Valley of the Gods

by Alexandra Wolfe

  It was the first day of what would be a three-day floating networking party and one of the first meetings of some members of Thiel’s new 20 Under 20 team. The fellows had been chosen and now their decision to ditch the institution of college deserved some real attention. Patri Friedman was in attendance as research for his Seasteading “cruise,” but was spending most of the trip figuring out how to bring the Thiel fellows out west—in the most dramatic fashion. He walked around the deck shirtless, or wearing a flowing purple cape and a paper crown from Burger King.

  But aside from Friedman and his fellow geeks from Silicon Valley, the ship was filled mostly with men who had taken metrosexuality to the gym. Though only forming one-fourth of the crowd, the women onboard looked West Coast casual in cotton dresses and loose, sheer T-shirts bearing East Coast labels. Disciples of attendee Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek and, most recently, The 4-Hour Body, both boys and girls were there to hyper-network with millionaire company founders—and they wanted to look good doing it. Dubbed the Davos of the younger generation, Summit Series actually exemplified much more. Its founders, DC-born Justin Cohen, Elliott Bisnow, and Jeff Rosenthal, had unearthed a new social code, almost an entirely new generational personality, in which hundreds of twenty- and thirty-somethings would be walking around a cruise ship unabashedly wearing Bluetooth “poken” necklaces, plastic white pendants shaped like cartoon hands with Bluetooth technology programmed with the user’s contact. Instead of exchanging business cards, wearers could simply touch necklaces together to exchange each other’s information and later plug the necklace into their computer’s USB port. There, they could log in to the ship’s own private social network called “The Collective” and download the contact information of anyone they met during their scheduled bonding activities, such as “speed-networking,” poker lessons, and life coaching sessions on deck or at the cruise’s lone stop on “Imagine Nation” island. Imagine Nation, more officially known as Coco Cay, is a man-made island with ice cream stands, water slides, folding lounge chairs, kayaks, ropes courses, and beach volleyball, all built specifically for passing cruise ships. En route, the Summit at Sea participants would wake up for “mandatory team building exercises,” otherwise known as fire drills, take meditation guided by the Venerable Lama Tenzin Dhonden, attend lectures by successful tech entrepreneurs such as Thiel, and party with Swedish DJ Axwell, English musician Imogen Heap, and hip-hop band The Roots.

  By boarding the ship, all one thousand of them had Arrived, and gone was the snobbery-meets-sprezzatura attitude of the formerly cool.

  The cruisers were nouveau-nerdy, a cross between the Williamsburg hipster, the navel-gazing Tim Ferriss–following auto­sexual, and of course its predecessor, the metrosexual. During lectures, aisles were filled with entrepreneurs jumping from row to row to give elevator pitches to anyone sitting alone. “Where are you from?” they asked, before launching into their company’s founding and description. They capped off the mini meeting with a kiss of the Bluetooth necklace they held up to meet yours. Then they linked to their newfound friends on The Collective, which turned out to be a Facebook-meets-Match.com for cruisers.

  Peter Thiel’s talk was the most anticipated, and Friedman had a front row seat where he sat cross-legged in his purple board shorts, white tank top, and pirate hat, ­grinning.

  Over the course of the cruise he’d made progress in his and Thiel’s plan to pick up the fellows on a bus and drive them across the country. Deliberately modeled on the bus trip Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters took from near Palo Alto to New York in 1964, Thiel and his partners were planning a bus trip in the opposite direction. Kesey had exhorted the youth of America to “move off dead center” (in much the same way that Timothy Leary would later advise young people to “turn on, tune in, drop out”) into a lotus land of LSD, psilocybin, hashish, and locoweed in order to “open the doors of perception” (in Aldous Huxley’s phrase). Thiel’s idea was that the bus trip would exhort American youth to “stop out,” drop out of the comatose American education system and get smart, turn on their powers of invention, tune in to billions of dollars before age thirty—ideally before age twenty—and renew America’s position as the world center of innovation.

