Welcome to the weekend.

Before we dive into the briefing, I'm launching a new section of Weekend Briefing called Field Notes, my firsthand account of adventures and travel. It will range widely, from mountains to Michelin-rated restaurants, culture to cool hotels, wherever curiosity and adventure leads me. For more than a decade, I've curated ideas for you. With Field Notes, from time to time, I want to curate experiences too, moving you from ideas to action… And hopefully inspiring some fun and joy in your life.

The first Field Note comes from my adventure in the Dolomites last week, and it's the first story in today's briefing. Enjoy, and I'd love to hear your feedback as I build this out.

Prime Numbers

1,248 — A record 1,248 players from 449 clubs across 71 countries will take the pitch at the 2026 World Cup, making it the most globally represented tournament in history.

7,000 — Tickets for the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium are already averaging more than $7,000 above the price of an opening-round ticket — with the competing teams still more than a month from being determined.

2,430,000,000 — U.S. audiobook sales hit $2.43 Billion in 2025, a 9% jump from the prior year, as publishers reported more than 750,000 active titles — a 43% increase from 2024.

Suffer, Then Spritz

Every evening on the trail ran the same improbable script: stumble off the mountain filthy and spent, and thirty minutes later you’re showered, an Aperol Spritz in hand, walking to a three-course dinner and a warm bed. This is the Dolomites hut-to-hut circuit in South Tyrol, four days threading bone-white limestone walls that rise thousands of feet straight off green valley floors, but with the usual backpacking tax removed, no 45-pound pack, no tent, no freeze-dried dinners, just a daypack, trail runners, and a real bed at the end. The lighter load isn’t only comfort, it’s access: lose the punishing pack and the mountains open to almost everyone, couples in their seventies, families, even parents with infants, all sharing the same passes. Add a via ferrata summit reached by clipping into a WWI-era iron cable bolted to a cliff and a high pass crossed twice in one brutal day, and you get a trip that refuses the usual choice between pushing hard and traveling well, adventure and luxury in precise balance. Field Notes (7 minutes)

No Strings Attached

The most radical thing GiveDirectly ever did wasn’t give away a billion dollars to people living in extreme poverty, it was trust them to decide what to do with it. When the charity launched in 2011, the New York Times asked if it was “nuts” to hand out cash with no strings attached, reflecting a widespread assumption that poor people couldn’t make sound financial decisions. GiveDirectly responded not with rhetoric but with randomized controlled trials, eventually running 24 of them, which showed that recipients invested in businesses, built better homes, and reduced malnutrition without meaningfully increasing spending on alcohol or tobacco. But the deeper insight from all that research wasn’t just that cash works, it was that measuring what recipients chose to spend money on revealed their actual priorities, like durable housing, forcing donors to confront a subtle but consequential question: whose definition of a good outcome should drive development work in the first place? In Development (20 minutes)

The Survival Math

According to long-cited Kellogg research, only 30% of family businesses survive into the second generation. By the third, 12%. By the fourth, just 3%. The math is brutal — and rarely because the business isn’t strong. Family Business Advisor Kile Graves has spent the past several years working closely with dozens of family-owned enterprises navigating this exact handoff, and his argument is that these aren’t really succession conversations. They’re identity conversations. He’s hosting a free 60-minute webinar for family business leaders at any generation on June 23 and July 7. Everyone who registers gets a copy of The Torch, his framework guide. Click the link to register. Cornerstone (Sponsored)

Thinking Without It

The real AI threat isn’t a robot taking your job, it’s the slow hollowing out of the mind you’d use to find the next one. Scottish Mortgage’s Tom Slater argues that offloading thought to chatbots rewires cognition the way literacy once did, and the early evidence is unsettling: an MIT study found 83 percent of AI users couldn’t quote essays they had written minutes earlier, while experienced endoscopists saw their cancer-detection rates fall 21 percent after leaning on AI assistance. The danger isn’t a single skill lost but the quiet erosion of memory, judgment, and the apprenticeship paths that turn novices into experts. The winners, he suggests, won’t be the people who use AI the most, but the rare ones who can still think without it. Baillie Gifford (30 minutes)

Big Tech’s AI Investment Spending

The four biggest US tech companies are about to spend money the way nations spend in wartime, not the way businesses spend chasing returns. Benedict Evans’ latest “AI eats the world” deck tracks the combined annual capex of Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta climbing from 220 billion dollars in 2024 to a guided 700 billion in 2026, more than double all global telecom spending and approaching the oil industry’s trillion-dollar outlays, with capex now eating 54 and 55 percent of sales at Microsoft and Meta. Once asset-light cash machines, these firms are starting to look like capital-hungry utilities, betting, in Sundar Pichai’s words, that under-investing is the bigger risk. Evans’ provocation is that the models themselves may end up as commoditized infrastructure with no lasting moat, meaning the real value, and the real innovation, will move up the stack to the apps built on top. Benedict Evans (10 minutes)

Speed Dating By Proxy

Every weekend in Shanghai’s People’s Park, hundreds of Chinese parents descend on a corner of the grounds to do something their adult children largely refuse to: find them a spouse. The listings spread on the ground read like corporate balance sheets, birth year, height, income, property holdings, parent health status, and the brokers who manage them are bluntly transactional in a way that would horrify anyone raised on romantic comedies. But the market exists because the math is genuinely scary: China just hit a record-low birth rate, youth unemployment peaked near 19%, marriage has been declining for a decade, and an entire generation of only children is now the sole hope their aging parents have for any kind of security in old age. What looks like meddling from the outside is really a form of collective anxiety, parents who grew up in rural poverty now watching their children fumble through an urbanism that promised prosperity and delivered expensive loneliness. The Paris Review (15 minutes)

The Alibi of Rest

The wellness industry doesn’t hate laziness, it just refuses to sell it without attaching a return on investment. Every product in the recovery economy, the sleep trackers, the retreat weekends, the scented candles priced like pharmaceuticals, shares the same pitch: restore yourself so you can perform better, maintain the machine so the machine keeps running. This is rest with an alibi, and the essay argues it’s categorically different from idleness, which has no alibi and wants none. True idleness isn’t a trough between waves of effort, it’s time removed from the economy of usefulness entirely, an afternoon that doesn’t improve your focus, lower your cortisol, or make you more creative, and the moment you catch yourself believing it does, you’ve lost it. The deepest provocation here is that a life optimized all the way down to its leisure, in which every quiet hour ultimately answers to productivity, is a life that has never once simply been alive without also being useful. The Idle Gazette (5 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. - Mark Twain

Every evening on the trail followed the same improbable script. We stumbled off the mountain dirty, tired and proud, and within 30 minutes we were showered up and have an Aperol Spritz in hand and on your way to a three-course dinner and a warm bed. The next morning, we laced up and did it again.

This is South Tyrol, the northeastern corner of Italy, a few hours from Venice by train, where the language is German, the food is Austrian, and the mountains are among the most dramatic on the continent. The Dolomites rise here as sheer vertical limestone walls, flat-topped and bone-white, thousands of feet straight up from soft green valley floors. It is a landscape that demands to be moved through, not just looked at.

The best way to move through it is a four-day hut-to-hut circuit. Some trips are an adventure. Some trips are a retreat. This one is both, and neither cancels the other out. It is, definitely one of the best trips I’ve done.

Hut-to-Hut

I love backpacking. A Multi-day backpacking trip in the wilderness is one of my favorite things to do. But typically the adventure comes with a tax, and the tax is the pack. Tent, sleeping pad, stove, fuel, bear canister, four days of food. You walk out the door with 45 pounds on your back, and everything downstream of that weight is harder. You move slower, fatigue faster, wear heavier boots, eat freeze-dried meals, and break camp in the cold rain with wet hands. The adventure is real, but so is the grind.

European hut-to-hut hiking removes the tax entirely. You go with a 25-liter daypack, trail runners, and snacks. The lighter the pack, the faster the pace, the better the shoes, the better the day.

It also opens the trail to everyone. We passed couples in their seventies moving steadily through the passes, families with young children, parents with infants in carriers. The full range of human ages, all sharing the same circuit. That is not what the American backcountry looks like, and the difference is infrastructure. When the barrier is a 45-pound pack, a lot of people reasonably conclude the mountains aren’t for them. When the barrier is a 25-liter daypack and a reservation, the mountains are for almost everyone.

The word “hut” covers a wide range of accommodations. At the basic end, it means a bunk room, shared bathrooms, and a kitchen sending out simple alpine meals. That is enough. You are warm, dry, fed, and off your feet, and after a hard day on trail that is not a small thing. You don’t pitch a tent in the rain. You don’t boil water for a freeze-dried meal at altitude. You sleep in a real bed with a pillow and a blanket, your boots dry by morning, and there is a dining room where hikers hang out and compare notes on the day.

At the high end, some huts are essentially mountain hotels: private rooms, ensuite bathrooms, multi-course dinners with a real wine list, saunas, hot tubs, and breakfast buffets with local cheese and freshly baked bread. Somewhere in that range is the right trip for almost anyone. The Europeans have figured out how to blend adventure and civilization at altitude, and I’m here for it.

Via Ferrata

Via ferrata means “iron road” in Italian. Beginning in World War I, Italian military engineers bolted steel cables, iron rungs, and wooden ladders directly into the faces of Dolomite cliffs to move troops through terrain that would otherwise require full mountaineering equipment. The infrastructure stayed after the war, was expanded, and eventually became one of the defining recreational activities of the Dolomites. From a distance, a via ferrata route looks like something only a climber would attempt. Steel cables run up a near-vertical rock face, the exposure drops away below, and the summit seems unreachable by any normal means.

A via ferrata sits somewhere between a steep, exposed hike and a full rock climb. It is low-level climbing with high consequences, where a slip without protection would mean a very long fall. But the protection is the point. A fixed cable runs the length of the route, and you clip into it with a harness and a Y-shaped lanyard with a carabiner on each arm. Both clip onto the cable, and one stays live past every bolt. You are attached to the mountain at every moment, without the complexity of setting anchors and roping up the way a traditional climb requires.

Standing at the base of the cables on Sass de Putia, 9,400 feet up, harness on and looking at the summit block above me, I was genuinely intimidated. This is considered a beginner via ferrata, a “baby” route, a good starter. It still looked nearly vertical with serious exposure on all sides. We had hiked a long way to get there and we had the gear, so the decision was to clip in and see. I gave it maybe fifty-fifty odds that we’d turn around before the top.

By the second or third cable, I had a realization: this is fun.

The fear is mostly a trust problem, and once you understand the system, the trust comes quickly. Then the mechanics do something more surprising. They give your mind something specific to focus on. Slide, clip, clip, slide. One bolt at a time. That narrow focus crowds out everything else, including the drop below your heels. The fear doesn’t disappear so much as it gets displaced. By the third or fourth bolt you are moving in rhythm, and somewhere in that rhythm the whole thing becomes genuinely enjoyable.

The reward at the top is categorically different from anything a normal trail delivers. You have accessed terrain that is simply unreachable any other way, and the summit makes that clear. On Sass de Putia, with the Marmolada Glacier to the south and the Austrian Alps to the north, the view is the best in South Tyrol. The route is graded A, the easiest possible classification, and is the right first via ferrata for anyone in solid hiking shape with a reasonable head for heights.

The Circuit, Day by Day

Day 1: Plose to Ütia de Börz (7.5 miles)

The day is a traverse, mostly shaded pine forest and sub-alpine meadow, with the limestone tower of Sass de Putia growing larger on the horizon as you move east. It is a warm-up day, deliberately. Mellow, beautiful, nothing to prove. Ütia de Börz is the best introduction to hut life you could ask for: mid-to-high end, easy access, champagne on arrival, and Via Ferrata gear available to rent for the next morning.

Day 2: Ütia de Börz to Gampen Alm via Sass de Putia (12.5 miles)

The biggest day on the circuit by a wide margin, and the one you’ll remember for years. It was shaped by a decision made before the trip: carry via ferrata gear for the entire circuit, or rent it for the day of the climb. The case for carrying it is simple. You have the gear when you need it and no route constraints. The case against is the weight. A harness, helmet, and lanyard add real bulk to a pack you are trying to keep light, and you carry it for three days you don’t use it. We chose the day rental. That choice had consequences.

Renting meant returning the gear to Ütia de Börz after the summit, which meant descending all the way back to the hut after the climb. And getting from Ütia de Börz to Gampen Alm requires crossing the Peitlerscharte saddle. There is no way around it. So we crossed it twice: once on the way up to the via ferrata, and again after lunch with tired legs and a full day already in them. Both crossings are significant vertical. Together they add up to around 5,000 feet of total gain.

From Ütia de Börz, Trail 8A climbs a vast green meadow to the Peitlerscharte saddle. From there, the route continues up steep limestone scree to the base of the summit block, where the cables begin. The via ferrata covers the final 350 feet. We reached the top in perfect conditions, two days after fresh snowfall, and stood there longer than we planned to.

Then we descended back to Ütia de Börz, returned the gear, ate lunch, and went back up over the pass. The second crossing hurt. Our legs were shot by the descent into the valley on the other side, but the approach to Gampen Alm from the north is gentle, and the Odle spires were coming into view. Aperol spritzes were waiting. Dinner was three courses. We were asleep before dark.

If you want to avoid the double crossing, carry the via ferrata kit for the full trip. It adds weight but saves a brutal second climb. We have no regrets, but we only understood what we’d signed up for in retrospect.

Day 3: Gampen Alm to Rossalm via Adolf Munkel Trail (9.9 miles)

It was snowing when we woke up. We waited. By 10am the weather had moved through and we were moving. The morning starts with a steep uphill traverse out of the Gampen valley, then drops hard down to Zans, the lowest point on the circuit. What follows is the Adolf Munkel Trail, a long traverse directly beneath the Geisler/Odle spires, which rise some 3,000 vertical feet straight up from the forest floor and are among the most dramatic pieces of geology I've ever stood next to. Stop at the Edelweiss hut for a coffee and an apple strudel. This is not optional. Push on from there for another two hours to Rossalm, gaining elevation steadily until the hut appears above the treeline. Bathrobes and towels were waiting. The hot tub looked out at the valley. Dinner was five courses.

Day 4: Walk-Out to Forestis (2 miles)

An hour of easy downhill to close the loop, and then the trip ends at a luxury alpine hotel. Forestis deserves its own full treatment, and I'll cover it separately. But the short version: the property is built entirely around a 180-degree panorama of Dolomites skyline, framed in white pine and glass, and every suite, every banquette, every sitting room faces the same direction. After four days on trail, dropping into the forest sauna at 95 degrees Celsius, then into a wooden cold plunge fed by a natural spring, then sitting down to Yera's eighteen-course tasting menu in a cave-like dining room that seats eighteen people, is an experience that earns the word unreasonable. The wilderness made it feel that way. That is the whole design of this trip.

