How Psychedelics Are Helping Entrepreneurs Heal and Grow With Matt Zemon

How Psychedelics Are Helping Entrepreneurs Heal and Grow With Matt Zemon

by | Podcast

Matt Zemon, MSc, is an educator, author, and leader in psychedelic wellness who focuses on the impact of psychedelics on mental health. He is the best-selling author of Psychedelics for Everyone, Beyond the Trip, and The Veteran’s Guide to Psychedelics. His work centers on expanding access to psychedelic therapies, supporting veterans, and helping people find purpose, connection, and healing.

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Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

  • [2:26] What Matt Zemon’s childhood businesses taught him about entrepreneurship
  • [4:50] How producing a White House event led Matt to launch an American Indian entertainment company
  • [7:09] Why Matt created Bernard to support cable operators with billing and call centers
  • [15:02] Why source, set, and setting are critical for psychedelic safety
  • [21:19] Matt talks about guiding veterans through ayahuasca ceremonies with Heroic Hearts Project
  • [24:39] The impact of MDMA clinical trials on treatment-resistant PTSD
  • [29:52] How psilocybin research helps terminally ill patients reduce end-of-life anxiety
  • [35:23] What makes 5-MeO-DMT the “God molecule” and how it differs from other psychedelics
  • [38:50] Why most psychedelics are nonaddictive and carry a lower risk than alcohol
  • [40:56] The importance of medical screening and safe practices before psychedelic use

In this episode…

Psychedelics have moved from counterculture to boardroom, and more entrepreneurs are turning to them for healing and personal growth. But can these substances really transform the way business leaders think, feel, and lead?

According to Matt Zemon, a bestselling author and educator in psychedelic wellness, the answer is yes. He explains how a guided journey helped him reconnect with his late mother, opening the door to profound emotional healing. He highlights the importance of mindset, environment, and source when approaching these medicines responsibly. For Matt, psychedelics didn’t just shift his inner world; they made him a more present father, a more grounded entrepreneur, and an advocate for veterans and others seeking transformation.

Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Matt Zemon, an educator, author, and leader in psychedelic wellness, to discuss how psychedelics are helping entrepreneurs heal and grow. Matt also shares insights on the therapeutic potential of psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT. Discover how psychedelics can enhance emotional availability, why set and setting are vital for safety, and how these tools are supporting veterans with PTSD.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Quotable Moments:

  • “In that first journey, I reconnected with my mom, who died when she was 49, and I was 22.”
  • “My father has never been more emotionally available.”
  • “Psychedelics don’t cure anything. These are catalysts which help put us into a state where we can remember who we are.”
  • “It is amazing to me that we allow almost 18 veterans a day to kill themselves.”
  • “Psilocybin is both nontoxic and nonaddictive.”

Action Steps:

  1. Prioritize set, setting, and source when exploring psychedelics: Paying attention to mindset, environment, and medicine origin reduces risks and ensures safer experiences.
  2. Explore emotional availability through self-work: Becoming more present and emotionally connected can strengthen family bonds and improve leadership effectiveness.
  3. Support veterans and vulnerable groups with proven therapies: Providing access to psychedelic-assisted treatments can address PTSD and reduce alarming suicide rates.
  4. Integrate scientific research into personal growth practices: Combining academic insights with lived experiences creates a more balanced and informed approach to healing.
  5. Build supportive communities for integration: Ongoing dialogue and shared reflection help solidify lessons from psychedelic journeys and foster lasting transformation.

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Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

All right. Today we’re talking about entrepreneurship and psychedelics. What do those two have to do with one another, and how can one help support the other? My guest today is Matt Zeman. I’ll tell you more about him in a second.

So stay tuned.

John Corcoran: 00:14

Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: 00:31

All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of the show. And you know, every week we talk with smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of different companies.

We’ve had Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree. Go check out the archives. Lots of great episodes for you to check out there. And of course, this episode is brought to you by Rise25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that?

We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast. We do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution. And we also created what some are calling the Wix or Squarespace of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform podcast Copilot.

So go to our website or email our team at [email protected] and you can learn all about it. All right. Jumping into today’s guest, his name is Matt Zemon. He is a psychedelic wellness advocate, mental health entrepreneur, long-time seasoned entrepreneur and bestselling author. And he’s an advocate for psychedelics for everyone, written a number of different books on it, and holds a master’s degree in psychology and neuroscience, and so has really understands both, has the personal experience behind it, and also has the academic understanding behind psychedelics, which has been really a hot topic in health and wellness for a number of years now.

