Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is more than a backdrop in the book’s account of psychedelics: it becomes a place where Al Hubbard’s therapeutic practice met the ambitions of engineers, and where experiments in personal transformation spilled into arguments about creativity, technology, and culture. Through Myron Stolaroff, Ampex, and the International Foundation for Advanced Study, LSD was explored not only as a treatment but as a possible aid to problem-solving among healthy people. The resulting influence on the region’s technological imagination is presented as consequential but difficult to measure: a network of people and ideas, not a single cause of the technology boom.

From farms and orchards to a research network

In the mid-1950s, the area later known as Silicon Valley was still a sleepy landscape of farms and orchards; it would not acquire that name until 1971. One of the first technology companies to establish itself there was Ampex, a pioneer in reel-to-reel magnetic tape for audio and data recording. Myron Stolaroff, an electrical engineer educated at Stanford University and among the company’s earliest employees, had risen to assistant to the president for strategic planning. His position and early stake in the company made him wealthy, but his interests extended beyond engineering: by his thirties he was a spiritual seeker.

A description by Gerald Heard of an LSD session with Al Hubbard drew Stolaroff to Vancouver in March 1956. In Hubbard’s apartment, a dose of 66 micrograms of Sandoz LSD preceded an experience that Stolaroff later described as moving through the planet’s history, from its formation and the development of life to the appearance of human beings, before culminating in the trauma of his own birth. He understood the experience as a profound opening, linking the reliving of a painful birth to a sense of human unity and the reality of God. It left him committed to psychedelic work. The book notes that this broad movement through evolutionary history and birth recurred in Hubbard-guided sessions, making Stolaroff’s experience part of a recognizable practice rather than an isolated episode.

Stolaroff shared his discovery with a small circle of Ampex friends and colleagues who began meeting to discuss spiritual questions and the possible benefits of LSD for healthy people. The group included Don Allen, a young Ampex engineer, and Willis Harman, a Stanford electrical-engineering professor. Hubbard traveled to Menlo Park to guide their psychedelic sessions and train participants to guide others. In this way, the area became a node in a network that Hubbard had already built across North America, carrying clinical knowledge, LSD, and practical guidance between scattered research groups.

Ampex and the experiment in creative work

Stolaroff and Hubbard tried to extend the experiment beyond a circle of private sessions. For a time, they pursued the idea of turning Ampex into the world’s first psychedelic corporation. Hubbard held weekly workshops at the company’s headquarters and gave LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The proposal foundered when Ampex’s general manager objected to religious images Hubbard had brought into his office, including depictions of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper. The episode exposed a fault line within the project: Hubbard’s method joined psychological intervention to spiritual symbols, while a corporate setting did not necessarily welcome that combination.

Harman, meanwhile, shifted his teaching at Stanford toward human potential, ending a new course with a unit on psychedelics. The engineers’ interest was thus spreading through more than one channel: workplace workshops, university teaching, and the informal group formed around Stolaroff. In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to pursue psychedelic research full-time. With Harman he established the International Foundation for Advanced Study, which sought to investigate whether LSD could enhance personality and creativity. The foundation hired psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director, James Fadiman as staff psychologist, and Allen as a screener and guide. It obtained an FDA research permit and supplies of LSD and mescaline from Hubbard. Over the next six years, it worked with roughly 350 people.

One line of research focused on creative problem-solving. Fadiman and Harman worked with groups of four, administering the same dose of LSD to artists, engineers, architects, and scientists who felt stuck on a particular project. The researchers deliberately shaped participants’ expectations and surroundings, telling them to expect unusual intellectual fluency and better problem-solving. Participants reported being able to visualize problems more readily, think with greater fluidity, and view a problem in a new context. Among them were William English and Douglas Engelbart, who would soon help transform computing. The research also had substantial limitations: it lacked a control group, depended on subjects’ own reports of success, and stopped before completion. Its findings therefore suggested a research direction rather than establishing that LSD reliably improved creative performance.

After IFAS: a guarded return to the valley

The foundation had closed by 1966, but Hubbard’s connection to Silicon Valley continued. In 1968, Willis Harman, then working at the Stanford Research Institute and leading its Educational Policy Research Center, brought Hubbard out of semiretirement. The institute had contracts with federal agencies, including the military, and Harman’s center was charged with thinking about the future of education. LSD was illegal by then, though still used among engineers and academics around Stanford.

Hubbard, who was by this time broke, was employed part-time as a special investigative agent. His ostensible task was to monitor drug use in the student movement. Harman’s employment letter framed the investigation around concern that some New Left drug use might be deliberately directed toward political change and asked Hubbard to assess its implications for long-range educational policy. The book also reports that Hubbard used his government contacts to help keep SRI contracts flowing. Thus his return combined a formal security role with the older function he had served in the region: connecting people, institutions, and forms of knowledge. He resumed work in a khaki security-guard uniform, with a badge, sidearm, and ammunition belt—a stark change of appearance from his role guiding psychedelic sessions.

Hubbard’s influence was often encountered indirectly. Futurist Peter Schwartz recalled meeting professors, researchers, writers, scientists, and computer engineers in the Bay Area who had taken LSD with Hubbard. Some early computer engineers, he said, used LSD while designing circuit chips, especially before computer-aided design was available. The challenge was to hold a highly complex three-dimensional arrangement in mind; Schwartz believed the drug helped them perceive patterns. His assessment was sweeping—he attributed a major effect on Silicon Valley’s birth to the LSD people in the community had taken—but it remains a participant’s judgment, not a controlled demonstration of cause and effect.

Technology, counterculture, and a continuing afterlife

The book connects Hubbard’s work to a wider change in how computers were imagined. Stewart Brand had his first LSD experience at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in 1962, with Fadiman as his guide. Although Brand remembered that initial session as unpleasant, later journeys contributed to a changed outlook. The Whole Earth Network he gathered—including Peter Schwartz—helped recast computers from instruments associated with centralized military and corporate power into tools of personal liberation and virtual community. The book does not claim that psychedelics alone produced this shift. Instead, it asks whether an imagination shaped by psychedelic experience helped make ideas such as cyberspace, virtual reality, and the translation of material reality into information feel thinkable.

That legacy is presented as an enduring possibility, not a settled genealogy. Steve Jobs publicly treated his LSD experiences as among the most important of his life, and the book notes that he used the subject to challenge Bill Gates to imagine how the experience might have broadened him. In the contemporary technology community, microdosing—regularly taking a small, subperceptual amount of LSD—had become fashionable at the time of writing. The author draws a possible line from Hubbard’s arrival in the valley carrying LSD to the technology boom associated with Jobs, while explicitly allowing that the line is not straight.

The older therapeutic network also persists in less visible forms. The author reports that many underground psychedelic guides descend professionally from the first generation of West Coast and Cambridge therapists, including Hubbard, and that underground practice and university research have had some traffic between them. One guide, Andrei, worked with many young people from the technology world. He described clients questioning the pursuit of wealth and status within what he called a golden cage, and said some went on to seek more meaningful lives. In this account, Silicon Valley remains a place where psychedelic ideas move between personal therapy and technological culture: sometimes through formal research, sometimes through informal relationships, and sometimes through a contemporary search for alternatives to the very ambitions the region represents.