  Friedman and his friend James Hogan, the founder of Ephemerisle, a yearly gathering of ramshackle boats tied together as a floating precursor to actual Seasteading, were its appointed leaders, and here on this ship, Friedman had come up with a budget.

  “Come on, I’ll show you!” he said, and bounded down the ship’s central spiral staircase to a cabin he was sharing with two roommates. Next to a stack of new flyers for the Seasteading Institute, Friedman opened his laptop to a spreadsheet listing a monthlong schedule of rallies, concerts, and lecture events from Harvard to Yale across the country to Stanford. There were two versions, one labeled “epic.” The budget: $1.7 million.

  Thiel’s team—Friedman, Hogan, and a few Founders Fund employees—wanted this bus to be a far cry from the school bus the Merry Pranksters drove from California to the East Coast to spread their psychedelic cult, encouraging followers to embrace their inner wild child, “be what you are and don’t apologize for it”—whether it be frolicking in swamps or rolling naked down the side of the road. This new bus would have a specific purpose and direction. Whereas the Merry Pranksters’ journey across the country was a “superprank” ending in New York to shock the pants off the squares, the end goal of the new tour was to put brilliant brains to work.

  Instead of all-inclusive, the vibe would be exclusive, its style high-tech and sleek, not retro-fluorescent. The tour would commence at Harvard, the very bastion of the breed of East Coast elitism they found so ineffectual. Famous college “stop outs” such as Facebook’s Dustin Moskowitz would give talks at campuses across the country to persuade kids to follow through on whatever crazy idea they thought of in the freshman dining hall rather than bury it under a risk-averse, self-esteem-laden curriculum. The trip would be a countrywide call to reject the lax, coddling environment plaguing America’s higher education system—­created in part by Kesey’s own intellectual disciples.

  But fast-forward a few months, and the bus trip fell apart. The Founders Fund partners who were at first game to participate soon realized they didn’t really want to spend an entire month on a bus with twenty teenagers, especially when they had plenty of work to do at home. In fall 2011 they scrapped the plan, and the fellows started trickling in to Palo Alto one by one.

  2

  The Gluten-Free Open Marriage

  John Burnham had never been to a polyamorous community. Growing up on the East Coast, he always thought that sort of thing wasn’t only “not done,” it wasn’t even talked about. He’d just arrived in the Bay Area over the summer of 2011, and had few friends and little social contact. But he started hearing about the somewhat unusual social lives of people in his new circle, such as his mentor Patri Friedman.

  Burnham was renting a pool house in Atherton, which was about a half-hour walk from anything resembling a store. Few of the other Thiel fellows lived nearby. The ones that did stuck to themselves. Burnham missed having people to talk to. He called Danielle Strachman, who organized social activities for the fellows.

  She and her boyfriend lived with Friedman at a housing complex its occupants had named Tortuga, a few miles south in Mountain View. At the time, Friedman subscribed to a polyamorous lifestyle, as did most of the other eight people living in the two combined houses that comprised Tortuga. Strachman and Hogan were monogamous, but Friedman had a coparent, and they had two children. But the coparent was also in a relationship with one of their roommates, and Patri had a relationship—­albeit casual—with the roommate’s girlfriend on some nights. All of them were free to do as they pleased. They could swap rooms, people, houses, and then end up back with their “primaries.”

  The lifestyle surprised Burnham, and he was opposed to it morally. “It’s not li
ke I was up in arms about it; my general feeling was (and still is) that it’s not really any of my business,” he recalls. He was mostly perplexed at how anyone in the valley could find one viable female to mate with, let alone many. His fellowship class was mostly male, and while nearly every fellow had a crush on Laura Deming, none of them had succeeded in wooing her.

  Some people who didn’t do well in school headed out to Silicon Valley because they wanted to be let off the leash to do something innovative, and out here, that feeling tended to spill over into sexuality. Those who had been unlucky in love back home found hope here. They found friends willing to be just as experimental in the bedroom as they were in the lab. Those who maybe didn’t make it on the football field or the cheerleading squad were now in a place where it was encouraged to unwind and “get weird.”

