Endeavor co-founder and TKO Group CEO Ari Emanuel said a 2022 experience with 5-MeO-DMT did not reduce his ambition, rejecting a warning from Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen that psychedelics can leave founders less willing to keep building companies.
In an interview on the Founders podcast with host David Senra, Emanuel said he still gets up at 5 a.m. every day, keeps training, schedules meetings, gives interviews and continues expanding MARI. He said the difference is that he no longer needs work to prove his worth or to quiet worries about how other people see him.
Musk’s 2007 view on AI and live entertainment
Emanuel said Elon Musk had been discussing AI with him as early as 2007. He recalled that their relationship began after he read an article about Musk starting an electric car company and decided to call him despite not knowing him at the time. The two later built a long-term relationship.
Emanuel said he and Musk do not agree on everything and often hold different views, but he still learned from him. One point that stayed with him was Musk’s view of AI and the future of entertainment.
According to Emanuel, Musk saw sports, live broadcasts and live entertainment as especially important. Emanuel said Musk believed live experiences were the only part of entertainment that AI could not "disintermediate." As AI lowers the cost of producing digital content, events that let people participate in person and create immediate emotion and shared memories still carry value that digital media cannot fully replace.
Emanuel said that idea helped shape MARI, his live events company. Unlike TKO, which operates sports entertainment assets such as UFC and WWE, MARI is meant to bring together a broader set of live experiences, including the Miami Open, the Madrid Open, Frieze art fairs, Barrett-Jackson car auctions, collectibles and other large events.
His bet, as he described it, is not to compete with AI in content production. It is to own experiences in the physical world that become more valuable as digital content becomes more abundant.
Years of anxiety, anger and self-doubt
Emanuel also spoke about how he moved away from a working life shaped by anxiety, anger and self-doubt. He said that even after building a business empire worth tens of billions of dollars, he still carried insecurity rooted in childhood dyslexia.
He said he grew up in a family that placed a high value on education. While his brothers excelled in academic and artistic fields, he struggled with reading and spent years worrying that other people would eventually discover he was not smart enough.
That insecurity stayed with him for decades, even after he became successful. He said he turned anxiety into extreme competitiveness and workaholism, and often used anger to handle business conflict.
One turning point came when he was about 32 and was involved in a car accident. At a time when his career was moving quickly, he said the crash forced him to confront how suddenly life can end, regardless of wealth or achievement.
After that, he spent years in therapy and also attended meditation retreats. He recalled that during one five-day retreat, a teacher told him, "You cannot live in war and anger and also live in a beautiful world. You have to choose."
The 5-MeO-DMT experience in New Mexico
Emanuel said the experience that had the biggest impact came in 2022, when he tried 5-MeO-DMT in New Mexico. He described 5-MeO-DMT as a strongly psychoactive tryptamine often linked to secretions from the toad commonly referred to as Bufo, though it can also be synthesized. He noted that it is not the same substance as what people usually mean by DMT.
He said he traveled to New Mexico with his partner and was asked to read a poem before the session. Because of his long struggle with dyslexia, he said he even complained that he could not escape reading, not even then.
Emanuel said that after inhaling the substance, he lost his ordinary sense of consciousness for about 10 minutes and then entered an intense subjective experience that lasted about 30 minutes. During that period, he said he felt how small an individual is in the world and began to see personal achievement, fame and posthumous reputation as less important than he had once believed.
"You realize how small we are in this world," he said. He added that the experience did not make life feel meaningless. Instead, it helped him separate what actually brings him happiness, purpose and meaning from what does not.
Andreessen’s concern about founders losing their edge
Senra then brought up comments from Marc Andreessen, who has criticized Silicon Valley’s embrace of psychedelic culture and said he worries that founders who use these substances may no longer want to work as hard as they once did.
Andreessen said he had seen a pattern in which founders under intense pressure and anxiety tried psychedelics after hearing recommendations from others, only to undergo a dramatic shift.
"They go through the psychedelic experience, they become like a different person, they become much more peaceful inside, and then they often quit the company and move to Indonesia to become a surf instructor," Andreessen said, according to Emanuel’s interview. He said he had seen many cases like that, with founders no longer obsessed with building companies and in some cases leaving the startup world altogether.
Andreessen also said he once complained about this to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who offered a very different response: "How do you know they’re not happier? Maybe that’s the positive outcome. Maybe what drove them to become great founders in the first place was deep insecurity. They had this unsatisfied, almost neurotic drive, and now it’s finally been satisfied."
Andreessen said he did not fully accept that answer. He recalled replying, "Yes, but their companies are collapsing." The exchange captured a deeper disagreement over what drives founders: if anxiety, insecurity and an inability to feel satisfied are part of what pushes people to keep chasing success, what happens when those feelings fade?
Emanuel’s answer: the drive is still there
Emanuel pushed back immediately. He said that account does not match his own experience. After taking 5-MeO-DMT, he said, he did not lose his enthusiasm for running businesses or his desire to keep growing them. What changed was his understanding of why he works.
He said he still wakes up at 5 a.m., works out, takes meetings, does interviews and keeps building MARI. He no longer sees life as a contest over who has more money or the bigger company.
Emanuel also pointed to former General Motors executive Alfred Sloan, saying that even people who once had a major place in American business history can fade from public memory over time. In his view, a founder’s historical standing or personal legacy does not need to sit at the center of life.
"I do these things because I love it. It gives my life purpose and meaning," he said.
He also shared advice he said he received from Bezos: when you are on the court, be fully in the game; when you leave the court, actually leave work behind. Emanuel said he used to feel guilty about taking vacations and treated every minute away from work as wasted time. He now sees rest differently and said stepping away does not mean losing competitiveness. It can help him perform better when he returns.