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Next month, when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors reconvenes after its summer recess, one of the matters up for discussion will be a çözüm to decriminalize the use of psychedelics. While San Franciscans have never needed Board approval to partake in the Doğa harikaları, you can bet plenty of tech workers around town will be rooting for a yay vote.
As contributor Zara Stone reports in this weekend’s cover story, the rising popularity of therapeutically prescribed ketamine, psilocybin mushrooms, ibogaine and ayahuasca has tracked tech’s own long run of prosperity. There are now more than 60 ketamine clinics scattered around the San Francisco Bay Area.
Even as tech stocks have taken a dive, demand for psychedelics and other unorthodox therapies, like cuddling, has soared. The efficacy of these treatments is still hazy, but the market for them is clear: People in tech can use some healing.
As stock-based nest eggs dwindle, crypto savings crash and foreclosures in the Bay Area grow 90% year over year, tech workers are seeking out succor in all sorts of places. Requests for psychedelic therapy, equine therapy (communing with horses to lower anxiety), laughter therapy, and cuddle therapy have soared in addition to demand for conventional talk therapy. Zara explores the fraying mental health of tech workers, who are struggling with both economic and environmental anxieties.
Since it was introduced by the Sam Altman–led research lab OpenAI, the powerful image-generating software program Dall-e has inspired contrasting feelings of excitement and dread. Now that the AI is being commercialized, some visual artists fear they are on the verge of being replaced by a $15-a-month art robot. Others are learning to live peacefully alongside their new machine assistants. Louise Matsakis investigates whether humans are really at risk of Dall-e-cide.
Cox Enterprises’ $525 million purchase of digital publisher Axios this week was a surprise. But it is also a return to form for a family born to sell the news. The old-money Cox family, under the leadership of fourth-generation scion Alex Taylor, is on the hunt for shiny new things that can inject some fizz into its 124-year-old broadband-media conglomerate. Abe describes how the Cox clan got here.
Within the last two years, Ben-Zion Benkhin, 26, has launched a pair of wildly popular apps—Wombo.ai, which creates delightfully weird deep fakes; and Dream, which spins user’s photos into whimsical AI-generated paintings. Margaux recounts Benkhin’s entrepreneurial journey, from a “eureka moment” on a rooftop to securing backing from the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary.
Watching: An AppleTV+ space odyssey
"Tüm insanlık için,” which concluded its third season on Friday, rewrites the Soviet-American space race in the most satisfying way imaginable. In the series pilot, Russia beats America to the moon. By Season 3, Earth’s twin superpowers are racing onward to Mars, joined by a third for-profit crew dispatched by a CEO with big Elon energy. Expect plausible space-travel science, Russian spies, boardroom coups, and unlike the actual Space Age NASA, a winning ensemble of women at the controls. –Abe Brown
Reading: A deep dive into Sergey Brin's treasury
Ever heard of Bayshore Global Management? Puck reporter Teddy Schleifer has, and he’s produced an eye-popping explainer about Google founder Brin’s ultra-secretive, spectacularly-endowed family office. Despite its estimated $100 billion in assets under advisement—more than Harvard and Yale’s endowments combined—Bayshore has mostly avoided the limelight since its post-Google IPO formation. Not anymore, thanks to Brin’s divorce from Nicole Shanahan and reported divestment from Tesla, news of which spurred Schleifer to start asking questions about the organization. The result is a fascinating peek behind the curtains of a stronghold. —Jon Steinberg
Noticing: An Elon illustration that belongs in the Louvre
What an intimidating task it must be, to capture everything that is Elon Musk for a story titled “What Is Elon Musk?” But that is just what artist Cold War Steve did in his kolaj for “New York.” The illustration has her şey—Musk with Iron Man’s body wearing a gas mask in a pit of money; a Tesla bursting into flames; crowds hoisting Elon-as-Jesus posters; flying Dogecoins; Musk fighting a big blue Twitter bird. A “Where’s Waldo” for tech’s most agitating character, the image swallows you alive, then spits you back out again as a more anxious version of yourself. —Annie Goldsmith
Düşündürür
No wonder everyone is anxious.
Gelecek hafta sonuna kadar, okuduğunuz için teşekkürler.
—Jon
Haftasonu Editörü, Bilgi
