LU X U R Y W I T H O U T C O M P R O M I S E

THE
HEALTH ISSUE

O ver Ma
nd tt
i The next wellness frontier

er
M

isn’t in your doctor’s office

or at the gym—it’s all in your head.

Plus: Stranded in Alaska, and what researchers

are learning from the world’s fittest people.

AUGUST 2022
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 AUGUST 2022, VOLUME 46, NUMBER 6

F E AT U R E S

90

Is This the Future

of Health?
Robb Report writers
fan out to Switzerland,
Italy and South Africa
to test the latest
wellness programs.

102

The New Doors

of Perception
Once dismissed as party
drugs, psychedelics
are being taken
seriously as treatments
for mental health.
BY ALYSON KRUEGER

110

Alone at the
Edge of America
Above the Arctic Circle,
searching for caribou—and
the sound of silence—in the
farthest reaches of Alaska.
BY JOSH CONDON

122

Survival of(f)
the Fittest
Researchers at the cutting
edge of medicine are
looking to the strongest,
most vital among us for
the secrets to good health.
BY JAMIE ROSEN

P. 90

14 Contents
AUGUST 2022
 D E PA R T M E N T S

22
CONTRIBUTORS

24
ED IT OR’S L E T T E R

50
THE ANSWERS
with De Boulle
Diamond & Jewelry
president Nick Boulle

62
GE N IUS AT WOR K
Custom clubs from
Parsons Xtreme Golf
can take your game
to the next level.
Here’s what makes
its wedges ace.

P. 68

THE GOODS DOMAIN DREAM MACHINES

83
F IEL D NOT E S 28 TRAVEL
Road biking is all the A converted 1940s mansion
rage with C-suite lets you experience Mexico
execs: Let’s hope that City’s most charming
sweat-slicked Lycra neighborhood like a local.  boundaries of sustainability
doesn’t become the new
boardroom uniform. 32 ART
For Freedoms cofounder
128 Hank Willis Thomas curates
T H E DUE L a wide-ranging look at
Sardinia vs. America with Another
Amsterdam Justice: US Is Them at the
Parrish Art Museum.
34 STYLE
Six guys share their go-to
sneakers, and silk is the
material of the moment—
but not in the way you think.
42 WATCHES &
JEWELRY
Accessible brands muscle
C OV E R in on high-end sports
IL LUSTR AT IO N BY watches, while high jewelry
TISHK BARZANJI shines on the red carpet.
46 FOOD & DRINK
At her new London
restaurant, chef Chantelle
Nicholson pushes the
in style. Plus: the growing
trend of cristalino tequilas
and a martini’s secret
ingredient, revealed.
P. 34
55 OBJECTIFIED
Who needs a right angle?
The most alluring new
high-concept furniture
deploys the time-tested
comfort of the curve.
58 TREND
Designers are leading
homeowners away from
neutral rooms and toward
vibrant colors. Science
says it might enhance your
health.
60 HIGH SOCIETY
With inspiring views and a
private elevator to the gym,
this Chicago penthouse will
keep you in fighting form.
68 WHEELS
McLaren’s first series-
production hybrid and how
Czinger’s new hypercar
could change the face of
manufacturing.
72 TECH
The art may be virtual,
but these frames provide
real-world displays and
management for all your
NFT acquisitions.
74 WATER
The extreme-retro Golden
Globe Race is the toughest
solo circumnavigation in the
world. Plus: stagecrafting
your yacht.
78 WINGS
Aircraft manufacturers get
hip to private chefs, AR and
white-glove service on the
ground, plus Jared Isaacman
on his upcoming space walk.

16 Contents
AUGUST 2022
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 Tishk Barzanji
There’s a naturally psychedelic quality to Barzanji’s
work, which has graced the pages of Architectural Digest,
Vogue and Wallpaper. The Kurdistan-born, London-
based artist credits this sensibility to “books and surreal
movies” and their connections to his own dreams and
experiences. This made him the ideal choice to create
the cover for this issue, which envisions a solitary
figure under the influence of psylocibin (aka magic
mushrooms). “I explored the theme by focusing on the
effect of nature on our mind and body,” he explains. “I
wanted to take the viewer on a journey, through each
element in the piece, and how they interlink.”

Andrew McCarthy Jamie Rosen Max Berlinger

You’d think that after many
years of traveling the globe
as both a successful actor
(Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s
Fire) and editor at large for
National Geographic Traveler
and contributor to Men’s
Journal, The New York Times
and others, McCarthy might
be hard to impress. But he
found himself pushed to the
limit during his stay at the
Ranch’s new outpost in Italy,
which he wrote about for this
issue (“Malibu Meets Italia,”
p. 94). “I never thought I’d
get used to being a little (and
sometimes very) hungry all
the time,” he says. “But I
eventually found it a positive
state, adding to mental
sharpness and creativity.”
Rosen has investigated
all manner of wellness
movements, from
homeowners installing
“healing” crystals under
their floorboards to organic
skin-care products with strict
expiration dates. This month,
she interviewed the doctors
and biohackers taking lessons
from superhuman bodies and
applying them to average Joes
and Janes (“Survival of(f )
the Fittest,” p. 122). “It’s not
about doing something so
extreme but, rather, identifying
and adopting the hallmarks of
a healthy body,” she says.
In his work for The New York
Times, GQ and Men’s Health,
Berlinger has helped readers
decipher trends from the
runway to the dermatologist’s
office. For this issue, he
plunged himself into freezing
water to understand why
cold immersion is suddenly
in vogue (“An Ice-Cold
Challenge,” p. 96). Even
though the experience left
him with a chill, he can’t wait
to do it again. “After leaving,
I remember that I could
not, for the life of me, gauge
temperature. Like, was it hot
or cold out?” he says. “I kept
rolling my car window up
and down and turning the
A/C on and off.”

22 Contributors
AUGUST 2022
 “AN INSPIRING ACCOUNT of WHY WE
NEED to PUT PEOPLE FIRST in BUSINESS.”
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MODERN LEADER NA M E D E R N S T & YO U N G ’ S

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 Editor’s Letter

So, how are you? I’m OK, thanks for asking. You know, surviving.
But wait. Am I? Are we? How are you really feeling? And I don’t mean
the usual aches and pains that come (often) from a life well lived, full of
sports (that’ll be the meniscus tears in both my knees, plus two spinal
surgeries), travel (two shoulder operations), work pressures (24 years in
front of a computer haven’t helped my back any and account for the glasses)
and .. . what’s the phrase we use .. .“general wear and tear.”
Two years ago, Robb Report published its first health
issue, which we called the Transformation Issue. It felt
apposite, five months into a global pandemic that we hoped
was reaching its conclusion, to focus on how we could be
well again. And that started a train of thought for me that’s
yet to stop rolling. How much do we really know about our
health? And how can we know more?
In the time since, my father has been laid low with
cancers, and my mother died of a lung condition. I
looked at my son, not yet 5, and wondered whether it
was inevitable in decades to come that he will
experience what I am now: the constant care, the
admin, the worry that come with tending to an ailing
parent. That led me to research anticancer lifestyle
changes and, ultimately, to adopt a plant-based diet.
What other adjustments was I prepared to make (I
haven’t given up drinking, for example—I need some
vices) in order to give myself the best chance of living
longer and, more importantly, healthier?
“Health should not be the absence of disease but the
abundance of vitality.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot at
a company called Next Health, a “health optimization
and longevity center,” according to its website. I started
visiting its branch in New York City after discussing
with cofounder and president Kevin Peake if there was
anything that could be done about my chronic sciatic
pain, which the second of those spinal surgeries failed
to clear some six years ago. While the fire in my leg is
considerably less searing than it was post-surgery, I still Paul Croughton
take three prescription medications daily. They come with Editor in Chief
side effects, including memory loss, insomnia, brain fog, @paulcroughton
digestive issues, memory loss . . . and who knows what else?
I want to be rid of them.
At Next Health, I’ve had extensive blood analysis which You can read their reports on page 90. One of our editors,
has targeted things for me to work on—my stress markers Michael Verdon, fearlessly(ish) volunteered to visit one of
are high, unsurprisingly—but has been largely positive. the few legal psilocybin-assisted-therapy retreats (that’s
I’ve tried cryotherapy, infrared-light therapy and ozone magic mushrooms to you and me) to attempt to deal
therapy to address inflammation, pain and that stress, but with childhood trauma and depression. You can read his
life has frequently interrupted the process. That said, the remarkable firsthand account, and learn more about how
discomfort has faded and I’m on fewer meds. Is it due to psychedelics are currently being trialed to treat a range of
the treatments, the lifestyle changes, the supplements I’m conditions, on page 102.
now also taking? I couldn’t tell you. Will I continue? Sure. I may struggle to convince you that deputy editor Josh
I might not have found the answers I was looking for, but I Condon’s extraordinary adventure in Alaska was part of
like the direction I’m heading in. a search for enhanced health—not least because he was
In this issue, you’ll find many stories of quests and involved in a plane wreck and stranded in the bush for
discoveries. We tasked a series of writers with testing the several days (p. 110). But he did return a changed man.
JOSHUA SCOT T

newest forms of wellness treatments, from the physically Now, for the good of his health, I have to persuade him not
demanding to the mentally exhausting—plus what sounds, to go straight back there again.
frankly, like a thoroughly indulgent hiking tour in Italy. Enjoy the issue.

24 Editor’s Letter
AUGUST 2022
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HOME WELLNESS
 THE
GOODS
THIS MONTH’S WHO,
WHAT AND WEAR

28 The Goods | Travel

AUGUST 2022
Living
La Vida
Local
Now a new boutique hotel,
a transformed 1940s mansion
lets you immerse yourself
in Mexico City’s charming
Polanco neighborhood.
BY SANDRA RAMANI

Travel | The Goods

AUGUST 2022 29

G
Given Mexico City’s population density,
it’s no surprise that visitors and locals
alike cite leafy, airy Polanco as their
favorite neighborhood to escape to. Set
near Chapultepec Park and the main
Paseo de la Reforma thoroughfare, the
elegant area is home to upscale shopping,
diverse restaurants, intimate parks and
quiet side streets lined with historic
mansions and apartment buildings.
And it’s these streets that real-estate
investor and developer Octavio Aguilar,
a 25-year resident of Polanco, walks when
looking to spot his next project. Since the
early 2000s, Aguilar has sought out
buildings that have been historically
designated and protected, which he then
restores to their original glory while
finding a new purpose—an office building,
for example, or boutiques.
LEFT TO RIGHT: A wrought-iron gate welcomes you to the sanctum of Casa Polanco; a lush sundeck, which can double as a dining area.
30 The Goods | Travel
AUGUST 2022
So when Aguilar heard that a stunning
1940s private residence facing Lincoln
Park, built in what was once called the
California style—that is, with plenty of
Spanish colonial revival elements—might
be available, he worked to ensure the
mansion’s then-owner felt comfortable
he’d be leaving it in the right hands. Once
the home was purchased, Aguilar says, his
team worked to “strip it to the original era,
getting rid of many things that had been
added over the years, and bring it back
to life.” During the three-and-a-half-year
process, there were some thoughts about
what this standout space could become;
at one point, there was even talk about it
being rented to the Danish Embassy. “But
then suddenly, I thought this has to be a
place where people can stay,” Aguilar says.
“This has to be a place where people can
come and live the Polanco experience.”
Aguilar calls the new 19-room boutique
hotel “more of a passion project than a
business” and claims “there’s no other
[accommodation] in town that can give
you this sense of place.” Indeed, his love
of architecture, art and design, as well
as his lifetime of travel, fueled every
part of the property, from the handmade
mattresses and the incredible green-hued
marble in the entryway to the world-class
art and photography in the rooms and
public spaces, much of which comes from
Aguilar’s private collection. Furnishings
include custom-made pieces by award-
winning industrial designer Héctor
Esrawe, noted cabinet maker Alfonso The library, featuring
Marina and mother-daughter interior- walnut furniture
design duo Monica Romo and Monica by Héctor Esrawe
 3 to See
in Polanco
The space
at Xinú

CULTURE raw botanical

Museo Nacional de materials native to
Antropología remote parts of the
(MNA): Designed by continent. Pink
architect Pedro pepper, marigold,
Novelo. “I didn’t want things from hotel left outside your door as a pre-breakfast Ramírez Vázquez cedarwood and
providers,” Aguilar says. “I wanted people “eye-opener.” Taken together, it gives and featuring more hearty tones
who made things for homes.” Casa Polanco a true private-club feel. 23 different help create rich
Having never operated a hotel before, Rooms are spread between the sections with 18 scents that highlight
Aguilar enlisted the expertise of Hamak original mansion and a seamless permanent displays artisan techniques.
Hotels, which manages several boutique contemporary addition and vary in size and 6 temporary
luxury properties around Mexico, to bring and view, but all have 600-thread-count collections. Limited DINING
his vision to life. The mandate: It should Egyptian cotton sheets, Bang & Olufsen time? Focus on the Mandolina: Martha
feel like a private home. To that end, sound systems, rainfall showers and a settlements of the Brockmann’s
there’s no traditional restaurant; instead, complimentary minibar with drinks and American continent, down-to-earth
popular neighborhood chef Martha chef-made morsels. Book the Lincoln including the dawn eatery transports
Brockmann has created an all-day menu Park Suite, which has a large furnished of the Mesoamerican you to a dreamy
that guests can savor anywhere from the terrace overlooking the green space.
cultures. corner of the Amalfi
rooftop terraces down to the ground-floor The team can also organize private
conservatory. Rates, starting from around experiences around town (partnerships Coast with a
RETAIL comfy-chic
$560, include a generous breakfast with are still being finalized) and arrange
hot and cold options—“and you can come yoga and Pilates sessions at the hotel as Xinú: Translated as atmosphere and a
down in your bathrobe to enjoy it,” as one well as massages in the rooftop spa cabin. “nose” from the menu of Mexican
staff member is quick to note—as well as a Our favorite touch: Guests can even tonal Otomí and international
late-afternoon tea hour with snacks, teas browse a selection of menus from language (still favorites (think
and wine. The library is stocked with an prime neighborhood restaurants, order spoken in certain chilaquiles, French
honor bar for when you want an after- in a meal, and the staff will pick it up, parts of Mexico), dip, empanadas and
dinner tequila, and in the morning, a plate it and serve it—just like staying at this high-end gourmet grilled
carafe of coffee or tea and some treats are a friend’s house. fragrance line uses cheese).

Travel | The Goods

AUGUST 2022 31
 ART

This Is US
At the Parrish Art Museum,
Hank Willis Thomas co curates a pointed view
of the modern American landscape.

B
ack in 2016, as the country’s
political divide cratered into
an abyss against the backdrop
of a bitter presidential
contest, a quartet of art-world
friends came together to found For
Freedoms. Playing on Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s famed “Four Freedoms”
speech and Norman Rockwell’s
subsequent series of oil paintings
celebrating the freedoms of speech and
worship and freedoms from want and fear,
the collective sought to promote more
civic—and civil—engagement via art.
For Freedoms continued its mission
through another election cycle, and now
one of the founders, conceptual artist
Hank Willis Thomas, has co-curated
Another Justice: US Is Them, an exhibition
at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill,
N.Y., on view until November 6. “We
believe artists often are on the forefront
of critical thought in our society and
are the ones who introduce us to ideas
and concepts that we might otherwise
be averse to,” Thomas says. “This
exhibition is just the beginning of that
conversation. We say good art asks
questions and good design answers them,
and the quality of questions dictates the
quality of the answers.”
The artworks span from sculptures
and paintings to prints and photographs,
and the exhibition even extends beyond CLOCKWISE FROM

the Parrish campus to the Shinnecock LEFT: Muna Malik;

Monuments, 62-foot-tall electronic an installation

billboards owned by the Shinnecock view of Hank
Willis Thomas’s
Indian Nation on its ancestral land along
Remember Me,
what is now Sunrise Highway, where
2020, white
the work of several Indigenous artists,
neon with black
including Jeremy Dennis, Jeffrey Gibson,
painted front;
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira and Zoë Buckman,
Marie Watts, will be displayed. Dennis’s like home like
contribution is pointedly titled Return something, 2022,
Our Stolen Sacred Shinnecock Hills (2022). vintage textiles and
Thomas says it was a priority that Dennis, beading, leather,
a member of the Shinnecock Nation, and chain; Thomas.

32 The Goods | Art

AUGUST 2022

other “voices of the local community”
take part in the show.
Thomas’s own pieces in the exhibition
ZOË BUCKMAN: COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PIPPY HOULDSWORTH G ALLERY. PHOTO: ADAM RE-
ICH; HANK WILLIS THOMAS: JEFF VESPA; HANK WILLIS THOMAS WORK: COURTESY THE ARTIST
include Remember Me (2022), a 55-foot-
long neon sign installed on the Parrish’s
AND JACK SHAINMAN G ALLERY. PHOTO: G ARY MAMAY;MUNA MALIK: DANIEL N. JAONSON
facade since the late spring. Its words
quote a postcard sent from a Black soldier
during World War I and even replicate his
penmanship. “It’s a beautiful homage to
people who served this country but often
aren’t recognized,” says Corinne Erni, the
senior curator at the Parrish who organized
the show with Thomas and Carly Fischer.
Inside the Herzog & de Meuron–
designed museum, Christine Sun Kim,
who was born deaf, is making site-specific
drawings based on sign language that will
cover two facing walls, and Zoë Buckman
will address violence against women with
pieces such as like home like something
(2022), for which she embroidered boxing
gloves that dangle like festive ornaments.
Several of Thomas’s recent mazelike quilts
stitched from scraps of American flags will
also be on display; if you look closely at
one, for example, it spells freedom. “The
fabric of our nation seems to be fraying,”
he says, “and this investigation into the
various pathways and confusing methods
we take to get to the ideals we subscribe to
is what a lot of the work is attempting to
reflect upon.”
“This is a really good moment to reflect
on what it means to be American,” Erni
adds, noting that one of Thomas’s works is
made with remnants of not only the Stars
and Stripes but also prison uniforms.
Muna Malik, who was born in Yemen,
immigrated to Minnesota at the age of
10 and now lives in Los Angeles, offers
her own take on migration and American
identity with abstract paintings inspired
by current events. She rendered one
piece during the US military’s chaotic
withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer
and a second amid this past spring’s
spate of mass shootings. Malik says
she painted the works not with the
intention of exhibiting them but as an
“emotional release.”
“Essentially, the process is watching
consistent news coverage and the stories
being told about these major events that
often have drastic outcomes for victims,”
she explains before becoming choked
up. Thomas steps in: “So they’re basically
time capsules.”
Despite the stereotype of artists holding
progressive views, Thomas, who will also
take part in a slate of public programs
during a residency at the nearby Watermill
Center beginning in September, is adamant
that For Freedoms is nonpartisan and
traces the left-wing/right-wing binary to
the extremism of the French Revolution. “I
feel that we are at a moment in our society
where we have to reevaluate everything we
know and the way we used to do things,”
he says. “The pandemic was an invitation
into a new world and a new worldview. If
we change the course of the future by one
degree, it might give us millennia more of
existence.” Julie Belcove
Art | The Goods
AUGUST 2022 33
 STYLE

Well Tread
Six style savvy guys on their go to sneaks.
BY KAREEM RASHED
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHANDLER BONDURANT

MICHAEL APA, D.D.S.

Dentist, Apa Aesthetic
Brunello Cucinelli
Calfskin Sneakers

“For me, when it comes to

sneakers, the most important
thing is that they look elegant,
because I’m wearing them
with nicer clothes, trying
to not look like I’m wearing
sneakers. I love Brunello’s
calfskin sneakers—the
leather’s super soft; you can
see that it looks rich. They
have these natural brown
rubber soles, and they’re
low cut to the ankle, so you
can pair them with a suit.
I also have huge feet—size
13—and these make my feet
look a little smaller, whereas
others can make me look
like a clown.”

34 The Goods | Style

AUGUST 2022
 ³

SID MASHBURN
Retailer and designer
Tretorn Nylite Plus

“I love the basic, basic Tretorn low tops. I’ve been wearing them
for over 45 years—I got my first pair in junior high, because of Björn
Borg. That whole era of tennis, I love that look: the white shorts,
white shirts, white sneakers. I like them when they’re a little beat up,
a little shaggy. I’ll get them a little shaggy and then throw them in the
washing machine, so they’ve still got a brightness to them, but the
seams are a little broken or they might have a little tear somewhere.
I don’t like them dirty; I like to give them my own patina.”

³
ALEX FRENCH
Co-author, Sneakers
NikeCraft Tom Sachs Mars Yard 1.0

“In order to get the shoes, [Tom Sachs] required that you do this
astronaut preparedness obstacle course on [New York’s] Roosevelt
Island. I completed the course and won the shoes but, in the process, really
badly injured my knee. Now I wear those with pride. I have this ethos of
sneaker collecting, which is: I’m not interested in the hype shoe right now.
The never ending hype cycle resets itself every week—the idea should be
wearing shoes that people have forgotten, or never even knew about.”

JAMES GARDNER
Restaurateur and founder,
Grupo Gitano
Nike Free Run

“Sneakers are definitely

part of my daily uniform,
and the most comfortable
go to that I just replenish
and replenish and replenish
is the Nike Flyknit running
sneaker. It’s not in your face,
it’s not a trend statement,
but it’s still chic. I like things
that feel comfortable and are
elegant but not necessarily a
statement. The Flyknits
in black, they just sort of fade
away. If I’m going to a meeting,
I’ll change into a Margiela or
Saint Laurent boot, but a good
80 percent of the time, I’m
in sneakers. Is that bad?”

Style | The Goods

AUGUST 2022 35
 “
I’m not interested in the hype shoe right now—
it should be about wearing shoes that people have
forgotten, or never even knew about.”
³

PATRICK JOHNSON
Designer, P. Johnson
Mephisto Match

“The first time I saw them, I was in New York, walking in the park,
and I saw this old guy wearing them, and I was like, ‘Those are either
lawn bowling shoes or they’re the best shoe I’ve ever seen.’ I like
that they’re not a fashion shoe—they have a purity and they come
from a place of function. They’re beautifully made in the Pyrenees in
France, and they age extraordinarily well. I probably wear them two
or three times a week, and when I travel, I always take a pair.”

ROZE TRAORE
Chef
Balenciaga Speed

“I’ve been wearing them nonstop for the past,

like, two and a half months. I love the mesh.
They’re not too bulky, it’s kind of like your own
two feet just doing their thing. They’re versatile
but, more importantly, they’re sleek. Especially
in all black, they just blend in—you could mistake
it for a dress shoe if you do a quick look. Last
week I wore them with a suit, and I’ll also wear
them with jeans when I’m sprinting across the
city running errands. They’re super comfortable;
it’s worth just trying them on to understand.”

36 The Goods | Style

AUGUST 2022
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 Finer Things
from the ancient Romans
to Tang dynasty royals, silk has
long been prized as the most
precious of all textiles. And yet,
for much of modern history,
silk has been relegated to the
fringes of a man’s wardrobe,
turning up as a tie or a pocket
square, on the lapel of a tuxedo
or blended into a summer suit.
For most guys, the thought of
wearing pure, 100 percent silk
conjures images of Saturday
Night Fever–era lounge lizards:
more mafioso than Medici. But
lately designers are making
a case for reconsidering the
material’s many pleasures—and
not just for after dark.
“Silk has taken over the
menswear runways,” says
Olie Arnold, Mr Porter’s style
director, citing graphic resort
shirts from Valentino and luxe
tailoring by Dries Van Noten. “It
blurs the boundaries between
formal and off-duty, comfort
and luxury,” he says. “Silk
pieces embody the high-low
g visit Queen Elizabeth for the
balance that’s now so ccoveted.”
That equilibrium is what
makes so many of the latest
CLOCKWISE
ISE FROM TOP:
silk garments appealin
appealing: They
Edward Sexton silk don’t look as opulent as they
shirt, $396;
396; Amiri feel. While most asso
associate
silk shirt,
t, $890; the fiber with glossy ssatin,
Stefano Ricci silk it can be woven or wa washed
overshirt,
rt, $1,
$1,200;
200; into numerous, more muted
Saman Amel raw-silk fabrications. “It’s an easy fabric
jacket, $3,330. to level up any outfit
outfit,” says Saks
Fifth Avenue’s men’s fashion
market manager, Re Reginald
Christian, singling o out Giorgio
Armani’s matte-silk utility
jacket as a prime exexample of
the material’s abilit
ability to wear its
preciousness lightl
lightly. For fall,
Loro Piana even us used a tightly
woven water-resis
water-resistant silk in a
quietly sumptuous down jacket.
Silk shirts are one
o of the
simplest ways to iincorporate
the material’s low-key
low finesse,
whether with sum summery camp-
collar styles, rakis
rakish pajama tops
or more tradition
traditional spread-
collar numbers. ““We’ve been
making them bes bespoke for more
glamorous client
clients since the
1970s,” says Edw
Edward Sexton’s
creative director
director, Dominic
Sebag-Montefiore, of the
Sebag-Montefio
38 The Goods | Style
AUGUST 2022
latter. While they’re great for
upping the swagger of a suit, he
suggests that wearing one with
trousers “makes you look sexy,
like you made an effort,” adding:
“The rules are changing, and
the silk shirt is becoming a
staple for giving a sense of
occasion without being stuffy.”
Stefano Ricci has
specialized in the material
since the brand was founded
in 1972 with a collection of silk
neckties. Today, it operates
one of Florence’s oldest silk
mills and employs 18th-century
hand-loom techniques
alongside more innovative
knits, incorporating the fiber
into T-shirts and technical
jogging suits. For those who
might be wary of embracing
the material’s languid attitude,
creative director Filippo
Ricci gives the example of
one notable client: “Nelson
Mandela always wore our silk
shirts, and when he went to
first time, he wore a black-
paisley shirt.” This, of course,
was not standard protocol. “He
later told us she said, ‘Nelson,
you’re the first person not
wearing a jacket in front of me
at an official event. But that is a
very beautiful shirt.’ ”
For even subtler silk, look
to Swedish brand Saman Amel,
which champions the material
in gauzy knit shirts as well
as tailoring. Cofounder Dag
Granath explains that the label
primarily uses slubby shantung
and dupioni weaves for its
suiting. “One of the jackets that
I wear the most is black silk,”
Granath says, noting that he
reaches for it year-round, paired
with everything from light-wash
denim to charcoal trousers. “It
doesn’t necessarily have to be
evening wear; it can be with
notched lapels,” he adds.
In any variation—shirt,
sweater or suit—silk makes a
garment uniquely pleasant to
wear. “It’s a very fine fiber and
drapes closer to your body,”
Granath says, trying to articulate
the material’s singularity. “It just
feels special.” K.R.
 ™
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 HERE, E VERY DAY
feels like an escape.
Just east of Atlanta, Reynolds Lake Oconee is a private waterfront
community where Members from around the country thrive, and where
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 WATC H E S & J E W E L RY

Blood
Sports
Make room, Rolex and
Patek: A new group
of watchmakers
is jumping into the
game with high priced
sports models.