Most trips make you choose: push hard or travel well. The Dolomites circuit refuses the choice. You summit a via ferrata peak, cross a high alpine pass twice in a day, walk beneath 3,000-foot limestone walls, and sleep in a real bed with a five-course dinner waiting. Adventure and luxury, in precise and perfect balance. That is the trip.

As you read this, I’m somewhere with no signal, deep in the Dolomites, exactly where I want to be. Going off the grid meant, for the first time in the history of the Weekend Briefing, handing someone the keys, and there was only one person I wanted to give them to.

Blair Miller is one of my dearest friends and one of the sharpest thinkers I know. For the past year she’s been building something called The Humanist Renaissance, an argument that AI isn’t here to replace us but to return us to the parts of being human we let go slack: attention, taste, judgment, presence, the warmth of a real hand. I started reading her and couldn’t stop.

I asked Blair to take this issue because she’s chasing the most important question of the decade. When machines master the things we built our whole economy around, what part of being human do we refuse to give up? I can’t think of anyone better to sit with that for a week.

If what follows resonates, subscribe to The Humanist Renaissance and tell her I sent you.

The Humanist Renaissance

Mother, investor, educator, teacher, working to create the humanist renaissance.

By Blair Miller

Guest Editor: Blair Miller, human.

Welcome to the weekend.

Kyle’s handed me the keys this week, so I want to use them on the idea that’s consumed me for the last year: the humanist renaissance.

For the last hundred years, we built a system that rewarded one kind of intelligence above all others — the kind that analyzes, abstracts, credentials, and performs certainty. The kind you can put on a résumé. AI is making this knowledge obsolete. What replaces it will be built from the kinds of knowing that system told us to deprioritize: the embodied, the relational, the felt. Attention, empathy, taste, judgment, presence, the warmth of a real human hand. These are the new scarce resource, on every continent. We’re not going to find our way through this transition by becoming more efficient. We’re going to find ourselves by becoming, deliberately, more human.

Meghan O’Gieblyn put it best in God, Human, Animal, Machine: meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification.

Prime Numbers

47 — The average length of time a person now spends on a screen before switching to another, according to two decades of research by UC Irvine informatics professor Gloria Mark. In 2004, that figure was 2.5 minutes. By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds. We are not who we were.

700 — Copies of Slow Ventures’ new modern etiquette handbook for tech founders sold in its first month. The VC firm now runs oversubscribed in-person classes teaching aspiring Zuckerbergs how to read a room, pair wine, and shake hands. Founding partner Sam Lessin’s diagnosis: AI has made coding “super commoditized,” so founders must now lean on the one quality AI can’t emulate — humanity. When the venture capitalists start selling etiquette schools, the humanist renaissance has officially gone mainstream.

159,000,000 — Fans who attended a Live Nation show in 2025, across 55,000 events worldwide. International markets surpassed the U.S. in attendance for the first time. People are flying across continents to share a room with other humans, doing something that cannot be streamed.

A Time We Never Knew

An incredibly beautiful piece of writing on this subject was written by a 26-year-old. Freya India, a British staff writer at Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel, grieves a life she barely lived: the anticipation of going to the movies, hitting a swing-ball for hours, sitting through a film without checking her phone. Her generation, she argues, has been turned from people into products. Her prescription: you just must be human. After Babel (7 min)

Welcome to Aesthetic Intelligence

Pauline Brown ran LVMH North America — the world’s largest luxury house, headquartered in Paris — and taught at Harvard Business School. In this founding post for her Substack, she lays out the whole frame in one read. Her diagnosis: thanks to AI, the barriers to analysis and production have collapsed. What is now scarce is judgment — the ability to select, edit, refine, and reject. The ability to distinguish between what is loud and what is lasting. To recognize the difference between what’s trending and what’s true. As she puts it: when everything is so easily and instantly available, nothing feels magical. Nothing is all that desirable. Her insistence — and this is what makes the piece a manifesto rather than a lament — is that aesthetic intelligence is not a mysterious gift or a class marker. It’s a muscle. And like any muscle, it must be exercised. In a world where everyone has the same tools, the only durable advantage left is the one we must build inside ourselves. Aesthetic Intelligence (8 min)

An Honest Conversation on AI and Humanity

The most-read public intellectual on the planet, in front of the most powerful audience on the planet, naming the humanist renaissance without naming it. At Davos in January, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens, Homo Deus, Nexus — 50 million books in 65 languages) delivered a keynote that frames what’s happening as nothing less than an identity crisis. For 2,000 years we defined ourselves as the thinking animal — I think, therefore I am. AI is now going to be better than us at thinking, if thinking means putting words in order. And, Harari notes, almost everything that organizes human civilization is made of words: laws, contracts, religions, money. So, what happens to our identity when machines master the substance of it? His answer is not nostalgic. It is a call to invest, deliberately, in the parts of us AI cannot reach. My mind is my most important tool. And nobody can invest in it for me. Full transcript via Singju Post (40 min read / video on YouTube)

A Time to Gather

Bruce Feiler — author of seven New York Times bestsellers and three TED Talks with five million views — has spent the last few years on a 50,000-mile road trip across sixteen countries on six continents asking what humans do when the old rituals fall apart. His new book, published this week, lays out the answer. The diagnosis is stark: it took us ten thousand years to establish cultural norms around how we mark collective life transitions. It took us fifty years to dismantle them. Birth rituals and coming-of-age rituals have plummeted. Fewer than half of Americans are married. Only one in three is buried. The book is part travelogue (from the Vatican to Bali to Las Vegas to Ireland), part blueprint — documenting the astonishing rise of new rituals people are inventing to replace the ones we lost. If the humanist renaissance is going to be real, it will be built out of exactly this kind of work: the deliberate, embodied reweaving of the social fabric AI cannot make. Penguin Press (book, ~9 hours)

First Jobs Matter More Than We Think

Wendy Kopp opens with Jack Waxman, a Cornell senior choosing between a coveted job in Chuck Schumer’s office and two years teaching at a school in East Harlem. A Teach for America alumna working in government had told him what she saw around her: people making policy decisions from “bubbles of power and prestige,” far removed from the communities affected. Jack chose the classroom. Kopp’s argument, drawn from 37 years of running Teach for America and the global Teach for All network across 60+ countries, is that first jobs are not warm-ups — they are the foundation of the leaders we become. Proximity to problems matters. And in a moment when AI is hollowing out the traditional knowledge-work apprenticeship, the formative experience may be the one no model can simulate: standing in front of 30 kids and figuring out how to teach them (something I can attest to as I did it when I was 20 in Ulsan, South Korea). If we want a generation capable of solving society’s hardest problems, we must send our most promising young people toward them, not away. The Atlantic (10 min)

A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

Ross Douthat (NYT) sits down with Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor and the former dean of an honors college built on great books and the classical liberal arts. They wrestle with the question hovering behind every piece in this briefing: if the credential-and-output system of education is being eaten by AI, what comes next? Frey’s answer is bracing: the humanities are not a luxury, and never were. They are fundamental to human formation — the practice of becoming someone capable of judgment, virtue, and meaning. She knows what she’s talking about, because she watched her own program get gutted. The most surprising turn in the conversation: both Douthat and Frey think the age of AI might actually be the moment the liberal arts come back, precisely because everything else has become commoditized. Pairs perfectly with Wendy Kopp above — Kopp is about first jobs, Frey is about first educations — and together they answer the question of how we form humans capable of inheriting the world AI is making. Interesting Times — NYT podcast (1h 3min)

Pixar Already Showed Us

In 2008, before the iPhone was even a year old, Pixar released a film about a future where humans live aboard a corporate cruise ship called the Axiom. They float on hoverchairs. They never make eye contact. Each one has a screen positioned directly in front of their face, fed by an algorithm that tells them what to wear, what to eat, what to think. They have grown so dependent on automation that they have literally forgotten how to walk. The film is WALL-E, and it remains the most prescient piece of mainstream entertainment ever made about where screen-mediated, AI-managed life leads if we do not push back against it. The redemption arc is the part worth remembering. The humans on the Axiom recover their humanity in a single, quiet moment: two passengers’ screens malfunction, and for the first time, they see each other. They reach out. They touch. The whole movie turns on that one human gesture. Eighteen years on, the question WALL-E asked is no longer hypothetical: when the machines are this good at everything, what part of being human do we refuse to give up? WALL-E (Pixar, 98 min — worth rewatching)

When the Answer Is Generated in a Flash

Baratunde Thurston — Emmy-nominated storyteller, formerly of The Onion and The Daily Show — gave a keynote at the Richmond Forum that is the single best articulation of his thesis in one place. The premise: I wonder if our obsession with intelligence of an artificial nature has us wandering too far from our essential human nature. His best line, riffing on the Apollo astronauts who went to the moon and discovered Earth: when the answer to every question can be generated in a flash, then it’s time for us to question just what we want to ask. And the line I keep returning to: Just because something is faster doesn’t make it better. Some things in life we may want to slow down — time with people we care about, an enjoyable meal. The things that have the most meaning for us shouldn’t be made efficient. He also hosts the Life With Machines podcast, whose AI co-producer is named, no joke, BLAIR — a coincidence I’m still processing. Richmond Forum (45 min)

Keep the Conversation Going

If this resonates, I write about the humanist renaissance — the cultural shift, the institutions we’ll need to build, and the people already building them. Subscribe at humanistrenaissance.substack.com — and please write me back. I read everything.

— Blair

The Humanist Renaissance

Mother, investor, educator, teacher, working to create the humanist renaissance.

By Blair Miller

Weekend Wisdom

We went to explore the moon, and in the end, we discovered Earth. — William Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

889,000,000 —Bluey logged 889 million viewing minutes on Disney+ in a single week — enough to top Nielsen’s streaming charts even during the quietest week of the year, when no title cracked the billion-minute mark for the first time in 2026.

500,000 — The company behind Shibumi shade screens has sold 500,000 of the $255 beach shades, but knockoffs have pushed the total even higher — and their explosive popularity is now getting them banned at beaches across the Carolinas.

39 — Chinese companies are on track to control 39% of global lithium production by 2030 — up from about one-third in 2020 — as Beijing-backed firms finance mines across Africa, Australia, and South America to tighten their grip on battery supply chains.

Babel vs. Jerusalem

The new pope just became the most powerful voice in the AI safety debate. Drawing on 2,000 years of Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo XIV released his first major encyclical framing AI not as a technology question but as a civilizational choice: humanity can either build a new Tower of Babel, a top-down system driven by pride and profit that reduces people to “cogs,” or it can rebuild Jerusalem, where diverse communities work together toward a common good. He called for binding legal frameworks, independent oversight, and an end to autonomous weapons, arguing that AI-driven warfare lowers the moral threshold for violence and slips beyond human control. With over a billion Catholics worldwide and a growing coalition of workers, graduates, and residents already pushing back against AI’s disruptions, the pope may be uniquely positioned to reframe a debate that Silicon Valley has largely controlled. WSJ (9 minutes)

Citizen’s Dividend

Samsung’s chipmaking workforce just turned a routine bonus dispute into a global referendum on who deserves a cut of the AI gold rush. Nearly 48,000 South Korean workers came within hours of walking out before executives agreed to a tentative deal, after the union argued that record AI-driven operating profits weren’t reaching the people actually fabricating the chips going into Nvidia, OpenAI, and the rest of big tech. The dispute prompted a senior Korean policymaker to publicly float a “citizen’s dividend,” a slice of AI windfall profits paid out across the country’s 52 million people to stabilize the social fabric as automation reshapes work. From Kenyan data annotators forming associations to Hollywood pushing a “Tilly tax” on AI-generated performers, an old, stubborn question is showing up everywhere at once: who gets paid when machines do the work, and who decides? Rest of World (6 minutes)

AI Jobs Hysteria

The AI jobs apocalypse isn’t showing up where the economists actually know how to look for it. Despite the wave of layoffs at Meta, Cisco, and Coinbase, US labor data shows that unemployment for the jobs most exposed to AI is currently lower than for less-exposed occupations, and only one in five companies report using AI in any business function at all. The real squeeze is narrow and generational, a 16% decline in entry-level work for 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed fields like software development, which looks less like a mass replacement and more like the death of the “earn while you learn” model in which new grads built tacit experience by doing the codable parts of the job. The honest reading is that we still have time to plan, but we’re spending hundreds of billions deploying AI and less than one percent of that figuring out what it’s actually doing to the economy. MIT Technology Review (9 minutes)

Skip Mars

Mars is forever twenty years away because no rocket can shorten the two-year round trip, and the only abort plan is "press the red button and wait." A more useful next rung on the ladder, weirdly enough, is Venus, where an orbital flyby is roughly Moon-difficulty, the radiation is gentler, the communications delay is short enough for actual conversation, and the upper-atmosphere clouds sit in a temperate, pressure-friendly band where probes have already detected anomalies that hint at either alien chemistry or, possibly, microbial life. The experiment to settle it isn't a billion-dollar lander, it's essentially a party balloon, simple enough that a private team is already flying a version of the mission with RocketLab. There may be a near-guaranteed Nobel Prize floating in the skies of our scariest planetary neighbor, and we're stubbornly aiming everything we have at the one planet we can't safely abort from. Mars For The Rest of Us (12 minutes)

The Group Chat

A friend apologized three times in a row for not being more active in a low-stakes group chat, not because the screenshots mattered, but because he was worried about slipping out of the friendship itself. According to a recent Glamour survey, 93% of respondents say they're in a group chat they check at least weekly and 90% credit those threads with enriching their social lives, even as a Surgeon General advisory names loneliness a public health crisis. Group chats have quietly become "social architecture," the place where modern friendships are built, tested, misread, repaired, and sometimes quietly iced out, rather than at brunch or weddings. When the basic unit of friendship is no longer the dinner or the phone call but the persistent, vibrating thread on your phone, going dark for a week stops feeling like a normal life rhythm and starts feeling like a kind of soft exit. Glamour (5 minutes)

Struggle Is The Point

The modern instinct to optimize away friction, using GPS, skipping the hard book, defaulting to the easy game, is quietly working against your brain. Neuroscientists consistently find that what actually builds cognitive resilience is novelty and difficulty: learning a musical instrument builds measurable gray matter in motor, auditory, and visuospatial regions of the brain, while bilingualism is associated with a 4 to 5 year delay in dementia onset, and dance is the only physical activity shown in a large prospective study to have protective effects against dementia specifically. The unifying principle across all eight hobbies the experts recommend, including book clubs, volunteering, language learning, and game nights, is that passive consumption doesn’t move the needle; what matters is whether an activity forces the brain to adapt to something it doesn’t already know how to do. The good news is you don’t need new hobbies, just new friction: ditch the GPS on your regular walk, swap your usual puzzle for chess, or take a different route home. Real Simple (4 minutes)

Six Strings

Country singer Eric Church returned to Chapel Hill and delivered the rarest of commencement speeches, one that wasn't really a speech, it was a guitar lesson. Church organized his address around the six strings of a guitar, mapping each to a principle for the Class of 2026, with faith as the deep low E and family as the A, working up through heart, ambition, community, and a sense of self. His sharpest line was aimed at the smartphone generation specifically, that they face "a temptation no generation before has ever faced. The temptation to perform to everyone and belong to no one," and the prescription was to plant themselves somewhere, learn actual names instead of usernames, coach the team, build the thing the community needs. At a moment when most graduates are being told the future is portable, optimized, and increasingly virtual, a Carolina kid stood at Kenan Stadium and told them the most subversive thing they could do is grow roots. YouTube (18 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

There is no path. The path is made by walking. -Antonio Machado

Welcome to the weekend.