  Polyamory intrigued Burnham, though he didn’t subscribe to it. Friedman did too. Granted, he wasn’t as excited about Friedman’s Seasteading Institute. When he saw what Seasteading actually was, he remembered thinking, “I was a little underwhelmed.” Designs for it involved a concrete platform with makeshift metal shelters sitting way out in the ocean.

  Living on the East Coast, Burnham had come from a family of sailors. “One of the characteristics in my family is this love of the ocean and sleeping on a boat, setting sail; that’s part of the poetry of the Burnham family,” he said wistfully. “One of the things that deeply disappointed me about Seasteading is I didn’t get the sense of the sea.” Seasteading’s proposed aquatic communities would be close enough to land to commute but far enough to escape government control. They had none of the majesty and sense of freedom of a sailboat, he thought.

  Burnham had a grander vision of freedom. Polyamory was nothing like what he imagined to be Hugh Hefner’s Playboy grotto. But still, Friedman had long been a hero of Burnham’s, and he was interested to see what this new life was all about.

  Although, at five foot four and 111 pounds, Friedman wasn’t the typical ladies’ man, he had a good time flirting with fellow techies, whom he wooed with his wit and his rather uncaring disrespect for authority—apparent currency, sexually and otherwise, in Silicon Valley. Lately Friedman had been having difficulty with his wife, who was now spending more time with his roommate than with him. “I have needs too!” he’d exclaim. But his wife didn’t want to break off anything with their roommate, nor meet Patri’s “needs,” as he requested.

  On some mornings Friedman and his roommates would go to Hobee’s diner in Sunnyvale. There a group of techie couples in their late twenties and early thirties filed in for breakfast. They would order pollo supremo tacos and chicken apple sausage scrambles off a special gluten-free menu and then talk about libertarian ideas, such as holding events in ponds and lakes with rafts that might prepare them for their eventual free-floating island communities in the middle of the ocean.

  Other mornings, they might come in and do it again—but possibly with different partners. Some in the group had made a choice to be “poly,” or have one “primary” mate, with the option for others. They blogged about it, of course. They called it conscious living.

  Tortuga was the brainchild of Friedman, but Strachman, her boyfriend, and nearly a dozen other Bay Area techies lived there too. The ex-wife’s new boyfriend, the roommate, a “rationalist,” and his primary girlfriend also lived there. The girlfriend worked as a college testing tutor.

  Along with cohousing and sharing partners, many of the group members were hyperaware of their diets. They had tried the carb-free, meat-heavy Paleo diet, as well as intermittent fasting. Being gluten free was a given. In a post about his new yoga class, Friedman wrote, “Regular acrobatic activity is a key part of my self-care,” a not unusual topic on his once prolific, now defunct blog patrissimo. Friedman settled on a version of the Paleo diet in which he carried around sticks of butter and coconut oil to add to his meals at restaurants, so he would fill up with less food.

  He and his ex-wife had been “polyamorous” for more than ten years. In this arrangement, they had been married for six. Their Facebook profile pages said “in an open relationship.” The past summer, Friedman first bristled at his wife’s dating their roommate, so he moved out. But then the ex-wife missed him, and so the two started a trial separation. “I told her I wanted another family later in life, so I think she was always worried she wouldn’t be my primary forever,” he lamented. “There were times I felt bad, like, ‘poly should be easier than this—we’re an embarrassment,’ but several friends said, ‘Are you kidding? You guys are amazing!’ ” he wrote on his blog. Friends wrote in to comment, mentioning the typical patterns they saw: “Guy and girl in serious relationship decide to have an open relationship—Guy dates various girls on the side over time, girl doesn’t happen to have any outside opportunities but is fine with this. Girl finally meets one outside guy, who she starts dating—Guy flips a shit, everything explodes.”

