Dropping Acid in Silicon Valley
BALDWIN: LSD, a drug made famous in the '60s. The mere mention of acid conjures images of hippies tripping in San Francisco's Haight- Ashbury district, ground zero for the movement. For some in Silicon Valley today, it feels like the '60s all over again. And instead of hippies, it's techies dropping acid to not just to expand their consciousness but also their profits. That's right, profits. That's today's focus of our week-long series "Sex, Drug and Silicon Valley." "CNN Money's" Laurie Segall is back with me. We talked smart drugs, and now dropping acid.</s>LAURIE SEGALL, CNN MONEY CORRESPONDENT: Yes, absolutely. As part of our series on sex and drugs in the valley, I want to pull back the curtain on drug use in the bay area so I asked some of the most innovative people out there what they're on. Turns out, LSD.</s>SEGALL (voice-over): Part is dependent on flexing your biggest muscle, your brain. How well can you focus? Can you stay up all night and cope? But the other part is creativity, the ability to think outside the box, to have the breakthrough moment, a moment that could turn your millions into billions.</s>TIM FERRISS, AUTHOR: The billionaires I know almost without exception use hallucinogens on a regular basis.</s>SEGALL: Tim Ferriss is a valley inside, an entrepreneur, and he wrote the book about optimizing your time. His lifestyle insight has a cult-like following. (on camera): The creativity comes from drugs?</s>FERRISS: The people I know trying to be very disruptive and look at the problems in the world that exist and ask completely new questions. They might look at something that's been for hundreds of years and see something completely different.</s>KEVIN HERBERT, ENGINEER, CISCO: I was actually in a science fiction convention with a bunch of friends and the Grateful Dead's "Trucking" came on the radio and my girlfriend at the time sort of had a revelation, oh, that's why people listen to the Grateful Dead on</s>LSD. SEGALL (voice-over): It was the fourth of July in 1980 when Kevin Herbert first tried LSD. He's been using for decades. He works as an engineer for Cisco. (on camera): How high is the premium on creativity in Silicon Valley?</s>HERBERT: Everything we do is creative. Everything requires creative solutions and LSD fits into that because we get the sort of magical breakthrough. The grateful dead show, the drums. The hard core debugs. I took LSD. Wait, the problem is in hardware, not software at all. I come back to work the next day, tell my manager I had an epiphany. He laughed and said, great show.</s>SEGALL (voice-over): And there's actually scientific proof that LSD could do just that. One study funded by the U.S. government in the '60s took a group of scientists and set them out to solve 48 different physics, math, and architectural problems, problems that the scientists themselves had been unable to solve. Each scientist was guided through a psychedelic trip, at the end of which, 44 of the 48 problems found a solution.</s>DANIEL KOTKE, FORMER APPLE EMPLOYEE: I moved here to work in the apple garage building Apple Ones. That was 1976.</s>SEGALL: That's Daniel Kotke, one of Apple's first employees. And before we knew Steve Jobs as the creator of one of the most successful create companies in the world, Daniel knew him as the guy he used to trip with in college. (on camera): You said Steve said LSD was one of the best things he did. Why was that?</s>KOTKE: It expands your consciousness. It could have been mushrooms, peyote, any number of things. Conversely, Steve was never interested in smoking pot. That did not expand consciousness.</s>SEGALL (voice-over): Today, psychedelic researcher is having a renaissance. There are more studies now than there have been in decades.</s>FERRISS: We don't know as much about the human brain or body as we think we do. I mean, we're absolutely medieval. I think we'll look back in 10 years at our behavior now and it's going to look like blood letting in the dark ages.</s>SEGALL: Brooke, you see, I was just talking to Tim there, like, are people open about this? And he's, like, you know, they're not ashamed of it at all. They just don't really talk about it openly, but in small settings, people exchange notes.</s>BALDWIN: Looks like the guy. when he went in with his epiphany, some sort of code of what I did last night. A brilliant idea. It's interesting hearing Dan Kotke talking about dropping acid with Steve Jobs back in college. But are there any, you know, higher profile techies in Silicon Valley out with during this currently?</s>SEGALL: You would get connected to other people and a lot of folks didn't want to talk openly about it. But people responsible for software that we are using today spoke a little openly about saying we got the idea for this during this trip. You know, obviously, you have to talk about the dangers. One other one, when doing the research that was interesting was Francis Crick, the DNA structure. There's rumors that was discovered on LSD. So interesting when you peel book the curtains, about LSD, the safety implications here. This is classified by the DEA as a very dangerous drug that can cause paranoia and anxiety. But there's a resurgence in research about this and people wanting to know, what are the applications? Is there any safe way?</s>BALDWIN: Wow. All right. Something you learn everyday. Laurie Segall, what about tomorrow? What are you bringing me tomorrow?</s>SEGALL: We've talked about drugs in the valley. Tomorrow, things will get a little awkward. We'll talk about sex in Silicone Valley. We interview the guy behind Twitter's hash tag, coined the hash tag on Twitter, and he applies data and analytics to this idea of love. He talks about non-monogamy, something called polyamory. And you'll see me get uncomfortable because we go to a high-tech swinger's party and talk about the phone is the modern day key. So it's going to be interesting nonetheless, Brooke. I promise you that.</s>BALDWIN: Swing party, you had me there.