Monday Brunch: Whale-hunting at Burning Man

And other ecstatic stories from around the internet

Matt Schultz’ Space Whale, from Burning Man

Welcome to Ecstatic Integration, a Substack exploring how or whether western cultures can re-integrate ecstatic experiences wisely and relatively safely. I’m Jules Evans, also director of the NGO, the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which researches post-psychedelic difficulties and how to help people recover.

Autumn is NGO fund-raising time, and I imagine it’s particularly difficult now, with USAID closing down and CDC and other critical health organisations in freefall. I’ll be out there trying to get funding for the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project - if you want to know what we got up to in the last 12 months, check out our Outcomes Report here.

We’ve just had the most important week for fund-raising among psychedelic NGOs - yes, Burning Man. Imagine, hundreds of millionaires and billionaires all gathered together in the desert for a week of sex, drugs and intense bonding. They’re never more open, never more expanded. Perfect time to go whale-hunting.

• Whale: a high-net-worth (HNW) figure whose appetites and desires create an entire ecosystem of advisors, servants, courtiers and hangers-on. Whales have always been critical to the luxury hospitality industry - night-clubs, models, villas, mega-yachts etc. In the last couple of decades, the 1% has got into psychedelics in a big way, leading to the ‘rise of the shaman bro’, or the psychedelic concierge.

For more on this entire HNW ecosystem, see this article:

High-Net-Worth spirituality and elite shamanification

Burning Man is the gathering for the psychedelic elite, so it’s a target-rich environment to fund-raise for your NGO, start-up, research project, DMT temple, alien channelling device or whatever it is you want to make.

To give you a glimpse of the Burning Man fund-raising scene, check out this funny Bloomberg article and podcast episode from 2018. To my mind it’s one of the best pieces of journalism from the psychedelic renaissance. Journalists Kristen V. Brown and Sarah McBride somehow got invited to follow Rick Doblin at the playa, while he bicycled around looking for millionaires and billionaires to ask for funding, particularly Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He also guides a veteran in an MDMA therapy session and presides over a Bronner foam party, all while tirelessly seeking funding for MAPS’ Phase 3 FDA trials. I don’t know these journalists but they must have been laughing that whole week.

It’s an amazing glimpse into the heart of the psychedelic renaissance and the importance of the 1% in funding it, and it lightly touches on some of the ethical issues that other journalists explored since then (especially this 2024 Business Insider article) - is it ethical to seek funding when wealthy people are in expanded states, did MAPS blur the line between underground use and legal medicine…these are all well-worn topics by now, but just for a slice of psychedelic history I think it’s a fantastic article and podcast.

Rick Doblin appeared in a Guardian article last week, by the by, examining his relationship to Elon Musk’s advisor and friend, Antonio Gracias. Doblin and Gracias met each other at Burning Man last year, where Rick apparently complained about the difficulties facing Lykos from the FDA and its shareholders. That encounter led to Gracias teaming up with another investor to buy a big stake in Lykos and re-launch it as Resilient Pharmaceuticals. Another example of Burning Man as the place to pitch for funding!

It’s poignant that in the Bloomberg article / podcast, Doblin bumps into Florencia Bollini on the playa, the ‘corporate shaman’ and entrepreneur, who promises him she can introduce him to Guy LaLiberte, billionaire-founder of Cirque de Soleil, on the playa. Flor died last year in Ibiza, at a millionaire’s party, from over-use of various drugs including ketamine. Friends of hers tell me she got seduced by the world of high-net-worth spirituality at Burning Man in 2014, when she visited an elite camp whose guests included Guy LaLiberte and Sergey Brin. Apparently the camp even had its own hot spring. I think this must refer to Fly Geyser, a ranch with a hot-spring about 20 miles from Black Rock, which Burning Man bought for $6 million in 2015 through anonymous donations, rumoured at the time to be from Sergey Brin, with plans to turn it into a sort of year-round Burn camp. Flor, according to people who knew her well, went round giving various Burners at the camp 5-meo-DMT. That experience proved intoxicating, one friend tells me - psychedelic ceremonies could enable her to enter the luxury bubble of the richest people in the world. But that gilded world has its risks - financial, psychological, physical, maybe even spiritual…

That, at least, is what Sergey Brin’s ex, Nicole Shanahan, declared last week, denouncing Burning Man as ‘demonic’ in a long Twitter post. She writes:

I used to be a devoted “Burner,” having attended faithfully every year from 2014 through 2022 (minus one year due to COVID)...nearly everyone in my social circle was a Burner. It was like belonging to a secret society of sorts. Together, we believed we had access to a limitless reality, something hidden from the outside world…The more exclusive the camp, the more valuable the roles become. There are the beautiful young women, prized for flattery and companionship. The builders, tasked with fixing things and running errands. The wealthy executives, underwriting it all. The celebrities, passing through on invitations. The trust-fund shaman-socialites, curating the “experience.” And, of course, the drug dealers, rebranded as psychedelic healers…

Nicole goes on:

I have come to believe that Burning Man is not just an eccentric festival, but rather a powerful vehicle for deception. In fact, it may be one of the most effective tools for Satan to misdirect souls away from our Heavenly Father.

This is interesting but also a bit rich. Nicole Shanahan is arguably the Captain Ahab of festival whale-hunting.

That’s all for free. After the paywall, more on Nicole’s odyssey; plus Liana Sananda Gillooly on psychedelic temperance; a conversation between Graham St John and Dennis McKenna about Dennis’ brother Terence; how the ‘ketamine queen’ left a wealthy family to become a celebrity drug-dealer in LA, leaving a trail of dead clients (well, two anyway); the David Lynch Foundation settles a law case for apparently forcing Chicago children to do Transcendental Meditation; the first case of ChatGPT-fuelled homicide; and a really useful article on adverse experiences in psychotherapy.