And so excited to have him here on the show. But Matt, you know I love I told you beforehand that we love to start by knowing a little bit about our guests and what they were like as a kid, so that we can understand what we were like, why we’re who we are as an adult. And this is one I’ve never heard before. Okay. I’ve heard people selling gum at school. I’ve heard people selling pot at school. I’ve heard people selling erasers at school. You’ve sold pencil shavings. Tell me about the pencil shavings. How do you sell pencil shavings?

Matt Zemon: 02:26

Constantly trying to find ways to to make money, even from an early age. And I had this idea that if I took the pencil shavings and I created a board game on a piece of lined paper, that kids might pay enough money so I can go get some pretzels on the way home from the pretzel vendor. I was growing up in a center city Philadelphia, and we’re big on our pretzels. And it worked. And again, this was not a a business built to scale.

This was not a business that was built to sell. It was a business built to acquire pretzels. And it worked for that for.

John Corcoran: 02:55

Pencil shavings and a board game. How does that work?

Matt Zemon: 02:59

Those little square pencil sharpeners we had and we turn them and they make those little. Yeah, yeah. So people would would come and they’d pay a quarter or they pay a quarter for the pencil shavings and then a game that they could play using the pencil shavings.

John Corcoran: 03:13

Okay.

Matt Zemon: 03:14

It was just a, it was a thing. It was.

John Corcoran: 03:16

You must have some good sales skills. You must have some good sales skills. Here, here’s some crap that I. That is the discard from my pencil. I’m going to sell it to you for a quarter so that’s pretty impressive.

And then you also sold your sister’s toys. Your parents went away for the weekend and you sold your sister’s toys.

Matt Zemon: 03:30

So much trouble. I ended up running a casino on our front porch. And so part of it was using her toys as, like, you throw the hoop over the stuffed animal and you can win the stuffed animal. And I didn’t really care because it was her stuffed animals. And then part of it was those were the prizes for a bunch of different things. So parents came back. She was very upset that many of her toys were missing, and I had to walk around the neighborhood and buy them back. At least the kids were nice to not sell them back to me at a margin. I was able to basically give the money back. But it’s funny, big trouble in the house and not a I do not recommend selling your sister’s toys at any point.

John Corcoran: 04:04

Probably. Good advice. And you’ve started a number of different companies, some more successful than others. I know one was an American Indian entertainment company that you worked with. What was this?

Matt Zemon: 04:15

I was so much fun. I mean, in 94, I was picked to be the producer of the the All Nations meeting at the white House. So this was the Clinton administration and the leaders of the 545 tribes, a federally recognized tribes. And I made friends with different tribal leaders. And as I.

John Corcoran: 04:30

Take a step a few steps backwards. I worked in the Clinton White House.

Matt Zemon: 04:34

Hey, look at that.

John Corcoran: 04:35

Yeah, the picture is back here. Well, not in 94. I was there a little bit later. But you don’t just, like, organize an event at, at the white House. So take me a few steps backwards.

Matt Zemon: 04:47

How do you do a few steps back?

John Corcoran: 04:48

How’d that happen?

Matt Zemon: 04:50

They were partnering with the National Congress of American Indians, which is an organization out of DC. That organization needed a young producer to raise some money for this event and then actually to do all the logistics from meetings at the Sheraton with Gore and Shalala and Cisneros to a meeting on the white House lawn. And as well as juggling all these tribal leaders from across the country, the buses, the stuff. It was a series of meetings, and we answered like an RFP and was picked to do it. So I was working for an event marketing company at the time, and that was a big project for me.

And what.

John Corcoran: 05:27

Amazing.

Matt Zemon: 05:27

Experience. Oh my gosh, such a great experience to meet these tribal leaders. And then afterwards I just made friends. So I traveled the country and I was visiting different people. I had done some work in the entertainment industry, and it just somehow I noticed a gap in talent and tracking of American Indian talent.

So really my first business in that space was a database of American Indian talent where I would just create, yeah, create a database. So then when PBS was looking for a hoop dancer, they called me. When Andy got Get Your Gun went to Broadway and needed American Indian casting. We did it. And then that led to actually producing our own stage shows and our own albums.

And my idea at the time, this was when the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was happening, if you remember that. So this was the Indians taking the rights back to have casino gaming on their land. And my thought was if we could showcase Indians as contemporary people with a traditional background, we could help shift the perception of them and people could understand why they needed gaming today and what that was rooted in from the past. So that was the idea behind Tribe was the Big Show. We partnered with the guy who produced rent, a guy named Kevin McCollum, to produce that.

