I keep having the same conversation with investors. They’re putting 90% of their capital into AI. They believe in it. They’re also scared of it. And somewhere in the back of their minds, most of them are asking a question they don’t quite know how to say out loud: what happens to us when this works? Not to the economy. To us.
I believe psychedelics might be the most important thing happening in the world right now, not despite the AI moment we’re living through, but because of it.
The Meaning We Borrowed From Our Jobs
Every major labor transition in history has triggered a crisis of meaning. When the Industrial Revolution hit, it didn’t just change how people worked, it changed who they were. Craftsmen who had spent lifetimes mastering a trade watched machines do it faster, cheaper, without them. The dignity that came from making something with your hands was gone overnight. And what rushed in to fill that void? Labor movements. Utopian communes. An explosion of new philosophical and religious sects. Marx. Engels. People reaching desperately for new frameworks to explain what their life meant now that their work no longer did.
Then came the knowledge economy and our heads got really busy. Productivity became identity, and your job title became your answer to “who are you.” The cognitive work, the writing, the analysis, the building of things with your mind, became the new source of meaning. For a while it worked, or at least it kept us distracted enough not to notice what we were losing.
What’s happening with AI is our modern version of the Industrial Revolution for knowledge workers. Except it’s happening faster and the thing being automated isn’t your hands, it’s your cognitive intelligence. When those tasks disappear, what’s left? What do we actually provide as humans? My answer is empathy, love, art, creativity, and the ability to be present with another person in a way no AI will touch for a very long time. But most of us have devalued these aspects of our humanity because we’ve been too busy flexing our cognitive intelligence.
Our Spiritual Crisis
In my country, community, and generation, there’s no dominant shared spiritual practice. Humans evolved with the understanding that we are part of some unexplainable vastness, and religion used to fill that space. It declined, often for good reasons, but it left a vacuum that nobody has filled. The loneliness epidemic, mental health crisis, new wars, violence, and political rage—I think these are all symptoms of the same thing: people who have lost their connection to something greater than themselves and don’t know how to find it again. We were burned by spiritual leaders and stopped trusting them, which was reasonable. But did we throw out the experience along with the institution? And now here we are, more connected than ever by technology, yet more alone than ever as people.
This is where psychedelics come in. What they reliably do, and I mean this in the most non-woo way I can muster, is give people the direct experience of being connected to something larger than themselves. Not a belief in it, but the actual felt sense of it, and it’s hard to unfeel that. This is why they have been shown to be therapeutically beneficial across such a wide range of despair. If you have a spiritual practice, psychedelics tend to deepen it. If you don’t, they tend to start the search. They don’t hand you a doctrine, they pull you into a relationship with the divine and let you figure out what to do with it. That’s exactly what’s missing right now.
These medicines are for moments: a coming of age, grief, the kind of transition that breaks your sense of who you are and asks you to build a new one. I think about my own son and wonder when I’ll help him through his first psychedelic journey. What would it look like for that to be as normal and as carefully held as a graduation ceremony? I think about someone losing their job, or waking up at 3am feeling like a stranger in their own life, or sitting with the death of a parent and not knowing how to carry it. These are the moments where people have always reached for something beyond themselves, and AI is going to manufacture more of them, potentially faster than any generation before us has had to face.
That’s the kind of disruption that breaks people. It’s also the kind of disruption where these medicines have historically shown up to help.
From Curiosity to Care
How do psychedelics scale to the mainstream? Not giant institutions or slick wellness brands. Small, human-scale communities—neighbors who show up when someone is grieving, friends who sit with you through a big transition, guides who have done their own work and are held accountable by the people around them. In that world the most powerful path into psychedelic care isn’t an ad campaign, it’s a conversation. A friend saying: I know your mom just died, and that’s a huge thing to hold. These medicines really helped me when I was going through something similar. I think it could help you too.
That’s the future I want to help build. I believe the business lens is actually what makes this scale. Activists can sound the alarm and academics can document the problem, but if you want to actually reach people, you have to build something. What doesn’t exist yet is a trusted, accessible way for a normal person to find their way to psychedelic care when they need it. That middle of the funnel, where curiosity becomes care, is basically empty right now.
That’s what we’re building at Althea. Not because it’s a great market opportunity, though I think it is. But because I’ve sat with these medicines and seen what they do for people who thought they were beyond help. The world AI is building is going to need this. We need this.
