context. She summarized the speech as:
“I was shit, I was in shit, I got out of
shit, I became alive in shit.”
Batiz attributes Poo-Pourri’s success
to the fact that it was an “alive idea,”
which, she said, means that it had an
“energetic resonance” that aligned with
her own. The company made a million
dollars in its first year. At the same time,
Batiz’s oldest son, Dustin, was going
through a period of depression. Batiz
suggested that he go on an ayahuasca
retreat. Four days later, he was on a plane
to Peru, and soon he called her from
Iquitos to announce that God was real.
Batiz began going on ayahuasca retreats,
too. She has participated in ninety-four
ayahuasca ceremonies to date. “Each
time, I would come back from Peru with
a little more of myself,” she said. (At
one point, I asked Batiz if she’d ever
tried micro-dosing. She smiled and said
brightly, “I may or may not be micro-
dosing right now!”)
Batiz began to wonder whether she
should be a shaman, and asked for ad-
vice from one of her own shamans,
whom she described as “a former her-
oin addict who owned one of the larg-
est psychic networks in England.” He
replied, “Shamans move energy. They
pull negative energy out. They make
space for positive energy. Money is en-
ergy. And business is the biggest way to
move money. You’re going to do more
good there and impact more people than
pouring ayahuasca to twenty people at
a time.” Batiz told me, “That’s when I
was, like, ‘Oh, I’m a business shaman!’ ”
T
he history of American capitalism
is littered with inventors who con-
nected magical claims to prosperity. In
the late nineteenth century, this trend
manifested as the cult of success known
as New Thought. Incorporating ideas
from early Christian mysticism, East-
ern religion, mesmerism, hypnotism,
and nutrition, and drawing on the
emerging fields of neurology and psy-
chology, New Thought posited that
matter was merely a projection of the
mind and could therefore be shaped by
the spirit. Negative thoughts created
bad situations, and positive thoughts
happy ones. As Beryl Satter, a profes-
sor of history at Rutgers University,
wrote in her 1999 book, “Each Mind a
Kingdom,” when the movement began,
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