T
he meteoric and continuing
rise of the sports watch has
spurred unabashedly elitist
brands such as A. Lange &
Söhne and Vacheron
Constantin to produce more casual
timepieces, aimed at clients who want
watches they can (hypothetically) knock
around without remorse despite five- or
six-figure price tags. Even Patek took it up
another notch: In April, it launched a
monopusher chronograph that measures
³

down to tenths of a second and features

seven exclusive patents. The ultra- Tag Heuer Carrera Plasma
technical, platinum-cased creation drove
Tag’s Carrera lineup is a collection that traditionally
home the message that the brand plans
sells $5,000 to $7,000 sports models to college
to elevate its sports-watch category
graduates or first-time watch purchasers—a far cry
beyond the ubiquitous (but impossible
from its newest model, the high-tech, six-figure Plasma
to obtain) Nautilus.
tourbillon chronograph. The 44 mm watch comes
But in a twist, this year has seen more
decked out in blocks of lab-grown diamonds that slot
accessible brands raising the bar on their
along edges of the sandblasted anodized aluminum
own sports models, unveiling increasingly
case—an eye-catching trick that can’t be replicated with
pricey versions no doubt meant to capture
natural diamonds. The man-made carbon material was
some of the still-fevered market. Tag
also used to outfit the dial, made from crystals grown
Heuer released a six-figure chronograph
into a single block, while the chronograph counters are
accented with lab-grown diamonds, for
executed from a black polycrystalline diamond plate.
example, while Grand Seiko debuted its
At $375,000, it’s the most expensive creation the
first constant-force tourbillon—and
company has offered—for now. According to CEO
both brands took pains to say that these
Frédéric Arnault, it won’t remain an anomaly. “It’s
models were, rather than one-off events,
the first piece we launched with such exceptional
instead a hint of things to come. In other
technology,” he says, adding that the Plasma represents
words, expect a whole new team of watch
“the beginning of a new story for Tag Heuer.”
brands to get in on this high-stakes game.
Paige Reddinger

42 The Goods | Watches & Jewelry

AUGUST 2022
 ³
Oris Aquis Sun Wukong Artist Edition
Framing its 41.5 mm Aquis diver in an entirely new light, Oris took
its first plunge into the world of rare handicrafts by executing the
dial in cloisonné enamel. And it was a deep dive, indeed: The Aquis
normally ranges in price from $2,000 to $4,600, but the métier d’arts
execution is painstaking—each dial requires three days of work
from a single artisan—resulting in a $27,500 price tag for the Sun
Wukong Artist Edition, limited to 72 pieces. The process to create
the dial, which depicts the dragon’s palace from a scene in the 1961
Chinese animated film The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven, begins
with an outline of the design shaped in silver wire on a white-gold
plate. Each section is then filled with colored glass powder in various
hues, fired in a kiln at approximately 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit and
polished to a shiny finish.

Grand Seiko “Kodo”

Constant-Force
Tourbillon
Ten years ago, Grand
Seiko began plotting its
foray into high horology
when it started work
on its T0 concept
movement, which
boasted the world’s
first constant-force
mechanism integrated
with a tourbillon on a
single axis.
The “Kodo” (it
means “heartbeat” in
Japanese) was unveiled
in March and houses a
revised version of the
concept movement in
the 9ST1 caliber, which
³
delivers a level of stable
accuracy of +5 to -3 Panerai Luminor Goldtech Calendario Perpetuo
seconds per day with Panerai was born as a tool-watch brand creating
50 hours of constant- utilitarian timepieces for the Italian Royal Navy, though
force energy, previously since the ’90s it has largely been known for sporty
unprecedented at the commercial watches made famous by action hero
company. Limited to Sylvester Stallone in the movie Daylight. In recent
20 pieces, the 43.8 mm years, however, the company has been dabbling in high
model, in 950 platinum horology under its Laboratorio di Idee department,
and brilliant hard with the R&D hub serving as an incubator for the
titanium and priced at creation of exceptional timepieces ranging from minute
$350,000, features an repeaters to astronomical moon phases. Beneath that
openworked design umbrella, the debut of the caliber P.4100 movement in
and comes on a calfskin 2021, seen in both Goldtech and Platinumtech models,
strap treated with marked the brand’s first in-house perpetual calendar.
urushi made from the The new 44 mm Goldtech ups the ante in both
sap of Japanese trees. design and added perks. Its smoked-sapphire-crystal
It also heralds the first glass offers a full view of the day and date discs—a
mechanical complication stylized window into the architecture of the inner
watch in the company’s components—while the month, leap-year and power-
62-year-long history. reserve indicators are visible through the caseback. A
purchase of the $83,700 watch, limited to 33 pieces,
also comes with a trip to Florence and the surrounding
Tuscan countryside, as well as an exclusive NFT.
Which means the Calendario Perpetuo is less about
deep-sea exploration and more about kicking back
in the Med with a Negroni in hand and a mechanical
marvel on the wrist.

Watches & Jewelry | The Goods

AUGUST 2022 43
 Chopard’s Cinematic
Moment
julia roberts, who wore a
100-carat yellow-diamond necklace
on the red carpet during May’s Cannes
Film Festival, was unsurprisingly quick
to sing the praises of the woman who
made it, Chopard co-president and artistic
director Caroline Scheufele. “This is a
relationship I really do appreciate, and
one of the things she said to me today was,
‘This is not about Chopard; this is about
cinema,’ which is the love of my life—after
my husband,” said the actress, who was
named an ambassador of the Swiss watch
and jewelry house in April 2021, at the
Trophée Chopard dinner.
Scheufele was instrumental in forming
a partnership, 25 years ago, with the
iconic film festival set amid the glamour
of the French Riviera. In addition to
redesigning the Palme d’Or trophy in 1998,
she also conceptualizes the house’s high-
jewelry stunners that make their debut
each year during the festival, in a grouping
dubbed the Red Carpet Collection.
This year Scheufele celebrates both
Chopard’s 25 years as a sponsor and the
film festival’s diamond-jubilee anniversary,
44 The Goods | Watches & Jewelry
AUGUST 2022
as well as her own love of film. “Chopard
Loves Cinema” comprises 75 high-jewelry
pieces, one for each year of the Cannes
Film Festival, with many taking their cues
from Scheufele’s favorite movies. Her
love of 1955’s To Catch a Thief inspired
a diamond necklace that showcases a
13.69-carat internally flawless D-grade
diamond, designed to evoke a piece Grace diamonds atop cornflower-blue sapphires
Kelly wears in the Alfred Hitchcock film. FROM LEFT: edged in brilliant-cut white diamonds.
Another necklace, in 18-karat yellow Chopard Red Lengthy ropes of regal pearls, meanwhile,
and white gold featuring an oversized Carpet Collection are accented with gemstones, including
medallion resembling the marriage of Fairmined 18-karat an asymmetrical necklace that highlights
a sunburst and a lion’s mane, draws its white-gold ring set a morganite totaling roughly 33 carats,
inspiration from the 1985 romantic drama with a 20.40-carat inspired by the 1920s decadence of the
Ceylon sapphire
Out of Africa. Richly embellished with 1974 flick The Great Gatsby.
and diamonds;
diamonds and sapphires, the medallion Scheufele’s design work was also in
Fairmined 18-karat
detaches to be worn as a brooch. evidence with the Palme d’Or award’s
white-gold earrings
Star-studded events and high-wattage refreshed look: The coveted prize’s
with 33.01 carats
stones are a natural pairing, so the sizable rock crystal has been replaced
of sapphires,
collection focuses on ultra-high-value two purple-pink
with rose quartz, while two leaves on its
showpieces—think a 20.40-carat cushion- diamonds totaling golden palm branch are embellished
cut Ceylon sapphire in a natural vivid blue 1.39 carats, two with diamonds: a larger leaf set with
flanked by a pair of white diamonds and blue diamonds 75 stones and a smaller leaf with 25.
taking center stage in a ring of 18-karat totaling 1.2 Ample, to be sure, but as far as trophies
white gold, and a pair of earrings set carats and white go, it was the least wearable one of the
with various cuts of pink, blue and white diamonds. evening. Laurie Brookins
 SP ONS O R ED C O N T EN T

ARDBEG’S
EXCEPTIONALLY RARE ‘CASK NO. 3’
ACHIEVES HISTORIC SALE

A
rdbeg’s distinctive, heavily
peated single malts have earned
the brand a huge worldwide
following among Scotch whisky
fans over the last quarter-century. Their
limited-edition bottlings, featuring new
and innovative experiments from
legendary whisky creator Dr. Bill Lumsden,
are exceptionally sought after by both
whisky connoisseurs and novices around
the world. But back in 1975, Scotch whisky
was in the midst of a decades-long
downturn, and Ardbeg’s fortunes looked
bleak. Most of their small output was used
in blends, and the distillery actually shut
down intermittently in the 1980s and ’90s
before the Glenmorangie Company bought
it, and gave it a new lease on life, in 1997.
The few surviving Ardbeg bottles from
the dark days of the 1970s are highly
coveted both for their quality and rarity.
A surviving cask from those lean years is
virtually unheard of. But one such cask,
distilled on November 25, 1975, was
recently purchased by a private collector
for £16 million—the highest price ever paid
for a single cask of Scotch whisky. Ardbeg
is donating £1 million of the proceeds to investments, has seen its index of rare single
charities benefitting Islay, where the malt bottles sold at auction increase by an
distillery has stood since 1815. eye-popping 426% over the last decade. It’s
The whisky was originally laid down in this context, alongside the rarity of the cask,
two casks, one ex-bourbon and one Oloroso Ardbeg’s popularity and the unique nature of
sherry. In 2014, Dr. Lumsden married them the vertical series, which explains the record
in a single refill Oloroso cask, to continue price paid for Cask No. 3.
to mature with only the subtlest influence Commenting on Cask No. 3’s exceptional
from the wood. For the next five years, quality, author and world-renowned whisky

Cask No. 3 will give its owner 88 bottles of
precious Ardbeg each year, while the rest
will continue maturing in the same cask
under Dr. Lumsden’s supervision until
2026, resulting in a vertical series of
Cask No. 3 aged between 46 and 50 years.
Based on the price paid for Cask No. 3,
each bottle is valued at about £36,000,
which is comparable to the most valuable
whiskies sold at auction. The Knight Frank
Wealth Report, which tracks luxury
“
expert Charles MacLean says, “This truly
unique whisky is a remarkable piece of liquid
history – an evocative taste of what Ardbeg
This truly unique whisky was like when it malted its own barley. The
is a remarkable piece factors which make a particular whisky
investable are threefold: rarity, flavor and
of liquid history– an variety. Many old whiskies can go flat with
evocative taste of what age. But Cask No. 3 is a really lovely whisky,
hugely complex, still having vitality after
Ardbeg was like when it
nearly half a century.”
malted its own barley.
For more information, visit ardbeg.com
 FOOD & DRI NK
New Growth
In London, chef Chantelle Nicholson looks
to change the rules of fine dining starting with
how we consider the people who make it.
T
he word “apricity,” a
17th-century term that once
denoted the warmth of the
winter sun, is now obsolete,
grouped under “rare wintry
words” in Merriam-Webster’s online
dictionary. That means, should you
suddenly hear it tossed around in
conversation, it will most likely be in
reference to chef Chantelle Nicholson’s
new London restaurant, which she named
for that same poetic notion.
For Nicholson, Apricity—both the
word and her restaurant, which opened
this spring in the city’s upscale Mayfair
neighborhood—embodies regeneration
and rejuvenation, concepts that apply
not just to her low-waste, hyper-seasonal
menu but also to the well-being of her
46 The Goods | Food & Drink
AUGUST 2022
staff. The restaurant has a strict 11 pm
curfew, so that workers can safely take
public transportation home, is closed two
days a week—an anomaly in the high-
stakes, low-margin world of professional
kitchens—and includes a service charge
factored into menu prices to help generate
a higher living wage for employees.
“When you start from scratch, you can
carve out a positive way forward and look
at how we can change things,” Nicholson
says of her approach.
A “positive way forward” is also an
apt description of Nicholson’s menu,
which is on-brand: After earning a
reputation as one of the city’s most
influential champions of sustainable
dining—as chef at Tredwells, in Covent
Garden, she earned the now-shuttered
restaurant a Michelin Green Star in
2021—Nicholson allowed herself to
think big for her first solo project, which
means that everything at Apricity has
a backstory. A simple green salad is the
product of a dozen small decisions: The
lettuces are harvested one day before,
from a local vertical farm, and delivered
via electric vehicle; the wild garlic
flowers are foraged; the sweet, tangy
dehydrated tomatoes originate from the
Isle of Wight; and the rapeseed oil in the
dressing is likewise British, as is the miso
paste, made by an artisan in London.
“You might think it’s just a salad, but
when you eat it all together, with all the
textures and flavors, it takes people by
surprise,” Nicholson says.
To meet her vision for creating a
circular economy, design firm Object
Space Place focused on reusing or
recycling as much as possible from the
former Duke Street shop, bringing in
minimal new items and considering the
end-of-life cycle in the design elements.
To wit: All chairs (made from recycled
Coca-Cola bottles) and tables in the
eatery were salvaged from a nearby
restaurant after it closed. The original
staircase, which had to be torn down,
was reused to create a feature wall, while
the skirting boards were repurposed as
bar fronts. “I wanted to see how far we
could push the boat out and get things to
be as forward-thinking and sustainable as
possible,” Nicholson explains.
While the menu is “veg-forward,”
as Nicholson puts it, it isn’t meatless, a
trend among many haute chefs who have
made headlines for pledging to create
planet-friendly fine-dining experiences.
(Chef Daniel Humm caused a stir last
year when he eliminated meat at his
New York restaurant Eleven Madison
Park, while Dominique Crenn removed
meat from the menus at her San
Francisco restaurants, including Atelier
Crenn, in 2019.)
While she’s against factory-farmed
meat, Nicholson—who grew up in
New Zealand, where sheep and
beef farming are backbones of the
economy—never considered going
meat-free. Instead, she believes in the
principles of regenerative agriculture,
which focuses on biodiversity and
rehabilitation of soil health. Within
this model, the manure produced by
livestock plays an important role:
At Apricity, regeneratively farmed, Chef Chantelle
zero-waste meat may show up as Nicholson.
LEFT: Apricity’s
Devon pork belly served with kale,
braised ox tongue,
mutton lamb and spiced chickpeas,
spring vegetables
caramelized whey and kimchi or braised
and ricotta gnudi in
ox tongue with vegetables. Meat or
aromatic broth.
no meat, chef Nicholson is here to
transform. Vivian Song
 Martini,
Shaken, Extra
Ambience
for the most to believe, is the
famous cocktail in the atmosphere in which
world, the martini you drink it.
remains a riddle. The Washington, D.C.,
recipe is simple, is an inherently good
verging on boring, martini town, a heady,
made with just three serious mix of
components: gin, dry back-room power
vermouth and bitters. dealing and well-
Yet it’s shockingly lubricated diplomacy.
easy to be served a And at the new Doyle,
terrible one and, in the revamped
unlike a boulevardier Dupont Circle, senior
or a margarita, bar manager Julian
there’s no innate Enright pours an
drinker’s sense as to impeccable version
where the best ones from behind the chic,
are hiding: I’ve had Martin Brudnizki–
superlative martinis at designed bar: a tall
southern BBQ joints, measure of crisp dry
strip-mall Chinese gin; enough vermouth
restaurants and a to add structure;
surprising number of three dashes of
dive bars. The drink’s orange bitters; all
final, intangible shaken to the verge of
ingredient, I’ve come assault and served
with a twist of
w
llemon—my personal
ne plus ultra recipe,
n
without having asked.
w
As I sit by a large
picture window in the
p
elegantly colorful,
midcentury-inspired
m
llounge, observing a
NICHOLSON: LISA TSE; MARTINI: ADOBE STOCK

clientele conspicu-
ously knotted in
neckties and pearls,
n
tthe drink feels like a
ffundamental extension
of the decor, while
tthe Doyle’s buzzy
v
vibe is the cocktail’s
fi
final ingredient, in
perfect proportion.
p
JJosh Condon

Food & Drink | The Goods

Fo
AUGUST 2022 47

The Clear
Th Cl Choice
you might think you’re looking at a
blanco tequila, but you’re not. Cristalino,
the fastest-growing agave spirit in the
United States and Mexico—where it
has already unseated reposado as the
country’s most popular pour—was first
conceived in the 2000s by Juan Domingo
Beckmann Legorreta, CEO of José Cuervo
Group and an 11th-generation tequila
maker. Although he counted the world’s
best-selling tequila, José Cuervo, among
his assets, Beckmann, an accredited
distiller, wanted to create a new style of
tequila that would entice consumers in an
increasingly competitive market.
He and his master distiller, Alex
Coronado, developed a unique blend of
reposado, añejo and extra-añejo tequilas
aged in toasted European-oak barrels.
48 The Goods | Food & Drink
AUGUST 2022
Beckmann then employed a proprietary
filtering technique to strip the distillation
of its color, resulting in a crystal-clear
aged tequila with its intricate flavors not
just intact but pleasantly enhanced.
“That was the challenge,” Beckmann
recalls. “How to take out the color
without taking out the flavor. Because
normally you would be taking out both.
So this would be a pleasant surprise to
consumers, who would not be expecting
that type of flavor from a clear tequila.”
In 2008, Beckmann christened the
new liquid Diamante and launched it
under his newly created Maestro Dobel
label; four years later, to celebrate the
70th anniversary of Don Julio tequila—at
the time, Casa Cuervo owned 50 percent
of the brand—Beckmann suggested the
distillery release a cristalino añejo.
Thus, Don Julio 70 became the first
añejo cristalino, though it wasn’t the
first cristalino (no matter what the
internet says).
Today there are over 40 cristalinos
and counting, most created through
variations of activated-charcoal filtration,
which removes not just the color but
also the “woodiness” from aged tequilas
while enhancing the agave’s fruit and
floral characteristics. Beckmann’s newest
cristalino, Gran Coramino ($49), created
with comedian and actor Kevin Hart,
is a reposado aged in Eastern European
casks and finished in California Cabernet
Sauvignon barrels, while Komos Añejo
Cristalino ($144), the inspiration of wine
impresario Richard Betts, is aged in
French-oak white-wine barrels for
12 months before being stripped of color
and transferred into amphorae jars for
aeration; the result is a silky-smooth
texture and grassy taste with a soft agave
finish. Or try Avión Reserva Cristalino
($145), a blend of 12-month-old añejo
with a touch of three-year-old extra-
añejo that’s double-charcoal-filtered to
deliver an extra-thick, extra-smooth
hit of herbaceous agave, plus vanilla
nuances picked up from the bourbon-
barrel aging.
Reposado cristalinos are perfect for
adding a heightened agave profile to
cocktails, while añejo and extra-añejo
cristalinos are best appreciated over a
single cube of ice, or even better, neat
in a snifter or long-stemmed Cognac
glass, to fully discern their multifaceted
flavors. And given the category’s
booming popularity, expect future wood
experimentations from Beckmann and
Cristalino tequilas others, including cask aging in Japanese
are the fastest- Mizunara and Irish oak, opening the
growing agave-based door for even further creativity within
spirit in America— this boundary-pushing new style.
and Mexico. Richard Carleton Hacker O
  H * H    H
A w y

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granddaughter — your life is just as unique. Backed by sophisticated resources and a team of specialists
in every field, a Raymond James financial advisor can help you plan for the dreams you have,
the way you care for those you love and how you choose to give back. So you can live your life.
 THE ANSWERS
with . . .

Nick
Boulle
As a second-generation jeweler, 33-year-old Nick Boulle, president of De Boulle
Diamond & Jewelry, splits his time between his family’s sprawling 13,600-square-
foot retail empire in Dallas, just off the city’s prestigious Preston Road, and its
recently opened second, 3,500-square-foot store in Houston’s posh River Oaks
District. The retailer is known for exceptional diamonds and watches—Patek
Philippe and Rolex have dedicated showrooms in the Houston location—and both
boutiques have become go-to destinations.
When he’s not working the floor and acting as gatekeeper to De Boulle’s cov-
eted inventory, Boulle can be found strapping in behind the wheel at professional
racecar competitions such as the Rolex 24 at Daytona and 24 Hours of Le Mans
in France. Not surprisingly, both his vault and his garage keep pace with his life
in the fast lane. Here’s how he rolls. PAIGE REDDINGER

What have you done recently for the first time?

A good friend of mine who was in the Marines started a charity called
Ride for Your Flag. It’s a 2,226-mile motorcycle ride, attended primarily
by military veterans, from Texas to Montana. He lent me a Ducati 1200
Hypermotard, and I went along with the crew and helped raise money.

What, apart from more time, would make the biggest difference
to your life?
The ability to be in two places at once . . . or maybe three or four places.

What do you do that’s still analog?

My dad and I love old cars. Most cars nowadays have an electric fuel
pump. On vintage cars, you have to prime the fuel pump: Pull the choke,
pump the throttle five or six times, let it turn over. The engine runs and
runs and runs, and then it comes to life.

What in your wardrobe do you wear most often?

1
I’m not much of a shopper. I do have a pair of pants from Brunello
Cap Juluca is a Cucinelli that have lasted five or six years. And I run four to five miles a
Belmond Hotel day, so I’m always buying new running shoes. I like a lot of what [Zurich-
resort with
64 rooms and 44 based brand] On has done.
suites decorated
in a Greco When was the last time you completely unplugged?
Moorish style
overlooking When I’m in a racecar, that’s when nothing else is coming in. And
the turquoise another time was when my fiancée and I went to Aspen. I love horses, so
blue water of the
Caribbean. I booked us for a four-hour horseback ride. When we got on the trail, we
NICKOLAS WOLF

had no cell service. We ended up out there for six hours.

What’s your favorite hotel?

Cap Juluca in Anguilla. That was probably the best experience I’ve ever
had at a hotel.1 h

50 The Answers
AUGUST 2022
 Boulle at the 2022
Rolex 24 Hours of
Daytona in January

The Answers
AUGUST 2022 51

FROM TOP: Boulle in his
Dallas showroom with the
current Indy 500 lap record
holder that was driven by
Eddie Cheever Jr.; 2019
Porsche 911 Speedster; On’s
Roger Federer sneakers;
Rolex Cosmograph Daytona
Ref. 116503; Boulle and his
wife, Allison, in Aspen.
52 The Answers
AUGUST 2022
What’s the most recent thing you’ve added to your
collection?
I bought myself a stainless-steel Rolex Sky-Dweller for my 30th
birthday.
How many watches do you own?
I think I have seven. I have a couple of Rolexes. I have a Tudor that
was a limited edition of 25 that we did for sponsors when we went
to Le Mans. I have a Girard-Perregaux. It’s one of the OG Laureatos
made in cooperation with Ferrari, so it has the outline of the F40
on the back. I’m working toward a Patek. My dad and I share his
Patek Philippe Ref. 5204 in rose gold and a Ref. 5712/1A. Those are
two of my favorites, especially the movement on the 5204.
What watch are you wearing right now?
My steel-and-gold Daytona that I won at the 24 Hours of Daytona.
How do you get to sleep?
I like to read before going to bed. It helps me switch off. I just fin-
ished Billion Dollar Whale. Earlier this year, I read Extreme Owner- 2
ship. That was an interesting book.2 Written by Navy
SEAL officers Leif
If you could learn a new skill, what would it be? Babin and Jocko
Willink, Extreme
I’d love to learn how to juggle better, figuratively and literally. I also Ownership
want to learn how to do a wheelie on a motorcycle this year. explores how to
apply leadership
skills from the
Drive or be driven? battlefield to the
boardroom and
Always drive. beyond.
What are your regular tables in London, New York and LA?
And let’s throw Dallas and Houston in there.
Can I throw Paris in there, too? My favorite restaurant in Paris is
L’Avenue. In New York, I like the small Cipriani [on West Broadway].
In London, Chiltern Firehouse. In Houston, I love the food at
Le Colonial and Bludorn. And in both Dallas and New York, I like
Le Bilboquet.
What is the car you’re most attached to?
Our Porsche 911 Speedster—a 2019 GT3. You’re never going to take it
to the racetrack, but it’s just fun everywhere.
Do you still write letters?
D
I write thank-you notes by hand, and I save all of the notes that peo-
ple give me. When is an appropriate time to throw away a note that
someone gave you for a special occasion?
What was your last streaming binge?
W
The Lost Leonardo.
What’s your wine of choice?
I don’t drink a lot of wine. I drink Clase Azul Reposado and Reserva
de la Familia tequilas.
What’s your most treasured possession?
JENNIFER BOOMER; HORSES SHOT: COURTESY OF NICK BOULLE
My racing helmets. When you’re in a car, that’s your identity. Yellow
is our corporate color, so one of my helmets has a pearl-white ring
and it’s in De Boulle yellow. I spent, and I’m not exaggerating, seven 3
months determining exactly how I wanted it to be.3 German artist
Jens Munser
What was your favorite children’s book growing up? paints Boulle’s
helmets. Because
Dr. Seuss or Winnie-the-Pooh. I still like Winnie-the-Pooh. He’s very regulations
positive. stipulate helmets
can’t exceed a
certain weight, a
What are you afraid of? special paint must
be used.
I’m always scared of standing still.
What music makes you smile?
I’m a big fan of Maroon 5 and things like Kygo and chill house
music. O

  
 
    


   
 

 
    



 
 

 














 
  
 
  
    
    
  
 

 
  
     

 

 

    

   







   
     
    
 



 
  
  

   
  
   

           

    
  
 
 
    
  
   

      

    
  
   
  
 
   
 
  

 

      
      

   
  
 DOMAIN WHERE DESIGN LIVES

Ahead of
the Curve
From subtle swoops to full on rainbow shapes, high
concept home furnishings are bending this way and that.

