Hi, welcome to your Weekend.

Today marks the opening of the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperative Summit in San Francisco, which is basically NBA All-Star weekend for government people. For the next seven days, our one-name tech leaders (Sam, Elon, Marc, Sundar) will play unofficial hosts to their lawmaking counterparts from around the globe (Joe, Xi, Fumio, Justin).

It’s a chance for San Francisco to show off its best side—the views, the food, the gay scene, the Cerebral Valley—and to try to hide away its worst. The city’s been working overtime to spiff up the joint for the 30,000 expected diplomats and business execs, sweeping out homeless encampments around the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in SoMa, chasing away fentanyl dealers from UN Plaza and Market Street and bringing in some 1,000 additional police officers to patrol the streets. 

Besides the highly anticipated meeting between Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the biggest news of APEC week will likely come from panels featuring some of tech’s mightiest names, including a Nov. 16 session on AI featuring OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s James Manyika and Meta’s Chris Cox. Later that day, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff will square off one-on-one with Elon Musk. 

If all goes well, perhaps some of the foreign visitors will change their impressions about San Francisco and decide to invest in business or real estate here. Maybe some will even encourage their citizens to spend vacation bucks in the city.

But knowing San Francisco, the unexpected will also occur. Let us hope it’s of the peaceful, diplomatic variety, and doesn’t involve bipping or flash mobs or a new geopolitical crisis. We’ve got all we can handle right now.

social studies

The Surprise Fanatics for Meta’s VR Headset? Your Mom’s Facebook Friends

The Supernatural fitness app has become the first breakout hit in Meta’s virtual reality efforts. But its most passionate audience isn’t Gen Z. Reporter Pranav Dixit writes about the devoted middle-aged and senior users giving Meta’s Quest 2 its first success story. 

the 1:1

Airbnb Needed a New Story—It Found a Narrator from the West Wing

Margaux spoke to former Obama press secretary Jay Carney one year into his role as Airbnb’s chief communicator. Through a slate of new features and a warts-and-all press tour, Carney and CEO Brian Chesky are attempting to revamp the platform—and reframe its narrative.

the most epic

The Tech Evangelist Who Lives Life According to the Tides

Podcaster and Apple alum Guy Kawasaki took up surfing at age 60—and now has surfed almost three continents and owns over 20 surfboards. He tells Margaux about surfing the shores of Santa Cruz, India and Australia and picking up hockey in his 40s. 

Following: Influencer camps for kids 
Forget canoeing or archery: summer camps are now teaching kids to be influencers. For The Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz reports on the rise of creator camps, where children spend all day running around, their parents’ iPads in hand, attempting to recreate the work of heroes like MrBeast or Unspeakable. One camp founder told Lorenz that they want to redefine how children use technology; instead of kids spending all summer watching TikToks, the camp is teaching them to write scripts and edit videos. Although the kids see content creation as a method of self-expression, their young eyes remain on the prize: “I want to be famous on YouTube, because I want a lot of money,” said one seven-year-old.—Margaux 

Reading: The Bridgewater tell-all
This week, New York Magazine published a jaw-dropping excerpt from New York Times business reporter Rob Copeland’s new book, The Fund, about Ray Dalio’s legendary hedge fund Bridgewater. The piece opens on Dalio’s meticulous, campus-wide investigation into how urine could possibly end up on the floor next to Bridgewater’s men’s urinals—and it only gets crazier from there. The real meat of the story is about Dalio’s secretive $100 million project to embed his famous “Principles” into an AI system nicknamed Prince. (For context, the Principles drive Bridgewater’s corporate culture, which has employees rate one another regularly and vote on which colleagues to fire.) According to this account of the project, which ultimately failed, there is one single area where radical transparency is not welcome: any form of criticism against Dalio himself. —Julia

Noticing: Kendrick Lamar’s hot-selling dumb phone 
Over the summer, a viral tweet described a new kind of screen-time philosophy—toggling between a basics-only “kale phone” and a dopamine-addled “cocaine phone.” Now, the kale phone has its own celebrity endorser. Rapper Kendrick Lamar is collaborating with “dumb phone” manufacturer Light to offer phones that only do calls and texts (no internet or social media) and have an e-reader-like screen. The $299 Light Phone 2 from Lamar’s creative agency, pgLang sold out in less than a day. While there’s always demand for limited-release celebrity collaborations, this one particularly struck a nerve. For comparison, Lamar’s collab with sneaker brand Converse, which launched around the same time as the phone, has yet to sell out. —Annie 

Makes You Think

What if Humane dropped the "A" and just called it the iPin? 

Until next Weekend, thanks for reading.

—Jon