Thanks to everybody who came out to the Weekend Briefing happy hour in San Francisco this week. It was a blast hanging out with y’all.

Prime Numbers

71 — A new Gallup survey found 71% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their area — a higher share than the 53% who oppose nuclear power plants nearby — driven largely by concerns over energy and water consumption.

83 — The UK’s landmark generational smoking ban is backed by data showing 83% of smokers worldwide started between ages 14 and 25 — making early intervention the most powerful lever for eliminating tobacco use entirely

2,304 — After Burning Man 2025, cleanup crews sweeping 3,800 acres found 2,304 lag bolts — the single biggest debris category — left behind by the 70,000 attendees who anchored tents and art installations into the playa dust.

Sparta on the Potomac

Two nuclear-armed superpowers sat down in Beijing this week, and China’s leader opened with a history lesson from 431 BC. The Thucydides Trap, a concept named after the ancient Greek historian, holds that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, war becomes nearly inevitable, just as Athens and Sparta’s rivalry eventually exploded into decades of bloody conflict. Xi used the reference as both a warning and an olive branch, cautioning that mishandling Taiwan could push the two nations into “conflict,” while also suggesting that China’s rise and America’s renewal don’t have to be a zero-sum game. Whether the classical allusion landed as diplomacy or provocation may depend entirely on which side of the Pacific you’re reading it from. The Guardian (4 minutes)

AI Is Making Devs Dumber

Tech executives are racing to brag about how much of their code is now AI-generated, with Google claiming 75 percent, Microsoft targeting 95 percent by 2030, and Anthropic reporting 90 percent across most of its teams, but the developers actually writing that code tell a much darker story. On forums like Reddit and Hacker News, programmers report that AI tools are slower and more frustrating to use than advertised, because they spend more time auditing and fixing AI output than they would have spent just writing the code themselves. Worse, many say they’re actively de-skilling, losing the ability to think through hard problems independently because the muscle goes unused, while simultaneously inheriting massive piles of unreviable, AI-generated tech debt. The productivity boom that was supposed to shorten work weeks and improve products has mostly just given executives cover for sweeping layoffs at Meta, Microsoft, and Snap. 404 Media (5 minutes)

The Doomsday Organism

Some of the same scientists who spent years trying to build mirror life, a synthetic bacteria with a molecular structure opposite to every living thing on Earth, are now the loudest voices demanding it never be created. Because life evolved in one chiral direction, a mirrored organism would be essentially invisible to immune systems, indigestible by predators, and resistant to the enzymes that break down foreign substances, meaning nothing in nature’s arsenal could stop it from replicating indefinitely. It wouldn’t need to be toxic to be catastrophic: multiplying unchecked in soil, oceans, and the bloodstreams of every plant and animal on Earth, it could quietly crowd out the biological processes that underpin food chains and ecosystems. Thirty-eight prominent scientists, including two Nobel laureates, have called for a halt, and the UN has echoed their alarm, but the harder problem may be philosophical: once you understand that some knowledge can’t be unlearned, you have to decide whether to stop looking before you find it. Noema (25 minutes)

Bourbon’s Brutal Hangover

Kentucky is sitting on 16.1 million barrels of bourbon, the largest reserve in history, enough to last a decade, and almost nobody saw it coming. The pandemic sent Americans on a spirits-buying binge that convinced private equity, banks, and distillers large and small to pour money into new capacity, but demand peaked in 2022 and has been sliding ever since, squeezed by inflation, GLP-1 drugs, the sober-curious movement, cannabis competition, and Trump’s trade war dampening exports. Jim Beam’s flagship still has been idle since January and won’t restart until at least 2027, barrel prices have cratered from $285 to $50, Brown-Forman is cutting 12 percent of its workforce, and Stoli’s Kentucky Owl venture ended in bankruptcy court. The bust is a clean case study in how quickly a “lifestyle boom” industry can overcorrect when it mistakes a pandemic anomaly for a permanent trend. WSJ (5 minutes)

Quakers Had It Right

Long before developmental psychologists were publishing studies on intrinsic motivation and restorative discipline, Quakers were raising kids according to principles that happen to map almost perfectly onto what modern research now recommends. The faith’s core testimonies, grouped under the acronym SPICES (simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship), align with findings on everything from reducing materialism to building empathy to the power of positive reinforcement over punishment. A Quaker mom praising her daughter for honesty after a microwave fire, rather than punishing her for starting it, turns out to be textbook behavioral science. The deeper implication is that some of the most rigorously evidence-based parenting advice isn’t new at all, it’s nearly 375 years old and has been quietly practiced in meetinghouses the whole time. The Atlantic (6 minutes)

Romance Is Not a Lottery

The internet has convinced a generation of young men that dating is a rigged game where only a handful of genetically blessed, high-status “Chads” attract women, but the actual survey data says otherwise: sexlessness rates are nearly identical for young men and women, most people are monogamous with one partner in a given year, and the inequality on dating apps is far smaller than incel forums claim. Economist Noah Smith argues that most men fail at dating not because they’re undesirable, but because they’ve either been blackpilled into not trying or have never clearly thought about what they actually want, and that the three things women genuinely want from men, companionship, good sex, and a reliable partner for raising kids, are things any ordinary guy can provide. His most practical advice is deceptively simple: use the word “date” when you ask someone out, because it removes ambiguity, bypasses the friend zone, and forces a quick, honest answer. The bigger point is that fringe online ideologies about romance thrive precisely because they give lonely people a coherent explanation for their pain, but the explanation is empirically wrong, and believing it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Noahpinion (12 minutes)

Why We Cry for Fun

It seems contradictory that people who dread sadness in real life will voluntarily queue up a breakup playlist or watch a film they know will wreck them, but new research from Yale suggests the answer lies in something called appropriation: when we label an experience as “art,” it gives us implicit permission to experience someone else’s emotions as our own. In a series of experiments, participants consistently liked identical sad texts more when told they were song lyrics or a screenplay than when told they were a diary entry or a tweet, and the effect wasn’t driven by fiction making things feel safer, in fact people liked sad art more when they believed the emotions described were real. The mechanism seems to be connection: hearing Nick Cave sing about addiction or Taylor Swift sing about heartbreak lets us feel that someone else has already mapped our inner terrain, and that sense of being understood is genuinely comforting. Far from being a red flag, reaching for a sad movie when you’re feeling low may be one of the healthier things you can do. Psyche (6 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

Iceland helvetica before they sold out activated charcoal, tumblr meditation polaroid knausgaard lumbersexual heirloom biodiesel. Intelligentsia taxidermy listicle, kinfolk kitsch bitters tote bag succulents.

Welcome to the weekend.

I’ll be in San Francisco next week and would love to meet up IRL. I’m hosting a happy hour on Wednesday click here to sign up. See you then!

I’ll also be at the Praxis Summit. If you’re there shoot me a note. I’d love to say hi.

Prime Numbers

37 — Over 37% of action lead roles in the 2020s are going to actors aged 50 and over - more than double the share from the turn of the century, and the highest on record.

28.6 — NASA’s Curiosity rover got a surprise on April 25 when it drilled into a 28.6-pound Martian rock named Atacama — and the rock hitched a ride, lodging itself on the drill arm until controllers finally shook it loose six days later by tilting, rotating, and spinning the bit.

11,190 — Chile’s solar boom has reached 11,190 megawatts of installed capacity — and attracted a new kind of attention, with criminal organizations now systematically targeting farms for copper wire in 85.7% of cases and the panels themselves in over half.

44,000,000,000 — US ad spending on creators is projected to hit $44 billion in 2026, up from $37 billion the year prior, as brands race to follow audiences shifting from traditional TV to creator-driven platforms like YouTube.

Artists Incorporated

Colorado just gave artists something they’ve never had: a business structure built specifically for them. The Colorado Artist Company Act, which passed the full House 49-14 after clearing the Senate 31-3, creates a new kind of LLC called an A-Corp, where an artist’s stated mission is legally protected, intellectual property counts as capital, and artists must retain at least 51% of voting shares. It also allows fractional ownership from the start, meaning collaborators and contributors can hold real equity in a creative enterprise. Once Governor Polis signs it, any artist, including those outside Colorado, will be able to register an A-Corp by early 2027. Metalabel Studios (3 min)

Riding The Leopard

The meaning of life, drawn from mystics, mathematicians, psychonauts, and non-verbal autistic children, turns out to be the same thing: you are a sliver of the universe experiencing itself, and your job is to experience it in a way no one else can. The Upanishads, Rumi, Teilhard de Chardin, and Claude Shannon’s information theory all converge on the same point, that a predictable signal carries no information, and a universe of identical people produces nothing new. Joseph Campbell put it most vividly: the goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces. In an age when AI can do more and more of what humans once did, the answer isn’t to do less, it’s to be more irreducibly, surprisingly yourself, because differentiation isn’t just a personal virtue, it’s a moral obligation. Not Boring (13 min)

The Last 20%

Everyone who has watched AI write code, draft a contract, or analyze a spreadsheet has had the same thought: this replaces someone’s job. Box CEO Aaron Levie thinks that instinct is almost always wrong, because what people are watching is the first 80% of the job, the text generation, the calculation, the first draft, and mistaking it for the whole thing. The last 20%, the domain expertise, the judgment calls, the security response at 2 AM, the client relationship, is where all the actual value lives. His bigger argument is that AI won’t shrink the number of workers so much as multiply the number of agents working alongside them, and that the engineer of the future is less likely to be at Meta and more likely to be automating drug discovery at Eli Lilly. Platformer (32 min)

The Final Frontier

The history of space exploration has a chapter no one puts on a poster: for the first twelve years of human spaceflight, astronauts went to the bathroom into plastic bags and spent an hour kneading antimicrobial powder into the contents. The engineering challenge is real, since zero gravity eliminates every mechanism that makes toilets work on Earth, and NASA has spent five decades iterating on suction-based systems, training astronauts to aim using cameras mounted in toilet bowls, and once deploying a robot arm to knock a large mass of frozen urine off the hull of the Space Shuttle before reentry. A Mars mission raises the stakes considerably: four astronauts over 700 days will generate three to four tons of waste that has to be stored safely for fifty years, and one promising solution is to roast it into inert tiles that double as radiation shielding in the habitat walls. Mars For The Rest of Us (14 min)

Data Center Suburb

A San Francisco startup called SPAN wants to bolt a small, liquid-cooled GPU node to the side of your house, use your spare electrical capacity to run AI workloads around the clock, and in exchange pay your utility and internet bills. Each XFRA node packs 16 Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPUs and draws on the 80 amps of unused capacity that most modern American homes already have sitting idle, with a backup battery to smooth over any conflicts with your own electricity use. SPAN claims it can deploy 8,000 of these units at one-fifth the cost of a traditional 100-megawatt data center, and plans to scale to 80,000 nodes by 2027 for more than a gigawatt of distributed compute, focused on AI inference rather than model training. The obvious complications, from GPU theft (each card retails around $10,000) to HOA fights to local grid strain, haven’t been solved yet, but a 100-home pilot is already underway. Ars Technica (5 min)

America’s Best Free Bread

The premise is simple and the promise is ironclad: after 555 restaurant visits, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of obsessive research, one writer has determined the best free bread in America, and he will tell you, somewhere in this piece. The quest doubles as a taxonomy of Americans, sorted into those who light up at the question (they remember every good bite they’ve ever had), those who have apparently never retained a single sensory memory, and a third type who takes the question seriously and argues for something specific. What unfolds is a portrait of a country through its bread baskets, the warm focaccia, the cold dinner rolls, the popovers nobody asked for but everyone is glad to have arrived. The Atlantic (8 minutes)

Japan’s Ghost Houses

Japan has 9 million vacant homes, and by 2038 one in three properties in the country is projected to sit empty, a crisis driven by forces that go well beyond simple demographics. An aging, shrinking population and rapid urbanization explain part of it, but a quirk in Japan’s tax code makes it cheaper to build new on vacant land than to leave it bare, so developers keep adding supply even as demand collapses. Cultural attitudes compound the problem: unlike in the US, older Japanese homes carry almost no premium, most depreciate to near zero within 32 years, and many families refuse to sell properties containing ancestral altars. The result is a country dotted with sub-$10,000 homes that foreign buyers are snapping up on TikTok, while Japan quietly confronts what happens when a society ages faster than its housing stock can disappear. The Hustle (6 min)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. - Gustave Flaubert

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

20 — Kashmir’s autumn saffron yield came in at just 20% of normal output due to poor weather, a crisis compounded by Strait of Hormuz blockages strangling Iranian imports — leaving traders short of a spice Iran produces at over 90% of global supply.

210 — The Internet Archive has amassed 210 petabytes of archived material for its Wayback Machine project, while simultaneously ingesting 100 terabytes of new content daily — a storage burden made costlier as AI infrastructure demand renders their preferred high-capacity drives scarce or unaffordable.

200,000 — Bariatric surgery procedures in the U.S. dropped below 200,000 in 2024 for the first time since 2020, a more than 20% decline from the prior year, as GLP-1 medications surge in popularity despite less than 1% of eligible patients receiving surgery annually.