Kissing Armchair, Bohinc Studio Objectified | Domain

AUGUST 2022 55
 ³

Merlin, Roche Bobois

In recent years, mirrors have
shed function in favor of
fun. Alnoor’s Merlin mirror
for Roche Bobois is a tribute
to what the Paris based
industrial designer calls the
“circular and geometrical
rhythms” of artists Sonia and
Robert Delaunay. The most
current iteration is crafted
from a mix of silver, smoky
gray and periwinkle blue
glass. $1,925
³

Ulu, Ara Thorose

Armenian American designer Ara Thorose approached his Ulu table as
though it were a brain teaser. The Cranbrook grad asked himself: What’s
the most efficient way a circle could travel through a cube? His answer is
a playful side table with custom silk upholstery over a foam covered steel
³

base. It looks like Windows’s 3 D Pipes screensaver come to life in your Circular Sofa, kar- Studio
living room. The simple, transparent glass top offers maximum utility and Where Vladimir Kagan’s iconic
showcases Thorose’s geometric acrobatics. $7,000 Serpentine sofa is sexy and
sinuous, the Circular sofa
by kar Studio verges on
cherubic, almost chubby. With
an inner arc that nestles into
an outer swoop, it’s a piece of
furniture that wants to soothe
rather than seduce. Still, it’s
sophisticated enough to take
center stage in a penthouse
lounge or any sleek space
that needs softening up. The
³

Guangzhou based studio Ipséité, Arthur Vallin

offers upholstery in nine dusty
Not everything at Versailles was made from gold. Arthur Vallin, a
shades. About $12,523
French born, New York–based designer, carved this table from a
single block of aubergine and jade colored marble sourced from the
same quarry that supplied stone to Louis XVI. Not only is its folded
form at odds with the unbending material, but the hefty piece also
seems to levitate above the brass ball underneath. $85,000
³

Kissing Armchair, Bohinc Studio

Craving comfort during the pandemic, Slovenian born, London based
Lara Bohinc tended toward silhouettes that cocoon. Shaped like a smile,
with the frame as the lips and the seat as the tongue, the Kissing armchair
is not just happy, it’s downright giddy. The sculptural piece speaks to the
former jewelry designer’s penchant for deconstructing geometric forms,
and its soft upholstery enhances its allure. $9,710 Marni Elyse Katz

56 Domain | Objectified
AUGUST 2022
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 In Living
Color
you can fill your home with custom
furniture and museum-worthy art. But a
growing body of psychological research
suggests that if you want your rooms to
enhance your health, no factor carries
more weight than how you use color.
“The science shows that you can
make particular moods more or less likely
with color, and that you can actually
influence how peoples’ minds work,”
says Sally Augustin, a practicing
environmental psychologist, author and
principal at Design With Science. “Color
can be a powerful and useful tool in
anyone’s home.”
These impacts on human emotion are
so significant that researchers at the
University of Lausanne in Switzerland
have spent the past five years conducting
the ambitious International Color-
Emotion Association Survey. The 12,000
responses they’ve recorded from 90
countries indicate an indelible—and
universal—link between the colors around
us and our moods.
And because the shades in your home
can relax you, energize you or even make
you feel happy, notable designers are
drawing clients away from the long-
prevailing minimalist palette of neutrals
and toward more vibrant hues. Try the
Instagram pages of creatives such as
Rayman Boozer, Jessica Davis and Corey
Damen Jenkins for proof or inspiration.
Perhaps no space symbolizes this shift
more than the Gallery at the London
restaurant Sketch, arguably one of the
most recognizable dining rooms in the
world. India Mahdavi, the Paris-based
interior designer responsible for its look,
set social feeds alight in 2014 when she
bathed the space from floor to ceiling in
pale pink—a color known for its calming
energy. This year, when the eatery
welcomed a new installation from British
Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, Mahdavi
followed his lead and drenched the room
in canary yellow.
58 Domain | Trend
AUGUST 2022
CLOCKWISE FROM “Yinka’s artwork was a real
TOP LEFT: India inspiration and enticed me to work
Mahdavi’s Project differently,” Mahdavi tells Robb Report.
Room series “I used elements that have allowed me
showcases her to extend Yinka’s artistic exploration
irreverent use
of culture and identity—and bring a
of color; the
warm feel of Africa to the space and
dining room at
furnishings. Warmth is the new color
Sketch in London;
at Sketch.”
patchwork
Mahdavi, one of a number at the
curtains from Les
Crafties punch up
forefront of this movement, says
another Mahdavi she’s always looking for the perfect
design. dialogue between color and space. “I
often speak of my colors as an alphabet,
a grammar,” she says. “They are my
secondary mother tongue with which I
seek to celebrate joy; I want the places
that I invent to carry energy.”
But practitioners of color psychology
will tell you that choosing a mood for
your rooms is not as simple as “blue is
calming, red induces anger.” Each color
contains three distinct components to
consider: hue, value and saturation. Hue
represents its dominant visible
wavelength (blue, for example), while
value refers to the relative lightness or
darkness (light blue). Saturation dictates
the level of intensity (powdery sky blue).
Each can shift how we perceive that
color, both visually and mentally. A shade
with less saturation and higher value can
be calming: A light, dusty blue or green,
for example, is ideal for a bedroom. If the
goal is to be energized by your living
space, Augustin recommends colors with
higher saturation and less value, such as
PROJECT ROOM #3: FRANÇOIS HALARD; THE G ALLERY: EDMUND DABNEY; PROJECT ROOM #1: SIMONE BOSSI
sapphire blue and emerald green.
Color psychology extends beyond
those three components as cultural
implications and the power of memory
come into play. For instance, in the US,
shades of blue are typically associated
with trustworthiness and dependability,
which has led many prominent banks to
use the color for their logos. According to
new research by Zillow, making your
front door black, a color associated with
power and elegance, raises a property’s
value by over $6,000. Not a bad ROI for a
few brushes and a can of paint.
A word of warning, however:
Augustin says there’s one color worth
avoiding altogether. “Generally, I think
of white spaces as an opportunity missed.
And if the space is not only white but
also relatively stark in terms of other
elements present, you’re creating
an environment that is really
understimulating,” she says. “It can
actually be quite a stressful place for
people to spend time in.”
Austa Somvichian-Clausen
Sculptures in Bronze Commissions Invited

Man carving his character,

carving his future.

SELF MADE MAN

Small to Monumental Bronze

+PIZOMZ[\ISQVO[XMMLNWZOZIV\MLI[\PMaÆaIKZW[[\PMQZ\MZZIQV

PACE THE WIND

Pedestal Size to Monumental Bronze

THOMAS JEFFERSON
24” h. and life size
His passion was the Declaration of Independence and he fought
to keep it intact in its original words and intent.

HARD TO LEAVE BobbieCarlyleSculpture.com • BobbieCarlyle@att.net

(970) 622-0213 • 1233 North Country Rd. 29 • Loveland, CO 80537
7’ tall bronze, also 30” tall
 Feeling on
Top of
the World
soaring above downtown Chicago’s
landmark Navy Pier and Lakeshore
Drive, this stunning 65th-floor, 7,500-
square-foot penthouse in Robert A. M.
Stern’s One Bennett Park tower is an
exercise lover’s dream.
The owner can take the private
elevator—or perhaps the stairs—down
to the building’s third floor, where a
60 Domain | High Society
AUGUST 2022
7,000-square-foot state-of-the-art well-
ness center features an expansive fitness
club designed by New York’s acclaimed
the Wright Fit group.
In addition to a gym packed
with cardio and strength-training
equipment, there’s a separate Pilates
studio, a low-impact “relaxed energy”
studio and a full-service spa suite with a
ABOVE: The 65th-floor massage-treatment room. This level is also
penthouse of Chicago’s home to a 60-foot-long indoor lap pool,
One Bennett Park which should satisfy any swimmer wishing
offers stunning views to channel their inner Michael Phelps.
over the Windy City. Out on the 10,000-square-foot recre-
BELOW: A private
ational deck, there are cabanas, an outdoor
elevator leads to a
kitchen, a plunge pool and views across
serene health club with
grassy Bennett Park with its meandering
its own Pilates studio.
walking paths and dog runs.
There’s no shortage of exterior space
on the penthouse level, thanks to a 65-foot-
long terrace with jaw-dropping views east
across Lake Michigan and north, past the
sky-scraping Hancock Tower, all along the
city’s tony Gold Coast.
Covering the entire 65th floor of the
landmark building, the residence includes
a living room centered around a stone
fireplace, a dining room that can easily seat
12 and a windowed family room whose
ceilings will be as high as 13 feet finished.
All three spaces have direct access to the
terrace and enviable views of the lake.
To fuel your workouts, there’s an
oversized eat-in kitchen and adjoining
breakfast room. The private wing of the
house boasts four sizable bedroom
suites, including a cavernous primary with
its own cozy corner library and a huge
walk-in closet.
The penthouse is currently listed with
Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty for
$15.17 million fully finished and turn-key.
But the home is currently raw space, so its
future owners will have the opportunity to
choose between the proposed interior
scheme or to redesign and reconfigure it
all with the help of Robert A. M. Stern
Architects. Howard Walker O
 GENIUS AT
WORK

Swingers
Custom clubs just might take you to the next
level. They’ll cut down on excuses, anyway.
B Y R O B I N SW I T H I N B A N K
PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS INGERSOLL

even to the most robotic of players, golf is
about feel. Mashies and niblicks, those clubs of
yore, might feel like Iron Age artifacts in the hand
now, but since the sport’s early days, club makers
have sought to give players tools that send clear
signals from their fingertips to their brains and
make them better golfers.
One of those driving club design and
manufacturing forward is Parsons Xtreme Golf,
known as PXG, an Arizona-based company set up
in 2013 by the colorful GoDaddy founder,
billionaire and golf fanatic Bob Parsons. The
brand makes precision-engineered clubs to order.
Parsons’s vision, backed up by former tour pro
and expert club designer Mike Nicolette and
former Ping director of engineering Brad
Schweigert, is to make “clubs without
compromise,” using computer-aided design
(CAD) drawings, 3-D printing and laser-guided
milling. Not only would this mean players get a
full set of clubs tailored to the idiosyncrasies of
their own game, but they could also get them
reproduced to the same tolerances and finishes if
their clubs were lost or stolen or simply wore out.
Tour-level pros hit thousands of balls every
month, hammering their wedges in particular as
they hone control and distance. Some, according
to PXG, replace them every month, having worn
down the grooves that deliver so much of that
all-important feel.
Currently, PXG works with around 30 players
across the PGA and LPGA Tours. Zach Johnson,
former Masters champion and the USA’s Ryder
Cup 2023 captain, is among them, and he helped
develop one of the company’s early wedges.
“Back in the day, almost everything was
hand-polished, and there was lots of room for
variation,” says Schweigert, PXG’s chief product
officer. “For an expert, the difference would be
clear. For the tour pro, a new wedge will be
identical to the one before.”
Here’s how the PXG Sugar Daddy II is made.

62 Genius at Work
AUGUST 2022
 LEFT
1 Model Made
Where it all begins. PXG
uses CAD software to draft
a 3 D model.

BOTTOM LEFT
2 In the Groove
Material, cosmetic, weighting,
loft, lie and groove geometry
choices have been made, all in
line with USGA rules. Simulations
show how the club will perform.

BOTTOM RIGHT
3 A Dozen for the Win
The design becomes a physical
object through 3 D printing but
only for reviewing the aesthetics.
It can take up to 12 iterations to
perfect the look.

Genius at Work
AUGUST 2022 63
 TOP LEFT
4 Steel the Show
The wedge starts as a billet of 8620 steel,
a high quality raw material with no voids
that is then forged by heating and stamping
it at high speed.

TOP RIGHT
5 Line Drive
A spindle moves across the block briskly,
repeatedly removing tiny bits of metal until
the final geometry is revealed. Halfway
through the milling process, the wedge is
removed and flipped so the process can
continue on the opposite side.

RIGHT
6 Wedged In
Fully milled and looking like a clubhead,
the piece will now be sandblasted,
chrome plated for hardness and
corrosion resistance and then painted.

64 Genius at Work
AUGUST 2022
 Not All Art
is Framed®

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Lever Action Rifle Factory
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 TOP LEFT
7 Worth the Weights
Swing weights are added to the back of
the clubhead. During a fitting, players can
adjust these in two gram increments—
between 2.5 grams and 20 grams—until
they find their optimal weight. Once fitted,
the weights aren’t intended to be adjusted.

TOP RIGHT
8 Shafts of Light
Length and type of shaft are as crucial as
the clubhead’s grooves, loft, lie and
weighting. PXG uses third party shafts.
Every club is built to order.

LEFT
9 Chip off the Old Block
The finished article emerges. The club
now has its grip (there are several size
options), and after final quality checks,
it’s boxed and sent to its new owner. O

66 Genius at Work
AUGUST 2022
 UNDER THE HIGH PATRONAGE OF HSH PRINCE ALBERT II OF MONACO

MONACO YACHT SHOW

2 8 S E PT E M B E R • 0 1 O CTO B E R 2 0 2 2
 DREAM MACHINES
A DEVOTION TO MOTION

68 Dream Machines | Wheels

AUGUST 2022
Hybrid’s Six Appeal
The V 6 plus electrification configuration will seem familiar, but the agility
and daily drivability of McLaren’s new Artura will surprise you.

Wheels | Dream Machines

AUGUST 2022 69
 W
What’s happening in the high-
performance automotive sector looks
like a Top Chef challenge. Leading
marques, operating under the same set
of emissions restrictions, are picking
from a common crate of power-train
ingredients—a six-cylinder engine and
70 Dream Machines | Wheels
AUGUST 2022
electric motor—while trying to present the
most tantalizing supercar du jour. Latest
on the menu: McLaren’s 671 hp Artura.
During the past few years, McLaren
Automotive has seemed to favor
frequent model releases over substantial
advancements in engineering and drive
experience, impacting the perceived
collectability of some of its most recent
cars. Enter the Artura, which signals
a return to late racer Bruce McLaren’s
penchant for reinvention and innovation.
Touted as McLaren’s first series-
production hybrid, the Artura, starting at
$233,000, represents a laundry list of firsts
for the automaker (some more auspicious
than others), including use of a V-6 engine
in a road car and the introduction of the
McLaren Carbon Lightweight Architecture
(MCLA) platform.
Navigating Spanish traffic through the
seaside destination of Marbella, the Artura
feels like it may also be the brand’s first true
daily driver, whether in Comfort, Sport
or EV settings—the last of which offers an
11-mile range on battery alone. (There’s
also a Track mode, which should be saved
for, well, you know . . .) Improving on the
rattling side mirrors and echo-chamber
cabin of the barely street-legal 620R and
McLaren’s 671 hp with more functional space than the 720S,
Artura is a hybrid this car is what we wanted the McLaren GT
daily driver at home to be but with an agility on par with some
on any race circuit. of the marque’s more track-focused models.
 Yet as far as sibling resemblance,
the Artura seems closer kin to the 819
hp Ferrari 296 GTB. Both rear-wheel-
drive machines feature a 3.0-liter V-6,
with twin turbochargers set between
120-degree cylinder banks to lower the
center of gravity, complemented by an
axial flux electric motor (providing 94
hp in the Artura). And both have the
shortest wheelbase in their respective
manufacturers’ current stables, the
McLaren measuring 104 inches versus the
Prancing Horse’s 102.3-inch span—though
at 3,075 pounds, the Artura’s dry weight
saves 166 pounds over Maranello’s machine,
thanks in part to the MCLA’s carbon-fiber
monocoque tub and a new ethernet-based
electrical system that’s 10 percent lighter
than the outgoing iteration.
The resultant athleticism is evident
on the roads weaving to Ascari, a private
racetrack in Málaga. The coupe’s stability
at speed is due to a revised rear suspension The 1,250 hp Czinger 21C hypercar could preview a paradigm shift in manufacturing.
and, especially, McLaren’s debut of an
electronic differential. The combo’s
effectiveness is driven home on the
3.35-mile circuit’s 26 turns and truncated
straights, where the e-diff constantly
optimizes the traction of each back wheel.
Printing the $2 million, carbon-fiber-bodied,
tandem-seat Czinger 21C hypercar
astounds with specs—1,250 hp, zero to 62
Able to cover zero to 60 mph in 3 seconds
flat, the Artura only hints at its 205 mph
Makes mph in 1.9 seconds, a claimed top speed of
253 mph—and recently blew away the
top speed before the carbon-ceramic
brakes are required, able to scrub 124 mph
down to zero in 413 feet. (Note: That’s
Perfect McLaren P1’s production-car track record
at Circuit of the Americas by six seconds.
But more impressive—seriously—is the
62 feet longer than required by the more hybrid’s build process: The main structural
potent 296 GTB.) components are designed by Czinger’s
Heading back to the coast, there’s time proprietary AI software and then
to appreciate improved cabin ergonomics, 3-D-printed. “These structures cannot be
including the engine-mapping selector made more perfect for the requirements
that now sits on the steering column. Most inputted,” says Kevin Czinger, who, along
noticeable are the seat adjustments; finally with his son Lukas, cofounded Los
Angeles–based Czinger Vehicles. “You
could have 1,000 engineers and they would
This car is what we wanted the never get to this solution.”
McLaren GT to be but with an agility Figuring out how to put these “perfect
Lego blocks” together was tasked to Lukas,
on par with some of the marque’s with a degree in electrical engineering from
more track-focused models. Yale, who invented a fixture-less assembly
system. In other words, there’s no part-
specific fixture or tooling required to hold
easy to reach and operate, they’re no longer pieces in place during the robotic build.
the cruel exercise in frustration they’ve Meanwhile, his polymer team created an
been on previous models. As with any adhesive that bonded in under two seconds.
relationship, small gestures go a long way, The result is a 22-robot cell that doesn’t
and it feels like McLaren has been listening. have to be retooled from one application
It also feels like there’s a lot riding on to another, meaning the same hardware
the Artura. Admittedly, it doesn’t wow quite can transition from creating a rear frame
like the roughly $318,000 Ferrari 296 GTB, to a full chassis with only a software
but it fits solidly between that model and change—a potentially revolutionary new
the solely V-6-powered Maserati MC20, approach to manufacturing.
which it outperforms but is still the more Revolutionary, too, is the Czingers’
comparable car in terms of power and price. share-the-wealth philosophy. “The
How it fares in the near future must keep mission is to democratize the pinnacle of
McLaren execs up at night. After all, the technology and engineering so that anyone
likes of Aston Martin and Lamborghini also can use it,” says Lukas. “We ultimately
have this production-hybrid recipe, and you want to change the way anyone thinks
know they’re busy cooking. Viju Mathew about making anything.” V.M.

Wheels | Dream Machines

AUGUST 2022 71
 4K QLED HDR Smart TV–based
display uses quantum dot technology
to produce a vibrant, realistic picture
with superior contrast and color tones
and features a sound system that
automatically calibrates audio settings
to suit the dimensions of the room.
Samsung’s NFT Platform application
features an integrated medium for
discovering, purchasing and trading
digital artwork. The TV also provides
access to a library of over 2,400 works of
non-NFT art from around the world.

³ Tokenframe
Ranging from a $333, 10-inch tabletop
setup to a 55-inch screen for $2,777, the
seven-model Tokenframe lineup features
a choice of 2K or 4K resolution and
pairs with the Tokenframe app, which
connects to your Web3 wallet through
MetaMask, Fortmatic or WalletConnect
and allows you to adjust display
parameters such as background color and
image size. The larger versions also feature
a rotating wall mount: Spin the frame 90
TECH degrees and the artwork repositions itself
just like it would on a smartphone.

Real Frames,
Virtual Art
Show off your NFTs IRL with these top tier displays.

W
hether you love them, loathe them or just don’t understand them, NFTs
continue to be the most buzzed-about topic in the art world, with several
examples fetching sums that put the priciest O’Keeffes and even some
Rembrandts to shame. Each digital creation is tagged with a unique set of
data that establishes proof of ownership and stored using blockchain
technology, which verifies provenance and authenticity beyond a doubt—an obvious boon for any
Lago G
L Genesis
i
³

art investment. But how are you supposed to enjoy what you’ve bought? These four cutting-edge
frames let you hang your virtual masterpieces in the real world. Mark Hacking The $4,500 Lago Genesis is a 33-inch
frame billed as the only model on the
market with premium sound and the
ability to interact with your NFT through
Blackdove Digital Canvas wallet and serves as mission control for voice commands and hand gestures. It’s
importing, purchasing and managing all designed to accommodate all types of
This digital viewing surface is currently your digital masterworks. digital art at its highest quality, whether
offered in six screen sizes ranging from 49 layered, 3-D motion, generative,
inches ($1,512) to 98 inches ($14,700), plus augmented reality or music, the last of
Samsung Frame TV
four style choices, including a floating which can be played through the optional
screen with no frame. Utilizing Samsung As the name implies, Samsung’s Frame Lago x Master & Dynamic sound bar. And
technology, the platform features 4K Ultra TVs perform double duty as television with the option of the Lago Pass, at a cost
HD resolution and silky smooth 60 frames and NFT frame in one, though not of 2 ETH, you also get exclusive access to
per second (fps) playback. The key to this specifically designed for the latter. NFT drops in real time, along with curated
canvas is the Blackdove app, which can Varying in size from 32 inches to an experiences and compatibility with many
connect directly to a MetaMask crypto 85-inch option priced around $4,300, the common crypto wallets.

