In Silicon Valley, Psychedelics Aren’t Just for Recreational Use Anymore
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, June 4th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Silicon Valley has long dabbled in the use of psychedelics. Our reporter tells us how its uses have gone from recreational to professional. Then, the Trump administration's trade restrictions on China are designed to hobble the country's ability to continue marching forward in the global tech race. But our columnist writes that plan isn't working.

But first, as we grow in our careers, most of us strive to become more efficient, unlock our full potential, maybe even find meaning in what we do. In Silicon Valley, tech workers are turning to psychedelics to aid in that process. It's a world in which such drugs have long been used for pure entertainment, but have increasingly thrown techies into existential crisis.

Enter integration therapists. WSJ reporter Angel Au-Young has been reporting on this growing trend. Angel, first tell us what integration therapy sessions are and how they work.

Psychedelic integration therapy sessions come into play after a client has taken psychedelics, whether it's traveling to an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica or doing psychedelics in their friend's backyard. And they come out of that drug trip basically needing help with processing various thoughts and emotions that came up.

And this is something that I heard from therapists has become a more and more requested service from their clients in the Bay Area. How these sessions work, it's still the wild, wild west when it comes to how it's actually conducted. There are a couple certificate programs that exist around the world, but these therapists, they use some classic therapy tools such as

taking their clients back to their drug trips while they're in a sober state, whether that's through guided imagery or other tools, and just asking the clients to remember what were the specific thoughts or emotions that came up when you were on the drug. And just talking through that experience, their feelings afterwards, and potential action items that they want to do after the experience. And

And as you point out, this is really a burgeoning industry in the Bay Area, mostly used by tech workers, but interestingly, sanctioned by the companies they work for. So what really is the overall goal? Is it just working through some of these feelings and finding out what they really mean? There was one therapist that I interviewed who told me that they had been hired by startups.

And the goal could be making sure that the workers are able to process the feelings and thoughts that came up during their drug trips. Another reason could be to, quote unquote, reawaken creativity in the office. Another reason was to address burnout amongst the workforce. You also write that some companies will hire these coaches after their workers have psychedelic gatherings offsite. How does that all work?

So these off-sites are quote-unquote unofficial off-sites. You know, one of the therapists told me that there are examples of executives going on these retreat centers on their own time and coming back, basically telling his or her peers, this was an incredible experience. I think we as a team should do these off-sites together unofficially.

So the way that it was described to me was it's not like an official offsite that the company will send an email about, but more unofficial word of mouth emails.

If you're interested in these experiences, you can join in and we will go to Mexico or another country that's somewhat close to the U.S., somewhat close to SF Bay Area. And we'll do these retreats and we'll come back and we'll hire a coach or a therapist to basically process what came up.

But not everybody, as you write, comes away from these experiences with a revelatory outcome. What are some of the downsides of this kind of coaching experience, I suppose we can call it?

It's obviously not an experience that should be for everyone. At the end of the day, these are drugs that remain unregulated and remain illegal in many parts of the U.S. And there are examples of people who take these drugs and come back thinking that they had a psychotic break.

That's one example that a therapist had told me from one of their clients who did work in tech. And that's why they basically started seeking out therapy, both from a regular therapist who did not offer psychedelic integration. And then with a therapist that I interviewed who does offer psychedelic integration, they

So there are definitely real risks to taking these substances. And it depends on whether you see this as a risk or not, but it really has become a part of the Silicon Valley myth where tech workers, founders, VCs will take these drugs and come back and say, I don't really want to work in tech anymore. I don't really find meaning in this work and I want to do something else.

That was WSJ reporter Angel Aoyong. Coming up, if tech is the new Cold War, which side is winning? And are President Trump's tariff policies helping the American side? That story after the break. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.

