Sam Altman discusses the life-changing psychedelic experience

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

A “long-time super anti-Burning Man,” Altman has been to the Black Rock Desert festival five or six times. When he first went, he said everyone seemed so happy and thought it was “a possible part of what the post-AGI world might look like.” Altman was one of the few people who didn’t bother going to the event sober.

While he had “psychedelic experiences” at the week-long event, Altman said the truly “life-changing” drug sessions are the ones where “you go on a journey to a guide.” He likened those meetings to medicine.

Altman was surprised by how much the retreat in 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 because of his workload. “If you had told me that a weekend retreat in Mexico would significantly change that, I would have said no,” Altman said. “And he really did.”

Altman isn’t the only Silicon Valley founder to make psychedelics uncool with their adult stamp of approval. Tesla’s Elon Musk would really like you to know that he has been prescribed and takes ketamine. He told CNN’s Don Lemon that the substance “is helpful to get one out of a negative mood” and that he takes a small dose every two weeks.

Claiming that he doesn’t drink and doesn’t “know how to smoke pot,” despite doing so in the video with Joe Rogan, Musk also allegedly did drugs with some Tesla board members. And billionaire Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and Palantir, is backing a doping-friendly sports competition touted as “the modern reinvention of the Olympics.”

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

Tech executives are turning to drugs in part because of immense pressure from their investors, said Spencer Shulem, CEO of BuildBetter.ai. The Wall Street Journal. “They don’t want a normal person, a normal company,” Schulem says of investment firms. “They want something extraordinary. You weren’t born extraordinary,” said Shulem, who himself takes LSD while working alone after hours.

Despite going mainstream, there’s still a counterculture allure around mind-altering substances in Northern California. It’s a story as old as time. Or at least the sixties.

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

“I think there are threads of counterculture that still exist in Silicon Valley — a kind of worldview that some people have,” Markoff said. “But the counterculture is something that existed in the middle of the peninsula and then eventually globally in the 1960s and 1970s. But then it was co-opted. A lot of the ideas that came out of the counterculture became part of mainstream culture.”