72 Dream Machines | Tech

AUGUST 2022
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4
YE 0 th
AR
ROBB REPORT’S
LONGEST RUNNING ADVERTISER

WATER
Sailing Like
It’s 1969
The Golden Globe is the most grueling,
slowest single handed race around the world.
Luddites welcome.
T
he heavily retro Golden
Globe Race, which starts
September 4 from Les
Sables-d’Olonne, France,
can claim to attract some
of the world’s most eclectic die-hard
racers. Pro sailors used to 80-day
circumnavigations in multimillion-dollar
carbon-fiber foiling hulls, with onshore
teams and big-budget sponsors, probably
need not apply.
74 Dream Machines | Water
AUGUST 2022
CLOCKWISE
FROM LEFT: Tapio
Lehtinen in the
2018 race; in
1969, Sir Robin
Knox-Johnston
became the first
man to sail solo
nonstop around
the world.
“It’s the loneliest race in any sport: six
to 10 months alone, with no electronics or
GOLDEN GLOBE RACE: JESSIE MARTIN/PPL /GGR;
communication with the outside world—
just you, your boat and the ocean,” says
organizer Don McIntyre, who views the HISTORICAL SHOT: BILL ROWNTREE /PPL
GGR as the antithesis to today’s high-
dollar, high-stakes round-the-world races.
This year’s event has the same rules
and technology as the original Sunday
Times Golden Globe Race of 1968-1969, a
solo circumnavigation so extreme that, of
the nine sailors who departed, one was
rescued after his boat sank, one died by
suicide, another decided to sail for Tahiti
 “
You don’t have to be Tarzan. The key is to prepare so you don’t
hurt yourself or the boat. That boat is your survival.”

instead and five others quit. Only Robin For months, the sailors don’t see a
Knox-Johnston finished. That made Sir human being. They catnap every few
Robin, as he’s now known, the first person hours, with one eye constantly watching
to complete a nonstop, single-handed shipping lanes for oncoming freighters.
circumnavigation, aboard his 32-foot It’s consistent and often grueling work,
ketch Suhaili. and most of the Golden Globe racers are
McIntyre, a former offshore racer, older, with ocean-sailing backgrounds.
resurrected the 50th-anniversary Lehtinen, 64, crewed in the 1981
rendition of the race in 2018. Eighteen Whitbread Round the World Race and
entrants started; five finished. many others, while Kopar, 69, started
“It was a huge undertaking, but an his first solo circumnavigation in 1990,
even bigger one on land,” recalls Istvan finishing a year later. Jean-Luc van den
Kopar, who raced Puffin, starting on July Heede was 74 when he won the 2018 Around miles around the
world and stopping
1, 2018, and finished in fourth place on
March 21, 2019. “My boat was 30 years
Golden Globe.
But the 2022 edition is trending
the World at nine international
cities over a six month
old when I bought it and had been up on younger, with offshore racers such as in 4 Ways period.
blocks for the last 10 years. Restoring it 27-year-old Eliot Smith, from Jacksonville
took three years and 2,500 hours,” Kopar Beach, Fla., Canada’s Gaurav Shinde, 35, Barcelona
says of the work leading up to the race. and Kirsten Neuschäfer, 39, from South World Race
“I had my toolbox out constantly,” Africa, the second female competitor in January 2023
says Finnish competitor Tapio Lehtinen, the series. Damien Guillou, 39, is being Clipper Round the This circumnavigation
whose Asteria was originally built in 1965. touted as the favorite thanks to his World Yacht Race covers 26,000
After reaching Tasmania, about halfway offshore racing career and sponsorship by August 2023 to nautical miles, from
around the world, Lehtinen discovered a the PRB Group. July 2024 (yes) Barcelona to
crust of barnacles between two and five Despite its man-against-the-sea Founded by Sir Robin Sydney and (yes)
inches thick on the boat’s bottom—which reputation—especially the segment that Knox Johnston, this back. The boats
helped explain why he’d been passed by calls for sailing solo for months in the event trains people are crewed by two
competitors. When he jumped into the notorious Southern Ocean—Lehtinen from all walks of life sailors and cross 12
ocean to scrape the barnacles off, “a relishes the race’s leisurely pace. “I was to become ocean climate zones and
huge shark started swimming around alone for months but never felt lonely,” racing sailors. The three oceans over
the boat,” he says. Lehtinen jury-rigged a he says. “I read books and listened to course travels more four months.
hook with a blade and could get a small cassette after cassette of classical music. than 40,000 nautical
hull section clean by working from inside It was wonderful.” For the upcoming race, miles across multiple Vendée Globe
³

the boat but chose to leave the rest. He 38 sailors originally signed up, but only 18 legs, with the yachts November 2024
finished a distant fifth. are “provisional”—meaning they plan to captained by pro Born from the Golden
Part of the Golden Globe’s allure is reach the starting line. sailors and crewed by Globe, this single
that racers are limited to 32- to 36-foot After his 2018 race, Lehtinen will shave the new recruits. handed, nonstop
production sailboats designed before 1,000 pounds from Asteria’s weight by round the world race
1988 and must use 1960s technology. cutting water and fuel. He has trained for The Ocean Race has morphed from its
Forget GPS, radar and sonar; think this year’s event but says it’s not as January 2023 1989 debut into the
instead sextant, paper charts and celestial physical as the Ocean Race and Vendée world’s most exciting
The granddaddy of
navigation. Racers have to store all the Globe series suggest a circumnavigation team races, the 14th solo event, with
fresh water and food they’ll use for the must be. “You don’t have to be Tarzan,” edition begins in carbon hulled foiling
trip. Even onboard entertainment is he says. “The key is to prepare as much January 2023, with yachts, bleeding
specified as throwback: cassette tapes for as you can so you don’t hurt yourself or 21 teams competing edge electronics
listening pleasure, plus 35 mm cameras the boat. That boat is your survival.” in two race boat and serious on land
and Super 8 to record the races. Michael Verdon classes, sailing 32,000 support teams. M.V.

Water | Dream Machines

AUGUST 2022 75

All the Yacht’s a Stage
for the latest craze keeping yacht
owners on the edges of their helm seats,
consider a trick that even world-famous
illusionist David Copperfield would find
challenging: instantly transporting a
superyacht 1,000 feet under the sea,
allowing guests to experience the ocean’s
Twilight Zone without ever leaving the
main salon.
That stagecrafted experience,
produced by London-based Berkeley
Rand, requires underwater drones, high-
definition cameras, augmented-reality
technology and a host of digital-effects
wizards to create. “West Coast tech titans
are critical members of our audience,”
says Berkeley Rand cofounder Andrew
Grant Super. “The complexities around
trying to entertain a three-generational
power family who have seen it all is
stifling, but they love what we do.”
Priced between $350,000 and around
$2 million, the company’s activations
have included a trip through the lost
city of Atlantis, using both a yacht and a
submersible, and a pop-up Michelin-star
restaurant on a sand shelf in the Maldives
where, using advanced digital panels
with 3-D layering originally developed
as camouflaging technology for the US
military, the waiters and food seemed to
appear out of nowhere. Or consider an
76 Dream Machines | Water
AUGUST 2022
adventure from a few years ago, when
Berkeley Rand helped re-enact the
Battle of Midway, transforming a client’s
superyacht into a World War II American
battleship; effects included virtual combat
against enemy fighter planes, with the
smell of cordite and cannon fire drifting
on the sea breeze, plus full-body haptic
suits so wearers could feel the ship taking
incoming “fire.” Each trip is overseen
from the brand’s Mayfair headquarters
and supported by up to 40 lead creative
“
The theme and content are tailored to individual clients,
but we call on government officials and military contacts
to help stage these bucket-list events.”
tech experts from entertainment and
technology powerhouses including
Marvel Studios, Apple, Disney and
Google—even NASA.
Of course, “stagecraft,” according to
its most common usage, is all about the
technical aspects of theater production,
including set design, props, lighting and
machinery, and indeed many experiences
are less virtual, more reality—think a
full-costume rendition of a Broadway
hit, performed by professional actors
on a floating pontoon just off the yacht
or re-creating a miniature Burning Man
in the Arctic.
Adventure travel company Pelorus has
arranged a Bond-themed treasure hunt
in Greenland, with yacht owners and
guests hiking across the barren landscape,
solving clues and using abandoned radar
stations as overnight campsites. Or, if
that seems too straightforward, consider
“The Game,” Pelorus’s immersive
experience within a controlled, high-
pressure alternate reality using actors and
professional production teams, named
after the psychological thriller starring
Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. Guests
can find themselves in staged car chases
or extreme, survivalist jungle missions
involving special forces, intelligence
agencies and counterterrorism experts.
“It goes far beyond your typical
travel and yachting encounter,” says
Venetia Stagg, Pelorus’s travel designer.
“The theme and content are tailored
to individual clients, but we call on
government officials and military contacts
to help stage the series of bucket-list
events. It’s a way of experiencing
something you’ve always wanted to do but
never could.”
There’s even an NFT component,
with a non-fungible token giving the
option for guests to not only repeat but
also own a tradable blueprint of their
bespoke experience—Super describes it
as an “instruction manual” that can be
performed (for an additional activation
fee) as many times as the client likes.
They’re currently only available in
cryptocurrency, but ownership can
also make the holder a royalty
stakeholder should they wish to sell
the NFT in the future.
If you’re part of the been-there,
done-that superyacht crowd, this new
evolution of big-budget, high-production-
value personalized entertainment might
be just what the doctor—perhaps even
Dr. Who—ordered. Julia Zaltzman
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 E
ver since Jared Isaacman
attended the Aviation
Challenge summer camp at
age 12, his goal was to fly—
fast. The New Jersey native,
39, is founder and CEO of Shift4; in 2020,
his company’s IPO made him a billionaire,
but he’d become a serious pilot long
before then. He earned his pilot’s license
in 2005, at age 22, and just four years
later—after moving through single- and
multi-engine instrument ratings to jets—
Isaacman broke the round-the-world
speed record in a Citation CJ2. Attaining
an “experimental type” rating allowed
him to pilot L-39 Albatros and A-4
Skyhawk fighter jets and ultimately to
form an aerobatic squadron—think
Thunderbirds or Blue Angels—called the
Black Diamond Jet Team. Composed of
Isaacman and six other pilots, the group
flew more than 100 air shows between
2011 and 2014. “We flew seven fighter jets,
18 inches apart, doing formation loops,
rolls and other maneuvers,” he says.
“The team included former USAF
Thunderbirds and civilians like myself.
It was a great brotherhood.”
Isaacman cofounded Draken
WI NGS International in late 2011 and built it
into the world’s largest private air force,

The Other Kind of

with more than 100 fighter jets used to
train pilots from all the main US military
branches. Isaacman’s favorite: “The A-4N
Skyhawk, which is basically the ‘bad-
guy’ jet that Viper and Jester flew in the

Space Billionaire
Jared Isaacman’s passion for exploration has led him
to become the rarest of pilots: a civilian astronaut with
a multiday orbital mission to his name as captain.
But he’s not doing it for personal glory.
original Top Gun.”
But his latest obsession is space. Last
year he funded the first all-civilian orbital
mission, a three-day trip using SpaceX
Falcon 9 rockets for transport. Isaacman
and his Inspiration4 crew raised over
$240 million for St. Jude Children’s
Research Hospital, in Memphis, including
$100 million from Isaacman himself.
Next: Polaris Dawn, a new, five-day
mission scheduled to lift off later this year.
We caught up with the record-breaking

78 Dream Machines | Wings

AUGUST 2022
 “
We will test-fly it, and if successful, Starship will be
the vehicle that will return human beings to the
moon and ultimately bring the first humans to Mars.”

civilian astronaut to talk mission prep and
the future of citizen space travel.
Michael Verdon
Did you really ever expect to get to
space as a civilian astronaut? My
passion for aviation and seeking out the
most demanding and challenging flying
I can do is in part because I did want to
be an astronaut, starting when I was in
kindergarten. But I did think that flying
fighter jets and air shows would be as
good as it got—I never imagined I would
have a chance to lead a mission to orbit.
How will Polaris Dawn be different
from Inspiration4? With Inspiration4,
I initially had no idea I would lead the
first civilian mission to orbit Earth. The
idea came together in a matter of weeks.
Once I knew it was a “first,” I took the
responsibility seriously. We assembled
a strong crew and had meaningful
objectives in space alongside what we
wanted to accomplish here on Earth . . .
and deploying cube satellites [miniature
satellites used for remote sensing and
telecommunications]. Finally, we’ll
communicate over a new constellation
of laser-based Starlink satellites [being
tested to ensure viability for outer-space
communications]. Those will be key to
long-range spaceflight.
How did you choose the crew? The
Polaris missions involve a lot more risk
than Inspiration4, so the crew needed
OPPOSITE:
to meet the mission objectives. Polaris
Isaacman is
is a joint program with SpaceX, so we
establishing assembled two talented engineers at
a new model SpaceX that we knew from Inspiration4:
for space Sarah Gillis, the SpaceX lead astronaut
travel. BELOW: trainer, and Anna Menon, a SpaceX
Inspiration4’s managing engineer and mission director
crew enjoying of mission control who previously worked
zero gravity. as a biomedical operator at NASA. We
also have Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who I flew
with for over a decade and who worked
previously at Draken. He served as the
mission director for Inspiration4.
Are there other missions planned
after Polaris Dawn? Polaris II’s
objectives will be designed based on
what we learn from Polaris Dawn and
the un-crewed test flights of Starship.
Polaris III will be the first crewed flight
of Starship and the super-heavy booster.
This vehicle is bigger and more powerful
than the Saturn V rocket that put human
beings on the moon a half century ago.
We will test-fly it, and if successful,
Starship will be the vehicle that will
return human beings to the moon and
ultimately bring the first humans to
Mars. Starship could someday be the 737
of human spaceflight.

Such as? We wanted to show how

nongovernment astronauts could be
happy, healthy and productive in space. If
Inspiration4 was successful, we knew it
would open the door to more interesting
missions. Now that the door is open,
there’s a lot for us to build in space
to truly open up this frontier. Polaris
is a series of technically demanding
developmental missions that will
JOHN KRAUS/POLARIS PROGRAM/INSPIRATION4

conclude with the first flight of the brand-

new launch vehicle Starship.
With Polaris Dawn, we’ll fly higher
than any human being has gone since we
last walked on the moon—the highest
Earth orbit ever flown. We’ll also test the
first new spacesuit designed in 50 years
with an EVA [extra vehicular activity, aka
a space walk], as well as new operation
protocols for pre-breathing [astronauts
breathe pure oxygen before a space
walk to avoid decompression sickness]

Wings | Dream Machines

AUGUST 2022 79
 Interior Dialogue
finding a design studio that matches
the sophistication of the $75 million
business jet you want to build can be
a tricky proposition, since the designers
are typically located inside aircraft
manufacturing facilities and assembling a
jet remains a noisy, industrial activity. But
a number of bizjet manufacturers are
looking to change that, investing big in an
overlooked part of the design process: the
client experience.
Bombardier’s Laurent Beaudoin
Completion Centre—a luxurious, purpose-
built wing across the hall from the bays of
Globals in different stages of interior fit-
out—bridges the gap between the design
and industrial worlds. “We had a delivery
center before but decided to customize
the visits for each client,” says Katie
80 Dream Machines | Wings
AUGUST 2022
Papoutsis, head of Bombardier’s customer
experience, strategy and operations. “We
wanted to make sure the experience is
similar to their normal lives.”
Modeled on contemporary five-
star hotels, the 150,000-square-foot
wing is a sanctum sanctorum used only
for clients, with multiple conference
rooms, an upscale interiors showroom
with hundreds of samples of fabrics,
leathers, veneers and countertops and a
professional kitchen where executive chef
Steve Lemieux and his team concoct five-
star dishes for each customer. “The clients
convey their food preferences and dietary
restrictions, and our chef creates meals
around that,” Papoutsis says. “We don’t
tell them what they’re eating ahead of
time because it would spoil the surprise.”
Gulfstream has also modernized
the design center at its Savannah, Ga.,
headquarters, transforming it into a high-
ceilinged showroom for its most popular
materials, which are sometimes grouped
in collections such as Sports Aesthetic or
Minimalist Aesthetic. “They tend to be
conversation starters, since our G500/600,
for instance, has hundreds of interior
options,” says Tray Crow, Gulfstream’s
director of interior design. The showroom
also includes three full-size interior mock-
ups of its new G700, G600 and G400
aircraft. “Having the mock-ups here lets
the client walk through to get a sense of
scale,” Crow explains.
Of course, some inside spaces are more
personalized than others. For Boeing
Business Jets, each interior for one of its
converted large-body aircraft is created
from a blank canvas. “Every one of our
designs is through outside designers,”
says Alexis Fecteau, global director
of marketing, noting the company’s
“
We presented the
floorplan a client
wanted on the
first visit. He was
surprised we
could project that
kind of detail on a
one-to-one scale.”

limited build schedule. BBJ works

with established design houses such as
Andrew Winch and Alberto Pinto and has
developed new relationships with firms
known for forward-thinking interiors,
including SkyStyle and KiPcreating, which
work together closely and jointly created
the award-winning “Genesis” concept for
the BBJ 787.
“We carry a few samples in the studio,
but these kinds of customers typically
have design advisers who come with
very specific ideas,” says Alex Pardo,
who heads visualization across the two
studios. His team relies on hyperrealistic
digital mock-ups, so the client can see the
interior at scale while also being able to
easily visualize different types of materials
within the setting.
Cutting-edge technology is becoming
increasingly important to the interior-
design process, particularly during
client meetings. In May, ACJ opened a
new ACJ TwoTwenty design center at
Airbus headquarters in Toulouse,
France, with a full-size cabin, materials
selections and VR technology that
immerses the customer in potential
layouts developed with ACJ’s design
team, led by Sylvain Mariat.
“We presented the floorplan a client
wanted on the first visit,” says Mariat. “He
was surprised we could project on a one-
to-one scale. You can look, modify and
touch everything before you even buy it.”
But designers must take pains to
ensure that the presentational fireworks
don’t get ahead of reality. “We take pride
in adding creative features that also work
with technical requirements,” Mariat
explains. That means constant
communication with critical counterparts
on the engineering side, who field
questions about new materials or
components meeting regulations for
flammability and structural integrity. “We
CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT:
never promise anything we can’t deliver,”
The new ACJ TwoTwenty he adds, noting a sculptural wood light
studio employs VR tech for fixture recently added to the bedroom in a
interior design in center; new jet. “If the client wants a reading
cabin mock-up right; the lamp, he simply touches the wood. It gave
Airbus Private Lounge’s a decorative look to the cabin that was
fitted-out cabin. also functional.” M.V. O

Wings | Dream Machines

AUGUST 2022 81
P R O M O T I O N

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 FIELD NOTES

By Robin Swithinbank

Deals on Wheels
WELLNESS Is cycling overtaking golf as
the C-suite’s hobby with benefits?

I L LU S T R AT I O N B Y
CELYN
Field Notes
es
AUGUST 2022 83
 W
e’ve become very
accustomed to
seeing them on the
road. You know,
the “riders.”
Wannabe Miguel Induráins (sorry,
Lance—you blew it) wedged into heaving
uniforms of fluorescent Grand Tour–
branded Lycra, their, ahem, masculinity
tokens protruding with all the elegance of
a vacuum-packed pallet of bananas.
But even so, there’s something about
cycling that remains a bit, well, off. And
it’s in the gear. Not just in those silly
shoes, surely the world’s most dangerous
footwear. Not even ski boots have the
power to morph a person into a fleshy-
carbon-fiber hybrid like cycling shoes. No,
it’s in the way cycling gear is transcending
its original purpose—that is, to be used by
bicyclists for bicycling.
Since when did it become acceptable
to traipse into the office or a café still
clad in cycling gear, helmet half-cocked,
sweat-slick forming behind you, bananas
bunching? At this point, where is everyone
else supposed to look? If the environment
thanks you, the rest of us are peeling away
in embarrassment.
The old maxim was “never let them
see you sweat.” But somehow, the cycling
uniform, despite its many foibles, is within
a real shout of becoming the C-suite
casual go-to.
We’ve seen this before—last time,
it was golf. At some point, probably in
the ’90s, the bland beige-chinos-and-
stripy-polo-shirt look migrated from the
spike bar to the office, so that men could
pack beepers on one side of a belt and
rangefinders on the other, making the
transition from corridors to fairways of
power almost entirely seamless.
How long before time-poor business
leaders, in the never-ending quest for
greater efficiencies, conclude: What’s the
point in changing out of Ralph Lauren
84 Field Notes
AUGUST 2022
into Rapha and back again when you can
simply flex the spandex all day?
The pandemic didn’t help. And not just
because of WFH and the casualization
of work attire. Sales of bikes climbed
spectacularly during lockdowns, spurred
in part by our boredom and need to get
out of the house, and in part because we
had nothing else to spend our money
on. Wait lists reached into months and
then years as China, the world’s largest
producer of bikes, struggled to meet
demand. A study by PeopleForBikes
calculated that 30 percent of Americans
got on two wheels during Covid-19, a full
third of them new riders.
And now, high on energy shakes,
executives are taking to the asphalt in
A study by PeopleForBikes calculated that
30 percent of Americans got on two wheels
during Covid-19, a full third of them new riders.
droves. And not just by riding to work
or heading out for a Peloton parley.
Events such as the Haute Route Pyrénées
or Hotchillee’s “professional events
for amateurs” have become muster
points for HNWs looking to ideate, smash
out deals and stave off the al-desko
heart attack.
So far, I’ve avoided not just the cardiac
arrest but also the over-the-handlebars
business meeting. Not long ago, I was
invited by a CEO to interview him on a
ride. Just the two of us—I assumed—in
plastic hats and thigh-gripping shorts,
breathlessly discussing EBITDA and
nipple chafing while I wonder where the
boss of a company turning over hundreds
of millions of dollars could possibly find
the time to get so damned fit. I took
the Zoom call option.
This isn’t about the sport, you
understand. Despite my misgivings
about stretchy shorts in the boardroom, I
recently discovered a love for cycling. Not
long ago I found myself on that snaking
new-bike waitlist, not quite as tortuous as
counting down the years until your new
Daytona arrives, but lengthy nonetheless.
Eventually my number came up. My
military-green Specialized Diverge E5 is a
thing of beauty and has become one of my
most treasured possessions.
Save the mental image, though. I’ve not
signed up in full. I don’t intend to become
another MAMIL (you know, middle-aged
man in Lycra), and I have no intention of
putting my life in jeopardy by wearing a
pair of the death-trap shoes.
But I have discovered how productive
it can be to ride with others. On a glorious
day earlier this year, my university
roommate and I took an early-morning
ride. We reminisced about the events
of more than 20 years ago, stopped for
a sandwich and a coffee and got out of
breath. As we flew along a rail track
turned cycle path, with the rising sun
breaking through the trees, he asked me
if I’d be godfather to his baby daughter.
Done deal. O
Robin Swithinbank is a frequent contributor
to The New York Times, The Financial
Times and GQ. He writes from the UK.
 P R O M O T I O N

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 u ture
he F
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Is T

90 Is This the Future of Health?

AUGUST 2022
 91
Is This the Future of Health?
AUGUST 2022
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A Chenot Palace Weggis suite balcony overlooking Lake Lucerne. Below, from left: A Chenot test measuring oxygenation, used to prescribe an exercise regimen;
quinoa and blueberry pudding, part of a meticulously designed low-calorie diet.