  • • •

  Experimental behavior wasn’t limited to the valley, of course. In May 2014, a group of mostly middle-aged men was filing into an empty, steamy warehouse deep in the Mission District (aka the Mission), a formerly undesirable neighborhood of San Francisco that was now home to a host of tech companies. Some were also in open relationships and participated in polyamorous groups such as OneTaste, in which women sit around in a circle to be sexually aroused by anonymous paying customers under the guise of both therapy and a newfangled philosophical sexual awakening.

  The dinner was a “Death Over Dinner.” It was spearheaded by a former-chef-turned-open-relationship proponent named Michael Hebb. After he disrupted monogamy, he planned to “transgress” death. This disruption was going to happen by talking about it at a series of dinners he had launched with the science journalist David Ewing Duncan. Frustrated by the lack of paying prospects in the media world, Duncan had just started an events-planning business called Arc Programs, in which he would host panels on artificial intelligence and humans becoming more machinelike.

  Inside the dark, cavernous space, the tables were set up in an X (for the chromosome, of course), although out of fifty attendees, only three of them had two X chromosomes. While death and longevity were the focus of the evening, the dinner was only foreplay before the after party, where traditional sexual roles would be rejected. To get warmed up for this “disruptive transgression,” guests received cards listing options of a, b, c, and d, in order of escalating willingness to upload their minds and bodies into a chip and take the artificial intelligence plunge. (The idea was that in the future it might be possible to develop a chip or nanobot onto which one could copy all the information in the brain.) Duncan and Hebb announced that the evening’s seating would be based on how everyone filled out those cards, making it clear that the more of oneself you uploaded, the more of your body you would entrust to artificial intelligence, and the braver, more enlightened you were.

  Ironically, while man as machine was being glorified up onstage, the audience was served the most organic, artisanal, straight-from-a-dirt-patch cuisine ever seen. Passed around in earthen bowls were what looked like blobs of soil and mush. Each vegan mushball had the gravelly taste of not animal, vegetable, or mineral, but of sediment. As the starved men looked around, pushing the blobs back and forth on their plates, they went for the wine instead, which if artisanal and organic was at least still alcoholic. Ravenous, they were ready for the rest of the evening, which entailed a long walk across an empty parking lot in front of a Walmart lot toward a row of abandoned buildings next to a highway underpass.

  But that was still a good half hour away. When dinner finished, Reese Jones, one of the founders of Singularity University, sat in the center of a circle of admirers in the front of the room, expounding upon the philosophy of OneTaste, the “orgasmic community” Jones helped support. He explained how women sat around in a circle cross-legged, naked from the waist down, and men sat behind them, caressing them until they orgasmed but withou
t having an orgasm themselves. Wearing pressed khakis and a white button-down shirt, Jones, with greying bushy hair and a grey beard, looked more like a disheveled professor than a sexual innovator. But as he described how this practice was not only disruptive but also enlightening, his face took on a fervor of a lusty teenager. His friends sitting nearby, a mix of other venture capitalists, Singularity University professors, and Thiel fellow mentors, were in agreement. They all wanted to achieve a new level of freedom. They thought that this new liberated sexuality would bring them to a new level of enlightenment. Some of them said they liked visiting the Russian baths north of San Francisco where they could bathe en masse in the nude and feel “fully alive.”

  What Silicon Valley could do for social mores, where hierarchies didn’t matter, and nor did family names or Ivy Leagues, it could do for sex. In the start-up world, making a wild, bold, bad decision—even if it resulted in catastrophic failure—was a resume builder.

  Could Silicon Valley hack ethics too? Religion in Silicon Valley was really a formalized hobby. Yoga in Silicon Valley was no longer yoga. Engineers recoded yoga to be a “religious, meditative, transformative, disruptive, transgressive” experience. Yogic gurus with nearly the level of Tony Robbins led these new religious belief systems. Yoga instructors were body engineers. Flexibility coders. Mind leaders. The guru would not only sweep in and out of your Sunday morning, but he would also take you on vacation retreats or spice up your marriage. It was not exercise, it was life choreography, spirituality, and psychiatry all rolled into one.