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The Silicon Valley leaders who have experimented with psychedelics

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The Silicon Valley leaders who have experimented with psychedelics

Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Sam Altman side by side
Steve Jobs, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates spoke publicly about using psychedelic drugs. Google cofounder Sergey Brin has reportedly eaten magic mushrooms.

Justin Sullivan/Kevork Djansezian/Justin Sullivan/Getty

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  • Silicon Valley has a long history with psychedelics.
  • Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and OpenAI's Sam Altman have talked publicly about their experiences.
  • Bryan Johnson recently tried magic mushrooms on a livestream on social media.

Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley have dabbled in psychedelics.

The psychedelic movement isn't limited to the most successful tech moguls in Silicon Valley. A rising number of entrepreneurs and executives are turning to psychedelics like LSD, ayahuasca, and MDMA to find inspiration in their professional lives.

While psychedelics haven't reached mainstream status, they're gaining popularity in certain circles. Startups focused on psychedelics are also drawing increasing interest and investment from prominent figures, including startup accelerators like Y Combinator and billionaires such as Peter Thiel.

Tech entrepreneur and longevity aficionado Bryan Johnson is the latest to make headlines for trying magic mushrooms on a social-media livestream. Read on to learn about which tech founders and billionaires have experimented with these substances — on and off the playa.

Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson.
Bryan Johnson.

Magdalena Wosinska

48-year-old Bryan Johnson began his career as a tech entrepreneur before making headlines for his extreme attempts to defy aging.

With a regimen that the longevity guru said costs him $2 million a year, Johnson has tried countless supplements, diets, and other health experiments. However, a five-and-a-half hour livestream on X where he took with magic mushrooms might be one of his more unusual pursuits.

Johnson was joined by his son, his father, Grimes, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and several other business leaders. As part of what he deemed the "most quantified psychedelic experiment in history," Johnson was measured for 249 biomarkers, underwent brain scans, and collected various other measurements throughout the trip. Johnson has hypothesized that taking magic mushrooms may help humans live past 120 years old.

The entrepreneur has also opened up about his experience smoking toad venom. In an episode of the "Core Memory" podcast in August, Johnson said he turned to psychedelic compound 5-MeO-DMT, found in the venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad, to explore the convergence of mind and machine. He said he wanted to create a "map" of human consciousness, and achieved his goal with the psychedelic.

The experience was so impactful that the longevity enthusiast said he got a tattoo of the 5-MeO-DMT molecule.

Steve Jobs
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs shows off the first iPhone on stage at an Apple event with the Apple logo looming in the background.
The same year that Apple debuted the iPhone, then-CEO Steve Jobs brought Tim Cook closer to the business' core as COO.

Paul Sakuma/ AP

Late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs didn't shy away from speaking about his experiences with LSD. The entrepreneur spent his early 20s searching for the meaning of life through meditation, traveling, and, sometimes, LSD.

"I came of age at a magical time," Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson.

The billionaire described taking LSD as a "profound experience" and one of the most important things in his life.

"It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could," Jobs said.

In the two-year period between 1972 and 1974, Jobs used LSD 10 to 15 times before he stopped for good, according to a questionnaire he filled out in 1988 for government security clearance.

Sam Altman
Sam Altman
Last year OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he thought ads were lame. Now he seems more interested.

Shelby Tauber/REUTERS

OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman said in a 2024 appearance on the "Life in Seven Songs" podcast that doing psychedelics was one of the most transformative experiences of his life.

The billionaire said he used to be a "very anxious, unhappy person" and now feels "calm."

"If you had told me that, like, one weekend-long retreat in Mexico was going to significantly change that, I would have said absolutely not," Altman said in the podcast. "And it really did."

While the CEO said he had used psychedelics at Burning Man, he said those experiences had been rare and less impactful. He said the "life-changing" experiences were the ones where he traveled for the experience and took psychedelics with a guide.

Altman has invested in a number of medical startups, including one focused on psychedelics. The billionaire served as the board chairman of a startup called Journey Colab that aims to help people suffering from addiction with the development and application of clinical psychedelic drugs for therapy.

Sergey Brin
Google cofounder Sergey Brin smiles.

Lionel Hahn/Getty Images

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has reportedly consumed psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

While Brin hasn't confirmed his usage publicly and didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, the cofounder previously attended Burning Man with Eric Schmidt to see if Schmidt had it in him to be Google's CEO.

The cofounder has also funds into a nonprofit investment firm called Catalyst4, which has pledged $15 million to Soneira, a startup studying the effects of a hallucinogenic mental health treatment.

Bill Gates
Bill Gates
Bill Gates, Microsoft

BI

Before founding Microsoft and becoming a billionaire philanthropist, Bill Gates experimented a bit with psychedelic substances.

Gates spoke about his experiences with acid on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" and included an anecdote about Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who suggested he "take acid" to help with his design taste. Gates said on the show that "he got the batch that's about code," not design.

Gates also revealed details of his past drug use in his memoir, "Source Code: My Beginnings." The billionaire said he initially declined acid when Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen asked him to try it in high school. When he was asked as a senior, though, he decided to try it out. He said the experience was at first exhilarating, but he wasn't sure what was going on the next morning when he had to get a dental procedure done.

Later in college, Gates tried LSD again on a friend's birthday and described the experience as "cosmic." It also made him think that his brain could delete memories like a computer — and he said it would be one of the last times he tried LSD.

One tech exec who says he has no interest in trying LSD? Google's Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis wearing a suit, a red tie, and blue-framed glasses
Demis Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Getty Images

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis spoke in a June interview about why he's not interested in psychedelics.

When asked if LSD ever helped him understand the "nature of reality," Hassabis said gaming and reading science fiction, and science helped him find those answers. The AI executive said he values mental acuity for his work and said he was "too worried about the effects" of LSD on his brain.

"I've done too much neuroscience," Hassabis said. "I've sort of finely tuned my mind to work in this way. I need it for where I'm going."

Read the original article on Business Insider

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