92 Is This the Future of Health?

AUGUST 2022
 THE
EUROPEAN DETOX
I’m covered in green mud and standing semi-
naked in the hose-down room.  A bespectacled
attendant in white Crocs sprays me with a jet of
water powerful enough to put out a five-alarm
fire. Bridget’s not just rinsing me off: This proce-
dure is designed to stimulate my body’s merid-
ians, like an acupuncture session, but the pres-
sure is so high it hurts.
It’s only day two of my weeklong detox, and
my patience is already waning. Perhaps my
hunger-induced headache is making me para-
noid. Maybe the smell of vegetal mud mingling
with the barky earthiness of the dandelion-root
tea still on my breath is causing hallucina-
tions. Whatever it is, I think I see a glimmer of
schadenfreude in Bridget’s eyes.
Though at times I feel as if I’ve been dropped
into a dystopian movie, I’m actually at a Swiss
facility called Chenot Palace Weggis. While iter-
ations of Chenot spas have existed for decades
in Italy, Greece and elsewhere, this flagship loca-
tion on Lake Lucerne opened in June 2020. It
consists of a renovated wooden hotel originally
built in 1875, buttressed by a brand-new white-
timber-clad wing that houses modern suites and
a labyrinthine medical facility.
The word “clinic” is eschewed here, but
anyone craving an old-world sanatorium vibe
would feel right at home. The hose-downs, for
instance, are a ritual of Chenot’s famed sev-
en-day Advanced Detox, the pillar program cre-
ated in the 1970s and customized with rigorous
diagnostic testing to address each visitor’s spe-
cific needs. The protocol, like the others on offer
here, is based on the Chenot Method, developed
PREVIOUS SPREAD:JOHN LAMB/GET T Y IMAGES; THIS PAFE: ALEX TEUSCHER
by Henri Chenot in the 1970s to excrete meta-
bolic waste and toxins, repair defective tissues
and restore hormonal balance. Its unique mix
of results-based science and luxurious accom-
modations has attracted everyone from Luciano
Pavarotti to Naomi Campbell.
As with any structured spa detox, the giv-
ing-up parts are hard: During the week, all
guests forgo salt, sugar, booze, dairy, meat and
caffeine. Everyone, regardless of size or gender,
starts with a diet limited to 850 calories per day,
a metric Chenot claims supports vital bodily
functions while still promoting cell renewal.
As a result, headaches are common and usually
peak around day two or three. To quote a friend
of mine who’d experienced Chenot’s Advanced
Detox before me, “Day three is a bitch. Power
through it.” I could almost guess which day the
other guests were on. The beige-robed Germans,
French, Greeks and Hollywood types began
their weeks grousing to staffers (who always
took it in stride) before finally acquiescing into
submissive kittens around day four. Evidently,
hose-downs can humble even the biggest egos.
What most impresses me is the variety of
medical tests and how they empower me to bet-
ter understand my body and its weak spots. Each
guest is assigned a general physician, a nutri-
tionist, a masseur and a traditional Chinese-
medicine doctor. My week is arranged into a
tightly scheduled regimen of medical appoint-
ments and daily massages. There are even cos-
metic appointments if you so choose. But sci-
ence is at the root of everything Chenot does.
One examination, a heavy-metal-and-min-
eral test, reveals that I have high counts of mer-
cury and aluminum but am low on selenium,
phosphorus, iodine and some vitamins. I take
supplements and eat a diet rich in seaweed
and probiotics, so this news surprises me. Spi-
rometry lung tests reveal a below-average lung
capacity, but cardio-fitness exams determine
I have an unusually high resting metabolic
rate—2,414 calories to be precise—which means
I need to eat at least that much every day just to
break even. Other tests measure my posture and
movement, vascular and artery functions and
bone density.
To quote a friend who’d
experienced Chenot before
me, “Day three is a bitch.
Power through it.”
Finally, a proprietary biofeedback test iden-
tifies my parasympathetic levels, which indi-
cate the body’s ability to de-stress. Mine are
so bad that I am called into the doctor’s office
for a special session to learn about the poten-
tial cardiac risks. I am also encouraged to reg-
ulate stress with deep breathing and medita-
tion techniques, best done in the property’s
heritage bonsai courtyards. This information is
particularly life-changing for me. All of the
results are printed out so that I can keep track of
things on my own long after the visit.
Another highlight is Chenot’s body-
composition analysis, which, among other things,
assesses the ratio of two types of fat we all have:
the problematic vascular fat, hidden around our
organs, and the easier-to-burn subcutaneous fat.
“You’re lucky that most of your fat is subcutane-
ous,” says my nutritionist, Maria-Anne, during
our consultation. “Many supermodels visit, and
they appear to have zero body fat but learn they
have high counts of hidden vascular fat after
the test.” I take comfort knowing that even
supermodels have health problems. Schaden-
freude strikes again.
Because you’re operating on limited calories,
Chenot discourages too much exercise during the
Advanced Detox. This is no bootcamp. Still, I swim
in the lake every day, and I try some of Chenot’s
fitness courses, among them antigravity tread-
mill training and aqua aerobics, both ideal for my
Gen X knees. My trainer helps me gauge my aero-
bic threshold, used to determine my optimal heart
rate for burning fat in high-intensity interval train-
ing, intel I still use at the gym months later. And
one evening, I timidly enter the -166 degrees Fahr-
enheit cryotherapy chamber, purported to help
you sleep better and relieve sore joints, but it does
little to assist me with either. 
During the week, I test a handful of other
unusual state-of-the-art treatments. I spend 30
minutes in a dark room wearing a headset to
experience neuro-acoustic therapy, which uses
auditory signals to decrease your autonomic ner-
vous system’s fight-or-flight mode and crank up
the parasympathetic levels. It is said to calm the
body into deep relaxation, but I feel more irritable
after it. I also sample photobiomodulation tests,
a form of focused laser-light therapy that shows
exactly where the body is experiencing inflam-
mation, and it is nice to see an accurate visual
of my body’s stressed areas. Chenot even has an
in-house lab where it’s researching and develop-
ing highly specialized treatments for an individu-
al’s specific genetic makeup.
If undertaking all these assessments on a near
empty stomach sounds daunting, know that lim-
ited calories don’t mean boring food. Chenot’s
vegan cuisine is stellar. The dishes are small but
ornate in their presentation, placing a premium
on colors, flavors and textures. They are also
deeply comforting. Variations of lasagna, sushi,
gnocchi, risotto, ravioli and eggplant parmesan
rely on nut creams and substitutions for tradi-
tional pasta grains to ensure that food is delicious
and statistically nonreactive, so reputedly less
likely to cause inflammation or digestion prob-
lems. Chefs and nutritionists choose ingredients
that trick the body into thinking it’s fasting even
though I continue to have small meals. I’ve even
attempted to re-create a few of the dishes back at
home after a week of heavy eating and drinking. 
I check out on day seven with a renewed sense
of my body and its capacity to heal itself. And I am
brimming with a focused, youthful energy I hav-
en’t felt since smartphones took over the world.
I’ve even lost 10 pounds.
The million-dollar question: Did I keep the
weight off? Not exactly. I gained two pounds back
the following month when Switzerland, where I
live, returned to a semi-lockdown. But I’ve man-
aged to keep the rest off for many months. I now
understand how to burn calories better by opti-
mizing the foods I eat and how to relax more
intelligently. I also have a better grasp of my own
body’s science and recognize the warning signs
earlier, including paying attention to my stress
levels and making sure I get the right amount
of food, not more or less. I’ve made the Chenot
method my own. And every once in a while, I still
treat myself to a dandelion tea. From $8,300 per
person Adam H. Graham
Is This the Future of Health?
AUGUST 2022 93
 MALIBU MEETS The trail gains elevation over exposed roots
between moss-covered limestone. Sun dapples
ITALIA the way through oak and beech trees. In a high
meadow, a small blue butterfly flitters between
yellow and white and purple wildflowers. A faint
breeze cools my hot skin. All is well, very well.
Except I’m hungry.
I’ve come to Italy to hike, eat good food,
perhaps engage in some reflection while being
pampered, and—incongruously enough for an
Italian vacation—maybe lose a few pounds.
For more than a decade, the Ranch in Mal-
ibu, Calif., has been dedicated to reconnecting
its guests to themselves and nature in equal
measure. With a regime of four-hour daily hikes,
exercise classes, massage, yoga and a plant-
based diet, folks leave tuned up and slimmed
down. And now the Ranch is branching out. To
The Ranch’s signature activity is a four-hour morning hike. Here, a picturesque stop in the Apennine Mountains.
94 Is This the Future of Health?
AUGUST 2022
Italy. (A third Ranch is set to open in New York’s
Hudson Valley next year.) While the mother-
ship exists in a world of its own on an expan-
sive, self-contained campus perched above the
Pacific, the Italian version embeds itself in the
102-room Palazzo Fiuggi, a 50-minute drive
from Rome in this eponymous hill town known
for its restorative springs.
I’m met by Eduardo. Quick with a knowing
nod, he embodies the hotel’s conspicuous mix
of opulence and silently understood need for
discretion. “We at the hotel cater largely to a
Russian trade,” he purrs. “At least we did, until
the war.” My well-resourced room faces the old
quarter of Fiuggi—houses tumble down the hill
outside my window. “Enjoy the Ranch experi-
ence, and if there’s anything we at the hotel can
do . . . ” Eduardo almost bows.
 Down in the Ranch’s corner of the palazzo,
I find Americans, Europeans, a few Canadians
and a contingent of Saudis gathered. Several are
Ranch Malibu veterans (the spa boasts a more
than 50 percent return rate). Over the next week,
the 23 of us will eat three meals a day, hike and
take classes together. My dread of such enforced
intimacy is quickly diffused as those seeking
their own space are left to drift, while the more
sociable gravitate—each posture equally wel-
come. An avid hiker and lover of Italy, but nei-
ther a “spa junkie” nor a vegetarian, I enter the
week with cautious optimism.
The focal point of the day is the morning hike.
After a 6 am stretch class, followed by a petite
bowl of homemade granola and almond milk,
we’re on the trail. It helps that the Ranch has
the Apennine Mountains over which to tramp.
Each morning a different route takes us through
beech forests to high lookouts with names
such as Porta del Paradiso, or over Roman
bridges and along the banks of the Fiume
Aniene, or down the ancient Cammino di San
Benedetto pilgrimage path, before we’re handed
cool, lavender-infused towels to whisk away
that Italian perspiration.
While the cross-cultural experience occa-
sionally strains to fit, as when New Age phrases
perhaps better suited to the Southern Califor-
nia DNA are imposed on an Italian sensibility,
the program works best when room is made for
both the Ranch’s trademark mindful, health-
conscious precision and the Italian dedication to
la dolce vita. The green minestrone soup tastes as
satisfying as it does clean, and the beetroot-filled
buckwheat ravioli are as flavorful as light.
It takes me all week to make it through the
palazzo’s three swimming pools, salt room
(when I ask, I’m told it’s for treating inflam-
mation), infrared sauna (for yet more inflam-
mation), steam room and dry sauna, multiple
plunge pools, hydrotherapy and Thalasso pools,
without time to even consider the scores of per-
sonal services on offer at the spa apart from my
daily afternoon massage.
After dinner on my final evening, I slip out
the gates of the palazzo, down the hill and into
town. The Italians are chatting on the street
and sipping digestifs at outdoor cafés under
cypress trees while children orbit. An accor-
dion plays somewhere. At a belle epoque restau-
rant, its doors thrown open to the night, I yield
to temptation and indulge in the best gelato of
my life before climbing back up the hill, feel-
ing only marginally like a tipsy teen sneaking in
after curfew.
The sensation of cultural whiplash brought
on by the peculiar hybrid of Southern Califor-
nia mindful-health-chic set amid laissez-faire
Italian hill-town culture, while being swaddled
in Russian-flavored indulgence, never quite sub-
sides, but the Ranch Italy delivers on its prom-
ise. Most guests lose between 3 and 6 percent
of their body weight during a week’s stay, and I
T YSON SADLO
walk away at the end of mine five pounds lighter.
Try saying that about any other trip to Italy. From
$9,100 per person for one week Andrew McCarthy
THE AUGUSTEN
BURROUGHS METHOD
There are unhappy childhoods, and then there
are unhappy childhoods. Augusten Burroughs
knows the territory intimately. His best-
selling book turned film, Running With Scissors,
famously and, strange as it sounds, hilariously
recounted his memories of his mother dumping
him at the home of her off-kilter psychiatrist,
where the oddball collection of residents also
included a pedophile living in a backyard shed.
But, in the first of several phone conversa-
tions this past spring, Burroughs tells me that his
goal in putting his harrowing past onto the page
was not, at least initially, to become a published
writer. He says he merely wanted to “fix myself.”
Writing it all down—the abandonment, the sex-
ual abuse, the neglect—enabled him to make
sense of what had happened and then to move
forward. “It put the power of transformation lit-
erally into my own hands,” he says. (The family
of the psychiatrist, who lost his license to prac-
tice medicine, challenged the veracity of many
of the book’s anecdotes. Their lawsuit against
Burroughs and his publisher ultimately settled.)
Eight volumes later, Burroughs is now put-
ting his energy into helping others process their
trauma, addiction or depression with a regimen
he has trademarked as Focus-Directed Writing.
“It’s not writing that’s meant to be read,” he
notes. “It’s a thought process you go through.”
At Five Foxes, a wellness retreat that opened
this July in woodsy, bucolic Connecticut and is
run by the established private rehab company
Privé-Swiss, Burroughs will coax clients to dig
deep and then to find a way to accept what has
happened and put the lessons learned to good
use. “Knowledge is the enemy of rote, mindless,
destructive behavior,” he says.
Prior to Five Foxes’ opening, Burroughs
agrees to coach me through an abbreviated
version by phone. Step one: Embark on a daily
10-minute practice of stream-of-consciousness
writing. “Write as fast as you possibly can,” he
instructs. “You don’t pause for an instant, not to
correct a spelling error or typo, not to consider
punctuation or what word to use, not to think
about how better to articulate your thoughts.”
These bursts are not exactly journaling,
though there may be some overlap, but rather
are meant both as an exercise to ease non-
writers into the practice and as an initial probe
into a guest’s troubles, a kind of structured mind-
fulness. “I strongly encourage people to share it
[with me] so I can zero in on the area that needs
to be focused on”—that’s the “directed” part,
Burroughs says, calling it a “collaborative pro-
cess.” Some clients also bring the writing exer-
cises to their regular therapists. “It’s a brilliant
complement to traditional therapy because it
provides the therapist with a great paper trail.”
A therapy neophyte, I decide to examine
a relationship that has badly frayed, perhaps
beyond repair. Since I am a professional writer,
Burroughs suggests on our second call that I
jump to a later protocol and write a letter to this
person—I’ll call them Alex—not with the inten-
tion of ever mailing it but as a means of excavat-
ing how Alex has hurt me. I spend the weekend
mulling, trying to verbalize my bruised feelings.
On our next call, I read Burroughs my let-
ter. “That’s excellent,” he says encouragingly.
“There’s a lot to look at.” He then astutely notes
that, while the assignment was to write a letter
to Alex, “what’s striking is that the fourth word
in” names Alex’s spouse, Jordan. We discuss how
Jordan has become a wedge between Alex and
me. He also calls me out for using “soft words”—
“jerk,” “doormat”—which he dismisses as lazy.
“Colloquially, we all know what you mean,” he
says. “But we need to define the behaviors you’ve
seen.” Noting that Jordan eats up most of the let-
ter, Burroughs floats the idea of writing a second
missive specifically to them.
“I poke and prod,” Burroughs says. “It’s about
getting to the rock bottom, the objective truth,
about what happened to you.”
Only then, he says, can the client reach the
goal: integration, aka “owning it.” Referenc-
ing the sexual abuse he endured as a child, he
explains, “What integrating this means is accept-
ing that we’re all houses made of brick and every
single brick is essential to the structure. The
sexual-abuse brick you want to take out, you
“It’s about getting to
the rock bottom,
the objective truth, about
what happened to you.”
don’t get to take out. We don’t get to alter the
past in any way, shape or form, no matter how
horrible. So we have to fully accept that yes,
it happened. Then we have to own it, and by
own it, I mean, ‘This has altered me. What new
knowledge do I have? What gift do I have tucked
away in the folds of trauma?’”
In my case, Burroughs says, I’d already instinc-
tively found a way to “recycle” my hurt by teach-
ing my daughters to cherish and prioritize each
other and their relationship, which gave me a cer-
tain solace and even a bit of pride. In his case, that
gift is developing this writing tool to help others.
“I’m very good at being useful to people,” he says.
“I could not care less about being an author now.”
From $50,000 for one week Julie Belcove
Is This the Future of Health?
AUGUST 2022 95
 AN ICE-COLD perform in a dark room under a cozy blanket
following audio coaching delivered via headset.
CHALLENGE Leary built this portion around data, culled from
the Journal of Alternative and Complementary
Medicine and elsewhere, suggesting that by har-
nessing basic breathing, you can control your
nervous system and your reactions to external
stimuli: mind over matter.
This concept is put to the ultimate test when
you disrobe and drop into a small black tub. The
experience is shocking. Your senses instantly go
haywire, as if you’ve short-circuited. A coach
named Fleur Saville is nearby to cue up inspir-
ing-slash-distracting music (hence Enya’s “Ori-
noco Flow” and “Sail Away”) and cheer me on.
My teeth are chattering, Enya is blasting, and I I am stunned as I try to focus on her shouting
think I’m going to die. encouragement above the bouncy melody.
This is how I begin one of the signature well- Then I remember that  I can regulate my
ness treatments at Remedy Place in Los Angeles, breath, the one thing I can use to divert my brain
the Ice Bath Studio, which translates to “sit in from the cold. The intense chill begins to feel
38-degree water for up to six minutes” (and pay like heat. Random memories keep popping up,
for it, no less). It’s not so much a traditional Zen
spa experience as a sadomasochistic test to see
how far people will push themselves in the name
of physical betterment.
Plot twist: I love it.
Founder Jonathan Leary, a chiropractor, bills
the space, which opened in late 2019 and has a
New York location bowing in September, as “the
world’s first social wellness club.” (Think Soho
House with vitamin drips.) The “remedies” are
aimed at reviving your body from life’s ills—
hyperbaric chambers pump you full of oxygen
to reverse aging, while infrared saunas help
flush out metals and other built-up toxins—all in
a soigné setting.
So why choose the least sexy, most aggres-
sive item on the menu? There’s growing evi-
dence (published in the North American Journal
of Medical Sciences and Sports Medicine, among
others) that glacial temperatures can kick your
nervous system into a sort of restart mode, with
purported benefits including improved sleep
and circulation, a dopamine spike and even a
period of increased fat burning. Part of its suc-
cess is down to its sheer spectacle. Remedy
Place’s Instagram and TikTok feeds are filled
with videos of people plunging into icy water,
the shock on their faces as entertaining as the and I am humming and vocalizing uncontrolla-
spunky music the clips are set to. Not that the bly. It is grueling, but also fun.
hype makes it any less effective. “How long have I been in here?” I ask after
  “In cold water, all of your blood vessels a while.
will contract, and when you get out, your blood “What even is time?” Saville sings back. I
vessels open up and rush blood back to the sur- laugh and keep breathing.
face,” Leary tells Robb Report. “The contraction Those six minutes feel like an eternity in
and relaxation of all the muscles in your body is the moment, but an hour later the discomfort is
essentially an internal workout.” There’s a pri- just a blip. I feel great afterward and flush with
mordial attraction that helps explain the tradi- energy for the rest of the day. Most excitingly,
tion of so-called Polar Bear Plunges everywhere I sense that I have grazed that liminal place
from Brooklyn to Britain’s Brighton Beach. where the mind and body meet, that by push-
“The initial feeling [is] uncomfortable, but ing my corporeal form to such an extreme I may
the natural high you have afterward is just so have accessed some untapped part of my meta-
MADELINE TOLLE

worth it,” Leary adds. “It’s crazy how powerful physical self. Could simple cold water be the key Taking an ice bath
your body is and what you can train it to do with to unlocking one’s hidden potential? The jury’s at Remedy Place in
the right mindset.” still out, though I’d happily do it again. But Los Angeles. Above:
The procedure starts with 10 minutes of next time, I’d listen to Beyoncé. $50 per session The spa’s hyperbaric
guided “holotropic breathwork,” which guests Max Berlinger chambers.

96 Is This the Future of Health?

AUGUST 2022
“It’s crazy how powerful
your body is and what
you can train it to do
with the right mindset.”

Is This the Future of Health?

AUGUST 2022 97
98 Is This the Future of Health?
AUGUST 2022
 MOTHER NATURE
KNOWS BEST

Cool water trickles over my right hand, sending

an invigorating shiver through my body. My eyes
are closed, palm pressed flat against the mossy
granite wall of a dribbling waterfall. The crisp
morning air smells alive with earthy scents ema-
nating from the damp soil, dewy ferns and tow-
ering pines. A shaft of sunlight breaks through
the canopy, causing my eyelids to flicker. I peek
through one eye, noting how the light is spill-
ing down the surrounding ravine, illuminating
the granite towers like a natural cathedral. My
forest-bathing guide interrupts my reverie.
“What is nature telling us?” she asks rhetorically.
At Future Found Sanctuary, a regenerative
retreat tucked away in the foothills of Cape
Town’s Table Mountain, experiences such as
this one are designed to help you slow down—
which is not my forte. I’ve been coming to Cape
Town for nearly a decade to attend an annual
tourism conference. In the past, I’d tack on some
grand adventure: kite surfing in Madagascar, a
walking safari in Zimbabwe.
But the pandemic made me realize how
much my body and mind were craving rest. As
the world slowly re-opened, my pace went from
0 to 100, and by spring 2022 I found myself over-
whelmed and stressed. So this year, I booked a
three-day, two-night stay here. If I couldn’t relax
in vast landscapes of the African bush, I won-
dered, would this be any different?
The seven-acre property was originally the
home of American businessman Jim Brett, a
former CEO of J. Crew. Between a string of
demanding jobs and life in New York City, Brett
longed to spend time in nature and acquired the
land in 2014. The rich setting opened his eyes to
a pace of living more in tune with Earth’s nat-
ural rhythms—rise with the sun, wind down at
sunset. To share his experience with others, he
built a second villa, plus a spa, and opened the
compound to the public at the end of 2021.
Next year, Future Found will introduce
themed group retreats. But for now, each stay is
bespoke and draws on the wisdom of a team of
experts, including a sound therapist, a breath-
The 5 Elements work guru and the University of Cape Town’s
Garden at Future director of sleep science, Dale Rae, Ph.D.
Found Sanctuary in Based on an email exchange covering my stress
South Africa and fatigue, Romy Paull, the resort’s director

Is This the Future of Health?

AUGUST 2022 99
 of wellness, crafted an itinerary rooted in rest,
nourishment and mind-body realignment.
Three days is not a lot of time for transfor-
mation. Tension melts from my muscles during
a restorative yin yoga session, but my mind is
still racing. I remain on my mat for a sound-bath
ceremony, a concept even stranger than forest
bathing and which, to my disappointment, does
not involve a tub. The instructor is seated on a
sheepskin mat in front of a dozen quartz bowls.
The setting feels a bit cult-like, but as she starts
to rotate a mallet around the rims of each bowl,
melodious tones lull my brain into a deeply
restorative state. I feel my nervous system down-
shift from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest mode.
My second day, I’m up before sunrise for the
forest-bathing session. Paull took a six-month
certification course in biomimicry in which she
trained to look for lessons in nature that can
apply to human advancement. (For skeptics, the
real-world results of this practice include Vel-
cro, based on burdock burrs.) She encourages
me to do the same by noting that fulvic acids,
which create microbiome-rich forest soil, have
also been shown to support gut health. I worry
she’ll ask me to eat dirt, but luckily my morn-
ing is focused on how trees are the lungs of the
planet and why we should pay more attention to
the quality of our breath.
That afternoon, I attend a conscious-breath-
work class. We breathe without thinking every
day, but forcefully inhaling and exhaling for
75 minutes straight takes serious effort and
leaves me feeling delightfully high. Later I get
more acquainted with the soil during a rasul
treatment. I enter a steam room and apply a salt
scrub, then rinse and slather thick mud over my
skin and hair. The mud hardens, and an herb-
al-infused steam clouds the room. I relax in
the scents of eucalyptus and lavender and after
25 minutes, “rain” from the ceiling washes me
clean, leaving my skin baby soft.
My final evening, I’m treated to a four-course
dinner in the healing garden. As I sip a cock-
tail made of local botanical gin and sceletium (a
native succulent the indigenous San peoples used
as a mood enhancer), I’m taught how to weave
endemic shrubs into a botanical crown. We dine
in silence, other than Paull’s occasional prompts
to experience the food through all five senses.
For the first half of the meal, I’m acutely self-
SPACE When Jim Kitchen flew into space on Blue Ori-
gin’s fourth human mission in March, he was in
conscious of the loud crunching sound that fol- CADET way better shape than the company required.
lows each bite of asparagus. I have flashbacks Kitchen is a strategy and entrepreneurship
to childhood punishment at the dinner table. professor at the University of North Carolina
By the main course, I hear birdsong rather than at Chapel Hill—but being an academic didn’t
the sound of my chewing, and it feels indulgent stop him from training like an athlete. He spent
rather than awkward to get lost in the flavors of the previous 10 months preparing for the
my food without having to make small talk. 10-minute flight, including cross-training with
I leave the next afternoon feeling a sense of boxing and weight lifting. He also prepped for
renewal and calm that I wouldn’t have gotten a 50-mile ultramarathon, running as much as
from a few solo hikes up Table Mountain. The 40 miles a day by the final month. “I ran some-
meditative time in nature, the pampering and the where close to 1,300 miles total,” says Kitchen.
organic meals all helped, but the game changer Why?
was Paull’s gentle guidance to tune in to my sur- “The last thing I wanted to do was be dis-
roundings. All the remedies I needed were right qualified because I was unfit,” he says.
in front of me—I simply had to look and listen. Robb Report spoke to the adventurer about
Prices start from about $400 per night Jen Murphy his obsession with space and how going above

100 Is This the Future of Health?

AUGUST 2022
 “We learned the same breathing
techniques that fighter-jet pilots use
to avoid becoming disoriented. The last
thing I wanted to do was pass out.”
and beyond at the gym can help you go out of
this world. Michael Verdon
RR: How long have you wanted to be an
astronaut?
JK: From the time I was 6. I saw the Apollo 11
launch in 1969 with my mother and knew that was
what I wanted. I became an entrepreneur instead,
but I was determined to get to space somehow,
some way. I’d been on a 30-year journey where I’d
visited all 193 United Nations–recognized coun-
tries. After the 193rd country, in 2019, I thought to
myself, “What’s my next journey?”
RR: Space?
JK: I knew I had to find my way onto a space
flight. I did a casting call for a reality show but
wasn’t cast. I was one of tens of thousands of
applicants for SpaceX’s Inspiration4 suborbit
The fourth mission
of Blue Origin, with
Jim Kitchen aboard,
launching in March.
Above: Kitchen,
right, during a boxing
training session.
around the Earth last year but wasn’t chosen.
RR: But you kept trying?
JK: I could’ve been one of the first 600 passen-
gers with Virgin Galactic, but I didn’t want to
wait. Then I made a contact via LinkedIn with
someone from Blue Origin. I emailed him about
20 times—just badgered him—and the next thing
you know, I was on the March launch.
RR: How did you prepare for it physically?
JK: In 2021 I started training for that ultramara-
thon. I’m a runner and have done 20-plus mara-
thons, but I cranked up the running in anticipa-
tion of the space trip. Besides long distance, I did
track workouts, running 400 and 800 meters. I
also crossed-trained for upper-body and cardio-
vascular strength by weight lifting and boxing
two days a week.
RR: Did it help?
JK: Yes, though the Blue Origin flight was more
intense than I thought it would be. When we
took off and hit 3.5 Gs, the rocket made a slight
turn and tilt, which messed with my vestibular
system. I even found that ascent a bit more chal-
lenging than the descent, where we exceeded
5 Gs. I’d experienced 6.2 Gs in a NASTAR train-
ing course, but this was even more intense than
that. [Editor’s note: The National Aerospace
Training and Research Center is the first Federal
Aviation Administration–approved commercial
spaceflight school.]
RR: Wait, you did a space-prep course?
JK: It was a two-day suborbital space course,
which included training and flying in a specially
designed centrifuge. The course lets you under-
stand what the flight will be like and how to
counter the challenges. It was helpful because
we learned the same breathing techniques that
fighter-jet pilots use to avoid becoming disori-
ented. The last thing I wanted to do was pass
out. I was breathing well and really enjoyed the
view up there.
RR: Sounds like a good prerequisite.
JK: You don’t have to do it, but I’d recommend
it to people. I also did parabolic flights, which
were good because I found out what zero grav-
ity feels like before going to space. Everyone
on those parabolic flights got sick. I didn’t get
sick at all.
RR: Do you want to go again?
JK: My dream is to visit the International Space
Station. I’ve been to every country that the UN
recognizes, and I want to see that whole spec-
tacle from space, just without the borders.
The problem is that I don’t have $55 million
just to do that. But when you get a little taste,
you want a lot more. That’s why it’s important
for me to stay in “space” shape by working out
two times a day and eating right. I hope one day
to get orbital. O
Is This the Future of Health?
AUGUST 2022 101
 HOW DID MAGIC MUSHROOMS, KETAMINE AND OTHER HALLUCINOGENS BECOME

102 The New Doors of Perception

AUGUST 2022
CREDIBLE TREATMENTS FOR DEPRESSION, PTSD OR EVEN SUBSTANCE ABUSE?
By Alyson Krueger Illustrations by Yimiao Liu

