They Could Be Saviours: Billionaires, Psychedelics, and the Ethics of Urgency — with Diana Colleen

Send us Fan MailWith thanks to Diana Colleen who joins me in this episode, she is a novelist, essayist, and psychedelic facilitator whose work explores transformation, responsibility, and social change.We discuss her latest novel, They Could Be Saviours, which brings together three challenging themes: extreme wealth, climate change, and psychedelic-assisted insight. Rather than offering easy answers, the novel functions as a kind of ethical stress test; asking readers to sit with discomfort and question what we accept as “normal” in times of urgency.Our conversation explores how Diana’s lived experience as a psychedelic facilitator has shaped her understanding of change and connection, why she chose fiction as a vehicle for engaging with complex moral questions, and what she means by framing “billionaireism” as a psychological and systemic issue rather than a personal moral failing.We also talk about maximum salaries, structural versus individual responsibility for climate change, the limits of behaviour-focused environmental messaging, and whether fiction can help us think more clearly about what is, and isn’t, justifiable when the stakes feel existential.This is a wide-ranging discussion about insight, ethics, and hope, and about what it might take to imagine meaningful change without collapsing into either cynicism or simplistic solutions. With thanks to Diana for this interview. Support the show