View online

2 July, 2023

Google co-founder Sergey Brin: a big fan of magic mushrooms. Fabrice Coffrini/Getty

Silicon Valley’s psychedelic secrets

Taking drugs used to be a strictly after-hours activity, say Kirsten Grind and Katherine Bindley in The Wall Street Journal. But it’s quickly becoming a banal part of corporate culture. Silicon Valley bigwigs Elon Musk and Sergei Brin take ketamine and magic mushrooms respectively; executives at venture-capital giant Founders Fund regularly throw staff parties offering free psychedelics. At the vanguard are tech execs who see these substances as “gateways to business breakthroughs”. The most common practice is to take a small dose – say 10 micrograms of LSD in a gummy or a pill – which supposedly allows you to dream up more creative ideas. “Think of it as a smart drug,” one sales consultant explains. “It’s giving you the ability to be more analytical.”

Some users employ chemists for a weekly or monthly “infusion” of psychedelics; others rely on more traditional means. One prolific drug dealer in San Francisco is known as “Costco” because users can “buy bulk at a discount”. The CEO of an AI start-up says that if you take a “low-enough dose”, nobody realises you’re under the influence. But other tech workers say weird behaviour like so-called “cuddle puddles” – groups of people hugging on the floor – has become “standard fare” in Silicon Valley workplaces. But for many, the high expectations of a ruthless workplace mean psychedelics are necessary to “provide an edge”. Employers “don’t want a normal person”, one venture capitalist adds. “They want something extraordinary. You’re not born extraordinary.”

Narendra Modi in Washington last week. Win McNamee/Getty

Why autocrats usually fail

Each generation in the West must confront the idea that the autocrats might be doing a better job, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. For those who are tempted by the myth of the “masterful, cat-stroking strongman”, this past week has been one to mark. Not only does the farrago in Russia make Vladimir Putin look foolish, though it certainly does. More importantly, China has pushed the once-ambivalent India “into America’s muscular embrace”. As unforced errors go, it’s hard to think of another with such “century-shaping potential”. But it should also be no surprise.

“Almost all of the world’s richest countries are democracies.” So are nearly all the countries people want to move to. As Amartya Sen has noted, famine never happens in a “functioning democracy”. No two democracies have ever gone to war. In fact, it’s incredible that there are any takers for autocracy at all. The one thing it does well – lift nations “from hardship to middle-income” – isn’t unique to dictatorships. (Democratic Japan did it just fine after 1945.) And the aggression they require, “so intimidating to observe from afar”, is almost always turned on each other. Hitler’s war on Stalin and the Sino-Soviet split were both cases of “existential threats to the free world” fracturing of their own accord. The same can happen within regimes. The wonder is not that Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin fell out, but that it took them so long. And without the looming threat of humiliation in front of a select committee, what incentive is there to stop “autocratic misadventures” like the botched war in Ukraine or the alienation of India? Not long ago, the West’s autocratic enemies “exuded a severe competence”. Recent events are “rather humanising them”.

THE ECO-LODGE This award-winning single-storey home sits in 14 acres of grounds in Dalry, 20 miles north of Castle Douglas. Its 2,000 sq ft interior includes three large bedrooms, a huge open-plan living-and-dining space, a modern log-burner and timber flooring throughout. Top-tier insulation, a heat pump and a private wind turbine mean the house sells energy back to the grid, and large windows throughout offer breathtaking westerly views across the Rhinns of Kells hills, with a roomy terrace perfectly positioned for watching sunsets. Glasgow is around a 90-minute drive. £880,000. 

Joe Biden’s battle with the English language

One of the most “reliable standards in international comedy”, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator, is the “outstanding ineloquence of American politicians”. But while Republicans are frequent targets of informed tittering, Democrats tend to get off scot-free. God knows why. Joe Biden approaches the English language “as though it were an assault course”. When he sticks to the teleprompter, he reads it with an “air of suspicion”, as if he knows it’s tricked him before and “he’s darned if he’s going to let it do it again”. When he strays off-script, “all surrounding eyes widen with fear”. Last year, flanked by his vice president Kamala Harris, the President told a crowd: “America is a nation that can be defined in a single word”. Whether or not America can be summed up in a single word, “what Biden pronounced was not a word in the English language. Or indeed any known language.” It was: “I-was-a-futum-futm-excuse-me”.

Perhaps Harris was taking notes, because her speeches have become celebrated in their own way, mainly for her attempts to imitate Obama, but “with none of the content or skill”. She picks big subjects and then proceeds to say something “simultaneously excitable, unfollowable and banal”. Last year, she said in a speech: “The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time… there is such great significance to the passage of time.” Everyone listening agreed. “Time was indeed passing – but very slowly.”

Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share

Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer in the forthcoming movie

From Middlemarch to the atom bomb

Robert Oppenheimer is best known as the “godfather of the atom bomb”, say Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on The Rest is History. But few people realise what an odd guy he was. His parents were rich Jewish émigrés who collected paintings by Picasso, Rembrandt and Cézanne, and would cart their young son around Manhattan’s galleries. Not surprisingly given this “very cerebral” upbringing, Robert was a bright little boy who loved reading poetry and collecting minerals. He was obsessed with George Eliot, and when his parents shipped him off to summer camp was more interested in chatting to the other boys about Middlemarch than the Yankees. 

Socially, he was inept. As a young academic he’d eat alone every day: chocolate, beer and artichokes for dinner, and something he called “black and tan” for lunch – essentially toast covered with peanut butter and chocolate syrup. When Oppenheimer transferred to study at Cambridge, he became pals with Rhodes Scholar Francis Fergusson, but was depressed when his companion got a girlfriend given his own dismal love life. He eventually found an outlet for his pent-up lust – writing bad erotic poems – which provide pretty compelling evidence science was “more his thing”. 

Sands, centre, with Natasha Richardson and Gabriel Byrne in Gothic

Julian Sands, whose death in California was confirmed last week, once played the Romantic poet Shelley in Ken Russell’s 1987 horror movie Gothic, says Richard Sandomir in The New York Times. The film recreates the true story of the stormy night in 1816 when Shelley, his wife Mary, their friend Lord Byron and Byron’s doctor John William Polidori huddled together in a Swiss villa and wrote ghost stories. (Mary’s Frankenstein is, of course, the most famous). In the film, Sands’s Shelley suffered “drug fuelled hallucinations” and was “tormented by fears and devils”. Gabriel Byrne’s Byron was “nearly demonic”. It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but Sands stood firmly by it. “I think these portraits are rooted in reality,” he told an interviewer in 1987. “If people think otherwise, it’s because of the later Victorian whitewash of them. These were not simply beautiful Romantic poets. They were subversive, anarchic hedonists pursuing a particular line of amorality.” 

“Tell the truth. You don’t have to remember anything.”

Mark Twain

That’s it. You’re done.

To find out about advertising and commercial partnerships, click here

Been forwarded this newsletter?

Sign up for free to receive it every day

Unsubscribe from the newsletter