We’ve all had, or at least know someone who has had, a bad trip. For whatever reason, the LSD or shrooms don’t hit the way you expected and suddenly you’re curled up in a ball on the floor of your tiny Bushwick apartment bathroom because the walls in the living room are angry at you.


But the CEOs of Silicon Valley are apparently having a different experience altogether when it comes to psychedelics. Tragically, these true American heroes are jumping down the proverbial rabbit hole and coming out the other side with no interest in driving America toward its dystopian future, one useless app at a time.


According to Bloomberg reporter Ashlee Vance, the tech industry has “lost several really good founders to ayahuasca” because “they came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”



Austen Allred, the CEO of Bloomtech, echoed this sentiment, explaining that 100 percent of the Silicon Valley founders he knows who went on “psychedelic self-discovery trips ‘quit their jobs as CEO within a year.’”



In case you’re not familiar with ayahuasca retreats, a brief rundown: People will travel — often to South America — for the purpose of taking ayahuasca in the hopes of gaining a new, powerful perspective on life. It’s a trend that’s become especially popular with founders and executives in Silicon Valley.


Perhaps inspired by Steve Jobs referring to dropping acid as “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life,” tech CEOs and other higher-ups began embarking upon ayahuasca retreats over a decade ago.


The appeal of the psychoactive brew is that it can activate “an imminent polar reversal that will wipe our hard drives clean,” according to Daniel Pinchbeck, the author of a shitload of books about ayahuasca and psychedelics. The journey of ayahuasca is meant to filter out the bullshit and provide clarity, whether in the form of healing past trauma or opening up your mind to the wondrous beauty of the universe and your place in it.


But while the purpose of ayahuasca is intended to be lasting inner peace and genuine connection to the world around you, Silicon Valley saw it as an efficient shortcut to getting rid of those pesky inner demons that are distracting their employees from their 100-hour workweek. It’s like if you could put synergy into a pill.


“This is a total hack. You can sit in therapy for six years, or you can come to Machu Picchu for a week,” Michael Costuros, founder of Entrepreneurs Awakening, told Business Insider. “You choose: red pill, or the sugar pill?”


Costuros says his experience gave him the perspective to “do what I’m meant to do in this life,” which is, according to his LinkedIn, helping “founding teams solve the most gut-wrenching issues they face as they rocket toward the next round of funding.”


But for other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the clarity provided by ayahuasca only makes them realize that what they’re “meant to do in this life” likely doesn’t involve receiving gobs of cash for exploiting workers in the hopes of creating the optimal product that will keep consumers hopelessly addicted.


And all it took was a mind-altering trip (and about 30 grand).


At this point, the evidence is anecdotal but is it really a surprise that the tech experience with ayahuasca involves not wanting to work in the tech industry anymore? By all accounts, it appears to be a morally bankrupt world that runs on turning everything into Uber and feeding the almighty algorithm.



Ironically, Allred’s warning that CEOs should “be careful with that stuff” highlights exactly why this sort of awakening is happening to Silicon Valley douchebags. In his mind, someone not wanting to be a CEO is bad, so therefore, it’s dangerous to mess with ayahuasca (while there are real risks, deciding not to run a start-up anymore isn’t high on that list).


What Allred and others never even consider is the painfully obvious truth that enlightenment or whatever you want to call it helped CEOs, consultants and angel investors alike realize what they’re doing is, at best, ultimately pointless and, at worst, genuinely evil and harmful to the world around them.


So roll your eyes and scoff at these ayahuasca retreats all you like, but remember that they could be the key to the destruction of Silicon Valley once and for all. And that’s an undeniable win for all of humanity.