When AI, math and physics researcher Alejandro Zarzuelo first arrived in the Bay Area from Spain, he joined friends he’d met online from similar circles. Naturally, they embarked on a four-day bender, one that included an LSD session. Zarzuelo had never tried it before, but if he was ever going to, it would be now. The experience turned emotional. Zarzuelo began to cry: He felt connected to these people, and they felt connected to his work.
“I was surrounded by people who knew me for my accomplishments, who cared for me,” he said.
He jumped into the field, seeking out other psychedelic circles that practiced turning inward. But, at its core, the interest was practical. He describes psychedelics as a tool that can be used to expand the brain’s plasticity, something he finds necessary in this line of work.
“If I don’t exercise my brain plasticity, I will be like all of the other mathematicians and physicists in academia,” Zarzuelo said. “Like the people who I think are going to be left behind.”
A growing number of researchers, tech workers and AI affiliates in the Bay Area are turning to psychedelics in a way that goes beyond their more conventional therapeutic applications. Silicon Valley’s optimization culture is now being applied to more than a startup venture, with many tied to this fourth tech boom seeking to hack none other than the human mind.
The ties between psychedelics and technological advancement in the Bay are nothing new. In the 1960s, during the rise of personal computing, research labs such as Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Capability project at Stanford Research Institute and legal LSD research facilities such as the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute operated within just a couple miles of each other.
LSD was obviously co-opted by the countercultural movement, but so was personal computing. Originally, the work these researchers did was outlandish. In a world where computers were only feasible in large institutions, they might as well have been dropping acid with the anti-establishment, pseudoscientific hippies next door—popular propaganda at the time. And a lot of them actually were.
Genesee Herzberg is a clinical psychologist, and co-founder and executive director at Sage Integrative Health in Berkeley. She describes psychedelic treatments like the ketamine therapy she offers as almost like a new technology that forward-thinking entrepreneurs are eager to try.
Joel Brierre, founder and CEO of Tandava Retreats in the vibrant forests of Tepoztlán, Mexico, says that they’ve been getting more and more people coming to the retreat who “have it all figured out.” They’re successful, oftentimes hailing from Silicon Valley, and come to ask, “What now? How can I further maximize myself and the way my brain works?”
Tandava deals in 5-MeO-DMT. Widely considered to be the world’s most powerful and potent naturally occurring psychedelic medicine, 5-MeO has recently gained traction, with infamous tech entrepreneur and bio-hacker Bryan Johnson livestreaming his “trip” in March of this year.
“Since it’s been making it out in the mainstream a bit more,” Brierre said, “we’ve had a lot more people coming less for intervention of mental health, and much more for kind of optimizing.”
Many attendees at Tandava’s eight-week program seek to fundamentally change the way their minds operate. According to Brierre, 5-MeO reopens the critical learning period window for over four weeks, giving people the chance to make changes at the base layer of the psyche. Creativity is also sought out, as researchers theorize that 5-MeO can be a catalyst for creative work and is especially beneficial to those always looking out for the next big thing.
In the coming year, Tandava will partner with Austin-based nonprofit research organization Center for Minds on a study regarding the use of psychedelics to enhance creativity. Manesh Girn, scientific director at the nonprofit, says that 5-MeO allows people to shake off the usual constraints they have around how they see the world. Often, this causes radically new perspectives on problems someone might have already pored over many times. In this context, it’s easier to understand creativity as not something having to do strictly with music or art, but as a practically applicable factor to computational thinking.
“Like engineers trying to figure something out with AI, or AI alignment,” Girn said, “or people having breakthroughs as innovation teams at companies.”
The first iteration of the study will be done mostly with AI engineers, researchers and tech founders. As someone who lives in San Francisco, Girn has seen many in these circles have breakthroughs in their work while on 5-MeO. However, a lot of them keep these experiences behind closed doors for the benefit of shareholders and investors.
Tandava recently finished a study with the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) that hopes to use its findings to crack a similar code of mental processes, only with different applications. Andrés Gómez Emilsson, president and director of research at the California-based institute, calls what they do “effective altruism.” This social and philosophical movement uses evidence and reason to find the best ways to help others. QRI is working towards inventing an epistemological paradigm for investigating consciousness for the explicit purpose of reducing as much human suffering as possible.
AI participants are valuable for this as they’re essentially network architects who understand how different topologies for neural networks are better or worse for specific information tasks. When applied to human consciousness, QRI believes the models of consciousness they create with the help of 5-MeO could be used to better diagnose and treat chronic pain disorders through modeling tactical and visual sensations for a patient.
