Vanity Fair reports that technology company leaders in the West are optimising their minds and bodies for performance with an intensity that few of us can imagine:
Last year, a number of rich founders began experimenting with microdosing drugs to make it through the day, as two people with knowledge of these habits have told me, by taking tiny amounts of MDMA and LSD, and a long list of psilocybin mushrooms to help take the edge off, but not so much that you’re seeing tie-dyed dolphins or 3D cartoon characters chasing you down Market Street. For Musk, the pressures of being at the top led the board of Tesla to worry about the founder’s use of Ambien to get to sleep each night after the “excruciating” toll running Tesla had taken on him… During the pandemic, I’ve heard of founders going to far-off places to experiment with ayahuasca, peyote, and the new drug of choice, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a synthetic drug that one person told me was “like doing 10 years of psychotherapy in five minutes.”
and
You’ve got the Dorseys of the world bragging about how little they eat each day, the Zuckerbergs boasting of killing their own food, and an army of nerds now wearing every tracking device imaginable—from rings that follow your sleep to real-time sugar monitoring devices you inject into your arm—and then experimenting with all forms of starvation and sleep habits to show how in control they are of their bodies. There’s intermittent fasting, working under infrared heat lamps, calculating ketones, and working with “DIY surgeons” to implant magnets and microchips.
Vanity Fair’s angle on this is the lack of authenticity and the sheer inequality of access to any of this.
That might be true. I feel less negatively about this. I think of it as an extreme example of William Gibson’s “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. These treatments, protocols, technologies and devices are new enough to be very costly to access. Tech billionaires have both the means and the willingness to experiment, and are therefore the first ones to experience them. They are also likely to create business models and distribution channels for them so they reach the rest of us. The media and we must hold them accountable so we are not compelled to make Faustian bargains for access.
More specifically I think about marginal returns on investment in these hacks for these tech personalities. I wonder for how many of them performance has plateaued, driving even more fervent searches for the next edge.