The New Doors of Perception

AUGUST 2022 103

Last summer, Gaetano, a 35-year-old
financial adviser from New Jersey, trav-
eled with his wife to the rainforest outside
Sayulita, Mexico, near Puerto Vallarta,
where they stayed in a well-appointed
villa overlooking the Pacific Ocean. For
five days they did what any couple might
do on a wellness retreat. They practiced
yoga with the handful of other guests and
tried a sound bath, lying on the floor and
feeling vibrations produced by a local
healer. They watched the sunset from
their balcony every evening and dined on
five-star cuisine.
But twice on their trip they also con-
sumed something else: psilocybin, the
hallucinogen more commonly known as
magic mushrooms. No longer just a rec-
reational drug favored by club kids and
Grateful Dead fans, psilocybin and simi-
lar psychedelics are increasingly gaining
acceptance by psychiatrists and other
mental-health professionals as genuine
treatments for all manner of ills. Any
skeptics need only consider the spate
of respected academic institutions that
have recently founded research centers
to study their efficacy, including Johns
Hopkins University, New York University
and Harvard University’s Massachusetts
General Hospital.
“Human beings, for thousands of years, have intentionally changed
104 The New Doors of Perception
AUGUST 2022
“Human beings, for thousands of
years, have intentionally changed their
brain chemistry to think about things a
little differently,” reasons Gaetano, who
asked Robb Report not to publish his last
name to protect his privacy. He was on
a mission for self-improvement. Specifi-
cally, he wasn’t happy with his tendency
to anger quickly. “I could be combative,
and I kind of recognized myself as an
angry person. I never really ran from con-
frontation, and in my mid-30s this started
not serving me.”
In 2019 he had picked up the No. 1
New York Times best seller How to Change
Your Mind: What the New Science of Psy-
chedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness,
Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Tran-
scendence by Michael Pollan. He couldn’t
put it down and after finishing it read
another half dozen books on psyche-
delics. “Some of them were mainstream
books like Terence McKenna,” Gaetano
says, referring to the late ethnobotanist
who advocated the use of plant-based hal-
lucinogens. “Others were more under the
radar. I was fascinated by it.”
In May 2021 he and his wife were cel-
ebrating their fifth wedding anniversary.
She had been suffering from anxiety and
depression, brought on partly by unsuc-
cessful efforts to have a baby. “It was a
very emotional time, so we were think-
ing about doing something different that
wasn’t going to be the normal go away
and just drink,” he says. “It was actually
my wife’s idea to go on a retreat, but it
was sort of a long time coming, because
we had both been fascinated by this.”
On the second day of the retreat, at
8 pm, just as the sun was setting, Gae-
tano and his wife lay on mattresses on the
ground next to the infinity pool with eye
masks on to block out any distractions.
Retreat leaders—people trained in yoga,
hypnotherapy, nutrition and spirituality—
stationed themselves close by in case any-
one needed help. As Gaetano listened to
native Spanish songs and the shruti box,
an Indian instrument that makes a dron-
ing sound, the mushrooms kicked in, set-
ting off a series of visions.
He observed himself revisiting events
from his childhood. Some were bright
moments spent with his family, times he
felt really loved. Others, however, were
dark. “I saw kids bullying me in school,
being embarrassed by rejection as a
child,” he says.
During a trip, some hallucinate and see
themselves flying through the universe,
swimming the ocean’s depths or riding a
shooting star. Others revisit actual mem-
ories that they’ve buried.
To get something particular out of a
journey—in Gaetano’s case, pinpointing
the sources of his anger—it’s possible
to guide the mind by setting intentions
or asking clear questions ahead of time.
Gaetano had journaled before leaving for
Mexico and discussed his goals with some
of the retreat leaders once he arrived. His
work led him to uncover memories, such
as the ones of being bullied, that shed
light on the root of his feelings.
When the drugs wore off, he found
himself crying hysterically before finally
being able to articulate what had hap-
pened to him. “That changed everything
for me,” he says. He felt closer to his wife
after sharing the humiliating experiences
he’d had as a kid. Immediately after he
returned home, he started seeing a tradi-
tional therapist, at first weekly and now
monthly. His blood pressure dropped
so much his doctor reduced his med-
icine’s dosage. “I had this feeling of
tightness in my chest that used to be so
worrying,” he says. “I haven’t felt it since
the retreat.”
 “The thing about these mushrooms
is, they get rid of your ego,” he explains.
“Sometimes you have to push that aside
and let your guard down so you can really
evaluate what is going on.”
And the experience he had on the
retreat is not the same as doing drugs at
a party, he adds. “If your eyes are open,
and you are living outside your body, you
might have a fun time and experience
cool things,” he says. “But that is not the
same as doing work within yourself.”
ne reason Gaetano trav-
eled to Mexico to try
psilocybin is that most
psychedelics remain
illegal in the United
States. Ketamine has been legalized
nationally if prescribed medically, but
only Oregon has approved psilocybin for
medical and wellness use, beginning by
year’s end. MDMA has also shown prom-
ising results, though it, too, remains illicit
except in approved studies. Advocates say
all three have the power to help people
overcome trauma.
Jennifer Mitchell is a professor of neu-
rology and psychiatry at the University of
California, San Francisco, where she has
spent the past four years studying poten-
tial psychedelic therapeutics for a wide
range of psychiatric disorders. “These
[psychedelics] reopen critical times” in
a patient’s memory, says Mitchell, who is
also affiliated with the UC Berkeley Cen-
ter for the Science of Psychedelics. “They
help you to see all the stuff inside of you
that you might not know is there or you
might not feel comfortable sharing.”
Psychedelics work by changing a
user’s perspective. People report emerg-
ing from their trips feeling at one with
nature or having newfound empathy.
their brain chemistry to think about things a little differently.”
Sometimes, as they did for Gaetano, hal-
lucinogens resurface buried memories,
allowing users to see the roots of their
problems and address them head on.
“It’s a new approach to processing
trauma,” says Rachel Yehuda, director
of Mount Sinai’s Center for Psychedelic
Psychotherapy and Trauma Research.
“Sometimes trauma is very distress-
ing, and our bodies and our minds don’t
cooperate with processing very negative
events. This provides a way to do that
work that might be very efficient.”
A more scientific explanation is that
psychedelics promote neurogenesis,
which makes your brain reorganize and
grow—meaning the drugs literally wipe
away old patterns and launch new ones.
Mitchell, Yehuda and other research-
ers hold that the science is there to war-
rant their legalization. What is truly
exciting is that “a number of psyche-
delics can really impact a series of men-
tal-health conditions, and many of them
don’t have particularly valuable treat-
ments at present,” Mitchell notes. “We
know they can help PTSD, depression,
alcohol- and drug-use disorder, end-of-
life distress and other conditions.” One
dose of ketamine can work for about 10
days to fight depression, she adds, while a
session of MDMA or psilocybin might do
the trick for years.
“There is clinical data that backs up
all this stuff,” says Jonathann Kuo, M.D.,
medical director at Hudson Medical, a
practice in New York City’s West Village
that administers IV ketamine for chronic
pain and depression. “At this point we
know that talk therapy and putting you
on Prozac for years at a time doesn’t really
work in the vast majority of people, so this
is the next frontier.”
Advocates for psychedelics agree
that SSRIs, pharmaceuticals (including
Prozac) that were hailed as game chang-
ers when they were introduced decades
ago, have run their course. “There is a
mental-health crisis, and we don’t have
too many good traditional solutions,” says
Yahuda. “This is something that looks like
it might work. So the question is not why
are we doing this? The bigger question is
how could you ignore this?”
Mount Sinai gave the go-ahead for the
research center after the FDA declared
MDMA a breakthrough therapy for PTSD
in 2017, allowing scientists easier access to
the drug for study. “There is a lot of hype
in the field, a lot of investment and drug
development, and it’s very important for
academic institutions to get involved
and produce scientific data so we can see
what is really going on,” she says. “When
academic medical centers get involved,
they will probably be very rigorous, [and]
the research will be done by people who
are skeptical, which is very important. It
should be done by skeptics and not just
people who have become very enamored
of psychedelics.”
Advocates believe and anecdotal evi-
dence suggests that the substances can
also help some users without full-blown
mental illness. Fewer studies have exam-
ined psychedelics for what scientists call
“the betterment of healthy populations,”
but Mitchell predicts such testing is right
around the corner. In Oregon, a diag-
nosis will not be required to access psi-
locybin. As for the danger of addiction,
the experts Robb Report interviewed say
that neither psilocybin nor MDMA is
chemically addictive. Ketamine may be—
research is ongoing—though taking the
drug under medical supervision probably
lowers the risk.
Ketamine, which requires a patient to
have some form of anxiety or depression
to obtain a prescription, is currently being
The New Doors of Perception
AUGUST 2022 105
 administered in clinics, in homes and on
retreats across the country. Experts pre-
dict the FDA will approve MDMA by
next year and psilocybin by 2025, and
start-ups are already busy setting up cen-
ters to treat patients once these drugs get
the green light.
In January, Business Insider identified
11 venture-capital firms that have invested
around $140 million into the treatment
industry. A month later, Mindstate Design
Labs, a biotech company that develops
psychedelic therapeutics, raised $11.5
million. “The funders know a new drug
application is in the works,” says Mitchell.
“Everyone now wants to get behind it.”
To be sure, psychedelics have already
seeped into mainstream culture. During
the pandemic, Netflix released Have a
Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, a
documentary featuring celebrities from
Sting to Sarah Silverman recounting their
experiences with hallucinogens. Sili-
con Valley CEOs are openly discussing
their own experiences with microdosing,
ingesting just a bit of a drug to get the
mental-health benefit without the same
level of high. Joe Rogan claimed to be on
mushrooms during his podcast with rap-
per Post Malone.
“I just think a lot more people are
more focused on mental health, especially
after Covid,” says Kuo.
Before the pandemic, Jay Godfrey
owned a namesake fashion line that
was sold at Saks and seen on celebri-
ties including Jennifer Lopez and Viola
Davis. Then, in May 2019, he journeyed to
Mexico, where he did plant-based hallu-
cinogens with a shaman. “My first expe-
rience was like five years in [therapy].
It was mind-blowing,” he says. “I felt
like this needed to be brought in a legal,
medically sound, hospitality-driven way
to the United States.”
106 The New Doors of Perception
AUGUST 2022
Godfrey cofounded Nushama, a
psychedelic wellness center with three
locations in New York City. The flagship
is on the 21st floor of a gilded building
in midtown Manhattan; the goal is to
open 35 in five years. Treatment rooms
are decorated with wallpaper hand-
painted with cherry blossoms, a symbol
of renewal, and decked out with white
zero-gravity chairs.
efore opening Nushama,
Godfrey studied the his-
tory of psychedelics. “The
first wave goes back thou-
sands of years, when Indig-
enous cultures across the world—in the
Amazon, in West Africa, in Mexico—
were using sacred plants to heal what
they called ‘ailments of the spirit,’”
he recounts. “Medicine likes to use
words like ‘mood disorders’ or ‘depres-
sion’ or ‘anxiety’ or ‘PTSD,’ or there is
a new one, ‘protracted grief syndrome,’
but ultimately they are all the same
thing, which is that something has hap-
pened—a trauma, a wound—to create a
sense of being dispirited.”
The second wave was a 20th-century
phenomenon. Harvard’s psychology
department became the unlikely epi-
center of research into then still-legal
hallucinogens in the early 1960s, when
a pair of academics, Timothy Leary and
Richard Alpert, started studying their
effects on human consciousness. After
their scholarly colleagues objected to
their methodology—Leary and Alpert
often went on trips of their own along-
side their subjects—the duo were booted
from the faculty. Though disgraced in
academic circles, the men became coun-
terculture icons. It was Leary who, pro-
moting recreational use of LSD, coined
“I could see everything from how I came together as
one of the era’s most iconic taglines:
“Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Still, Mitchell says, their theories
weren’t entirely discounted. “Even in the
’60s we knew they had a medical use, but
the drugs were terrifying to the public, so
they were scheduled very severely by the
FDA,” she says. “Even to this day, if you
want to study them and research them,
you have to jump through hoops.”
Following the government’s failed
“War on Drugs,” we are now in the third
wave, characterized by serious stud-
ies elevating psychedelics to the level
of medicines developed by Big Pharma,
mostly thanks to two important non-
profit players in the field: the Multidis-
ciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies (MAPS) and the Usona Institute,
which helps fund clinical research on
psilocybin and other “consciousness-
expanding medicines,” as the website
puts it. (“Big Pharma has been mostly
quiet, but it’s clear they are watching,”
says Mitchell.) MAPS, in particular, has
been around for 35 years and persevered
with studies even after the government
criminalized LSD and psilocybin.
When studies showed promising
results, other scientists were forced to
pay attention. “A lot of people have paved
the way for us to not be scared of psyche-
delics and understand that in the right
environment and in the right container,
they can be very useful,” says Yehuda.
Patients like Gaetano, who are not
willing to wait for MDMA and psilocy-
bin to be cleared for use, are traveling
to foreign countries such as Mexico,
Jamaica and Costa Rica to try the ther-
apies now (see p. 108). They should do
their homework. “It’s a mixed bag,”
Mitchell says. Some places are fantas-
tic, she notes, but some individuals have
also told her team that they felt vulnera-
 ble while tripping because they did not
feel safe with their guides—or even that
they were physically or sexually abused
while under the influence.
And, of course, there’s always the
potential for a bad trip, with creepy or
frightening hallucinations. Afterward,
users might still feel lost and con-
fused, especially if they  relive a pain-
ful experience while on the drug. They
might even feel worse than they did
before.  “We don’t have enough data to
know what the long-term effects of a
bad trip are and how long these could
last,” Mitchell acknowledges. “My
guess is that as much harm as healing
can occur in the throes of a vulnerable
psychedelic experience. That is why
facilitators are so very important. They
guide the experience and help make the
most of the journey.”  three eight-hour sessions to show any
ven good trips can have
a downside, according to
Mike Arnold, director of
Silo Wellness, a mushroom
company that also stages
psychedelic retreats in Jamaica (for
psilocybin) and Oregon (for ketamine,
but mushrooms will follow as soon as
they are legal). “One of the risk factors
is that there are people who think they
are not only communing with God but
have some sort of special relationship
with the divine, like the ancient  Gnos-
tics,” he says, adding that their gran-
diose notions can lead them to believe
they now possess “the secrets of the
universe.” “That is so dangerous. They
are so vulnerable and impressionable,
and it’s so important that the partic-
ipants in this industry do the least
amount of harm and the most amount
of good possible.”  seems plausible.
cells to myself being buried. I saw my entire cycle of life.”
At Silo, in addition to tripping, partici-
pants meditate in waterfalls, white-water
raft and dance under the stars. “People
need to travel inwards and outwards,”
says Arnold.
The benefit of these retreats, which
last about a week, is that they allow par-
ticipants to gain trust with the facilitators
before their mind explorations. “Research
shows trust takes 40 to 80 hours of per-
son-to-person contact,” he says. “That is
what we are trying to cultivate.”
Experiencing hallucinogens in nature
the way first-wavers did may hold a cer-
tain primal allure, but metropolitan out-
posts are proliferating, offering ketamine
treatments for $500 to $1,000 per session;
a series generally consists of six sessions
over three weeks, each lasting an hour.
(MDMA, by contrast, will probably take
therapeutic impact. Godfrey is getting
price estimates of $15,000 to $30,000
per treatment series, although the effects
could last for life.)
Hudson Medical, for example, stands
on the same block as a sex-toy shop and a
coffee store. Inside, patients seeking to alle-
viate their depression or anxiety are taking
ketamine trips, armed with noise-cancel-
ing headphones and eye masks and sur-
rounded by living green walls and Native
American–inspired dream catchers.
Scientists in psychedelics talk a lot
about set and setting, the former being
a user’s mindset (Are they relaxed?
Stressed? Do they trust the professional?)
and the latter being the physical space.
“We expect that set and setting matters
a lot,” says Mitchell. In other words,
whether you are tripping in the Ritz, the
rainforest or a hospital, in the presence of
your friends, a doctor or a total stranger,
might make a big difference. Which
Anecdotally, people do seem to have
more positive trips in places where they
feel comfortable, according to Ronan
Levy, executive chairman of Field Trip,
which operates 12 psychedelic wellness
centers, most of them in the US. “If you
are in an environment where you feel safe
and at ease and relaxed,” he says, “you
will have a better experience.”
So, many centers are trying to evoke
spas, with weighted blankets to help
guests feel cozy and protected, plus
plenty of snacks as well as coaches—often
therapists, nurse practitioners or med-
ical assistants—trained to guide them.
Mindbloom, by contrast, sends ketamine
lozenges to a client’s home to be taken in
front of a telehealth provider, which is a
boon for patients who live in more remote
areas—or those who want to undergo the
treatment at a ski or beach house or on a
business trip.
Whatever the venue, the results, for
some, can be remarkable.
In January 2020, Kris Giorgetti, who
lives in Atlanta, started a new job working
as a management consultant at the direc-
tor level for a 10,000-person firm. He was
thriving until the following December,
after a public run-in with a team mem-
ber. “I was waking up in the middle of
the night with anxiety attacks,” he says. “I
was having trouble remembering things.
I couldn’t even watch television shows
because I couldn’t concentrate long
enough.” After 10 years without a sick day,
he asked for a leave of absence.
A psychiatrist diagnosed him with
PTSD. Researching treatment options,
Giorgetti came across ketamine infusions.
“I read that it reorganizes your brain and
creates new neurons and connections,”
he says. “I chose to do ketamine-assisted
psychotherapy over other medicine
because I wanted something that would
The New Doors of Perception
AUGUST 2022 107
 cure me. You don’t want to take cold med-
icine when you could take something that
cures the cold.”
He did six sessions and had power-
ful visions from the get-go. “I could see
everything from how I came together as
cells to myself being buried,” he says. “I
saw my entire cycle of life.” But it wasn’t
scary. “During the experience, you real-
ize you are part of nature, and now when
my feet touch the ground, I no longer feel
separate from the earth.”
Giorgetti also saw memories of himself
coming out as gay in high school and feel-
ing ostracized by friends—just as he’d felt
shunned by his colleagues. Witnessing the
bullying, he strengthened his empathy for
himself back then as well as in the present.
“I had what I called the worry wheel
in my head, where I couldn’t stop thinking
about what had been done to me at work,”
he says. “After the first treatment, there
was nothing in my mind. It was clear of
all the lists, the worries, the things to do,
the pain, everything. It was all gone. It was
the most peaceful, calming experience
to sit there and not hear any of the back-
ground noise.” By the third treatment he
was sleeping through the night. After six
he was back at work.
tart-ups report their audiences
have diversified, especially
over the past year. “Last night
I talked to a conservative Mid-
western Catholic who wants to
come to a retreat,” says Arnold from Silo
Wellness. “We saw the same thing with
cannabis years ago: different kinds of peo-
ple slowly hearing about success stories
and wanting to try it.”
Once more psychedelics are approved
for use, doctors in the field say they will be
able to create mix-and-match regimens for
patients depending on their needs. “You
will come in, fill out a survey; we will map
your brain and do functional MRIs,” says
Kuo of Hudson Medical, “and then we
will have this treatment algorithm where
we say, ‘OK, we’re going to start with ket-
amine and then move on to MDMA and
this and that until you’re healed.’ ”
“There is an opportunity for this to be
part of everyone’s wellness regime,” he
enthuses. The same way you might seek
out a doctor when you are sick, you might
do ketamine once in a while when you
need a new perspective.
Even though Giorgetti says his PTSD is
90 percent gone, he continues to take ket-
amine every six months for maintenance.
“Every time I do a session, I feel something
remarkable,” he says. “It’s almost like you
could pick up the phone and call the uni-
verse and say, ‘What is wrong with me?’ It’s
like communing with the universe.” O
108 The New Doors of Perception
AUGUST 2022
ARMAGEDDON
TO EDEN
IN TWO EASY
TRIPS
By Michael Verdon
b
The idea of an intimate
Caribbean retreat where
high net worth individuals take
“trips” on magic mushrooms
all week then sit around the
pool sipping wine discussing
their lives may sound like the
premise for a bad movie, but
it actually makes for a great,
even profound, experience.
MycoMeditations, which
offers one of the world’s
few legal psilocybin assisted
therapy retreats, has been
able to reimagine one of the
hottest underground trends
in the fast emerging field of
psychedelics in mental health
into a five star respite.
Eleven of us met at
Bluefields Bay, a boutique
resort in Jamaica, where we
ate family style at a long
dining table between three
psilocybin treatments or, in
’60s parlance, “trips.”
“We’re aiming to establish
a gold standard for this type
of experience,” said Justin
Townsend, MycoMeditations’s
CEO and a longtime student
of psychedelics. “This isn’t a
religious or spiritual retreat
with a shaman, part of a
medical study or a recreational
week for drug users.”
Exactly what it was
remained to be seen. The
guests ranged in age from
26 to 69 years old and
included business owners,
an attorney, a former military
officer, a retired teacher,
psychologists, grad students
and my wife, Cathy, and me.
No one’s reason for coming
here was frivolous. Most of
us had painful childhoods,
some were battling alcoholism,
drug addiction or PTSD, and
a few others, like me, were
seeking relief from long
term depression for which
antidepressants had stopped
working, or as another guest
said about herself: “They’re
making me lose my mind.”
My wife was suffering
from two decades of severe
insomnia. Specialists, sleep
treatment, nothing helped.
We were both so burned out,
so exhausted from years of
this Groundhog Day, it felt like
we were at the end of our
shared rope, with nothing left
but thin air. Melodramatic,
maybe, but true.
At the back of my mind,
I wasn’t holding out much
hope for a miracle cure or
even substantive results. But
Cathy was. She’d seen the
Netflix movie Fantastic Fungi
and had further researched
the use of psilocybin for
anxiety, depression, end of
life reconciliation, alcoholism
and, yes, insomnia. The
laundry list of conditions,
not to mention true believer
accounts of meeting higher
powers or becoming one with
the universe, triggered my
journalist’s skepticism.
My doubts didn’t last long.
I took my first trip on day
two, and it was a fast plunge
down my own personal rabbit
hole. I’ll keep it brief, but
the first thing I heard, after
ingesting six psilocybin tablets
(manufactured by Myco in its
own facility), or three grams,
was an unidentifiable male
voice saying, “We better get
going. We have a lot to get
through today.”
Then my upper right chest
area, which has been stiff,
almost frozen, for as long as I
can remember began to pulse
with dread—yes, dread—and
a different, younger voice
said, “Oh, now you’ve done it.
There’s no turning back.”
For the two hour journey
to the trip’s culmination,
wearing dark eyeshades and
listening to a five hour playlist
compiled by the Johns Hopkins
Center for Psychedelic and
Consciousness Research
for its psilocybin patients, I
cycled through a montage of
my worst childhood traumas:
Four years old when my
father became an absentee
dad; 12 when we moved to a
new state, far from friends
and family, to a lonely,
rundown house on the edge
of a cemetery. The last was
age 15, having moved for the
ninth time since birth, feeling
such despair about leaving
friends behind again, I locked
myself in my bedroom for the
summer. There was a clarity to
these visions, minus the usual
emotion and resentment I’d
always felt when I’d dredged
them up in therapy. My
eyeshade was filling with tears
as I observed these younger
versions of myself as lost
boys, but I didn’t feel sad. And
I wasn’t detached, either, like
when watching a movie. Things
felt real, present. I could see
everything clearly, maybe for
the first time.
Coming down during the
second half of the trip was
the flipside of the anxious
climb: a prolonged sense of
inner peace. I hung on to every
nuanced, beautiful note of
Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D
Minor,” also catching the ocean
waves, crickets and birdsong
just beyond my earphones.
A sense of relief I hadn’t
experienced for a long time. I
leaned into that on the grass
for what seemed like hours,
feeling the darkness gathering.
When Louis Armstrong’s “What
a Wonderful World” was over, I
got up, and the facilitator, Mike,
waiting in a nearby hammock,
escorted me on wobbly knees
to the group dinner.
“I’d be very bad with
Wordle right now, but very
good with butterflies,” was
something Sean (he and
the other guests requested
pseudonyms to protect
their privacy), a Midwestern
commercial real estate
developer, had scrawled into
his notebook immediately
after his first trip. We were
all gathered in the Treehouse,
an open structure overlooking
the ocean.
Unlike my walk down
Trauma Lane, Sean’s trip
was lighter, almost carefree.