“What we want to essentially be capable of is that if you go to the doctor,” said Emilsson, “they show you—let’s say like hand animations overlaid on your leg with augmented reality—and you have to match the one that is the most similar in texture to your actual pain.”
This August, Emilsson and QRI held a Bay Area meetup in Daly City for those interested in interrogating consciousness. As gray fog clouded the slowly dimming world outside, researchers, theorists and startup founders sat with rapt attention. Emilsson shared the results that came from the recent study on the different Jhanas—states of meditative absorption and focused concentration—and the way they were visualized on 5-MeO. A projector screen lit up with pulsating humanoid models reminiscent of a heat map as participants strained to not interrupt with questions.
The study functioned as a collaborative project, with participants consisting of people who were already very familiar with psychedelics and as such, could focus on the pure mental and physical sensations of what they were experiencing and how to best translate that into a material form. The fact that many were mathematicians and physicists definitely helped.
“I don’t think you could pay somebody to do this work,” Emilsson said. “It really has to come from somebody who … he’s just thinking about this in the shower by nature.”
During the meetup, he continually gushed over one particular attendee. David Pearce, British philosopher, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and author of The Hedonistic Imperative, was foundational to Emilsson’s outlook and reason for pursuing the reduction of suffering through rational means.
While many in these circles want to figuratively hack their minds by expanding periods of critical learning or enhancing their brain plasticity, Pearce means it literally. The Hedonistic Imperative posits that humanity has a moral obligation to use biotechnology to abolish suffering in sentient life—and now, with constantly evolving rapid advancements in this sphere, it’s looking more possible than ever.
“Thirty years ago, when I wrote The Hedonistic Imperative,” said Pearce, in a strong Surrey accent, “it’s probably just sadly complete utopian sci-fi. But with the Transformer Revolution in AI […] the purely technical arguments against the feasibility of paradise engineering seem to be receding. Life in the hydrolase will be unimaginably sublime.”
Pearce came to the Bay Area to network. This is where the movers and shakers are, he said, the people who might have the will and the way to make his vision a reality.
One AI researcher from San Francisco explained that he came to the meetup because there’s a lot of discussion on whether AI models exhibit consciousness in the same way humans do. He believes that to meaningfully have this conversation, human consciousness needs to be fully understood. Psychedelics in this case are more a means to an end.
Others, such as Sila De Soul, founder of an AI startup who prefers to be referred to by his Twitter/X alias, came to the meetup in a purely spiritual context.
Ray Brejcha, executive advisor and psychedelic preparation and integration guide at Pioneering Pathway, has worked with nearly 200 founders and leaders in his 20 years in the psychedelic field. He describes his work as the intersection of leadership development, psychedelics and neuroscience. Originally employed at various Silicon Valley startups himself, Brejcha now dedicates himself to guiding what he calls “high performers.”
“I worked for some big brand names,” Brejcha said. “I would go do ayahuasca in the jungle.”
Brejcha focuses on optimizing human performance, catering his sessions and therapy to CEOs and founders looking for leadership development to combat burnout and ineffective communication in the companies they run.
He told the story of one client, a young founder, who connected with deeper empathy for herself and others that she hadn’t tapped into before her psychedelic retreat. Following this, she gained more patience for those she worked with and granted herself the permission to explore creative endeavors beyond her high-pressure role.
During the medicine sessions, Brejcha uses a framework his unique demographic will understand, inspired by the Internal Family Systems psychotherapy model.
“To CEOs I say: You have an internal board of directors. There’s this powerful you, there’s this confident you, there’s this part of you that’s an imposter,” Brejcha said, “In the psychedelic work, using this modality, we actually dialogue with these subconscious personalities, if you will, while they’re on the medicine. And what they do is they make peace in their system so that the parts don’t just kick in under pressure—they can lead from a deeper, grounded place.”
For some in these circles, taking psychedelics is integral to the process of creating “our last invention”—or AI’s final form. Others are squarely focused on the human condition. It will no doubt be interesting to see which application reigns supreme.
Peer-reviewed study on the effect of psychedelics on convergent, divergent and creative brain processes remains relatively limited by small samples, methodological problems and a lack of randomized controlled trials. But maybe for those in the general sphere of the Fortune 500, this is half the draw. If psychedelics do fulfill the promise of optimization, they’ll have been the first to know.
