Earlier this year, Ron Carson donated all of his neckties, “an amazing feeling,” he wrote in a Twitter post, accompanying a photo of them heaped on the floor.
The Carson Group founder and majority owner made the symbolic gesture in April, less than two weeks after announcing that he had stepped down as CEO immediately, naming Burt White as his successor. That happened after the firm was sued by its former chief marketing officer, who alleges retaliation and discrimination, but before news of that case was widely reported. The company has denied wrongdoing in that lawsuit.
Carson, who just turned 60, is hardly retiring. He is still chairman of the firm he started building about 40 years ago from his college dorm room.
But he now also goes by “Omani,” a nickname given to him that he says means “to run into a stiff wind.” And his ambitions go far beyond wealth management, spanning sustainability, mysticism, and personal transformation.
He talks openly about psychedelics, having started using them eight years ago – a turn of events that he credits with unlocking his creativity and helping him increase the size of the business tenfold. Carson Group’s assets under management today are over $35 billion.
“I remember the day after I did my [first] journey, everything looked brighter. My mind was cleaner. I was vibrating this energy, and people were looking at me and smiling. I’m not sure if they were before and I never noticed it,” he said during an interview last month on The Spiritual Psychologist Podcast. “This was when I’m like, ‘I’m going to devote my life to helping others jolt themselves into a different dimension and a different way of being.’”
The experience also encouraged him to slow down and be more intentional with his time. He meditated and started to enjoy life much more, he said. He later tried bufo, the extremely psychoactive venom of certain toad species, which made him more fully experience transcendence, he said.
When asked what he would tell other entrepreneurs about psychedelics, he said to be openminded, but “don’t abuse it.”
“Make sure you’ve got a really powerful support group,” he said.
He also tells people to get enough sleep, exercise, and take time for fun and play.
“We’ve been conditioned to think that you should only be able to have fun and play a little bit of the time and we know what we need for us,” he said. “I need[ed] a lot more fun and play than I had the first 51 years of my life.”
Last month, Nebraska’s professional soccer team, Union Omaha, announced that Carson took an ownership position in the club.
“My wife Jeanie and I and our entire family are so proud to be part owners of something that we think will be immensely beneficial to our local community,” he said in an announcement. “While we didn’t play soccer, we can certainly see the enthusiasm that the next generation has for it, and we believe this will be an important investment for our community going into the future.”
Carson is not shy about the camera – he regularly posts inspirational “Ronsense” videos on social media. He did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
In recent years, Carson and his family turned his hunting lodge into Freedom Healing Ranch, a sanctuary and retreat that appears to be backed by a nonprofit religious group he registered with Nebraska, Freedom Healing Church, Inc. Carson, his daughter, and Carson Wealth divisional president of partners Aaron Schaben are listed as the directors of the nonprofit, and The Carson Family Giving Foundation directed $275,000 to that entity in 2022, tax records show.
The 2,000-acre site is home to a $2,222-a-ticket annual event called Imagine OR, where up to 350 guests experience new-world music, art, gourmet food, breathwork, and talks on environmentalism and the cases for psychedelics. The event is alcohol-free, though “specialty drinks” are available at the elixir bar, the event’s site states.
The terms and conditions for last year’s gathering include a privacy clause asking guests to not film “performers, participants, staff, or any other visitors in a state of intoxication or exhibiting behaviors that may compromise their privacy or dignity.”
The event’s site notes that “participants travel far and wide for deep inner work with different alternative medicines and modalities.”
Guest speakers include the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and a psychiatrist who specializes in the use of ketamine in psychotherapy.
“We have people coming from all over the world this year. From hunter-gatherers from Ecuador who have nothing but what they have on them, to people that own sports franchises that are billionaires – but they’ve made the shift to love and abundance,” Carson said on the recent podcast.
People often have issues they want to address, but often other feelings come up that they may not have been aware of or were planning to work on, which makes the time afterward crucial, he noted.
“I had two people tell me last year after the Ranch, ‘I was going to kill myself.’ You talk about having to play defense. I heard from one last night another one a couple days ago. They are thriving. They were there, and now their life is on fire in a really beautiful way,” he said in the podcast. “Do the work, because we’ve got it within us to be way happier than we think we can be. And have more joy in our life than we think we can have.”
The event, which takes place Oct. 3 through 7, isn’t a festival, but a gathering, he said. The latter acknowledges that guests contribute to the event more so than the former, which implies that they only show up to consume, he said.
While Imagine OR is the biggest event at Freedom Healing Ranch, there are smaller retreats there “almost monthly,” Carson said.
There is a separate 2,000-acre property to its south, for which Carson plans a “business ranch.”
“We’re putting in 130 miles of hiking and biking trails, seven camp sites,” he said. “[We] want to build an intentional community. Food is medicine … We’re not doing it yet, but I want to raise elk, bison and really have a way of people coming existing together in the form of an energy exchange.”
That venture would seek to help entrepreneurs shift their “operating system” from “fear and scarcity to love and abundance,” he said.
With society and the planet “in the process of getting so out of whack, so unbalanced … it’s going to wake everyone up to say, ‘I want to have an active role in bringing back, clawing back our planet,’” he said. “I’m super bullish on humanity.”
And he thinks artificial intelligence will help lead to a new form of digital longevity, he said.
“We’re all going to have the ability to ascend our consciousness into a format where we can live forever. And that is ultimately rejoining this unified consciousness that we all came from.”
He also has an idea about how he wants to be remembered.
“The way I want it to read – I’ve written my eulogy, because I believe in going to the end and working backwards – is: Omani shifted the way we interact with each other, for a better world,” he said. “That’s what I want my legacy to be. That I had a part in the movement that is happening.”
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