Silicon Valley continues to embrace psychedelics, despite no longer being counter-culture

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, opened up about taking psychedelics in an episode of the podcast “Life in Seven Songs,” explaining that his high ended up altering his mindset. Formerly a “very anxious, unhappy person,” Altman said a weekend-long retreat to Mexico “significantly change[d] that.” 

Formerly “super anti-Burning Man for a long time,” Altman has since gone to the Black Rock Desert festival five or six times. When he first went, he said everyone seemed so happy and figured it was “one possible part of what the post-AGI world can look like.” Altman was one of the rare people who didn’t mind going to the event sober.

While he’s had “psychedelic experiences,” at the week-long event, Altman said that the truly “life-changing” drug-based sessions are the ones where “you go travel to a guide.” He likened those encounters to medicine.

Altman found himself surprised by how much his retreat to Mexico affected him. In part, he “feels like a very calm person now,” a temperament that has been helpful from “a quality of life perspective,” but also due to his workload. “If you had told me that one weekend-long retreat in Mexico was going to significantly change that, I would have said absolutely not,” Altman said. “And it really did.”

Altman isn’t the only Silicon Valley founder making psychedelics uncool with their grown-up stamp of approval. Tesla’s Elon Musk would very much like you to know that he has been prescribed and takes ketamine. He told Don Lemon on CNN that the substance “is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind,” and that he takes a small dose every other week. 

Claiming to not drink and not “know how to smoke pot,” despite doing it on video with Joe Rogan, Musk has reportedly also taken drugs with some members of the board of Tesla. And the billionaire Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir, is backing a doping-friendly sports contest advertised as the “modern reinvention of the Olympic Games.”

The psychedelics market is projected to grow globally from $2.9 billion in 2021 to $8 billion in 2029,  according to a report from Data Bridge Market Research.

Tech execs turn to drugs in part due to the immense pressure from their investors, Spencer Shulem, CEO of BuildBetter.ai told The Wall Street Journal. “They don’t want a normal person, a normal company,” Schulem says of investing firms. “They want something extraordinary. You’re not born extraordinary,” said Shulem, who himself takes LSD while working by himself after hours.

Despite becoming mainstream, there’s still an allure of counter-culture around mind-altering substances in Northern California. It’s a tale as old as time. Or at least the Sixties.

John Markoff, a tech journalist, explained to Vox that Silicon Valley came into existence when drugs like LSD were first being used to explore creative or religious pursuits. These same drugs became trendy again in 2010 as microdosing took off, he adds. 

“I think there are threads of the counterculture that still exist in Silicon Valley — sort of a worldview that some people have,” Markoff said. “But the counterculture is something that existed on the midpeninsula and then ultimately globally in the 1960s and 1970s. But then it got co-opted. Many of the ideas that came from the counterculture became part of the mainstream culture.”