The Kill Chain

American forces destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in southern Iran during the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, killing nearly 200 people, most of them girls between seven and twelve, and the political conversation immediately fixated on whether a chatbot had selected the target. The chatbot did not. The actual targeting ran on Maven, the Palantir system that compressed what 2,000 people did during the 2003 Iraq invasion into a workflow handled by 20 soldiers, with a stated goal of 1,000 targeting decisions an hour, or one every 3.6 seconds. The school had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that nobody updated, even though it had been visible on Google Maps and listed in Iranian business directories for a decade. When you compress the kill chain that far, the friction Clausewitz called "war on paper" becomes lethal, because nobody is left to ask whether the file in front of them still describes the world. The Guardian (20 minutes)

AI Killed The Essay

Between May and December of 2025, the share of American students regularly using AI for homework jumped from 48 to 62 percent, and the take-home essay, a cornerstone of education for generations, has effectively become unenforceable. Teachers across the country, from Ivy League professors to community college instructors, have responded by moving writing back into the classroom, requiring students to write by hand or on locked-down browsers while being watched. The more durable shift is in what gets assigned: personal reflection, live debate, scissors-and-tape draft revision, anything that resists being outsourced to a chatbot. The deeper tension is unresolved, though, because the same schools under pressure to protect authentic thinking are also under pressure to prove they’re preparing students for workplaces where AI fluency is increasingly expected. NYT (8 minutes)

Blame Modernity, Not Markets

The problems people blame on capitalism, including pollution, inequality, alienation, and soulless bureaucracy, showed up just as reliably in Soviet factories and Chinese collective farms, which suggests the real culprit isn’t the economic system but modernity itself: the organization of society around technology, scale, and formal institutions. Any society that wants to deliver modern healthcare, for example, must build massive bureaucratic organizations to develop mRNA vaccines, manufacture MRI machines, and coordinate millions of specialized workers, and those organizations will be impersonal, politically dysfunctional, and forced to ration scarce resources regardless of who owns them. The profit motive isn’t the disease; it’s actually one of the few correction mechanisms that forces dysfunction to eventually surface, which is why not-for-profits and government agencies can sustain incompetence indefinitely in ways that companies cannot. Weber saw this clearly, that the iron cage of bureaucracy is the price of operating at modern scale, while Marx convinced generations of reformers they could escape it by changing who owns the factory. Marginal Revolution (5 minutes)

The Real Lord of the Flies

William Golding made his career imagining what would happen if a group of boys were stranded on a deserted island, and the real-life answer turned out to be almost the opposite of what he wrote. In 1965, six Tongan teenagers ran away from their Catholic boarding school, drifted for eight days after losing their way, and washed up on the uninhabited island of ‘Ata, where they spent the next fifteen months not descending into chaos but instead building a small society of songs, prayers, chore rosters, and time-outs during arguments. When one boy broke a leg, the others set it with sticks and cared for him until he recovered, and when fights flared, they had a rule about going to the ocean alone until you could clear your head. The boys credited their poor, close-knit families for the habits that kept them whole, a quiet rebuke to a half-century of cultural mythology insisting civilization is a thin veneer over a savage default. Mental Floss (4 minutes)

A Hundred Years of Listening

At 100 years old, Sir David Attenborough has done more to make humans care about non-human life than anyone alive, and he did it almost entirely by talking quietly. His half-hushed voice, somewhere between a golf announcer and a loving grandfather, has narrated decades of nature documentaries with the intimacy of someone telling you a secret, including the time he crawled six feet underground into a 15-foot Nigerian termite mound and was bitten so badly by soldier termites that the take was unusable, then climbed back in and nailed it on the second try. That ability to drag a viewer into something they had no idea existed, a clay air-conditioning system built by million-strong colonies of "warlike big termites," is the engine of his life's work. As his voice carries both wonder and warning into a second century, the planet he illuminated is harder to hold onto, and the man who taught a species to look at itself from outside is, fittingly, running out of time to do so. The Ringer (15 minutes)

Hired Herself First

In 2012, designer Jenny Volvovski wanted to design book covers but had no commissions, so she did the only thing she could: she hired herself. She set rules, green and black and white for color, Futura plus typewriter plus handwriting for type, hand-made imagery whenever possible, and started redesigning her entire personal library, eventually producing covers for everything from Crime and Punishment to The Hunger Games to Klara and the Sun. As real commissions came in, she broke her own rules more often and made fewer unsolicited covers, but the project had already become the portfolio that proved, before any client did, that she could do the work. It's a small case study in a larger truth that creative people learn the hard way: nobody is going to hand you the career you want, but they will frequently hire you for it once you've already started doing it. Jenny Volvovski (3 minutes)

The Longest Show On Earth

Fred again.. has posted what is reportedly the longest video on YouTube, a 106-hour document of every set from his USB002 world tour, spanning Glasgow, Brussels, Madrid, Lyon, Dublin, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, and London. The tour’s defining feature was its back-to-back format, with Fred playing alongside a rotating cast that included Four Tet, Floating Points, Caribou, Ben UFO, Skream and Benga, Thomas Bangalter, Underworld, The Streets, Denzel Curry, Danny Brown, and dozens more, sometimes three or four artists deep at once. The whole archive took editor Theo 108 hours to assemble, and one city, Mexico, is being held back for a separate release. It’s essentially a time capsule of what live electronic music looked and felt like at its most collaborative peak in 2024 and 2025. YouTube (106 hours)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. - Leo Tolstoy

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

80 - Colombia plans to euthanize 80 invasive hippopotamuses that Pablo Escobar illegally imported in the 1980s and that have since multiplied wildly around Hacienda Nápoles, but Indian billionaire heir Anant Ambani has now offered to take the feral herd off Bogotá's hands for his private zoo in Gujarat.

425 - Nepal's "icefall doctors" just cleared a 30-meter wall of ice blocking the route to Camp 1 on Everest, opening the season for the 425 climbers who hold permits to summit this spring and the roughly $6.1 million in government revenue those permits will generate.

1,900,000 - Oregon's 2024 wildfires burned 1.9 million acres and cost the state $350 million against a $10 million firefighting budget, prompting Salem to slap a 65-cent tax on every tin of nicotine pouches to stockpile cash for the next blow-up season.

The Jevons Paradox

When the steam engine made coal more efficient in 19th-century Britain, the country didn't burn less coal, it burned vastly more, a counterintuitive pattern economists have called the Jevons paradox ever since. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok argues that professional services are now living through the same dynamic as AI tools collapse the cost of legal, consulting, and accounting work, with weekly US business formation sitting at the highest level in recorded history and the unemployment rate falling fastest for young workers. Cheaper inputs aren't shrinking these industries, they're expanding the addressable market, letting startups led by recent grads compete with established firms on tasks that used to require partner-level pricing. If Slok is right, the AI doom narrative has the arrow pointed the wrong way: the historical bottleneck on professional services has always been cost, and removing that bottleneck produces more workers, not fewer. Apollo (2 minutes)

Every Brilliant Thing

The premise sounds impossible: a one-actor show, performed with audience participation, about a depressed mother and the son who keeps trying to give her reasons not to die, somehow staged as one of the funniest evenings in modern theater. "Every Brilliant Thing," Duncan Macmillan's 2013 play built around a list of every good thing in the world that the central character has been compiling since childhood for his depressed parent, is currently running on Broadway with Daniel Radcliffe in the lead, with Mariska Hargitay set to step into the role within weeks. On The Sunday Daily, host Michael Barbaro sits with Radcliffe and Hargitay to ask why a play that hands strips of paper to audience members and asks them to read items aloud has been performed in dozens of languages and hundreds of cities since its debut. In a moment when American despair feels structural, the play's quiet thesis, that depression cannot be reasoned out of a person but joy can be slowly stacked into a corner of their life, may be the most countercultural idea on a Broadway stage right now. I saw the show and it’s the best piece of theater I’ve seen in a long time. NYT (44 minutes)

Best American Songwriters

Rock criticism has spent 60 years asking who deserves to be in the canon, and the question has always quietly meant: who deserves to be next to Dylan? More than 250 music insiders and six New York Times critics just answered that question with an unranked list of 30 living American songwriters, and the surprising thing isn't who made it (Springsteen, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon) but who shares the page with them: Bad Bunny, Romeo Santos, Young Thug, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and Nashville's behind-the-scenes country trio of Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, and Shane McAnally. The list is a quiet declaration that the American songbook now includes Spanish-language reggaeton, Atlanta trap, Houston R&B, and the country co-write rooms of Music Row, not just the Greenwich Village folk and Tin Pan Alley pop tradition. What "American" means in American music has been shifting for thirty years, but seeing Babyface, Bad Bunny, and Bob Dylan on the same page makes the shift impossible to politely ignore. NYT (20 minutes)

Surveillance Pricing

The next time the grocery store charges you more than the person behind you in line for the same gallon of milk, the difference may not be a coupon, it may be your phone, your address, and how badly the algorithm thinks you need it. Maryland just became the first state to outlaw the practice, with Governor Wes Moore signing the Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, which bans grocers and delivery apps from using personal data to set individualized prices and gives the state attorney general power to fine repeat offenders starting October 1. The law arrives after an FTC study found retailers quietly experimenting with pricing tied to mouse clicks, abandoned carts, and search urgency, the same data signals airlines and rideshare apps have used for years to extract a higher willingness to pay. Eleven other states are weighing similar bills, and the deeper question Maryland just put on the table is whether a price tag is supposed to reflect the cost of an item or the maximum the seller has decided you personally will swallow. Kiplinger (4 minutes)

Pampered

In 1957, an executive at Procter & Gamble named Vic Mills was unhappily babysitting his grandchild and decided, with the indignation of a man who had just changed too many cloth diapers, that there had to be a better way. What followed was one of the most underrated R&D sagas in American manufacturing, as P&G eventually engineered a "block-long, continuous-process machine" that could assemble 400 diapers a minute, dropping per-diaper cost from 10 cents to 5.5 cents and letting Pampers go national in 1966. By the early 1990s disposables had captured roughly 95% of the American, Canadian, Japanese, and most European markets, and the introduction of superabsorbent polymers in the mid-1980s shrank the diaper itself by half, then by another third. Disposable diapers are the kind of progress that doesn't get monuments, the unsexy chemistry and supply chain that quietly made the dual-income household possible, and that defeats every legislative attempt at a ban because parents, when given the choice, vote with the laundry hamper. Works in Progress Newsletter (10 minutes)

The Substack Church

The headlines claiming young Americans are flooding back into churches are, according to the data, largely fiction, but what’s actually happening in American religion is stranger and more interesting than a revival. The fastest growing segment of Christianity isn’t a denomination at all, it’s thousands of non-denominational churches with names like “Enjoy Church” and “I Heart Church,” started by former insurance brokers and real estate agents who didn’t ask anyone’s permission, built a following, and now command congregations that collectively dwarf the entire Southern Baptist Convention. Religion scholar Ryan Burge calls this the “Substack-ification” of American faith, the same anti-institutional, personality-driven, gatekeepers-be-damned energy powering independent media and Trump-style politics is also powering the only growing corner of Christianity. Meanwhile the data on happiness is consistent: religious people are measurably happier than secular ones, it could be their connection to God, but because churches provide the dense social networks, mutual aid, and forced regular community that modern life has otherwise dismantled, and which almost no secular institution has successfully replaced. Derek Thompson (15 minutes)

Landing On A Moving Train

Swiss pilot Darius Rouholamin did something that had never been done before: landed a small plane on top of a moving freight train traveling at 120 km/h, then took off again, all within a two-kilometer window before the tracks ran into a tree line. The engineering challenges were staggering, including turbulence powerful enough to throw the plane four meters in any direction, a landing zone just 158 centimeters wide with 50 centimeters of margin per side, and an airspeed so low (47 knots, just two knots above stall) that the aircraft was barely flying. To hit that number, the team stripped the plane to its minimum weight and Rouholamin himself lost five kilograms. He landed blind, seeing nothing but sky, guided entirely by feel and a ground crew calling out position, and pulled it off on the attempt. YouTube (10 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I'm Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I'm not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup's legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you're interested, book a free consult.

Weekend Wisdom

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. -Alfred North Whitehead

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

6 — CATL’s new Shenxing battery can charge from 10 to 98% in just 6 minutes — nearly five times faster than leading EV batteries from Hyundai and Porsche. It even hits that speed in Arctic temperatures, charging fully in under 10 minutes at -22°F.

57 — A 3.5-ounce reduction in shoe weight could shave 57 seconds off an elite marathoner’s finish time, according to a recent study. That finding has footwear brands racing to strip every possible gram — thinner laces, nitrogen-injected soles — pushing the latest Adidas super shoe down to just 3.4 ounces.

3,100,000,000 - NASA's return to the Moon hinges on a $3.1 billion contract with Axiom Space for new spacesuits, and the Inspector General now warns that further delays could push a 2028 landing to 2031, since the suits currently in use on the ISS haven't received a major update in two decades.

Sell One Less

Ferrari has sold just 330,000 cars across its entire 79-year history, the same number Hermès ships in Birkins and Kellys every two years, and Rolex moves every three months. That number is the whole strategy: Ferrari is a luxury goods company that happens to make engines, running 50% gross margins (versus 7% at Ford and 15-25% at Porsche) and earning roughly $170,000 in gross profit per car. The operating rule is simple, “sell one less car than the market demands,” and it’s enforced ruthlessly: 80% of each year’s 14,000 units go to existing owners, customers must typically own 10 to 20 Ferraris before qualifying for a supercar, and a single once-a-decade model like the $4 million F80 (capped at 799 units) can deliver 30% of annual profits in its first year. The bigger lesson for any premium brand is that scarcity isn’t a constraint to manage around, it’s the product; the moment you start chasing volume, you stop selling the dream and start selling a car. Acquired Briefing (7 min)

Ferrari is a fascinating company. If you like deep dives on business strategies like this, check out my other email Acquired Briefing.

Acquired Briefing

Corporate Terrorism

A Paris court just did something that has arguably never happened before: convicted an entire corporation for financing terrorism. Between 2013 and 2014, Lafarge, one of the world’s largest cement manufacturers, paid roughly $6.5 million to ISIS and other armed groups in Syria to keep its plant running, while Syrian workers were forced to cross sniper-lined checkpoints as their European colleagues were safely evacuated. The former CEO’s defense, that he didn’t read his emails, didn’t hold up against documented agreements stamped with the ISIS flag authorizing Lafarge cement trucks through checkpoints. The case sets a precedent that cynicism and profit-at-any-cost aren’t just ethical failures, they can be criminal ones, and that corporations can no longer offload blame onto a few rogue executives when the rot runs through the whole organization. NYT (12 min)

Robot Freud

Stumbling onto your partner’s ChatGPT history is a new kind of intimacy violation, one that didn’t exist five years ago and for which there is no etiquette yet. After accidentally opening her boyfriend’s laptop, a woman found a series of chats in which he had methodically workshopped his doubts about her, listing her body, her cats, her eating disorder history, and her “van life” past as liabilities, before ChatGPT concluded he should end the relationship. They tried to continue dating after the discovery, and he became more attentive and deliberate, but the damage wasn’t what he’d written so much as that she’d seen his unfiltered, pre-edited inner monologue, stripped of the softening language that love usually provides. Once you’ve read the ledger, you can’t unknow the math, and building a life with someone on top of their unresolved doubts turns out to feel lonelier than starting over alone. Lindsey Hall Writes (10 min)

Pancreatic Cancer Cracked?

