There’s been a lot of psychedelics in Silicon Valley for decades now. Back in the day I bet it had a pretty significant positive impact on the grey beards who built the place, but now that it’s being used by the money guys with big egos who came to exploit the place, it’s probably pretty detrimental. Ram Dass warned everyone about this. If you go through the doors of perception with your ego you lose your damn mind. I think a lot of the anti-democratic tech bro behavior we’re seeing is a result of this.
That’s an aspect I hadn’t thought about. It really does seem like a bunch of these folks have gotten into some kind of crazy messianic world savior ego trip. Hadn’t considered the psychedelics plus ego angle yet in exactly that way.
Part of that may be drugs, but my guess is that its a minor one. The messianic savior ego trip behavior is probably more because the type of person who would be prone to narcissistic hubris is now entering tech because that's where all the money and power is. Whereas in the early days, this wasn't so clear. So now we have all these tech-bros where we used to have tech-nerds.
Very interesting to consider, and there's probably some truth here. Correlating "rich person behavior" with the drug of choice in various decades certainly feels right, though I'm not sure you can actually draw a causal link.
One thing that's incorrect is that modern billionaires are more altruistic than their historical predecessors, and less likely to engage in conspicuous consumption. That's quite incorrect. Musk and Bezos own plenty of yachts.
Modern billionaires also seem far less interested in donating to the general public good "out the door"... the trend these days is to form massive foundations for tax purposes, but still hold the reins pretty tightly to make sure we don't just do something as simple as building a public library or something that might let the money end up in the hands of the undeserving.
And the counterexamples are also counterexamples to the pattern in the article... Gates gives a lot of money away, for example, but he's also not the poster boy for T supplementation and aggressive business practices at this point.
The side-effects on fertility are fairly obvious and not that interesting, IMO. Naturally side-stepping your body and giving it stuff it should be making for free makes your body go "well, I'm gonna stop making that".
What is interesting to me is that other effects high testosterone has. High testosterone is not just magically better, otherwise we'd all have much higher levels out the gate. There's down sides. It's hard on your heart and blood vessels.
Men, just off the rip, are at much higher risk of heart disease. It's not "free" to have testosterone, it harms your health in many ways. If you increase your testosterone even higher to super-human levels then you're really playing with fire.
In addition, we have to consider psychoactive effects. Men are also, off the rip, much more violent and aggressive. So we really run the risk of some unpleasant human effects if we raise testosterone too much.
When we amplify testosterone, we amplify all the good parts of male physiology: higher muscle mass, lower body fat, higher performance. But we also amplify the bad: heart disease, strokes, lower longevity, and emotional issues.
Regardless of who's supplementing these hormones, if testosterone levels are gradually dropping for most of the male population, not just type-A CEOs, should this not be a serious issue to be investigated in the interest of all males?
