights, I will stay firmly wedged up in my household just with more twinkly lights and that can aid and abet egoic development. So when you were saying, aren’t there a lot of people fundamentally accentuating the sacred and the sacramental, well you have to take them on a case-by-case basis and by their felt-woolen broad brim hats, you shall know them like fucking hell. It’s such a pretentious assemblage of dogary masquerading as the sacred at this point that, it just curdles your skin and your blood; I suppose is what we get cuddled with.

So there is the capacity to do it, there is the opportunity to do it but once again, market economics incentives of I’m an Instagram life coach, I’m a medicine server, I’m a whatever, fill in the blank. And look at me, here’s the imagery of myself projected to you as a way to exact commerce or likes or clicks or following or whatever it would be. The spiritual marketplace has been hijacking co-opted by false incentives because again, back in the proverbial day, there was always ritualized value exchange around access to the mysteries, it wasn’t pay-to-play, Ii wasn’t Venmo, it wasn’t overpriced personal growth workshops in sexy locations. There was often gifting for sure, there was something that happened and it’s the acknowledgment of the priest, the acknowledgment of the shaman is whatever it would be, but it was circumscribed. And that didn’t mean that there were never abuses or anything like that, it just meant there was a place and a way to embed value exchange that also was enculturated within the sacred experience and wasn’t somehow co-opted by a transactional personal growth marketplace dynamics. So yes, there are still sacred movements going on and yes, some folks are still holding that candle and keeping it clean, but it’s precious few among a whole bunch of money changes in the temple.

Laura Dawn: But would you still include yourself in this equation? I mean you have a beautiful lifestyle from the outside, I see you on Instagram, you also have the program that you charge for, there’s monetary exchange. We live in a monetary culture, so at what point do we pull the threads apart on this?

Jamie Wheal: We do what we have always done, we are guides and instructors and teachers, and we train people in hard important things. So for me, whether I was working in grad school or an outdoor boarding school or a mountaineering school, it’s always simply been tuition for training and that’s it. And to me that just seemed the cleanest, it’s not imaginative, it’s not even a good business model because if you want to get valuations, you get valuations, sums of recurring revenue and this and that and the other, it’s a lousy business model, but it’s the most honest one that ever occurred to us. We train people to do hard things in cool places with kickass instructional design if you want to do it; do it, if you don’t, don’t and we do no upsell, so if anybody’s in-state, which you probably will be at the end of a kickass week, doing something fun and transformational go home, cool your jets we’ll still be here.

So that’s our best effort at it, different people do different things, some people will do podcasts, and then they monetize via ads, some people do Patreon and they’ll say, here’s the tin cup if you like what I’m doing, or substack a similar model. There’s the whole red bull model and sell something high-margin and cheap like carbonated sugar, water, or supplements and then we use the profits from that to do something cool, like red bull athletics or any other organization that does that thing. So there are a lot of different ways people are trying to metabolize starlight at this point, how do I take whatever insights I’m getting from my particular sneak root up into the numinous, and then how do I come back and fundamentally put a roof over my head and food on the table.

But for many people, it doesn’t necessarily stop there; I mean for us, you’re asking about my life. Our life hasn’t changed a lick from when we were broke-ass grad students, our goal then was like, man, if I can just buy a mining claim, put a yard upon it, throw a solar panel and we’ll ski or buy again. And then can we just write and paint and be humans on this earth in a beautiful spot and what’s what with a $2,500 Volkswagen Westphalia to noodle around it, and so now a quarter-century later, we’re building an off the grid cabin on a mining claim up in the mountains in Colorado and our Volkswagen has grown into a sprinter, but it took 20 years of saving and waiting.

So it’s ironic, it’s not like we are and then we’ll get a boat and then we’ll get a plane but my plane doesn’t have as many portals, my plane has repeller and all my buddies have jets, no, there wasn’t scope creep in our life. And I would mak