Clockwise from top left: A view of the Jamaican waters from Bluefields Bay resort; a mushroom cultivated by MycoMeditations;
a golden shrimp plant on the lush property; the writer receiving the psilocybin capsules for his third dose.
He called it an “insightful”
experience, a mix of fantasy
and reality that revolved
around his family. The
setting was reminiscent
of a Broadway play, with
Disneyesque Fantasia like
characters. And butterflies,
lots of butterflies. “It was over
the top, and during it I laughed
at the absurdity,” Sean said.
His big takeaway: The true
purpose of life was to discover
love and share it abundantly.
The Hallmark card ish
content of messages like
that could be what turns
many people away from the
idea of psilocybin. But those
messages often resulted from
some of the most profound
experiences these people had
ever had, ranking up there with
their children’s births or their
wedding days. “The problem is
that words can’t get close to
touching what the experience
ABBIE TOWNSEND
was,” said Sean.
Others in the group had
joyous, if less message driven,
trips, exploring the impossibly
vibrant colors, birdlife and
plants of the tropical gardens,
eye masks off, via a new set
of psychedelic eyes. A few
had challenging experiences,
including the attorney, who felt
intense shame, and the former
US military officer, who relived
his war years in Iraq. But
now he was able to release
his grief. “I saw these young
soldiers again on their gurneys,
limbs missing and suffering,
and I don’t think I’ve ever cried
so hard,” he said.
My wife underwent a
deeply felt transformation
into a female elephant and
enjoyed romps with a bull in
her herd. She described feeling
at one with nature. She was
just radiant as she shared the
trip with the group. “I want
whatever she’s having,” said
another guest.
These integrative sessions,
the day after each trip, were
key to bonding the group and
gaining an understanding of
the mushrooms’ mysteries.
“On a neurological level, they
are resetting the default mode
network for cognitive insights,
emotional breakthroughs
and, at times, mystical
experiences,” said Townsend.
Set and setting, writes
Michael Pollan in his seminal
book How to Change Your
Mind: What the New Science
of Psychedelics Teaches
Us About Consciousness,
Dying, Addiction, Depression,
and Transcendence, are the
key parameters around any
hallucinatory trip. Set, or
mindset, is the mental state
one brings to the experience.
“We don’t take people with
bipolar disorder, schizophrenia
or histories of psychotic
episodes,” Townsend said,
noting that psilocybin can
trigger an episode of such a
condition in someone with a
personal or family history of it.
The setting, as it turned
out, was more than just a
beautiful Jamaican Eden. It
also had as much to do with
having the right staff to guide
and sometimes keep guests
from wandering into trouble.
On my first trip, I took the
facilitators (trained, licensed
psychologists, therapists
and counselors) for granted,
discounting them as a group of
true believers.
But during my last trip,
I appreciated how critical
they were to the success of
the retreat. In lucid moments
during trips, I could see
they were always nearby,
monitoring guests but keeping
a respectful distance.
They were also on hand to
talk guests through dark
sequences—and everyone
except Cathy had at least one
darkish trip.
“It’s a powerful tool, but
these medicines shouldn’t be
taken lightly,” said Kendra, a
psychiatrist practicing in the
Midwest, who trained with
Myco after doing one of the
retreats herself and no longer
prescribes antidepressants.
The retreat’s climax for
me was the third dose, at 8.5
grams, designed to obliterate
whatever ego, or sense
of self or self importance,
was keeping my rational
mind separated from my
subconscious—and perhaps
even allow access to a higher
consciousness.
The idea was to gain
deeper insights, maybe even
see a higher power. About 41
percent of the 1,300 people
who have attended Myco
retreats report having had a
“mystical” experience; I was
just hoping for a lighter trip
than my second, when I’d
glimpsed Armageddon. Spoiler
alert: The battle between good
and evil won’t be fun.
My last trip didn’t involve
speaking with a deity or feeling
at one with the universe, but I
did eventually get dropped into
the Garden of Eden, beside
the Tree of Life, where I felt
protected and nourished,
finishing the back side of
the trip with a sense of mild
euphoria. I didn’t meet the
serpent or God, or even Adam
and Eve, but the rush of joy it
gave me for the last few hours
felt like a symbolic place to
finish the week.
“It’s not a magic pill,” warned
Kendra, the psychiatrist.
“The euphoria and bliss, the
newfound hope and vitality, it
all wears off to some extent
as you go back to real life. But
what it does is open doors to
new options—doors that many
people never knew existed—to
help them start putting pieces
of their lives together.”
Our group all looked far
lighter (and happier) by week’s
end. Two weeks later, Cathy
is sleeping better than she has
in years, and my right arm and
chest—the area that
long seemed frozen—now feel
as normal as the rest of my
body. My depression is still
around, but a less weighty,
softer version.
Placebo effect? Maybe.
Temporary? Likely. But I do
know that the experience,
my experience, was worth
the price of admission, and
even if I slide backward, I’ll
see the doors Kendra was
talking about.
The New Doors of Perception
AUGUST 2022 109
110 Alone at the Edge of America
AUGUST 2022
 Alone at
the Edge of
America

Touring Alaska in a small bush plane,

Robb Report’s deputy editor found himself off-grid,
weathered in and unexpectedly stranded
in grizzly country high above the Arctic Circle.
It was just what he was hoping for.
WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY
JOSH CONDON

Alone at the Edge of America

AUGUST 2022 111
 A
fter the earth seems
to jump up and bite the right wheel on landing,
wrenching the gear leg back on itself like some
grotesque football injury, and after the wing slams
the ground like a palm hitting a tabletop in anger,
when the plane finally finishes its long shuddering
slide through the gravel, I sit in the swirling dust
and think back to a week before, in a Fairbanks
hotel room, as Randy McKinney calmly explained
all the many ways to die in the Alaskan bush. The
list consisted, in part, of freezing, starving, injury,
panic, getting lost, general stupidity and bears.
Especially bears.
“No one realizes just how dangerous bears
are,” said McKinney, my pilot and guide for the
next week as I went in search of the Western Arc-
tic herd, the massive caribou migration that takes
place across Alaska each spring. “There’s nothing
on earth you want less than getting charged by a
grizzly.” By his count he’d been charged 15 times,
which explained the guns, a .44 caliber revolver
and a pump-action shotgun, sitting on the floral
bedspread next to the flight tracker and a pile of
assorted camping gear.
McKinney owns Explore Alaska—along with
his wife, Lana—which arranges personalized trips
to hard-to-reach places throughout the state, to
fly-fish or view wildlife. I was there, ostensibly,
for the caribou, which McKinney had described
as a bona fide natural wonder, and maybe some
hiking and a few swims in the type of streams
they put on the postcards. But equally I was there
because I wanted to understand a frontier, to see
the other, outer edge of America. Northern Alaska
felt like a cosmic ledger balance against the unre-
lenting, overcrowded convenience of New York
City, where I live, and I thought that if I could
somehow glimpse that opposite philosophical
and geographic threshold, it would show me . . .
something. I had no idea what. That’s the thing
about frontiers: If you know what to expect when
you get there, it’s not a frontier.
Aesthetically, McKinney is exactly what
you want in an Alaskan bush pilot, a lanky, six-
foot two-inch version of Robert Duvall in his
60s with a trim white cowboy mustache and a
smooth drawl, who tells stories about characters
with names like Stinky Hardy and Two-Jump
Joe Tonasket and says folksy things like “tougher
than a cast-iron football.” More importantly, he
has an array of survival skills learned over an
astounding range of jobs; a partial list of his
résumé includes cowboy, dog-team driver, insur-
ance-fraud investigator, bear guard, photographer,
law-enforcement officer, commercial fisherman
and team leader for personal security details. He’s
also a doctor of homeopathic medicine and helps
counter-poaching efforts in Africa, including by
donating all profits from Explore Alaska.
112 Alone at the Edge of America
AUGUST 2022
In the Alaskan bush, everything is a matter of
life or death. Weather, judgment, gear, informa-
tion, common sense, patience—the wrong quality
or quantity of any one of them can mean oblivion.
McKinney ticked through a meticulous audit of
the 30-pound survival pack that accompanies him
each time he goes airborne: first-aid kit; freeze-
dried rations; flares; compass; signaling mirrors;
hunting knife; folding handsaw; an anti-dysentery
treatment he invented; paracord; tarp; binoculars;
several types of fire starter; fishing hooks and line;
a water-filtration system. The list went on. “In
Alaska, things can go wrong for any reason,” he
said, “or no reason at all.”
To drive home the point, he handed me a Bic
lighter in a small orange container on a bootlace
lanyard, to be worn around my neck every time
we flew, one last chance to start a fire should the
worst come to pass.
Sitting in a broken plane on a lonely gravel
bar hundreds of miles from anywhere, deep in
grizzly country above the Arctic Circle, I feel for
the lighter beneath my shirt and try to remember
everything McKinney told me about staying alive.
PART I: SCUD RUNNING
THE BROOKS
“I
t’s not looking too shiny over
that way, buddy,” McKinney said
over the headset, nodding ahead
of us toward a rolling gray wall,
dark tendrils of rain snaking
down into the mountaintops. Through the clear
canopy I glimpsed the plane’s shadow trailing us
800 feet below, a dark smudge blinking in and
out of view among thousands of square miles of
snow and rock.
Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas
but has less than half the population of San Anto-
nio, and few highways. The state is a hotbed for
aircraft, particularly bush planes, which in ideal
conditions can take off and land within the length
of a football field. McKinney’s pristine 2019 Piper
Super Cub, heavily modified with lightweight,
high-performance carbon-fiber components, can
make impromptu aistrips of gravel bars, fields and
mountain ridgelines.
But there’s a trade-off: the more stuff you
carry, the fewer places you can land. So after
flight-planning the route north from Fairbanks
to the Arctic Ocean—checking weather cameras
and calculating distances, fuel burn, potential
wind resistance, cargo weight and gas reserves—
McKinney began a ruthless culling from our over-
grown pile of gear. First to go was the cooking
tent, then a small folding table meant for prepar-
ing meals, then the fishing rods, and so on, until
he looked up and said, “How do you feel about
ditching the chairs?”
The reason the Super Cub is the most popular
bush plane in the world isn’t horsepower—the
Lycoming engine in McKinney’s model produces
just 180 hp, about the same as a Mazda Miata—but
its light weight, which makes it both agile and fuel-
efficient. Super Cubs are an example of what’s
known as “fabric-covered aircraft,” which is a
Flying north from Fairbanks, leaving the green behind. Opposite, from top: A signpost at Bettles Lodge; the remains of a grizzly kill at Kavic River Camp; the writer,
standing by McKinney’s Super Cub on a gravel bar somewhere in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
disconcertingly literal description: an airframe
composed of steel tubes swathed in synthetic
cloth. Pilots call them “tube-and-rag planes,”
which sounds like a type of toy, and sure enough,
rap your fingers along the body and you’ll hear a
hollow bong like a child’s drum.
The leading cause of aviation fatalities in
small aircraft like these is fuel mismanagement,
including improper calculation of range. Given
that weight and distance are natural enemies,
and considering we had some 400 miles to fly—
including the Anaktuvuk Pass, a 160-mile artery
through the heart of the Brooks Range, one of
the more immense and unexplored mountain
systems in the world—the chairs stayed behind.
We took off from a grassy airstrip outside Fair-
banks, gliding off the ground and skimming
over the trees, the cockpit filled with a roar like
mating lawnmowers.
As we pushed north, the bright primary col-
ors of Wild Lake and Bettles gave way to muddy
browns and blacks, the low scrub that sits atop
the base layer of permafrost above the Arctic Cir-
cle. The Brooks Range loomed into view, and then
we were in it, towering white-capped mountains
stretching out in every direction, a sea of gray
closing in around us, shouldering through the
wind in a plane made of tubes that weighs less
than some motorcycles.
We were scud running, chasing breaks in a
moving wall of weather, zigzagging back and
forth across the plotted course, always travel-
ing downstream, which is to say downhill, the
ground falling away in front of the plane acting
as a potential escape route, or emergency landing.
It’s not a game for amateurs—it’s exacting work,
and without patience and a keen sense of the
land below it can be deadly, the plane suddenly
K
socked in from all sides, flying blind in thick gray
soup, no way to tell whether it’s heading up into
a mountain or down toward the ground.
“If I dropped the whole state of New York
down there, you could spend the rest of your
life looking for it and not find it,” McKinney said
through the headset, nodding out toward the
endless mountains. There was no sign of life,
the small shadow of the plane the only move-
ment below. We were trying to refuel at Kavic
River Camp, on the North Shore just below the
Arctic Ocean, before flying to one of the wide,
flat ridgelines to the east to set up camp. But the
weather was pushing back, jamming us into a
headwind, forcing us to take the long way around
the weather, burning fuel.
After the better part of an hour dodging
clouds, McKinney finally banked west, out of the
mountains, toward the Kavic River, announcing
our position over the radio and requesting per-
mission to land.
PART II: THE SHERP GOES
FOR A SWIM
avic River Camp has the whole-
some, forthright name of some
lush getaway with burbling waters
and Robert Redford types in wad-
ers. In reality it was a cold, flat,
muddy expanse of gravel with a mess hall, a pair
of outhouses, a cavernous garage and work tent
and a series of low, rectangular wooden huts on
tall treads called hooches. It was once a logistics
base for an oil field; now it hosts hunters and vis-
iting researchers, film crews and scientists. We
were weathered in the moment we landed, the
Alone at the Edge of America
AUGUST 2022 113
 sky dropping straight to the ground to deliver
a cold, driving rain.
A gargantuan machine rolled up, a red metal
box on comically large tires nearly six feet tall.
The front windshield folded down and a stout,
gray-haired woman started hollering at us for
spooking her geese. This was Sue Aikens, who’s
lived at Kavic River Camp for the past 23 years
and has starred on the BBC reality show Life
Below Zero going on 13 of them. McKinney asked
permission to set up our tents, but Aikens waved
him off and suggested we grab a hooch. There
was a fresh grizzly kill less than half a mile
from camp, a pregnant caribou strewn about
in several pieces, and the bear was in the area,
defending his meal. McKinney nodded, at which
point I noticed his chest holster and it dawned
on me that he had flown the entire route with
the .44 strapped across his flight suit. “You have
to always fly with a gun,” he replied, “in case
the plane goes down and a bear decides to pop
up where you land.” The pecking order, though
never in doubt, was suddenly tangible: The pilot
had a gun; I got a lighter.
The next morning, the wings were dripping
in long icicles, visibility limited to a few dozen
yards. I loaded up on coffee and spent the morn-
ing in the hooch practicing knots McKinney
had shown me. Around noon there was a high
honking sound, like a bicycle horn. Aikens, in
her massive truck, a Ukrainian-made Arctic-ex-
ploration vehicle called the Sherp, was offering
us a tour.
She talked continuously as we rolled over
bushes and chest-high vegetation. Aikens is a
preternatural monologist and a poet laureate
of freestyle profanity, but her subject matter is
always Alaska: bears, the weather, bird hunting,
the Kavic River, bear attacks (hers and others),
homemade remedies for catastrophic injuries,
the ceaseless dark of Arctic winters, her garden,
how everyone in the pitiable monolith that is
“the lower 48” is living life hopelessly wrong,
the wildflowers in bloom (“If you don’t think
there’s life up here in the permafrost, you need
to get closer to the ground, because you’re only
looking for it at human scale and you’re going
to miss it”) and bears.
All that was left at the kill site was a shred-
ded half-pelt that was once the mother caribou
and a red, knobby shank of the fetus’s spine.
Aikens pointed out the grizzly tracks—huge, a
catcher’s mitt with claws—and placed a pair of
heart-shaped rocks in the aftermath. Then we
rolled off in search of the bear.
From the air I had watched how McKinney Stretching 700
continuously gleaned information from the miles across the
earth, reading wind direction in the pattern of Alaskan Arctic
ripples across a creek, or following the course and into Canada’s
of water downstream. From the Sherp, Aikens Yukon territory,
did something similar but reversed, reading the the Brooks Range
sky to get a sense of what was happening on the reaches a peak
ground—vying flocks of sea birds congregating elevation of nearly
in the same spot might mean a kill, while agi- 9,000 feet. It’s the
tated ravens could be a passerine bear alarm. highest mountain
We picked our way across gravel bars along range within the
the Kavic River with no easy place to cross. Arctic Circle.

114 Alone at the Edge of America

AUGUST 2022
Alone at the Edge of America
AUGUST 2022 115
 Aikens flipped a switch, rerouting the exhaust to
inflate the gargantuan tires, and the Sherp rolled
to the edge of the river. Then a slow, queasy
lurch to the driver’s side, one huge tire bobbing,
Aikens’s window nearly scraping the gravel as
she methodically cursed and worked the con-
trols, briefly pulling us back ashore before press-
ing forward again, plunging the Sherp into the
fast-moving river.
The Sherp, it turned out, couldn’t exactly
swim, but it was designed to float. We drifted
parallel to the shore for a dozen yards before
the rubber found footing on the far bank and
Aikens hauled the machine out of the water. We
continued on, Aikens stopping her narration
only to take a few potshots at a passing flock of
geese. Sifting through rocks on the riverbank,
she presented me with a gift of fossilized, blue-
ribbed colonial coral and showed us stones so
suffused with the crude oil that seeps from the
ground that they smell like sulfur when scraped:
scratch-and-sniff rocks. She expertly mimicked
bird calls and projected, for all her boundless
energy, the pervasive calm that comes from
being intimately connected to the land.
“I’m like the tundra, I just hang around up
here,” she said, watching the passing gulls, and I
realized that Aikens didn’t mind the adversity or
the almost cartoonish dangers: bears, murder-
ous storms, unbroken months of darkness, freez-
ing to death. For her, as for McKinney, and for
the aspiring dog musher I met at the gas station
at Bettles and for everyone else I had spoken
with so far in Alaska, these weren’t challenges
in constant need of overcoming. They were part
and parcel of one of the last untamed places in
America, and everybody I’d met couldn’t con-
ceive of living anywhere else. Sue Aikens, a
television star living in a tent at the edge of the
Arctic Ocean, her closest neighbor an offshore
oil rig, was exactly where she belonged.
McKinney and I spent the next several
days at Kavic, the ridgelines to the east too
snowbound to land and set up camp. When
the weather was clear, we flew along the coast,
searching for caribou that refused to materialize
save for a few small, scattered groups.
At first it seemed impossible that we could
miss half a million large, lumbering animals
stretching for miles across flat ground. But
the more we flew, the more it came to seem
ludicrous that we would ever manage to find
something so relatively tiny as the world’s larg-
est overland migration. The few caribou we did
see appeared as four or five or seven pin-dot
animals trekking across thousands of miles of
ice, inconceivably alone.
It was hard to stay mad at the caribou, if only
because the terrain was so fascinating. Who
knew ice came in so many colors? Rust red, jade, Kavic River Camp’s
moss, periwinkle, sea glass, lemonade, a tepid Sue Aikens, of
brown like weak coffee, the same rich sky blue Life Below Zero
of a Tiffany’s box. Tantalizingly, the mud and fame, and Explore
snow were perforated with thousands of tracks, Alaska guide
caribou prints in straight, orderly rows and the Randy McKinney
crisscrossing tracks of the wolf packs hunting talk bears beside
them, the awkward pattern of wolverine paws the Sherp.

116 Alone at the Edge of America

AUGUST 2022
 “If you don’t think there’s life up here in the
permafrost, you need to get closer to the ground,
because you’re only looking for it at human scale
and you’re going to miss it.”

Alone at the Edge of America

AUGUST 2022 117
 appearing like misplaced quotation marks and,
once, as we skimmed 50 feet above the beach,
the giant, moccasin-like tracks of a polar bear.
One day we landed on a small, scimitar-
shaped sandbar in the Arctic Ocean. The sand
was as dark and powdery as espresso grounds,
dotted with pale driftwood and gull feathers,
and it’s very likely McKinney and I are the only
two people to have ever stood on that exact spot
on earth. I leaned into the wind and sun and
peered out at the vast frozen plain beyond the
farthest edge of America.
“Do you hear that?” McKinney asked,
and I did. It was the sound of nothing, and it
was beautiful.

PART III: SHANGRI-LA

ON THE HULAHULA + SOCKED IN
AGAIN AT KAVIC

T
he days at Kavic ran together,
the weather never sitting still,
cycling from snow to fog to rain to
the midnight sun casting 50-foot
shadows across the gravel. The
hooch was dark and spartan, but it had a space
heater and a reinforced freezer door to keep out
snow, and the bears.
McKinney and I made a plan: We’d head
out in the morning for one last chance to find
the alleged caribou—a visiting ornithologist
said he’d heard they were to the east, some-
where along the Hulahula River—then return,
pack, refuel and head south, toward sun
and warmth and the mineral waters of the Tolo-
vana Hot Springs. It was Tuesday, or I was fairly
sure it was.
Setting out for the Hulahula, we found our-
selves scud running again, dodging an onslaught
of clouds. I asked McKinney to circle back past
a particularly menacing mountain for another
chance at a photo. On the second pass, fram-
ing the peak through the viewfinder, I heard, McKinney unstraps the axe and starts chopping,
“What’s that over there?”
We had almost missed it—a clear channel,
sunlight in the distance. McKinney made his
careful reconnaissance passes, examining the
terrain, and the next moment, like The Wizard
of Oz blinking into color from black and white, team, packed the guns, rode the two miles east, PART IV: STRANDED
we were soaring through a sunlit valley awash winched the Sherp onto dry land and got back to

in green—a hidden microclimate, surrounded
on all sides by winter, alone in the full bloom
of spring. Below, cutting through the plains
and carved into the rock along the base of the
mountains were the fossilized tracks of millions
of hooves, an etched record of caribou migra-
tions going back tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands of years. We cruised the valley for
the next 25 minutes, tracing the creeks and the
small lakes until the weather turned again and
chased us out of the secret paradise, back into
the snow and ice.
At Kavic, McKinney veered off his runway
approach, thinking he’d spotted a bear. It was the
Sherp, bogged in several feet of water covered by
an unassuming field of white like snow quick-
sand. By the time we landed, arranged a rescue
camp, it was late, and despite the clear skies we
gave up the plan to try for the hot springs.
When I awoke at three in the morning, it
was snowing again. All at once everything was
freezing and exhausting. It seemed I’d never be
able to leave the cold muck, and suddenly I felt
like demanding that McKinney hotdog us back
through the mountains no matter the weather—
to carry me away from the cigarette-burned
blankets and damp outhouse toilet paper, on
the way to grass and trees and warm sun. But
I knew he wouldn’t, of course he wouldn’t, and
in an instant I was full of rage at the oscillating
weather, knowing that all of our plans were at
the mercy of something as ephemeral as clouds.
The snow, as if in agreement, continued to fall
silently around me.
S
itting in the kneecapped plane, the
edges of the propeller torn off, I
wiggle and flex every part of myself:
It’s all in working order. McKinney,
too, is unharmed. We climb out—
much more easily now that the plane is sitting
on its belly, the starboard wing resting on the
ground—and survey the damage: a short stretch
of bent airframe, the mangled prop, vari-
ous patches of shredded rag and the gear leg
wrenched 90 degrees in the wrong direction.
It’s a series of repairs that will require a hun-
dred smaller bits and pieces, but all of it is either
replaceable or fixable.
“Could have been a lot worse,” McKinney
says, and there’s no doubt he’s right. At the
beginning of our trip, I asked him about crashes:

118 Alone at the Edge of America

AUGUST 2022
 Clockwise
from top left:
A Super Cub
looking slightly
worse for wear; the
caribou—finally—
arrive; Geordy
Pine, coming to the
rescue; a grizzly
print close to the
Chandalar River
camp; emergency
essentials, includ-
ing pump-action
bear deterrent.

cutting a long, jagged hole in the pod’s side;

we pull out the remaining gear and begin to set up camp.

Does anyone get away with being a bush pilot
for any length of time without wrecking? He
shook his head. “Everybody balls up their plane
at one point or another,” he said, and relayed a
series of increasingly harrowing tales of other
pilots’ bad luck—mechanical failures, boulders
hidden in the snow, blitzkrieg weather, being
stranded for weeks in a whiteout blizzard, sur-
vival hunting, living in a sleeping bag so as not
to freeze to death in -70 degrees Fahrenheit.
Our situation, by comparison, is idyllic: in a
meandering valley in the shadow of unnamed
mountains, the East Fork of the Chandalar River
rushing past to the east. The reason we were land-
ing was to determine whether we wanted to camp
there for the night, until the right wheel hit a hole,
at which point the decision was made for us.
We unload what we can from the plane, the
front of the belly pod crushed under the weight
of the cockpit; the camp stove, survival pack
and fuel bags are all jammed together up front,
unreachable from the rear loading door. McKin-
ney unstraps the axe and starts chopping, cut-
ting a long, jagged hole in the container’s side.
With some wiggling and heaving, we pull out the
remaining gear and begin to set up camp.
Even just over 130 miles south of Kavic, the
weather is more in tune with spring—which is
to say it’s not snowing—but we’re still above
the Arctic Circle. We manage to set up the two-
person tent next to a small creek moments before
the sun disappears and a brutal wind whips in
from the east, tearing out several guylines and
bending a handful of titanium stakes; I catch the
tent accidentally, standing downwind when the
gust slaps the fabric into my chest on its way to
blowing into the water. We run out more guylines,
re-drive the stakes and pile a barbell’s worth of
large rocks on top of each.
McKinney calls Lana on the satellite phone to
update her on the situation and confirm our coor-
dinates—she’s been continually monitoring our
whereabouts on the flight tracker—and together
they start devising a plan: components, materi-
als and tools needed to fix the plane; stores that
sell each; a list of people to call, to see who can
come to the rescue or lend parts; our food situa-
tion (light; we left the majority of our provisions
behind in Kavic, to save weight, though we still
have some eggs and meat and several days’ worth
of freeze-dried survival rations); and a realistic
timeline for getting everything procured, packed,
flown in, fixed and flyable. A couple of days at
best, more likely several.