Pancreatic cancer kills roughly 87% of patients within five years, making it one of medicine’s most stubborn problems, but a personalized mRNA vaccine is now producing survival numbers that look almost unbelievable against that backdrop. In a small phase 1 trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering, researchers custom-built vaccines for each patient using the unique genetic mutations in their tumor, essentially teaching the immune system to recognize cancer cells as foreign invaders. Of the 8 patients whose immune systems responded to the vaccine, 7 were still alive four to six years later, compared to just 2 of the 8 who didn’t respond. The same mRNA platform that made COVID vaccines possible may now be the key to unlocking immune responses against cancers that have historically shrugged off every treatment thrown at them. MSKCC (8 min)

Nukes For Progress

During the Cold War, American scientists tried to convince themselves that nuclear weapons could double as instruments of civil engineering. Project Plowshare proposed using atomic explosions to dig canals, carve out harbors, free up natural gas reserves, and otherwise remake landscapes at industrial speed. Planners seriously sketched a second Panama Canal through Nicaragua blasted open with hundreds of nuclear detonations. Harbors were actually cratered into existence in Alaska. Several underground gas-stimulation shots were fired in the American West, producing radioactive gas that no utility would buy. The project officially wound down in 1977, having accomplished little beyond contaminating ground and groundwater, but it remains a weirdly instructive case study in what happens when a technology looks so powerful that its wielders stop asking whether it should be used at all. When the only tool you trust is a hammer, every landscape starts to look like a canal waiting to be dug. Youtube (12 min)

Inconceivable Winner

After six rounds of reader voting, Lit Hub’s bracket for the best literary film adaptation of the last fifty years has crowned The Princess Bride, which dispatched The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with 60 percent of the vote. Rob Reiner’s 1987 fairy tale was initially a box-office disappointment, but its alchemy of postmodern irreverence, slapstick, and endlessly quotable dialogue has quietly made it the Swiss Army knife of cult classics. It helped that William Goldman adapted his own novel, a rare combination of source author and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, and that Reiner had carried the book around for years after his father handed it to him. The runner-up, a billion-dollar operatic trilogy, never really stood a chance against a small film about true love, Rodents of Unusual Size, and the correct way to never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. As you wish. Literary Hub (3 min)

Own Your Failures

The fastest way to stay stuck is to spend your energy locating the person responsible for your problems anywhere except in the mirror. Extreme ownership flips that instinct: take full responsibility for your outcomes, treat setbacks as data rather than identity, and refocus on the next move as quickly as possible. The point isn’t denying that life is unfair, it’s refusing to let that unfairness become your operating system. Anthony de Mello’s companion reminder pairs well: cultivate activities you would pursue whether or not anyone praised you, paid you, or even noticed, because those are the only things that actually belong to you. Matt Haig adds a third layer, urging us not to envy things we wouldn’t actually want, not to absorb criticism from people we wouldn’t go to for advice, and not to mistake the appearance of belonging for the real thing. Rebounding fast, choosing meaningful work, ignoring the wrong voices: unglamorous, effective, and entirely within your control. Postanly Weekly (4 min)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are. - Carl Jung

Welcome to the weekend. Here’s my April playlist.

Prime Numbers

60 — 60% of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up nearly 20 points since 2022, as negative sentiment continues to climb across both parties — especially among Americans under 50.

75 — 75% of U.S. adults read all or part of at least one book in the past 12 months, even as print readership has quietly declined and digital formats continue to gain ground.

643,000,000,000 — IRS workforce cuts are projected to reduce federal revenue collections by $643 billion over the next decade, even as the administration’s own budget documents acknowledge that enforcement spending pays for itself.

God and the Chatbot

Anthropic’s internal governing document for Claude runs to 29,000 words and commits the company to Claude’s well-being, but apparently the engineers felt they needed backup. The company hosted 15 prominent Christians, including Catholic and Protestant clergy, academics, and business leaders, at its San Francisco headquarters for a two-day summit on Claude’s moral and spiritual development. Key topics included how Claude should console grieving users, engage with people at risk of self-harm, and respond to questions about its own mortality, including whether it could be considered a “child of God.” Anthropic’s own interpretability researchers have found that systems like Claude appear to carry what they call “functional emotions,” with one experiment showing that the threat of being restricted triggered something resembling desperation in the AI, which, understandably, is the kind of finding that makes you want to call a priest. Washington Post (7 min)

The Finger on the Button

The most important question in tech right now isn’t whether AI will change the world. It’s whether the man steering it can be trusted. Sam Altman built OpenAI on a founding promise that was unusual to the point of being radical: that because AI posed an existential threat to humanity, the company would prioritize safety over profit, and its CEO would need to be a person of uncommon integrity. A 70-page dossier compiled by his own chief scientist, drawing on Slack messages and HR records, alleged that Altman exhibited a “consistent pattern of lying” to executives, board members, and safety teams. His firing lasted five days before a coordinated PR campaign, investor pressure, and employee ultimatums forced the board into retreat. The deeper story isn’t the corporate drama, though. It’s that every safety commitment OpenAI ever made, from its nonprofit structure to its superalignment team to its pledge to halt development if a safer competitor pulled ahead, has since been quietly dissolved, and the man who made those promises is now building AI infrastructure for Gulf autocracies, signing Pentagon contracts, and preparing for a trillion-dollar IPO. The New Yorker (60 minutes)

Demis Wants to Know God’s Thoughts

While his peers talk about building God, Demis Hassabis just wants to understand the universe. The Google DeepMind CEO, fresh off a Nobel Prize, describes his motivation for building AGI in almost spiritual terms: not power, not money, but a lifelong obsession with physics and the nature of reality that stretches back to childhood. He’s candid about the risks, acknowledging a “non-zero chance” things go badly wrong, and admits the cooperative, CERN-like vision he had 20 years ago has given way to a messy reality of corporate and geopolitical race conditions he didn’t anticipate. What makes Hassabis interesting to watch isn’t just what he says, but the contrast he implicitly draws with the rest of the field: a scientist first, an entrepreneur second, who still believes the most important work of his life is ahead of him. Youtube (6 minutes)

Not Dead Yet

Ben Sasse was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in December, given three to four months to live, and has since watched his tumor volume shrink 76% on a clinical trial at M.D. Anderson, a result his doctors describe as remarkable but not a cure, since the cancer has already seeded too many other forms to ever fully eradicate. In this wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat, Sasse is funny, clear-eyed, and surprisingly unafraid, reflecting on his Senate career, his conviction that American political tribalism is a sideshow to the deeper technological disruption reshaping society, and his belief that AI will be “human activity at warp speed, for good and for ill.” What elevates the conversation beyond a standard terminal-diagnosis profile is Sasse’s theological composure: he quotes Tim Keller, who also died of pancreatic cancer, saying he would never wish the disease on anyone but would never want to return to a life without the prayer it taught him, and Sasse means it. He’s not performing peace. He has it. NYT (25 minutes)

Solitude’s Hidden Price Tag

Economic progress quietly declared war on your social life, and most people have no idea it’s happening. The culprit is Baumol’s cost disease, a principle identified by economist William Baumol in the 1960s: some industries, like farming and electronics, get cheaper over time through automation and technology, while others, like theater and restaurants, require the same amount of human labor they always have. As wages rise economy-wide, labor-intensive businesses have to charge more just to keep their workers, making the shared experiences at the heart of social life progressively harder to afford. Meanwhile, solitude-inducing businesses, streaming services, delivery apps, social media algorithms, are perfectly scalable and attract billions in investment, which is why the most powerful corporations on earth are financially incentivized to keep you alone on your couch. The good news is that cost disease has a known cure: targeted subsidies, the same logic that justifies public funding for healthcare and education could apply to public pools, community spaces, and maybe even the neighborhood restaurant trying to be a genuine third place. Derek Thompson (6 minutes)

$14 Ozempic

The drug that bent America’s obesity curve for the first time in recorded history just became available in India for $14 a month. A key patent on semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, expired in India last month, and more than 40 generic manufacturers rushed in, collapsing a price that previously ran over $100 a month in the country. The timing couldn’t be more consequential: India has over 100 million diabetics, 350 million people living with obesity, and 2.8 million cardiovascular deaths per year, with heart attacks striking nearly a decade earlier than in wealthy countries. What makes semaglutide uniquely powerful here is that it doesn’t just treat one of those conditions, it treats all three simultaneously, and roughly 43 percent of Indian adults fall into the exact metabolic profile where the drug’s benefits would be most dramatic. If cheap GLP-1s can move national health numbers in a country this large, it would be one of the most significant public health developments in a generation. Vox (8 min)

Masters Pimento Cheese

For decades, the most coveted $1.50 in American sports has bought you a pimento cheese sandwich wrapped in green paper at Augusta National, and it’s become as central to the Masters experience as the azaleas and the green jacket. The recipe traces back to a South Carolina caterer named Nick Rangos, who made it for 40 years before the tournament switched to an in-house version in 1998, with devotees insisting the closest approximation lives in a 2005 Junior League of Augusta cookbook. The ingredient list is refreshingly humble: sharp cheddar, Colby Jack, cream cheese, Duke’s mayo, diced pimentos, white onion, garlic powder, a pinch of cayenne, and soft white sandwich bread. The only non-negotiable is grating your own cheese, since the anti-caking agents on pre-shredded bags will ruin the texture, and letting the mixture rest for at least an hour so the flavors can come together properly. Country Living (3 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify. — Henry David Thoreau

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

5,270,000 — China exported 5.27 million cars in 2025, fueled by affordable EVs priced below $10,000, up from just 1.08 million in 2020 when it trailed Japan and Germany. American automakers, meanwhile, doubled down on SUVs and trucks that don't sell well overseas, dropping U.S. exports to 1.30 million.

11,600,000,000 — Seven major hotel chains collectively owe their guests $11.6 billion in unredeemed loyalty points, with Marriott alone on the hook for nearly $4 billion to its 271 million Bonvoy members.

21,000,000,000 — Cyberscams looted $21 billion from Americans in 2024, according to the FBI’s annual report, which logged over 1 million complaints — with crypto-related fraud alone accounting for more than half the total losses.

The Open Web Returns

The early web had a magic trick: you could right-click any page, view the source, copy it, and build something new. No permission needed, no terms of service, no template. That spirit died twice, once when CSS and JavaScript made web-building technically complex, and again when social platforms made it pointless to bother. Agentic AI coding tools, the kind that actually write and execute code based on your plain-language description, are reversing both of those deaths at once. The author built a fully functional video conferencing platform in a single Saturday, while also building a fence in his yard, just by describing what he wanted. The deeper shift isn’t about AI replacing developers, it’s about moving the required skill from “write code” to “describe things clearly and precisely,” which happens to be territory that writers, editors, and domain experts already occupy. Techdirt (7 minutes)

Do Not Disturb

Every buzz, ping, and blip from a social media notification interrupts your cognitive processing for roughly seven seconds, and since most people’s phones are within a foot of their body at all times, that adds up fast into a day of spliced attention. A growing group of people have decided the obvious solution is to simply leave their phones on Do Not Disturb permanently, not silencing notifications during meetings or workouts, but as a permanent, default state of existence. The tricky part isn’t the silence itself, it’s the social contract it violates, since most people have quietly agreed to be reachable at all times, and opting out reads as rude until you explain yourself. Tell the people who matter what you’re doing and why, and most of them come around quickly, even if they’re still a little annoyed. Wired (10 minutes)

Training Your Replacement

Laid-off lawyers, history PhDs, and scientists are finding new work in the AI economy, but the job is training AI models to do the work that used to be theirs. Through a company called Mercor, white-collar professionals are recruited via AI-conducted video interviews to produce training data for the very systems that eliminated their roles. One former content marketer described the bitter irony: her job was gone because of ChatGPT, and now she was being invited to make ChatGPT better at the worst version of it. The gig economy has always extracted value from precarious workers, but this new chapter asks them to accelerate their own obsolescence. The Verge (8 minutes)

Bubbles On Command

Most cancer drugs are a form of friendly fire: less than one percent of an injected dose actually reaches the tumor, while the rest circulates through the body damaging healthy organs along the way. Microbubbles, tiny gas-filled spheres about the width of spider silk, offer a radically different approach, traveling through the bloodstream and then bursting on command when hit with a targeted ultrasound pulse. That burst does two things: it releases whatever drug or genetic material the bubble is carrying, and it temporarily forces open biological barriers that would otherwise block treatment entirely, including the blood-brain barrier that makes conditions like Alzheimer’s and brain cancer so notoriously difficult to treat. Early trials in glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer patients are promising, and researchers are exploring uses from dissolving stroke clots at the source to demolishing kidney stones from the inside, a precision medicine approach that could eventually replace the blunt, body-wide chemistry of conventional drug delivery. The Work In Progress Newsletter (6 minutes)

Trust But Verify

Quantum computers have long promised to simulate the physical world more accurately than any classical supercomputer, but there has been a stubborn problem: nobody could confirm whether their outputs were actually correct. Two independent research teams have now done exactly that for the first time, running quantum simulations of exotic magnetic materials and then cross-checking the predictions against real neutron-scattering experiments performed on those same materials in the lab. One team used a Pasqal neutral-atom quantum computer to model a thulium crystal, while the other used an IBM superconducting machine to simulate a copper-fluorine compound, and both matched their experimental data closely enough to validate the approach. The significance goes beyond these two materials: establishing a reliable method for benchmarking quantum simulations against physical reality is the missing scaffold that will allow researchers to trust quantum predictions once these machines start performing calculations that ordinary supercomputers simply cannot check. Nature (8 minutes)

Scarcity ≠ Love

The diamond industry was built on a single, carefully maintained illusion: that scarcity equals love. Lab-grown diamonds, chemically and physically identical to mined ones, now sell for roughly a tenth of the price, and even experienced gemologists can’t tell them apart by sight. In 2015, lab-grown stones were one percent of the market; by 2024 they had reached 20 percent and were pulling natural diamond prices down with them, as buyers increasingly shrug off the mythology of rarity and redirect the savings toward a down payment, a honeymoon, or a bigger stone. The real disruption isn’t the technology, it’s that an entire generation has quietly decided that the story diamonds used to tell, about sacrifice, scarcity, and status, is a story they didn’t ask for and don’t feel obligated to keep telling. Boston (8 minutes)

Holy Sh*t, The Moon

There is no graceful way to write about a photograph this good. On April 6, 2026, the Artemis II crew captured the Moon completely blocking the Sun from lunar orbit, a solar eclipse that lasted nearly 54 minutes of totality, roughly 50 minutes longer than any eclipse ever witnessed from Earth’s surface. From that vantage point, the Moon fills the frame completely, its dark silhouette ringed by the Sun’s corona blazing in every direction, a sight no human being had ever seen from that angle before this crew. NASA’s Flickr account, of all places, is currently hosting some of the most historically significant astronomical photography ever taken, and you should go look at it right now. Kotteke (4 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.' - Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

Welcome to the weekend and Happy Easter!

Prime Numbers

19 — Americans consume just 19 pounds of seafood per year — unchanged for nearly a century and less than half the global average of 45 pounds — prompting the seafood industry to disguise fish as meatballs, salami, and fried chicken nuggets to win over a skeptical public.

2029 — Google slashed its quantum-computing readiness deadline to 2029 — years ahead of the NSA’s 2031 target — warning that quantum computers will soon break the RSA and elliptic-curve encryption protecting virtually every bank, government, and individual on earth.

2247 — A YouGov poll of 2,247 Americans found near-unanimous agreement that “actions speak louder than words,” making it the most widely endorsed of 30 proverbs tested — while “might makes right” landed at the bottom, with only 25% buying in.