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The U.S. and China have for years been locked in a new age tech race. The latest focus is on artificial intelligence, and the U.S. has blocked China from accessing the most advanced American-made chips, all in the hope of choking off the world's second biggest economy to advance in this area. But is it working? WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims has written about that very question in

Christopher, let's look first at chips, because the latest evidence shows that export restrictions on NVIDIA to send less powerful chips to China hasn't really dented the company's revenue yet. China has plenty of other sources. So how do they stack up against the American chip giant? So China has been cut off not just from U.S. high end chips for AI, like from NVIDIA and AMD chips.

but also from the tools and in some cases even the chemicals and other materials required to build the latest generation of their own AI chips. And so really since about 2018, China has been on a tear building up its domestic capacity to fabricate high-end chips.

and build everything else in that whole really complicated supply chain, which of course starts with silicon, literally sand, but includes so many other things in order to create the most advanced chips. They haven't been able to replace everything in that supply chain from domestic sources, but they're kind of on the path and there's been a lot of interesting innovation.

China's largest chip manufacturer, SMIC, which is their answer to TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, which makes chips for Apple, has basically enhanced older chip making technology so it can make newer kinds of chips. And this has allowed companies like Huawei to continue to make some of the most advanced AI supercomputers in the world. And even the CEO of NVIDIA has said,

Huawei's latest AI supercomputer is comparable to or better than the ones made by NVIDIA. And let's talk about how we got to this place, because you write that the big turning point was in 2018 when then Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross cut off Chinese telecom giant ZTE from US tech. And that, as you write, forced Chinese companies to suddenly spend and innovate at a much faster pace.

So starting in 2018, the Trump administration got really worried that Chinese telecom giant ZTE was winning deals to build out the especially 5G telecom infrastructure of the world because they were concerned that just as the United States has done to its own citizens, ZTE would be able to build back doors into that equipment which would allow the Chinese state to spy on

telecoms all over the world, internet, voice, etc. So they took steps to ban the purchase of ZTE's equipment and ban the

the use of American high-end chips in ZTE's equipment by banning its export. And that basically took out this growing Chinese telecoms giant. And it put on alert every Chinese tech company and the Chinese government that the US could kneecap any Chinese tech company at will because of their dependencies on United States tech, hardware, and software.

And it really accelerated this push for China to build and source all of its high tech domestically. And there's this idea in some circles that this is a so-called new Cold War between the U.S. and China to develop this technology to really dominate this field. Is that true? And what happens next?

I'm not a geopolitics expert, so I can't say whether we're in a new Cold War with China. But if you accept the premise that we're in a new Cold War with China, then it does make sense that U.S. trade policy changes.

toward China should shift. There's always been this tension between the folks who want to engage and keep America and China connected because the idea being countries that are interdependent economically are less likely to go to war. The other side of that is people say, well, we've spent decades being engaged with China in terms of technology. And all we got from that was every time that new tech or equipment was shipped to China, it got reverse engineered and copied.

And then the Chinese state supported its development in a way that allowed China to flood the global market with copies of that technology, which could then destroy the domestic industry that had originally been copied. So it's not clear what we should be doing. Some of the experts that I talked to said no.

We may be in a situation now where we're trapped. We have already made it clear to China that any dependency on U.S. tech can and will be used against Chinese companies and China as a whole, the Chinese government. And so we may have to just double down on export restrictions because strategically there's just no other option at this point. I want to play out the tape on that thought just a little bit here because it's

If these export restrictions do what President Trump intends, hurt the Chinese tech industry, will that be a problem for China? Or will it sort of make that industry scrappier and allow it to find ways around U.S. tech titans that in the long run hurt American players more?

The pattern has been in the past 20 years, anytime that the US tries to hobble Chinese tech through export restrictions, China responds by figuring out how to make that tech domestically and eventually attains a level of mastery where China ends up making better stuff than anybody else in the world. So that's been true with

solar panels, electric vehicles, and it's even true with raw materials and various inputs. China is world leader in producing steel. China has gotten extraordinarily good at extracting and refining so-called rare earth

elements and critical minerals that the rest of the world needs to make its energy transition and to make its weapons and computers. So there's every reason to believe that history will repeat itself. That was WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

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