Alone at the Edge of America

AUGUST 2022 119
 The next morning I wake around six and head
down to the creek with the portable filtration sys-
tem from the survival pack. The water is several
inches deep and cold enough that shards of ice drift
across the surface like in a well-shaken martini. I
pump and listen to the flowing creek and watch the
clouds settle over the nearest ridgeline and real-
ize that, despite having spent the night before in a
two-person tent, in a battering wind, within arm’s
reach of a large handgun, I slept very well and I
feel oddly refreshed.
As I walk back to the tent, McKinney puts a
finger to his lips and points behind me. A herd of
caribou stares at us from the brush, a stone’s throw
away. A large bull, 400 pounds with towering
black velvet antlers, locks eyes with me for a long
moment, then snorts and turns, the rest of the herd
following. Within moments they casually exit the
bush, wade the creek and the river and disappear
into the far timber. Six days unsuccessfully chas-
ing caribou, with every man-made advantage of
speed and vision and range, and the cud-chewing
bastards got the drop on me.
McKinney tells me to wear the .44 at all times—
cooking, writing, doing dishes, ducking behind
the large thatch of bushes across the creek we’ve
designated as the bathroom. “Grizzlies hunt the
caribou,” he reminds me.
I fry slices of bread for breakfast alongside a
half dozen scrambled eggs with cubes of buffalo
sausage. Over the satellite phone, Lana relays
that none of McKinney’s plane-owning friends
are available to deliver parts: Two have engines
undergoing maintenance, one is guiding a hunt
and the other is heading to Michigan for a fam-
ily reunion. “Well, we’ll need an airstrip at some
point,” McKinney says to me, taking the shotgun
and handing me the pistol, and we walk off in
search of a runway.
An hour later we find a workable patch some
200 yards from the camp, mostly flat for several
hundred feet and running parallel to a small creek.
The only issue is the vegetation: chest-high clus-
ters of birch saplings and small, gnarly bushes
with tough roots twisted through the rocky soil, Stranded, but with a hell of a view: under the evening sun,
a thousand sharp awkward plants that all need to facing south along the East Fork of the Chandalar River.
be cleared from the airstrip, the taller branches at
the edges of the runway cut down to waist height
to avoid snagging a wingtip.
The bushes are too small and the saplings too
pliable for the axe, so we get to work with a ser-
rated pocketknife and the folding handsaw from another five hours to our location. The trip will with silverware and stack them on the lid of the
the survival pack, hot hours of kneeling in gravel require refueling several times, and the schedule food bin as a bear alarm.
and hardpack, yanking at roots and trying not for all of this, of course, depends on what the The next morning, Thursday. McKinney
to drive the saw into the sand as the gun holster weather decides to do, which means the only has been up for an hour working on the plane
bounces against my chest. sure thing is that he won’t arrive until later in when I stumble out of the tent just past six.
Several hours later, during a hasty lunch of the week. More good news from Lana: If the weather
protein bars, there’s good news. Geordy Pine, a We head back to the airstrip, spotting a foot- cooperates, Pine will arrive at Fairbanks that
21-year-old hunting guide and part-time pilot for high mound of scat and a grizzly print in the afternoon and expects to reach us at some
Explore Alaska, is skipping his family reunion to mud, six inches wide and eleven inches long, point this evening. We squat in the tent, waiting
come help. First, however, he has to secure every not including the claws, though neither is fresh. out a torrential rain and scarfing a few protein
item on the long list, which means raiding his own We spend another four hours clearing brush, the bars, then grab the guns and head back to
garage, then McKinney’s garage, then the garages work punctuated by the distant, echoing booms the airstrip.
of friends and neighbors, then flying four hours of ice shelves cleaving off into the river below. We After lunch—the last of the eggs—something
from Tok to Fairbanks, where Lana is making the finish work around eight and eat dinner squatting interesting happens. I’m waiting for the water to
rounds of aviation-supply stores. Then he needs by the tent, watching a new herd of caribou laze in boil for the washing up when I find a bottle of
to pack all the gear into his Super Cub, then fly the rock field. Before bed, we fill the coffee mugs honey in the food bin, so I squeeze a glob onto

120 Alone at the Edge of America

AUGUST 2022

a spoon. As I sit on my duffel bag, gazing out the
tent door at the mountains, the honey hits some
mainline pleasure artery and my neurorecep-
tors light up like a jackpot slot machine. In the
moment, there’s nothing but the comfort of sitting
after hard labor, the honey’s rich sweetness, the
warmth of the sun as it breaks through the clouds
to spotlight a distant peak. There are no distrac-
tions—my phone and computer are useless bricks
in the bottom of my pack; I haven’t seen an email,
a news story, Instagram or even a reflection of my
own face for over a week—and I realize that, even
though I’ve been lucky enough to have eaten in
some of the best restaurants in the world, this
simple tablespoon of honey is the greatest dessert
I’ve ever tasted.
We finish clearing the airstrip around five, then
pile mounds of brush into nearby ditches to mark
them as no-go zones. McKinney paces off the air-
strip as I stand bear guard with the shotgun: After
15 hours over two days, we’ve carved 760 feet of
airstrip out of inhospitable earth using nothing
but a folding saw and a pocketknife. Back at camp,
we sit and listen for the sound of an approaching
plane and watch a far-off herd of caribou gallop
silently across the ice.
Three hours later, 8 pm exactly, the unmistak-
able low whine of a Super Cub in the distance. We
hustle over to the airstrip as the gray and orange
plane appears, a dot over the mountains, getting
bigger, lower, swooping down to make a pass, then
another, touching the tires to the ground before
rising again into the air, banking, banking again
and coming in for a landing. McKinney pops a flare
so Pine can read the wind direction, the yellow
smoke blowing west to east. Pine’s plane, loaded
with gear, uses most of the runway to come to a
stop; McKinney and I whoop and high-five when
he finally kills the engine. Pine climbs out of the
plane. He has green eyes in a tan face, curly brown
hair, a hunter’s unkempt beard. He takes a look
around and says, “Wow, you guys are way out here.”
The work resumes immediately: unloading the
plane and hauling the gear to camp, getting a six-
foot-tall jack under the downed wing, McKinney
and Pine starting repairs. By the time we crawl
into our tents, it’s well past one in the morning.
Friday. McKinney and Pine are at work as I
cook breakfast, fried discs of buffalo sausage, the
last of the real food as there was no room for extra
provisions in Pine’s plane. I notice the two of them
huddling. McKinney walks over to me. They’ve
discovered some part or other that needs to be
replaced, something he couldn’t see until the wing
was in the air. It wasn’t on the list.
“Geordy’s flying back to Fairbanks today,” he
says, “and you’re going with him.”
It seems wrong, escaping before the job is done.
More than that, I suddenly realize, I don’t want to
go. The minor anxieties of modern life, asleep for
the past 10 days, jump awake and start yowling for
attention, demanding to be fed.
In the bush, there are no email backlogs, no
train delays or parking tickets or smog warnings.
There’s time, especially under a midnight sun, but
very little of it to waste. Life is reduced to provid-
ing yourself with what few comforts you can—a
warm breakfast, a spoonful of honey—after you’ve
finished all the work necessary for staying alive.
After time these comforts take on outsize meaning,
blooming, transforming into moments of profound
joy: icy creek water when you’re thirsty; warmth,
after being cold for a week straight. I consider pro-
testing my exit, but I know it wouldn’t do any good.
As Pine goes through his preflight inspection,
McKinney and I regard each other for a moment.
For 10 days we haven’t been more than a hundred
yards apart, and now I’m going home and he isn’t.
McKinney leans over and wraps me in an unex-
pected hug. I thank him for keeping me safe, for
orchestrating an extraction and especially for never
taking any unnecessary risk, beyond the obvious
one that is flying a small plane over dangerous
country. If it weren’t for his expertise, his ability
to improvise, adapt and overcome, things could
have been much worse. I’m grateful to realize
I’ve spent the past 10 days learning from a con-
summate Alaskan.
Pine’s plane bounces over the rocks, picking up
speed, and then the wheels are off the ground and
we’re airborne, the earth dropping away, McKinney
getting smaller. Suddenly I can make it out from the
air, the long runway that wasn’t there three days
ago—my infinitesimal mark on the remote wilder-
ness of the Alaskan bush, a last outpost of America
where few have ever been. And for the first time I
feel it, and I’ve felt it every day since, the mark the
bush made on me: a deep and unshakable stillness.
The sound of nothing at the edge of the world. O
Alone at the Edge of America
AUGUST 2022 121
 Survival
122
of(f) the
Survival of(f ) the Fittest
AUGUST 2022
 Studying
S tudying disease
disease is
is so
so 20th
20th century.
century.
Cutting
C utting e
edge
dge researchers
researchers are
are delving
delving into
into the
the
biology of
biology of the
the world’s
world’s healthiest
healthiest humans
humans
with the
with the goal
goal of
of sharing
sharing their
their genetic
genetic
wonders—and
wonders—and matter—with
matter—with the the rest
rest of
of us.
us.
By JAMIE ROSEN
Illustration by PETER OUMANSKI

Fittest Survival of(f ) the Fittest

AUGUST 2022 123
 You’ve seen
the headlines.
Things like,
THE 7 HABITS OF
PEOPLE WHO NEVER Inevitably, there is some practical advice mixed with a wacky
tidbit or two, along with shoppable links to supplements or fit-

GET SICK and

ness routines. So you make a mental note to remember one of
the more resonant tips and move on with your day. But what
if, rather than reading about the habits of highly effective and
healthy superhumans on the Internet, you had something more

THE 10 THINGS
to gain from them? Like their DNA.
From probiotics to cosmetic treatments to, yes, fecal trans-
plants, using the material wisdom of those fitter, stronger

THIS 100- YEAR - OLD

and sharper than you now can mean taking on not just their
early bedtimes and consistent workouts but also their genetic
material. Researchers on the cutting edge are increasingly
focused on studying the planet’s healthiest inhabitants and

TRIATHLETE DOES applying their freakishly robust makeup to the rest of us. Dar-
win would be proud.
“If you look at biomedicine, the notion is to look at unhealthy

EVERY MORNING .
populations and what doesn’t work and how we can correct it to
promote health,” says Jonathan Scheiman, Ph.D., cofounder and
chief executive officer of FitBiomics, which is trying to take the

Whether you’re
opposite approach, beginning with understanding the microbi-
omes of so-called “super performers” who represent the peak
of health and fitness. The company was born from intellectual
property at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engi-

scrolling on neering at Harvard. George Church, Ph.D., who leads synthetic

biology at Wyss, is also a cofounder. Scheiman, a former college
basketball player whom a colleague calls “the Tony Stark of pro-

Instagram biotics,” studies what makes the gut microbiomes of Olympians

and other world-class athletes unique and translates that infor-
mation into something he says anyone could benefit from. But

or catching up
the lab work is not just for the sake of data: FitBiomics debuted
Nella, a probiotic supplement for gut and digestive health,
last year. It contains three proprietary bacterial strains derived
from . . . elite-athlete poop.

on the news, “Our gut microbiome influences pretty much everything we

do, from a functionality and health perspective,” Scheiman says.
“It breaks down the foods we eat and digests them into nutrients

optimal-health
that our body can absorb. It synthesizes neurotransmitters to
affect functionality, which has an impact on sleep, and it inter-
acts with our immune system to support recovery and suppress
inflammation.” His theory is that most probiotics currently on

clickbait has the market are decades old and traditionally derived from baby
stool, animals or food; the ones he’s using, by contrast, are asso-
ciated with greater health by virtue of the fact that they come

become a genre from these athletes, a “natural-selection process” he says we

can all benefit from thanks to the correlation with their physiol-
ogy. The Nella supplement was beta-tested on 257 participants

that’s impossible
who consumed it daily for two weeks and reported their results
using online surveys. An impressive 94 percent saw a boost in at
least one category. Improved sleep quality was the top benefit,
with 45.1 percent, and decreased fatigue frequency, less sore-

to avoid. ness after workouts and more regular bowel movements each
scored above 30 percent. There has not been any testing to show

124 Survival of(f ) the Fittest

AUGUST 2022
how it performs against existing probiotics, but a double-blind
placebo-controlled clinical trial with 10 members of a profes-
sional soccer club is close to completion.
Five-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Nathan Adrian,
six-time world champion wrestler Adeline Gray and ultramar-
athon runner Kyle Pietari are among the athletes sharing their
fecal matter for the benefit of humanity. The bacterial strains
are isolated, purified and then replicated via fermentation—and
beyond the point of identification, so you don’t know exactly
who donated the probiotic you’re ingesting, but the idea is that
their optimal condition will literally rub off on you. Despite
the transient nature of probiotics, which tend to pass through
the gastrointestinal tract within 24 to 72 hours, Scheiman says
they could still have a tremendous impact on functional-
ity. “They could help us digest food, they could help us metab-
olize lactic acid, they could interact with our immune system,
they could produce neurotransmitters,” he says. “There’s a lot
they can do.” The downsides are similar to other probiotics: a
possible adjustment period of three to four days with mild gas,
bloating or more frequent trips to the bathroom, all of which
should subside within a week or two.  Wu Tsai said in a filmed announcement before the Tokyo Olym-
T
HE NEXT FITBIOMICS product, Veillonella, which
has recently passed necessary safety studies, works
in an entirely different way. It contains another
novel bacterial strain that grows in abundance in
the microbiomes of super performers. “We found
a similar pattern in how this bacteria, which eats
lactic acid, increased in the gut after strenuous exercise,” says
Scheiman. Because lactic acid is a byproduct of exercise that is
linked with fatigue, the discovery became “a light-bulb moment,
an opportunity to have an organism that could convert a byprod-
uct of exercise into something to promote endurance.” Pre-clin-
ical data, published in the journal Nature Medicine, showed the
identification of a “performance-enhancing microbe” found in
the guts of Boston Marathon runners, ultramarathon runners
and Olympic-trial rowers.
The athletes involved in FitBiomics receive their data and
are compensated with shares in the company. “We view them
as leaders of the new school,” Scheiman says. “Through [letting
us understand] their biology and their health, they’re helping us
change health for everyone.”
Billionaire philanthropists Clara Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai are
not just casual observers of peak human condition. As the own-
ers of the NBA Brooklyn Nets, the WNBA New York Liberty and
the pro lacrosse team San Diego Seals, they are surrounded by
high performers, and now they want to tap into that magic for
the benefit of varsity track stars, weekend warriors and those
who don’t exercise at all. They created the Wu Tsai Human
Performance Alliance with a plan to invest $220 million over 10
years in six institutions, including the Salk Institute for Biolog-
ical Studies and the University of Oregon, to understand what
aspects of our brains and bodies determine peak human perfor-
mance. The goal is to study superior specimens to improve the
health of a global population.
“Being athletic and understanding the value of athletics on
human performance is something that we value as a family,”
pics last summer. “What has really surprised me is the lack of
advancements in the areas of healing and training regimens,
largely due to underfunding in this space.” In addition to focus-
ing on elite athletes of all genders, the alliance’s discoveries will
be freely available and likely be used by other scientists in their
own research and innovations. One of the “moonshot” projects
on the Wu Tsai slate is the creation of a “Digital Athlete” at Stan-
ford University that will use artificial intelligence and medical
imaging to determine how to extend peak performance for all—
knowledge that could apply to an athlete in training or an elderly
individual seeking to live independently longer.
Y
OUNG ATHLETES HOLD an obvious appeal, but
some researchers are turning to a more unex-
pected, though no less remarkable, cohort: the old
and vigorous. Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D., an actual rock-
star scientist and Harvard professor of neurology
who has discovered several genes that contribute
to Alzheimer’s and plays keyboards for Aerosmith’s studio
albums, says that in order for doctors to responsibly prescribe
something new, they have to understand what really contrib-
utes to a healthy body, including one of our least understood
organs: the brain.
His work as the co-director of the McCance Center for Brain
Health at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital homes
in on what makes a vibrant brain. “Rather than only look for
biomarkers of disease or waiting for people to get sick with
Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, at which point the brain has already
deteriorated to the point of dysfunction and you’re trying to
turn back the clock, we’re asking, ‘How can we know whether
our brain is healthy?’” He points out that we can easily check
the health of our heart, our pancreas, our blood pressure but
“there’s no checkup for your neck up. The doctor looks in your
mouth, your nose—looks in the holes—and that’s it.”
The center is currently researching how genes are expressed
and how our bodies metabolize, as well as the gut microbiome,
to understand impacts on the brain, what’s special about healthy
people and how those lessons could translate to greater popu-
lations. “Until you do that work,” Tanzi says, “you’re guessing.”
There are, indeed, many biohacking brands that are built off
at-home nasal swabs, fecal samples and spit tests, each with the
promise of recommending skincare, supplements, fitness rou-
tines and diets based on your individual constitution. Tanzi’s
advice is to take those promises with a large grain of salt. “The
hard work is just being done now,” he says. “I know because I
read the literature. People might say, ‘I have a new idea for a
Survival of(f ) the Fittest
AUGUST 2022 125
 “I’m trying to take the visionary stuff
and say, ‘How do we get there?’ ”

126 Survival of(f ) the Fittest

AUGUST 2022
 company: We’re going to take your blood, we’re going to look at
this, this, this, and we’re going to sell you these supplements—
and we’re not going to tell you that we say the same thing to
everybody.’ That’s skeptical, but it can get that bad.” 
Tanzi’s goal is to reliably recommend a protocol that can
enhance how our brain ages. His lab at Mass General created
an “Alzheimer’s in a dish” model, developed in part because he
is vegetarian and wanted to avoid testing on mice. It enables
sophisticated testing for every approved drug and supplement
on the market to determine which ones can prevent or treat the
disease. He is also currently studying the oldest living “super
agers” in a collaboration with Boston University. The work
focuses on centenarians who are as cognitively sharp past 100
years old as they were at 60 to understand what’s special about
their DNA and epigenetics. “I’m trying to take the visionary
stuff,” Tanzi notes, “and say, ‘How do we get there?’”  ions and proteins from head to toe. Seale posits that part of the
I
T’S POSSIBLE that borrowing from our younger counter-
parts is one path. Research published in the influential
journal Nature in May demonstrated that old mice given
an infusion of cerebrospinal fluid from young mice for
one week had improved cognition, not just for remember-
ing the past but also for creating new memories. Human
application is far off, and similar studies using blood have shown
cognitive improvements as well but have yet to be widely and
successfully applied outside the lab, despite Lance Armstrong
admitting on Oprah that he received blood transfusions to boost
his oxygen levels in between multiday bicycle races. Silicon Val-
ley has long been seduced by the promise of immortality, and
young blood seems a direct way to get there. But start-ups such
as the California-based Ambrosia, which reportedly charged
people $8,000 to participate in a study and receive a liter of
youthful plasma, have been hindered by FDA warnings, shut-
downs and quiet re-openings. The FDA has cited health risks
combined with little evidence to bear out lofty claims.
One thing that’s already been put into action is React Neuro,
an advanced eye- and voice-scanning virtual-reality device that
was developed in part to help track athletes’ brains before and
after injury, clocking nano movements in a far more precise,
quantifiable way than having a patient follow a doctor’s finger
after a blow to the head. Tanzi, who is a cofounder of the com-
pany, hopes that the invention could become a “blood-pressure
cuff for the brain,” perhaps a regular part of a physical exam of
the future. He has used the device with the New England Patri-
ots and the Boston Celtics and in senior-living centers to mea-
sure progress and understand changes over time, assessing what
has happened to an athlete after a season playing in a profes-
sional league or a septuagenarian who’s had a life-altering
BERNADET T SZ ABO/REUTERS; STEFAN WERMUTH/RETUERS; ISSEI K ATO/REUTERS
event, such as a stroke.
Anesthesiologist Abhinav Gautam, M.D., and health-care
investor Christian Seale are pioneering a currently available
procedure for pain management that treats an organ that was
The Wu Tsai Human
Performance Alliance
and probiotics
producer FitBiomics
are among those
searching for the secrets
to good health in the
bodies of elite athletes.
discovered only four years ago, even though it makes up 20 per-
cent of our bodies. In 2018, researchers at New York University
published findings on the interstitium, a fluid highway that lives
between our skin and our muscles and transports nutrients,
reason it was less observed by Western-medicine doctors is that
they typically train on dead bodies, and this layer “pretty much
evaporates as soon as one passes away.” The lack of understand-
ing about the interstitium has made it an understudied area
with few direct treatment options. But Gautam developed the
procedure entirely on active bodies. “We know it’s very inner-
vated, which means it has a lot of nerve endings,” says Seale,
who adds that this won’t be news to practitioners of ancient tra-
ditions that have targeted the interstitium for centuries, even
if they don’t use that name. “If you look at Eastern medicine
and Chinese Ayurveda, this is where the chi flows, where the
chakras are, or the meridians.” 
G
AUTAM, A FORMER competitive tennis player
whose interest in pain relief stems from attempts
to fix his faulty shoulder, and Seale started the
company Vitruvia to offer Relief, a minimally
invasive ultrasound-guided procedure that uses
needles to break up scar tissue and free nerves
before rehydrating the treated area (common targets are shoul-
ders, knees and hips). Seale compares a pained area to a river
punctuated with rocks that change or block the flow of water.
The Relief procedure, he says, removes the rocks and redirects
the water so it flows in a more fluid, organized fashion. So far,
two-time American League MVP Miguel Cabrera, retired star
slugger David Ortiz, tennis player Tommy Haas and actor Danny
Glover have received the treatment, and the protocol is now
expanding to professional athletes and top performers in Miami
and Los Angeles.
At the cosmetic level, several European skin-care brands,
notably Neocutis, have tapped into even younger specimens,
drawing from human and sheep fetal tissue to create serums and
creams designed to regenerate skin the way a baby heals quickly
after getting a cut or bruise. But these days, it’s more likely that
products are plant-based, even if the processes they induce are
similar. Cult French skin-care brand Biologique Recherche
makes Crème Masque Vernix, which the company describes as
a “biocopy” of the protective composition of vernix caseosa, the
white substance that coats newborns as they exit the womb. Like
the real thing, the cream consists of water, lipids and proteins to
combat dryness and regenerate the epidermis.
But whether you are drawing from the newly born or the
well-aged, there is a clear and underexplored value in grasping
what makes a prime human specimen function well throughout
all stages of life. Whether he’s looking at blood-based biomarkers
or neuron activity, Tanzi says the goal is to be able to have our
routine health guided by more of what makes us thrive. “I want
to know the indicators, and then I want to have interventions that
drive those up rather than just get sick and try to drive down the
ones that are bad,” he says. “I don’t want to know what tells me
I’m sick,” he adds. “I want to know what tells me I’m healthy.” O
Survival of(f ) the Fittest
AUGUST 2022 127
 THE DUEL
“You and I are gonna live forever,” sang English rock siblings Oasis—but it would
have been nice if the Gallaghers had slipped in a verse about how. Turns out,
where you live might be the key. Sardinia was the first area in the world to be
declared a “blue zone,” where people lead exceptionally long lives. Meanwhile,
studies have declared Amsterdam the world’s fittest city. If you enjoy life and want
more of it, where should you head? Here’s what you need to decide.

Sardinia Amsterdam VS.

WHY YOU MIG HT G O ON AND ON. AND ON.

Researchers studying longevity discovered that Sardinia had the world’s highest Studies that compare factors including number of gym memberships, obesity
concentration of men who lived to be 100. In Sardinia there is an even ratio of male to rates, percentage of people who bicycle to work, hours of sunshine and amount
female centenarians, whereas in the US there are five times as many women. of public green spaces ranked Amsterdam top of the healthy cities.

DIET

Disappointingly for antiaging pizza lovers, Sardinians Bread with various toppings for breakfast, a small
mostly stick to a diet of whole-grain bread, vegetables and sandwich for lunch and then a rewarding meat dish
beans with only small amounts of meat and fish. with vegetables for dinner.

S E C R ET W E A P O N

Many Sardinians carry a rare genetic marker The Dutch are one of the top five
called M26, which scientists believe supports happiest nations—whereas Italy
longevity. Centuries of isolated island living ranks only 31st. Conclusion:
have helped keep this gene in the population. Cannabis is more fun than pasta.
SAY CHEESE

Pecorino is the most popular, but Sardinia boasts the world’s Gouda. It’s great on a cheeseburger,
most dangerous cheese, casu marzu, which contains live in mac and cheese and for grilled cheese
insect larvae. It’s illegal to sell, and eating it risks the bugs sandwiches. Less good on waistlines.
burrowing into your stomach. If you have the courage to tuck But it has no live creatures inside.

BOSA, SARDINIA: SIPA /AP; AMSTERDAM: DRAHOSLAV RAMIK /AP; BREAD, FRUITS AND VEGETABLES,
in, staring down the Grim Reaper will seem like child’s play.

CANNABIS: 2H MEDIA /UNSPLASH; HEINEKEN: DAVE WEATHERALL /UNSPLASH; BICYCLES: AP

SANDWICH, GOUDA CHEESE, FLOCK OF SHEEP: STOCK ADOBE; CASU MARZU CHEESE: AP;
E L IX IR OF YOUTH

Cannonau wine Heineken

Many Sardinians drink a few glasses of their Amsterdam loves its hometown brew, and some science
local vino every day. Cannonau (aka Grenache) says beer has as many antioxidants as wine, may build
has high levels of polyphenols, which are stronger bones and increases your brain power. That’s
powerful antioxidants. why they have trivia nights at bars, not libraries.

DAILY WORKOUT

Why is the mountainous center of It’s a flat city in a flat country, so

Sardinia where the most centenarians are
found? Because long before SoulCycle,
there was shepherding. Walking more
than five miles a day over rugged terrain
while tending the flock is great cardio.
Amsterdammers bike everywhere.
Over 45 percent use two wheels
instead of four to go back and forth
from work every day. They’re getting
cardio while you’re stuck in traffic.

F I N A L C O U N T D OW N

So how many people are actually living to 100 here? Cycling to work and beer can do only so much. The Netherlands
An impressive 33.6 for every 100,000 inhabitants. averages 10.4 centenarians for every 100,000 people. Looks like
Beat that, Amsterdam. it’s a one-way ticket to Italy’s second-largest island.

128 The Duel

AUGUST 2022