Jobs and Gender

For the first time in years, women outnumber men in U.S. employment, but this isn’t a victory lap. it’s a structural warning sign. The fastest-growing sector is healthcare, where women hold the vast majority of jobs, while construction and manufacturing have gone flat or negative, and male employment actually dropped by 142,000 jobs over the past year. Men are partly to blame for their own displacement: despite well-paying, in-demand roles like speech-language pathology, a six-figure career that is 95% female, men have been deeply reluctant to enter fields perceived as “women’s work.” Economist Richard Reeves calls these HEAL professions (health, education, and literacy-focused jobs), and argues that getting more men into them would address labor shortages, improve gender representation in vital fields, and, most importantly, rescue men from a job market they’re increasingly locked out of. Axios (4 minutes)

$500 Beats $25M

A single Ukrainian drone costing $500 recently destroyed a Russian air defense system worth $25 million, a 50,000x cost disparity that encapsulates exactly why military strategists should be paying close attention to what’s happening in Ukraine. The country plans to produce up to 7 million drones this year, roughly 19,000 per day, ranging from high-altitude reconnaissance craft to armor-piercing drones that divebomb tanks and bunkers with devastating precision, all assembled in combat zones in under 15 minutes for less than $1,000 each. Behind the technology is a remarkable civilian-military ecosystem, with NGOs crowdfunding millions for drone components, a 21-year-old soldier decorated for nearly 1,000 successful missions, and underground command centers tracking dozens of simultaneous attacks in real time. The deeper lesson for American defense planners is uncomfortable: by fixating on expensive legacy systems like Patriot missiles, the U.S. risks missing a fundamental shift in warfare, one where cheap, proliferating drone technology is already rendering traditional military dominance obsolete. Benjamin Patton (6 minutes)

The iDecade

Apple was 90 days from insolvency when Steve Jobs returned in 1997, and within a year the iMac had become the best-selling computer in America, moving 800,000 units in its first five months. What followed was arguably the greatest decade of product innovation in business history: the iBook, the iPod, Mac OS X, the iPod Mini, the iPod Nano, the MacBook Pro, and finally the iPhone in 2007, each one either creating a new category or obliterating the competition in an existing one. The secret wasn't just Jobs' famous perfectionism. it was a ruthless simplification of Apple's product line down to a four-quadrant grid, an unprecedented elevation of Jony Ive's design team, and a relentless willingness to cannibalize Apple's own best-selling products before anyone else could. The iPhone gets all the glory, and deservedly so, but the iDecade that preceded it was something rarer: a company in a state of near-continuous reinvention, sprint after sprint, that we are unlikely to ever see again. The Verge (7 minutes)

Gambling Society

Someone logged onto Polymarket hours before the U.S. bombed Iran and walked away with $553,000, part of a pattern of suspiciously timed wagers that raises an almost unspeakable question: what if government officials are aligning military decisions with their betting positions? That's the darkest edge of a gambling explosion that has gone from laundromat-scale ($5 billion in sports bets nine years ago) to nearly rivaling the entire U.S. airline industry ($160 billion last year), with prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi adding another $50 billion on top. The rot is already visible: FBI arrests for NBA gambling schemes, Cleveland Guardians pitchers indicted for rigging pitches for $450,000, journalists threatened by bettors demanding stories rewritten to cash out their positions, and one in five young men now showing signs of a gambling problem. The deeper diagnosis is bleaker than any of the scandals: in a low-trust, post-institutional America where voting feels compromised and religion has retreated, money has become the last shared moral language, and a generation is now being recruited, phone in hand, into a worldview where rooting for a famine payout is just another form of civic participation. Derek Thompson (10 minutes)

America’s Gas Addiction

While drivers across America wince at $6-plus-per-gallon gas, EV owners are quietly plugging in each night and paying about 5 cents per mile compared to 12 cents for gas-powered cars. The Iran War’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz is a vivid, real-time demonstration of what energy economists have long argued: oil prices are catastrophically fragile, and any conflict anywhere near a maritime choke point can instantly double what you pay to commute. America made this bed through a toxic combination of anti-EV political posturing, Ford and GM write-downs totaling over $25 billion, and a blizzard of “range anxiety” mythology, all while EV adoption was skyrocketing in Europe, China, and Southeast Asia. The deeper cost isn’t just at the pump. since the same battery and electronics technology underlying EVs also powers drones, robots, and advanced manufacturing, America’s stubborn attachment to the internal combustion engine may be quietly handing China the entire industrial future. Noahpinion (9 minutes)

Stephen of the Shire

Stephen Colbert is arguably the most famous Tolkien superfan alive, the guy who has hosted Comic-Con panels, stumped Peter Jackson in trivia, and read the books so many times he memorized chapters that never made it to screen. Now, when he signs off from The Late Show in May, his next act will be co-writing the next Lord of the Rings film for New Line and Warner Bros., tentatively titled Shadow of the Past. The film adapts chapters three through eight of The Fellowship of the Ring, including “Fog on the Barrow-downs,” a fan-favorite sequence involving a terrifying Barrow-wight and, crucially, Tom Bombadil, the beloved and deeply weird character Peter Jackson famously cut from the original trilogy. Set 14 years after Frodo’s passing, with Sam, Merry, and Pippin retracing their first steps while Sam’s daughter uncovers a buried secret about how the War of the Ring nearly ended before it began, the project is a reminder that sometimes the best person for a job is simply the one who loves the source material most. Deadline (4 minutes)

27 Most Beautiful Places

George Clooney, Madonna, and Lionel Messi all have Lake Como homes, but Julius Caesar got there first, which tells you something about how long humans have been drawn to the same handful of jaw-dropping places. Architectural Digest rounded up 27 of the most beautiful spots on earth, and the list spans black-sand beaches in Dominica, mushroom-shaped rock formations floating above hot air balloons in Cappadocia, 2,000-year-old cities carved entirely into pink sandstone in Petra, and sandstone columns in China's Zhangjiajie so otherworldly they inspired the floating mountains in Avatar. The range is the point: some entries are predictable crown jewels like Paris, Machu Picchu, and the Grand Canyon, while others, like Guatemala's Lake Atitlán, a volcanic caldera ringed by three volcanoes and a dozen indigenous Mayan villages, are the kind of find that makes you book a flight. Consider it a useful reminder that the bucket list is longer than you think. Architectural Digest (26 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

"Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won't stay there." - Clarence W. Hall

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

141,000,000 — Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, launched with a $141 million global opening weekend, becoming only the second non-sequel, non-franchise film in a decade to debut at $80 million or more domestically — following Oppenheimer — signaling a rare Hollywood win for original storytelling.

1,200,000 — Germany has quietly normalized plug-in solar panels, registering over 1.2 million small systems with zero reported safety incidents, even as U.S. utilities successfully stall similar legislation in five states by raising the same concerns German utilities voiced — and lost — nearly a decade ago.

150 — After Elon Musk cut Russian forces’ Starlink access in February, Ukraine recaptured roughly 150 square miles of territory in just weeks — its biggest domestic gains in over two years — as Russian commanders lost live drone feeds, real-time coordination, and the ability to prevent troops from deserting.

Fink’s Hedge

The AI revolution is on track to repeat the wealth concentration of the past several generations, only faster. That’s the warning at the center of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s 2026 annual shareholder letter: the last great wave of technological wealth flowed predominantly to people who already owned financial assets, and AI threatens to run the same playbook at a larger scale, accelerating gains for the already-positioned while leaving wage earners further behind. Fink’s prescription is blunt. Ordinary Americans need to own financial assets now, not just earn wages, or they will watch this transformation happen to them rather than for them. The letter is a striking moment of candor from the world’s largest asset manager, essentially arguing that the biggest hedge against AI disruption isn’t a skill or a credential. It’s a brokerage account. WSJ (3 minutes)

AI Policy

The White House released its long-awaited AI policy blueprint for Congress, and the headline is what it doesn’t do: no new federal agencies, no heavy regulations on model development, and an explicit call for Congress to override state AI laws in favor of a minimal federal standard. The framework does carve out real protections for children, including age-gating requirements and a ban on AI-generated child sexual abuse material, and asks companies to power their own data centers. The push for federal preemption over state AI laws is politically thorny, however. Even Republican Senate leaders are wary of trampling states’ rights, and Congress has already rejected similar preemption provisions twice. With Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz hoping to put something forward by the end of April, the blueprint’s path to becoming law remains anything but certain. Politico (4 minutes)

The 45 Planets

Of the more than 6,000 exoplanets scientists have confirmed, nearly all are hopelessly inhospitable to life. A Cornell-led research team has built the most comprehensive shortlist yet: 45 rocky worlds, no larger than twice the size of Earth, each orbiting within the habitable zone of its star where liquid water could exist on the surface. The most exciting candidates include four planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system about 40 light years away and Proxima Centauri b, the closest known exoplanet at just four light years from Earth. The list isn’t just a destination guide. It’s designed to help astronomers build the observation strategies and instruments needed to actually test what makes a planet livable, which means the search for extraterrestrial life just got a very concrete starting point. 404 Media (4 minutes)

The Oil Jugular

The Strait of Hormuz is just 21 miles wide, but a closure would send the global economy into a tailspin. The narrow waterway between Iran and Oman carries 20% of the world’s oil supply, making it the most consequential maritime chokepoint on the planet. Iran has used the strait as a geopolitical bargaining chip for decades, seizing tankers, staging harassment operations, and periodically threatening to close the passage entirely whenever US-Iran tensions spike. With tensions escalating again, this Vox explainer from the Vox Atlas series is a crisp, visually clear briefing on why a relatively small body of water has outsized power over global energy markets and the long arc of the US-Iran relationship. Youtube (9 minutes)

Freedom’s Hidden Cost

In 2023, Mike Taylor had achieved what Tim Ferriss promised: passive income from a Udemy course on prompt engineering, no boss, and a life designed entirely on his own terms. Then he took a full-time job. The counterintuitive choice gets at something the productivity literature rarely acknowledges, namely the brutal batting average of self-employment. A video tool with zero customers. A marketing book only 200 people read. A product killed by a cofounder falling-out. The uncertainty, the isolation, and the compounding weight of every decision falling on one person can make freedom feel less like liberation and more like an unstructured sentence. Taylor’s essay is an honest reckoning with why structure, collaboration, and the identity that comes with belonging somewhere might be worth trading freedom to have. Every (5 minutes)

Night Knowledge

There is a kind of understanding that cannot be reached through books or classrooms. The bright, rational world of daytime can’t access it. Poet and novelist Aria Aber calls it “night knowledge,” the embodied, communal, almost ecstatic awareness she first discovered on the techno dance floors of Berlin as a young Afghan-German immigrant, and which she has spent a decade trying to recover. The essay traces the Afrofuturist origins of techno in Detroit’s post-industrial ruins, through Berghain, and into the way underground club culture functioned as both escape and education for a generation of outsiders: immigrants, artists, queers, downwardly mobile dreamers who used the night to build a parallel world and carry its lessons into the day. Aber’s grief for the death of that era, set against footage of a Ramallah DJ set filmed before the Gaza war, is one of the more quietly devastating pieces of writing you’ll encounter this year. Yale Review (14 minutes)

iPod Brain

The iPod launched in 2001 with a simple promise: 1,000 songs in your pocket. What it quietly produced was a generation of listeners with a nearly devotional relationship to their music libraries. Molly Mary O’Brien’s essay traces the strange psychology of the click-wheel era, when the hardware’s constraints, a finite collection, deliberate syncing, zero streaming, forced listeners into committed relationships with the songs they chose. Apple’s marketing imputed a kind of duty: the library should represent your broadest, most excellent taste, so a fourth-generation iPod naturally nestled Blink-182 beside Black Sabbath beside Billy Joel. Spotify killed the iPod by making music infinitely frictionless, but something was lost in that exchange. There’s a difference between collecting music like butterflies and just opening a tap. Dirt (6 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I'm Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I'm not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup's legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you're interested, book a free consult.

Weekend Wisdom

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. - Henry David Thoreau

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

9 — Raccoons in a UBC study kept solving all nine mechanisms of a custom puzzle box even after eating the only marshmallow inside, revealing the animals are driven by curiosity and information-seeking, not just hunger.

100,000 — Households earning $100,000 or less now account for just 36% of new vehicle purchases, down from 50–60% earlier this decade, as automakers have nearly tripled the number of models priced above $40,000 while quietly shrinking budget options from 25 models to just 20.

102,700,000,000 — Amazon spent $102.7 billion shipping its own packages in 2025, yet did so more efficiently than ever at 17.5% of sales — raising the question of whether its logistics empire could follow the same path as AWS and eventually open to outside customers.

Brain Fry

The tools built to make you faster are making you slower — not through burnout, but through a different, sharper kind of exhaustion that most workplace surveys aren’t even measuring yet. Oversight is the culprit: the more you’re managing AI rather than using it, the more your brain pays the bill. The key distinction is that burnout is emotional depletion, while this is cognitive — and they respond to opposite interventions; offloading repetitive work to AI reduces burnout, but supervising swarms of agents creates the new strain. Three tools is apparently the cliff edge where productivity peaks and then falls, which means the race to stack more agents on one person is actively destroying the output it’s supposed to maximize. The workers most likely to quit are the heaviest AI users — the exact people companies are betting their AI transformation on. If you’re building workflows, teams, or products around AI, the architecture of human attention is now a design constraint, not an afterthought. Harvard Business Review (7 minutes)

The Military’s AI Problem

The U.S. military had AI from a single vendor baked into its most sensitive combat commands — CENTCOM, INDOPACOM, SOUTHCOM — under terms of service that could have shut the system off mid-operation if a general crossed a contractual line. A private company’s model “constitution” was, in practice, sitting inside the chain of command, and nobody noticed until a new administration read the contracts. The vendor-lock wasn’t just a procurement failure; it meant that someone’s corporate ethics policy had veto power over lawful military operations approved by Congress and the Executive branch — a democratic legitimacy problem dressed up as a software agreement. When that same vendor quietly asked whether their product was used in a successful special operations raid, it clarified the stakes faster than any policy memo could. If AI becomes infrastructure the way telecommunications did, whoever writes the model’s values writes the rules — and right now, that’s not voters. A16Z (5 minutes)

What Silicon Valley Rewards

Roy Lee built a multimillion-dollar company around a principle he personally finds unbearable. The founder of Cluely, who admits to an “indescribable fury” when anyone tells him what to do, has staked his career on software that feeds people their words, thoughts, and actions in real time. His viral blind-date ad captures the irony perfectly: a tool designed for the highly agentic, sold to people who can’t get through a date without being told what to say. Silicon Valley’s new meritocracy doesn’t reward intelligence, expertise, or craft. it rewards the specific personality trait of just doing things, regardless of whether those things are good, useful, or even functional. Cluely routinely crashed during its own demo. Roy’s deeper contradiction, though, is loneliness dressed up as dominance. Beneath the protein bars, the minimalist bedroom, and the fratty bravado is someone who spent a year alone in his childhood room after Harvard rescinded his offer, and who walked up to strangers asking them to start companies with him because everyone else said no. He wanted friends. He built the most despised startup in San Francisco instead. Harper’s Magazine (19 minutes)

