Heather and John continue their conversation with author, leadership visionary, and entheogenic legend Paul Karasik, exploring how the modern leadership crisis mirrors a deeper spiritual one. Drawing from his book Getting High on Leadership: The Leader’s Guide to Higher Consciousness, Karasik challenges listeners to rethink what it means to lead with awareness, empathy, and authenticity. From the lost ideals of the 1960s to the burnout of today’s workforce, Only GenX Wasteland asks: how do we evolve leadership itself—so it’s no longer about power, but about presence, connection, and conscious evolution?

Conversation include:

The Crisis of Inauthentic Leadership

Critique of the modern epidemic of inauthentic leadership—executives and public figures who “didn’t have a clue” and whose efforts lack an “underpinning of consciousness of truth,” leaving their words empty.

Consciousness as the Foundation

At the heart of both Getting High on Leadership and central to entheogenic leadership is a foundational principle about consciousness: “You can’t take anybody higher than your own consciousness.” Leaders must themselves be fully enrolled in their own vision, purpose, and personal growth.

Relationships and Empathy

Seeing team members, partners, and even strangers as “divine” and “equal” rather than cogs in a system transforms workplaces into living communities. Empathy, authenticity, and human connection become measurable business assets.

The Integration Imperative

The conversation revisits lessons from his experiences in the 1960s consciousness movement, which Paul says faltered due to a lack of integration. Despite an “awakening,” the movement missed the daily practice of embodying consciousness.

This episode of GenX Hits Menopause explores the many facets of Paul’s timeless message: our world’s “insanity” results from unconscious repetition of broken patterns, and lifting our consciousness is the only way to break our cycle of suffering.

Paul Karasik is a pioneering thinker at the intersection of conscious leadership, personal transformation, and the modern psychedelic renaissance, with over 30 years of experience developing high-impact leadership practices for major North American organizations. As the president of The Business Institute, a management‐consulting firm focused on leadership development, Paul has guided executives and teams in reshaping their inner dynamics to achieve sustained external results. His work has always gone beyond merely teaching leadership “skills”—he invites leaders to explore how their inner world influences their organizational impact, creativity, collaboration, and mission fulfillment.

A key milestone in his work is his book Getting High on Leadership: The Leader’s Guide to Higher Consciousness (2023/2024), which presents a roadmap for leaders to “get high” not in the sense of intoxication but in the sense of elevated consciousness, presence, and purpose. The book describes how as a leader’s awareness expands, so does the capacity of their team and the organizational culture to produce creativity, innovation, and deeper fulfillment. 

What makes Paul’s approach unique is his living through the cultural and experiential roots of the consciousness movement—his leadership in the 1960s and beyond, his hands-on study of meditation, breathwork, yoga, metaphysical sciences, and bodywork. He co-founded Thompson’s Ranch in Joshua Tree – one of the early alternative communities in America – and has worked to integrate safe, intentional practices of psychedelics into healing, leadership and transformation frameworks.

Paul is also founder of the Psychedelic Institute of Los Angeles, an international organization devoted to providing education & access to safe consciousness‐expanding technologies. Through the institute, Paul advances his belief that expanded consciousness is not just a