Former Flamingo AI founder and Shark Tank shark Catriona Wallace says the fastest way to create better leaders isn’t business school – it’s psychedelics, ritual, and a conscious embrace of technology.
When Catriona Wallace looked at the world’s most prominent leaders – think Trump, Putin, Netanyahu – she saw ego-driven boys, not elders. Her solution? A leadership revolution powered by ritual, AI, and psychedelics.
“My background is a professor in behavioural science,” Wallace tells Forbes Australia. “Leadership is my area of expertise. So I was like, ‘We need a different model of leadership, and we need different leaders, but we don’t have 15 years for leaders to go through their MBAs and get the experience they need in order to effectively lead in a different way.’”
She already had a shortcut in mind. Psychedelics. She had embraced the use of the mind-altering substance after she’d stepped down as CEO of an ASX-listed company, but thinks she would have been better at her job had she done them before.
Wallace founded Flamingo AI in 2014, developing chatbots for companies such as Credit Union Australia and AMP before such machine-learning helpers were commonplace. Flamingo became, in 2016, the second female-led business to list on the ASX before being sold to private investors in 2020, allowing Wallace to embark on her own journey of self exploration.
In 2023, she came to prominence as a Shark on Channel 10’s Shark Tank.
In her just-published book, Rapid Transformation: Shape the Future Now, with Ancient Ritual, Awakened Therapy and Emerging Technology she came up with three pillars for creating the leaders she says we need, and fast.
“One pillar was a return to ritual, so bringing ritual back into the way leaders lead,” she says. “The second was attaining altered states of consciousness, and for me the most efficient way to do that is psychedelics. And the third way is to embrace emerging technologies such as AI, but to do that in perhaps a more conscious way than done before.
“The thesis I put forward is that if we get a critical mass of leaders who have gone through a process of rapid transformation, the world would be an entirely different place than where it’s headed now.”
As part of her research, Wallace got a research company she used to own, Fifth Quadrant, to survey 5,600 people in the US and Australia, and found that 34% had used psychedelics and one third of those were doing it for personal development.
And while most saw potential downsides, they were doing it anyway. “There is already a strong movement of people personally and professionally using psychedelics, particularly microdosing, to enhance their health, their performance, their sense of connection and their overall wellbeing,” says Wallace.
“So it’s probably time for the government and legal authorities to have a more rigorous look at the benefits not only for health but for performance and leadership that these naturally occurring substances can support.
In terms of her first pillar – the need to bring ritual into people’s lives – she says the world is being run by uninitiated boys. “And I would put Putin, Netanyahu and Trump in that category.
“Initiations and rituals are about humbling a person so that they have a dissolution of their ego. Then they can lead from a place of connection and a place of being in genuine service to the world rather than acting from perhaps a trauma or a wound or an ideology that is based on ego or greed.”
Wallace went through a month-long initiation in Peru in the Shipibo tradition after she left Flamingo. “I so wish I’d done it beforehand. I would have been a much, much better leader.
“A lot of the way we were taught to run businesses back then was: what was your reputation; what was your identity; how could you sell more; what new markets could you establish. It wasn’t grounded in: what is needed of me; what product does the world actually need now?”
For her own transformation she took the “sacred medicine” – psychedelics from the ayahuasca and chacruna plants.
“I sat in ceremony deep in the jungles of Peru. I was shown that my ego is very strong, that I was identity- and reputation-focused. I was disconnected from my children. I was disconnected from friends and family, and I was just on this capital-raising, business-building juggernaut.
“All of that was just shown to me over and over again, the people I’d let down, the person I’d become, that was so far away from my true self. I had a chronic stomach condition for years that I healed while I was there in the jungle.
“Essentially just seeing the shadow side of myself was my initiation and then being humbled into realising that wasn’t the person that I wanted to be and it wasn’t the leader I wanted to be.”
Among her many current interests, she has a travel business Rapid Transformation which, with a Peru-based Aya Healing Retreats, is helping people go through a similar purge.
The response from the business community has been positive, she says. “The younger generations – who are already perhaps experimenting with micro-dosing of mushrooms or LSD or using ketamine to help with mental health or mood change – are already across this, and they’re just grateful that they’ve finally got a leader, me amongst others around the world, who are starting to talk about this taboo topic.
“But many of the older generation leaders who have always thought, ‘there has to be something more to what I’m doing’. ‘What’s the meaning in this work?’ Or, ‘What’s my second mountain?’ We see a huge number of these people, say 45 to 70, turning towards psychedelics to help support them. ‘How else can I be of service?’ ‘What else is there for me in the world’.”