It was really a beautiful, passionate, living time. And that was kind of a very different experience than some of my other businesses, which were more successful financially but less heart involved. Yeah. So that was that journey.

John Corcoran: 06:58

So that was more of a passion project. Talk about Bernard. This is one you still have.

Matt Zemon: 07:04

How did that come about? I am 19 years old now.

John Corcoran: 07:06

Where did the idea come from?

Matt Zemon: 07:09

I was running a small cable television company, and this was really what looked like a cable TV company was really a variable data marketing company. So we were reselling Dish and Direct TV to Multi-dwelling units, and we were great when we were selling bulk packages to these, when everybody in the condo, everybody in the assisted living in the hotel took the same thing. We were great when there was any individualization. We were awful. We couldn’t build properly and we couldn’t answer the phones correctly.

So I was like, oh, well, wait a minute, there’s a bunch of private cable operators in this country. We could create a spin off of this business that just supports them. And that’s what Bernard was. He spun it off. He partnered with a company called CSG to resell their billing system.

We ended up having call centers in America and in the Philippines. And we created a turnkey, a billing system in a box. Wow. And so would manage small and medium sized cable companies.

John Corcoran: 08:03

The inside there is funny because you said, wow, we’re really bad at this. Let’s make it a business, right? It’s kind of what you said.

Matt Zemon: 08:12

I think that’s when we all I think all the entrepreneurs, we’re like, we we can see we can connect the dots in ways that others can’t. And then more importantly, I think, than seeing that the dots that need to be connected, we have the we don’t mind doing the connection. Okay, here’s a gap. And rather than be annoyed by it, let’s just go fix it. And it’s been a super successful business and not one that filled my soul with joy.

John Corcoran: 08:41

And that’s a great transition to 2018 2019. You have some friends who say, hey, we’re going to do this psychedelic journey. Where were you at that point in life? Like, where are you feeling financially fulfilled but not personally fulfilled? Why did you decide that you would go and end up participating in this experience?

Matt Zemon: 09:05

I love that question, John. Because I think I, I think the honest answer is I didn’t know how unfulfilled I was. I knew I wasn’t, I knew I didn’t love what I did, but I also knew it paid all the bills and then some. But these friends said, why don’t we hire a guy to do a guided psychedelic journey? Why don’t you come and do this with us?

And I didn’t do drugs. It wasn’t my thing. But they were like, look, you love to learn about yourself and you love to travel. This is a great like, think of this as a big trip and reading a book about you. Okay.

And I really the honest answer is I went in completely Unprepared. And in that first journey with these again, all entrepreneurs, all people I trusted, and that first journey, I reconnected with my mom, who died when she was 49. I was 22, and I could kind of pull a string from her to me to my kids, and I could see how connected we were. And we were still, I felt incredibly safe and loved and then immediately realized, oh my gosh, I don’t feel this safe and loved in my everyday life. What’s going on with that?

I felt what it feels like to feel the sorrow of the world and to feel the joy of oh my God, a billion, trillion accidents had to happen for me to be alive. All of that in six hours. Wow. And I left that thinking, what? What was that I needed to learn more about?

I didn’t know this world existed. I didn’t know I could feel this way. And I wanted to learn more about it and check things off the list. Intellectual mind based self said. Let’s go back to school and let’s learn how to read scientific literature on this and let’s study psychedelics.

Okay, great. And something else said, but also go and work with maestros and Titus and MDS and experience different psychedelics and see how that feels in your body. And I did both and I’ve explored the medical side of providing these tools. And I’ve explored deeply the spiritual side. And I think there’s a place for both.

And for me, I prefer working in the spiritual side.

John Corcoran: 11:20

And I mean to say that this one experience had a massive impact on your life, your career trajectory. Everything is definitely underestimating it. You know, you end up getting a masters, you’re studying for a doctors now doctors and ministry You change your life in so many different ways. Reflecting back on it now, I always like to ask this question: what was it like in the early days? Like when you go back and you tell the people close to you about the changes, or they observe changes in you, like were they like, man, what’s going on with you?

Or we’re like, Matt, you seem just so much more happy and at peace than you used to be.

Matt Zemon: 12:04

I think all of that is true. I think there’s definitely meaning, especially with my wife, with my kids and my son. He’s 20 now at 16, he was with a group of people. And I heard him actually say, my father has never been more emotionally available. Wow.

I don’t know where he got that language. And that’s kind of amazing. And I.

John Corcoran: 12:25

And this was 6 or 7 years ago, so he would have been 13 or so when you had this.

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