Can psychedelics fit comfortably inside modern capitalism, or are they fundamentally resistant to being turned into conventional products? That question runs through a wide-ranging conversation between Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ and entrepreneur Ronan Levy.
Levy is the co-founder and former executive chairman of Field Trip Health and author of The Ketamine Breakthrough. His path took him from law into medical cannabis and eventually psychedelics, changing his views on medicine, business, success, and spirituality.
From Law to Cannabis and Psychedelics
Levy says he was once uncomfortable with the idea of losing control and initially skeptical of the term “plant medicine.” His perspective changed after helping build Canadian Cannabis Clinics, which assisted large numbers of Canadians in accessing the legal medical cannabis system.
Seeing cannabis used as medicine challenged his assumptions. When he later investigated psychedelics, he saw potential applications in mental health and a way for people to explore spirituality in an increasingly materialistic culture.
That realization led to Field Trip Health and Levy’s deeper involvement in the psychedelic movement.
Why the Psychedelic Investment Boom Faded
The psychedelic industry attracted enormous excitement and investment around 2020. Levy now describes much of that period as irrational exuberance, fueled by low interest rates, available capital, previous cannabis profits, and growing enthusiasm around psychedelic research.
He does not expect another investment wave of the same magnitude. Instead, he believes psychedelics are entering a healthier phase in which adoption may continue gradually without the same speculative frenzy.
Levy has also become skeptical that psychedelic medicine fits neatly into the conventional Western medical model. He believes many people may prefer experienced facilitators and community-based settings over expensive clinical environments.
Can Psychedelics Be Commoditized?
Levy believes psychedelics occupy an unusual position between products and services. Some substances and lower-dose experiences may function more like products, while others require significantly more support and context.
Ayahuasca is an important example. Levy notes that he has not personally taken ayahuasca and therefore does not claim expertise with it, while Believ emphasizes the importance of experience, skill, and support when working with the medicine.
From a business perspective, Levy increasingly believes psychedelics may resist large-scale corporate models. Rather than becoming dominated by a few enormous providers, he expects much of the field to remain community-driven and relationship-based.
Conscious Capitalism and Spiritual Business
The conversation also explores whether making money from spiritual or psychedelic work is inherently contradictory.
Believ describes the tension of operating an ayahuasca retreat while trying to balance spiritual values with salaries, investors, operating costs, and competition. Levy rejects the idea that spiritual services should automatically be free.
Money, he argues, is simply a medium of exchange. A retreat requires labor, infrastructure, time, and other inputs. Employees need fair compensation, and investors who take risks reasonably expect returns. The challenge is finding a balance without squeezing every possible dollar from customers or workers.
For Levy, conscious capitalism means operating profitably while treating employees, customers, investors, and other stakeholders fairly.
Why Financial Success Does Not Solve Everything
Levy describes entrepreneurship as a kind of spiritual pursuit. Building a company can consume a person’s attention, become part of their identity, and demand years of sacrifice.
The problem comes when financial success is expected to resolve deeper dissatisfaction. Levy says entrepreneurs can spend years imagining that a major exit or financial milestone will finally make everything better.
Then the money arrives, and the same relationship problems, family triggers, insecurities, and emotional patterns remain. The story that success will eventually fix everything suddenly disappears.
This can create a spiritual crisis. Levy believes it helps explain why many successful entrepreneurs eventually become interested in psychedelics, spirituality, or deeper forms of self-exploration.
Living the Game Instead of Trying to Win It
Rather than viewing life as a problem that can eventually be solved, Levy suggests that simply having the opportunity to experience it may be the point.
Humans naturally want to create, contribute, and find meaning. Those pursuits inevitably create obstacles and stress. Removing one problem often reveals another.
The same applies to relationships and personal patterns. Changing external circumstances does not necessarily remove what someone carries internally. Recognizing that can shift attention from constantly trying to escape discomfort toward understanding what it may reveal.
Psychedelics as Tools for New Perspectives
Looking toward the future, Levy sees psychedelics as potentially valuable because they can loosen established patterns of thinking and expose people to perspectives they might otherwise never consider.
He connects this not only with mental wellbeing but also with creativity and society’s ability to approach difficult problems differently. Psychedelics do not automatically provide solutions, but they may help people question assumptions that previously seemed fixed.
His broader prediction is that psychedelics will continue becoming normalized, but perhaps not through the giant corporate structures once imagined. Their future may be smaller, more distributed, and more community-driven—harder to commoditize but potentially better suited to the experiences themselves.
Listen to the whole podcast episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1tdkc3S4dJ7zbhwMsYsYzP?si=1563a924a82441ff
