What if the problem isn’t that the people with the most power don’t care? What if it’s that they’ve lost the capacity to?

That’s the question at the center of Diana Colleen’s debut novel, They Could Be Saviors. A group of the world’s wealthiest men is kidnapped and brought to a facility where they’re offered a choice: undergo psychedelic-assisted therapy, or stay put indefinitely. It sounds far-fetched. Spend a few minutes with the headlines, and it starts to feel less like science fiction and more like a thought experiment we should have started a long time ago.

Diana is an author, a trained psychedelic therapy facilitator, and a self-described democratic socialist. In 2018, she hit rock bottom and found her way to an underground facilitator who, she says, saved her life. That experience is the bedrock of her novel.

The book frames the billionaire class not as villainy but as pathology. A taker mentality writ large, scaled across centuries and obscene accumulations of capital. But it’s also an argument for reconnection. These men are still human beings. They’ve had trauma. They can change, if something happens to shake them loose from the story they’ve been telling themselves. That’s where the psychedelics come in.

We talked about the carbon footprint myth, the corrosive design of social media addiction, the feminist architecture of the story, and what any of us can actually do right now. Your voice, Diana says, is your power.

And then she told a story about a barista having a bad day, and how one small act of kindness ripples outward in ways we can’t always see. It sounds small. But it’s also how the world turns.

Takeaways:

• Billionairism is a pathology, not just a policy problem. Extreme wealth concentration isn't simply an economic issue. Diana frames it as a mental illness, a hoarding disorder scaled to planetary consequence, that severs its hosts from the shared reality the rest of us navigate every day.
• The carbon footprint narrative is a diversion. The idea that individual consumer choices are the primary lever for addressing climate change was largely engineered by fossil fuel interests to shift blame downward. Changing the behavior of a few thousand people at the top would do more than changing the habits of eight billion at the bottom.
• Psychedelic therapy is not recreational drug use. Set and setting make all the difference. Therapeutic use is built on intention, preparation, and a held, safe environment. That distinction matters, and the suppression of legitimate research since the Nixon era has cost us decades of potential progress.
• Hope is the consequence of action, not its prerequisite. Waiting to feel hopeful before doing something has it backward. Engagement, however modest, is what generates the sense that change is possible. Disengaging entirely may protect your mental health in the short term, but it removes you from the work.
• Small acts of kindness are not trivial. They ripple. The barista story isn't a consolation prize for people who can't do bigger things. It’s a genuine theory of change, grounded in how human beings actually affect one another.

Resources:

• Diana Colleen: They Could Be Saviors
• The Parado Principle (80/20)
• Daniel Quinn: Ishmael
• Earthbound Podcast
• GlobalWarmingIsReal
• Eartbound Listener Survey