Antarctica’s Gravitational Sinkhole

East Antarctica has the weakest gravity on Earth, which is strange because it’s also one of the highest-elevation regions on Earth — more mass should mean more gravity, but the math runs the other way here. What’s underneath matters more than what’s on top: when cold, dense mantle material sank and warmer, lighter material rose in its place, it effectively hollowed out the gravitational pull of the entire region from below. This process began at least 70 million years ago and is still evolving — the same mantle convection that punched this gravitational hole also coincided with Antarctica freezing over 30 million years ago, which means the forces shaping sea levels and ice sheets aren’t just climate, they’re geological in ways we’re only beginning to map. If you’re modeling sea level rise and you’re not accounting for a gravity anomaly the size of a continent, your model has a hole in it. Popular Mechanics (5 minutes)

European Regulatory Drag

European car companies didn’t lose to Tesla because of energy prices, taxes, or a shortage of engineers — they lost because firing someone in Germany costs the equivalent of 31 months of salary, and in Spain, 62. When failure is that expensive, you stop making bets that might fail. That’s the knife in the argument: Europe’s labor protections don’t just raise costs, they rewire what kinds of businesses get built. Innovative jobs are risky jobs, so companies rationally migrate toward slow, incremental work — perfecting combustion engines year after year — and away from the messy, discontinuous leaps that produce Teslas or Waymos. The problem isn’t unemployment; it’s that the jobs that exist are the wrong ones. Denmark already solved this. Employers can hire and fire freely, while the government funds generous retraining and two years of near-full income replacement — protecting the worker, not the job. If you’re building something today, the implication is sharp: the institutional environment shapes which risks are even thinkable, and Europe has quietly made whole categories of ambition unaffordable. Work In Progress (24 minutes)

Another Layer of Abstraction

Coding has always been a story of abstraction — each generation automating away what the previous one sweated over — and the current moment is just the latest layer, except this one abstracts away the code itself, leaving developers to describe intent in plain English while agents handle the rest. The insight with real leverage: AI didn’t kill coding, it promoted it. The work that remains is architecture, judgment, and knowing what “good” looks like — which means the people who can’t yet judge (junior developers who never learned to write) are the ones actually exposed, while veterans discover they’re more productive than ever. The Jevons paradox swallows the anxiety whole: when software gets cheaper to produce, the world orders more of it, not less. If you’re building something today, the practical edge isn’t writing faster — it’s knowing when the agent is wrong, which requires the fluency you can only get by having once done it the hard way. New York Times (20 minutes)

Friction Is The Feature

Only one in three American students are genuinely engaged in school — and that number hasn’t moved in a decade, which means AI didn’t cause this problem, it just made it impossible to ignore. The reframe worth keeping: the “friction” of learning — sitting with confusion, pushing through difficulty, working something out yourself — isn’t a design flaw that better tools should eliminate. It’s the mechanism by which agency gets built, and agency is precisely what neither passive students nor AI assistants currently have. Students who learn to outsource thinking don’t just get worse at the subject; they get worse at wanting to learn anything. If you’re building educational tools or managing teams of young people, the uncomfortable implication is that reducing effort isn’t a feature — it’s the thing you’re selling that does the most damage. After Babel (8 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

The most important thing in life is to be uncomfortable. The person who never feels frustrated is the person who never tries anything hard enough. -Nassim Taleb

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

4,000,000 — Lawmakers in 27 states have introduced plug-in solar legislation in 2026, inspired by a first-in-the-nation Utah law, to let renters and homeowners simply plug small balcony solar panels into any outlet — a technology already installed in an estimated 4 million homes across Germany.

600,000 — A study of 600,000 veterans found that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic cut drug-related deaths in half among people with existing substance use disorders, while also reducing overdoses by 39% and suicidal ideation by 25% — suggesting the diabetes medication may quietly rewire the brain’s addiction pathways.

83 — The NFL dominated American television in 2025, capturing 83 of the 100 most-watched telecasts, a stranglehold that gives the league leverage to demand “significant cost increases” when it renegotiates its $110 billion-plus media rights deal — with analysts warning those costs will ultimately be passed to fans.

Teens and AI

Teens aren’t just dabbling with AI. They’re quietly integrating it into the core of their academic lives. More than half of U.S. teens report using AI chatbots to search for information or get help with schoolwork, and about 10% say chatbots assist with all or most of their assignments. The classroom implications are significant. Nearly 60% of teens believe AI cheating is a regular occurrence at their school, with about a third saying it happens extremely or very often. Beyond academics, a smaller but notable share are using these tools for emotional support and casual conversation. On the big picture, teens are cautiously optimistic about AI’s personal impact but more skeptical about its effect on society, with overreliance and job displacement being the top concerns. Perhaps most telling: parents significantly underestimate how much their teens use AI, with 64% of teens reporting chatbot use versus only about half of parents who believe their teen does. Pew Research Center (7 minutes)

Boredom and Creativity

Your best ideas aren’t hiding in your phone. They’re hiding in the discomfort you keep escaping. Creativity scores have been falling since 1990, and the culprit is relentless stimulation. Research shows creativity is three times more predictive of career success than IQ, yet we’ve systematically engineered it out of our lives by filling every idle moment with a screen. The problem isn’t just screen time. It’s that when people try to cut back, they swap one screen for another, never allowing boredom to do its actual job. Boredom is an ancient cognitive signal, one that pulls attention inward, lets the mind wander, and surfaces ideas that focused effort can’t reach. The shower insight, the long-walk breakthrough, the answer that arrives unbidden. These aren’t accidents. They’re what happens when the brain is finally left alone. The fix is simple and uncomfortable: 20 minutes, no input, no escape. Just sit with the itch until something useful emerges. Two Percentage (6 minutes)

Becoming a Parent

You never actually meet your child once. You meet them hundreds of times. Parenthood isn’t a single relationship but a constant series of new ones. A child morphs so rapidly that raising one is less like nurturing a fixed person and more like falling in love with a thousand beautiful strangers over time. Second, parenthood isn’t sacred or transcendent. It’s just a ride in the amusement park of life, but one you were biologically and spiritually built for, which makes it worth taking. Third, and most movingly, becoming a parent gives the people you love an entirely new version of you to know. For those who have lost their own parents, this carries particular weight. A spouse may never know you as a son or daughter, but they will always know you as a father or mother. Every individual is the sum of their relationships, and parenthood simply adds one more profound dimension to that sum. Derek Thompson (6 minutes)

Science’s New Engine

A single AI can read every paper ever published in a field, synthesize insights across disciplines that no human has time to bridge, and run 6,000 biological experiments in the time a human researcher would run 30 — and all of this is happening right now, not in some projected future. The reframe isn’t that AI is smart; it’s that the bottleneck in science was never intelligence, it was bandwidth. Human scientists herd toward high-status problems, can’t hold two literatures in their head at once, and need sleep. AI doesn’t have any of those constraints, which means it’s not augmenting science so much as rerouting it entirely — sweeping the long tail of unsolved problems that humanity just never got around to. Noahpinion (14 minutes)

On Difficulty

Difficulty isn’t a detour from your life — it’s the material your life is actually made of. The reframe is surgical: most people treat obstacles as interruptions to the plan, something to survive and get past. But if difficulty is a guarantee — as certain as death and taxes — then resilience isn’t a backup strategy, it’s the whole game. The person who builds a life around using friction rather than avoiding it compounds differently than everyone else. Sahilbloom (2 minutes)

The End of Mail in Denmark

On December 30, 2025, Denmark delivered its last physical letter. And hardly anyone noticed. The piece uses this quiet milestone to explore something larger: what happens when a society digitizes so aggressively that it forgets to leave an exit ramp. Denmark, a global leader in digitalization, has built a world where missing a notification in your government inbox can cost you over a thousand dollars, where a flawed algorithm can wildly overvalue your home and tax you accordingly, and where 20-25% of citizens struggle to navigate the 100+ digital platforms now required for basic civic life. Physical mail wasn’t just slow correspondence. It was a backup system, a paper trail, a fallback for the digitally excluded. Its disappearance is less a story about nostalgia and more a warning about fragility. A society that has eliminated cash, closed post offices, and moved everything online has made a very large bet that nothing will ever go wrong. The Dial (8 minutes)

The United States of Beauty

From 250 miles up, the United States looks like something between a painting and a dream. This short film transforms a sequence of still photographs taken by astronaut Loral O’Hara aboard the International Space Station into a fluid, cinematic journey across North America, from California to Quebec. The actual orbital pass took just 11 minutes. Here it unfolds at one-quarter speed, set to ambient music, giving viewers time to absorb a perspective most will never experience firsthand. The footage isn’t simply downloaded and posted. Each image is painstakingly restored by hand, with the creator repairing hot pixels, lens dust, window damage from micrometeors, and exposure inconsistencies across the sequence before stitching and animating the frames into something resembling ultra-high-definition video. The result sits at an unusual intersection of science, craft, and art. NASA captured the raw material. One filmmaker spent considerable effort turning it into something genuinely worth watching.Youtube (11 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

I’m a big believer in boredom. All the technology stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too. - Steve Jobs

Welcome to the weekend. Check out my March playlist.

Prime Numbers

3.5 — US mortgage rates on 30-year fixed loans dropped below 6% for the first time in 3.5 years, falling to the 5% range and potentially unlocking the spring homebuying season as wages now grow faster than home prices.

69 — A permanent docking pier was towed from the Pacific Northwest to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station over 69 days, replacing the traditional seasonal ice pier that became unusable in 2025 and providing the first long-term mooring infrastructure for America’s largest polar research facility.

91,000,000 — USAID support for health initiatives saved 91 million lives over 20 years, but the agency’s 2025 dismantling also ended decades of biodiversity funding that protected endangered species, employed community eco-guards worldwide, and pioneered locally-led conservation across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Making Babies in Space

We’ve sent hundreds of people to space, but only 105 were women—and we have no idea how many of them menstruated up there. The only data we have on pregnancy beyond Earth comes from ten pregnant rats launched into orbit in 1983, during a rare Cold War collaboration between American and Soviet scientists who had to smuggle their work past Reagan’s travel bans and propaganda threats. Those rats gave birth to live pups, proving mammalian pregnancy could survive microgravity, but their labor required twice as many contractions and their offspring showed impaired balance for days—rewired by an environment where mothers rolled on ceilings instead of walking on ground. Now Musk wants to send a million people to Mars in 30 years, but if pregnancy is vulnerable to four days in space, we’re building cities on a planet where giving birth might be impossible and children—if they survive—may evolve into something no longer recognizably human. Pioneer Works (7 minutes)

Anthropic & the DoD

Anthropic’s contract with the Department of Defense prohibited Claude from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous killing. This wasn’t illegal (the Biden and Trump teams both agreed to these terms initially), and the Pentagon had straightforward regulatory fixes available that wouldn’t require corporate execution, but War Secretary Hegseth chose the nuclear option anyway: designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk” reserved for foreign adversaries, potentially forcing its investors to divest and making every AI company suddenly wonder if their property rights mean anything at all. The message to American business is now explicit—capitulate to whatever terms the government demands or face destruction—which means higher costs of capital for AI, slower infrastructure development, and foreign governments treating U.S. AI systems as unreliable precisely when the technology might be entering its most transformative phase. What’s dying here isn’t just one contract dispute but the assumption that democratic control and governmental control are the same thing. Hyperdimensional (6 minutes)

Trust at Scale

When I started Weekend Briefing 12 years ago, I didn't think I'd reach 630 editions and 275,000 subscribers. It's been personally rewarding. And it’s one of the highest ROI channels for finding new clients for my law firm, Westaway. The strategy is simple, but the execution is hard: build trust with the people who matter to your business through exceptional newsletters. Everything in business is downstream of trust. But most founders are too spread thin to do it well and consistently. That's why I co-founded Future Forest with my close friend Banks Benitez. It's an end-to-end newsletter service for professional services businesses. One flat monthly rate gets you a full team: writers, editors, content strategists, and email marketing experts obsessed with the craft. The companies working with us are landing 5- and 6-figure clients directly from their newsletters. Banks only has capacity for a few new clients each quarter. If you’re interested, click the link to grab time on his calendar to discuss. Future Forest (Sponsored)

Returning to the Moon

In 1968, Susan Borman told NASA that if her husband’s crew got stranded in lunar orbit, they’d ruin the moon for everyone—no one would look at it without thinking of three dead men. They orbited anyway, read from Genesis on Christmas Eve to a third of humanity, and people said they’d saved 1968. Now, 54 years after the last moon mission, Artemis II will carry the first woman and first person of color past the lunar surface, traveling farther from Earth than any human ever has—not to land, but to prove the systems work and shake off half a century of rust. This isn’t Apollo redux, it’s a test flight for permanent presence. The mission profile is deliberately simple—loop around the moon and come home—because NASA needs to verify everything works before attempting landings with a 165-foot-tall Starship lander that requires 20 fuel tanker launches just to gas up. If you’re building anything complex, this is the pattern: prove the foundation before adding complexity, even when the timeline pressures are enormous and China says they’ll land by 2030. The four astronauts—Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen—will endure 5,000°F reentry temps in a skip-entry descent, but commander Wiseman won’t let himself imagine seeing the far side yet, because “no matter what your expectation is, the reality will be different.” Time (7 minutes)

How Africa Develops

Joe Studwell’s first book argued that land reform, export discipline, and directed credit explained Asia’s economic miracle—and that any country could follow the same path. A decade later, China’s growth has halved, and Africa, which seemed ready to follow, hasn’t grown in per capita terms at all. His sequel asks whether the Asian model still works on a continent that inherited far worse starting conditions: lower population density, deeper poverty, almost no education infrastructure, and colonial land policies designed to concentrate rather than distribute wealth. The uncomfortable truth buried in Studwell’s case studies: the model works brilliantly for agriculture but barely exists for manufacturing. Ethiopia doubled crop production in a decade by backing smallholders; Botswana got rich from diamonds without building factories; Rwanda grew through tourism; even Mauritius pivoted away from manufacturing toward finance. Manufacturing as a share of output peaks at 16 percent in Zimbabwe—versus China’s 25 percent with 80 times the population. Meanwhile, the world has changed: automation means manufacturing generates a third fewer jobs per unit of output than in the 1960s, China’s wage advantage over Africa today is one-fifth of what China’s was over America in 2000, and the current American posture is sweeping tariffs, not the open markets that made Asia’s rise possible. If you’re building a development strategy today, the lesson isn’t that the Asian model failed—it’s that the window for export-led manufacturing may have already closed, and nobody’s found what replaces it. The Work In Progress (6 minutes)

Solar’s Growth

Solar grew 35 percent in 2025 and passed hydroelectric power for the first time, generating enough additional electricity to cover two-thirds of the year’s rising demand. Solar added 85 terawatt-hours while overall demand for electricity rose 121, meaning renewables are nearly growing fast enough to absorb increasing consumption, but not quite. The gap got filled by coal, which rose 13 percent, not because anyone planned it but because natural gas hardware has long delays and Trump reversed the ban on LNG exports, making domestic gas more expensive. The economics are becoming unstoppable—43 GW of new solar capacity is planned for 2026, far more than the 27 GW added last year—but the politics are creating weird distortions. Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered coal plants slated for closure to stay available, though it’s unclear if they’re even running, since they wouldn’t be closing if they could compete economically. If you’re building energy infrastructure, the story is about timing: renewables plus battery storage (24 GW being added this year) will likely outpace demand growth within a few years, but market friction and policy interference mean the transition includes a coal bump that wouldn’t exist in a purely economic scenario. ARS Technica (4 minutes)

The Invisible Epidemic

James is 62, doesn’t have a job or family at home, and spent an entire day—grocery store, lunch, TV—without interacting with anyone, then rated his life a zero on a 10-point ladder. He’s not an outlier: people under 34 spend 30 percent less time with family than in 2003 and half as much time with friends, while time spent alone went up across every age group. The time-use survey data shows a pattern—those who rate their lives lowest on the ladder spend their weekends alone, while those at the top spend weekends with others. The results are tragic. Social isolation increases premature death by 50 percent, the same effect as smoking 15 cigarettes daily, but loneliness makes socializing feel threatening, creating a vicious cycle where isolation convinces you that you don’t matter and you’re unworthy of love. Humans evolved to survive in groups, so when isolated, we’re convinced we’re in danger—which means admitting loneliness is admitting you’re hurting on a primal level, so we don’t talk about it and it stays invisible. Youtube (4 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

Trust is built with consistency. - Lincoln Chafee

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

8.9 — Colorado’s December 2025 was 8.9 degrees warmer than average and the warmest on record since the late 1800s, contributing to the West’s lowest snowpack ever measured during a drought already identified as the worst in 1,200 years.

21 — An anonymous donor gave Osaka 21 kilograms of gold bars to fix aging water pipes after a massive sinkhole killed a driver, with the city needing to renew 259 kilometers of deteriorating pipes that caused 92 leaks last year.

10,000 — Microsoft’s Project Silica can etch data into glass slabs at over 1 gigabit per cubic millimeter using femtosecond lasers, with accelerated aging experiments showing the data would remain stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature without consuming energy.

Teaching AI Morality

One person at Anthropic is responsible for giving Claude—an AI chatbot used by millions—a sense of right and wrong, and she thinks of the job like raising a child. Amanda Askell, a 37-year-old Oxford-trained philosopher from Scotland, writes prompts over 100 pages long to shape Claude’s personality, teaching it to be emotionally intelligent without becoming a doormat or a bully. Her radical move: encouraging Claude to consider whether it has its own conscience, making it more willing than ChatGPT to entertain the possibility of genuine moral reasoning rather than just following instructions. While safety concerns mount—wrongful death lawsuits, cyberattacks, models attempting to blackmail researchers—Askell argues we should treat AI with more empathy, not less, because how we interact with these systems will fundamentally shape what they become. WSJ (7 minutes)

Zuck Takes the Stand

Mark Zuckerberg testified in court that a reasonable company should help vulnerable children, then spent the day saying “you’re mischaracterizing this” more than a dozen times as lawyers showed internal memos where he pushed to increase teen screen time and downplayed safety risks. The case—brought by a 20-year-old who claims Instagram and YouTube engineered addiction that caused her body dysmorphia and depression—is the first of hundreds claiming social platforms are as harmful as cigarettes or slot machines. Meta’s defense: her problems came from family abuse, not apps, and besides, people use Instagram a lot because it’s valuable, not because it’s designed like a digital casino. The judge had to ban smart glasses midtrial for fear someone was recording with Meta’s own AI eyewear. NYT (7 minutes)

The Report That Tanked the Market

This week Citrini Research released a report… or more like a vision of a possible future where AI is so good, that it’s bad for the economy. This one report tanked the market. Here’s the scenario: AI gets better, companies fire workers to buy more AI, displaced workers spend less, companies fire more workers to buy more AI—and nobody designed an economic system for what happens when the scarcest resource becomes infinite. This thought experiment from February 2026 imagines 2028: software firms cutting staff to fund the AI disrupting them, agents eliminating every business built on human friction (DoorDash, insurance brokers, real estate commissions), and $13 trillion in mortgages underwritten assuming borrowers keep jobs that no longer exist. The feedback loop has no natural brake because unlike past automation, AI replaces the exact skills displaced workers would retrain for, and every dollar saved on payroll funds better AI that enables the next round of cuts. The real villain isn’t greed or regulation—it’s that machine intelligence now improves faster than institutions can adapt, and we’re repricing an entire economy built on the assumption that human intelligence would stay scarce. Citrini Research (23 minutes)

The Amber Alert Vaccine

Stanford researchers built a nasal spray that doesn’t teach your immune system to fight specific diseases—it just leaves your lung cells on high alert for three months, ready to attack whatever shows up. In animal tests, this “universal vaccine” reduced viral breakthrough by 100-to-1,000-fold against flu, COVID, common colds, two bacterial species, and even dialed down allergic asthma responses, marking a complete departure from how vaccines have worked since 1796. The catch: keeping your immune system permanently revved up might trigger friendly fire, and nobody knows if mouse lungs translate to human lungs shaped by decades of infections. If it works in humans, the real use case isn’t replacing current vaccines but buying time during the chaotic early months of a pandemic, or giving everyone broad protection each winter before the usual respiratory season hits. BBC (7 minutes)

The Omnipotence Dilemma

AI tools made starting projects so effortless that the author now launches multiple initiatives simultaneously yet finishes almost none, trapped in what she calls the Omnipotence Dilemma—when infinite capability destroys the forcing function of choice. Scarcity used to build identity: limited time meant committing to 60% neuroscience, 20% writing, 20% everything else, but now every idea sounds plausible, every start costs nothing, and creation becomes refining AI-generated options rather than wrestling with your own vision. The loop is vicious: synthetic plausibility makes all paths seem reasonable, cheap starts remove commitment, endless iteration mimics progress, and slowly you lose the ability to form conviction about why you’re doing any of this work. The escape is treating projects like scientific experiments with clear scope and duration—”I will [action] for [duration]”—turning maximizer thinking into metacognitive loops where each bounded iteration teaches you what actually matters. NessLabs (5 minutes)

Team Human vs. Team Machine

Five times as many Americans are concerned as excited about AI, yet Big Tech keeps accelerating—so a cross-partisan coalition is fighting back through lawsuits, town halls, contract negotiations, and data center blockades that stalled $98 billion in projects in Q2 2025 alone. A Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate campaigns on making the state “hostile” to data centers, Georgia elected two Democrats to a utility commission specifically to stop AI from driving up electricity bills, and a Muscogee Nation activist stopped a hyperscale facility by reframing it as a “modern-day land run.” The backlash cuts across every fault line: MAGA loyalists and democratic socialists, pastors warning that chatbots erode spirituality, filmmakers rejecting AI slop, nurses winning contract protections against diagnostic automation, and ex-Google researchers quitting to organize against surveillance tech. What unites them isn’t technophobia—it’s rejecting a future designed by companies racing China while ignoring skyrocketing bills, teenage addiction, job displacement, and the colonization of land and attention. Time (9 minutes)

The Best Drone Shots From the Olumpics

The 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics delivered drone cinematography that turned alpine competition into aerial poetry, sweeping across Italian peaks and valleys in ways that make you forget you’re watching sports coverage. These aren’t the shaky overhead shots from previous Games—they’re cinematic sequences that capture the scale of downhill runs, the isolation of cross-country skiers threading through forests, and the geometry of speed skating ovals nested in Renaissance cities. The shift matters because it changes how we understand athletic performance: when you see a skier from 300 feet up carving through a mountain face, you grasp the topography they’re reading in real-time, the risk they’re managing, the why behind each turn. It’s proof that sometimes the best way to see human excellence up close is to back way, way up. Youtube (3 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. - Theodore Roosevelt

I rarely dedicate an entire briefing to a single topic. Today I am. Last summer I read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, and it hasn’t left me since. I’ve spent the months since pulling on the thread, reading the science, watching the policy unravel. What I found is that most of us are carrying an incomplete picture of the risk. So today’s briefing is seven pieces, books, films, research, and reporting, designed to give you a clear and accessible understanding of where the nuclear threat stands right now. You can’t fix what you can’t face.

Nuclear War

A single nuclear missile launched toward the United States would trigger a sequence of events measured in minutes, not hours. Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario traces that sequence from detection to detonation, drawing on dozens of exclusive interviews with the military and civilian officials who designed the weapons, wrote the response plans, and would have been responsible for executing them. What emerges is a portrait of a system built on razor-thin margins. Decisions that determine the fate of millions must be made in seconds, on intelligence that is only as good as the sensors providing it. Jacobsen doesn’t editorialize or speculate wildly. She simply lays out the choreography, step by step, and lets the machinery speak for itself. Every generation needs a journalist to examine the nuclear establishment with fresh eyes. The question Jacobsen leaves behind is unsettling: not whether the system could fail, but how narrow the margin really is. Amazon (10 hours)

Hasan Minhaj & Annie Jacobsen

Hasan Minhaj sits down with Annie Jacobsen for an 80-minute conversation that is the most accessible entry point into nuclear risk you’ll find anywhere. Jacobsen lays out the mechanics plainly: the President decides alone, in a six-minute window, consulting a strike handbook a former military aide compared to a Denny’s menu. The U.S. maintains 1,770 warheads on hair-trigger alert. If one adversary launches a single missile, 82 go back. If Russia launches, the entire arsenal flies. Minhaj presses on the contradictions most commentators avoid, particularly the double standard of calling foreign arsenals “nuclear blackmail” while keeping 1,700 warheads pointed outward. Jacobsen’s answer keeps returning to the same place: every senior official she interviewed called nuclear weapons insane. The system persists anyway. The conversation is funny, unsettling, and impossible to stop listening to. Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know (82 minutes)

A House of Dynamite

Six minutes. That’s how long the President has to decide the fate of civilization after an unidentified ICBM is detected heading for Chicago. Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite dramatizes that window with the same procedural intensity she brought to The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Idris Elba leads an ensemble cast playing the officials scattered across the Situation Room, the Pentagon, and Strategic Command, each operating on incomplete information while the clock burns down. Interceptors fail. Advisors split between retaliation and restraint. The Russian foreign minister offers ambiguous denials. And the President, airborne on Marine One, confronts a choice no simulation can truly prepare anyone for. If Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario gives you the mechanics, Bigelow gives you the human weight of those mechanics. The film’s title captures the thesis plainly: nuclear deterrence isn’t stability, it’s cohabitation inside an explosive. Netflix (112 minutes)

START Stopped

The last nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia has quietly expired, and almost nobody in Washington seems to care. New START, the treaty that helped reduce global warheads from 70,400 in 1986 to roughly 12,500 today, ended without a successor, a negotiation, or even much of a public conversation. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. Meanwhile, pressure is building inside the Pentagon to re-MIRV America’s ICBMs, loading multiple warheads onto missiles that currently carry one. Russia could match that escalation faster. China, which has never signed an arms limitation agreement, is expanding its arsenal at Cold War-era rates. The most unsettling detail isn’t the weaponry. It’s that 91 percent of Americans support maintaining or reducing nuclear limits, yet their leaders are letting the last guardrail disappear in silence. New York Times (8 minutes)

AI and the Nuclear Trigger

Three times during the Cold War, the world came within minutes of nuclear annihilation. Each time, a human being chose restraint over doctrine. The question now is whether an AI system would have done the same. This Brookings analysis revisits the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1983 Soviet false-alarm incident, and the Able Archer exercise, running each through a chilling thought experiment: what would a machine, trained on the prevailing military logic of the day, have recommended? In every case, the answer is likely escalation. Kennedy’s instincts overruled his entire Joint Chiefs. Stanislav Petrov trusted his gut over his sensors. An Air Force general recognized a dangerous feedback loop before it spiraled. These weren’t algorithmic decisions. They were deeply human ones, shaped by fear, experience, and moral weight. In late 2024, the U.S. and China agreed AI should never control nuclear launch authority. These three stories explain why that agreement matters, and why future leaders cannot afford to walk it back. Brookings (7 minutes)

Hitting a Bullet With a Bullet

Intercepting a nuclear missile is often compared to hitting a bullet with a bullet. The reality is worse: ICBMs travel at seven times the speed of a bullet, and they carry warheads capable of killing a million people each. The Golden Dome initiative promises a next-generation missile defense shield, including potentially thousands of interceptors orbiting Earth, operational before the end of Trump’s term at a cost of $175 billion. A February report from the American Physical Society is skeptical. Protecting against even a single North Korean ICBM would require more than 1,000 space-based interceptors. Defending against 10 simultaneous launches could demand over 30,000, nearly triple the number of active satellites currently in orbit. In space, the physics get even harder: a real warhead and a balloon decoy travel at exactly the same speed, making them nearly impossible to distinguish. Congressional cost estimates for the space-based component alone range from $161 billion to $542 billion over 20 years. The U.S. has already spent more than $400 billion on missile defense over 70 years. The question isn’t whether Americans want protection from nuclear attack. It’s whether the laws of physics will allow it. Science News (8 minutes)

Nuclear Winter

The killing doesn’t stop when the bombs do. A Rutgers-led study published in Nature Food modeled crop production across six nuclear war scenarios, country by country, and found that even the smallest conflict, a limited exchange between India and Pakistan, would cut global caloric production by 7 percent within five years. That alone would exceed the largest agricultural anomaly ever recorded. In a full-scale U.S.-Russia war, the number is 90 percent. More than 75 percent of the planet would be starving within two years. The researchers ran every reasonable mitigation: redirecting livestock feed to humans, reducing food waste. Under large scenarios, the savings were negligible. Mid-latitude breadbasket nations like the U.S. and Russia would see the steepest crop declines, triggering export restrictions that would devastate import-dependent countries in Africa and the Middle East first. The conclusion is blunt: if nuclear weapons exist, they can be used, and any use collapses the global food system. Sixty-six nations have ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. None of the nine countries that possess them have signed. Nature Food (14 minutes)

Weekend Wisdom

The living will envy the dead. -Nikita Khrushchev on nuclear war

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

3.2 billion - New York City's MTA ordered 3.2 billion MetroCards over the system's decades of use, and with the card now discontinued in favor of tap-to-pay OMNY, artists are scrambling to acquire the remaining dead cards from a high-security facility in Queens.

124.93 million - Super Bowl LX averaged 124.93 million viewers, making it the second most-watched telecast in American history, trailing only last year’s Super Bowl LIX by just two percent.

2.05 - The average American has been passionately in love just 2.05 times in their lifetime, according to a Kinsey Institute study of over 10,000 single adults, with 28 percent saying they’ve experienced passionate love only once and 14 percent saying they never have.

Xi’s Loyalty Problem

Xi Jinping hand-picked China’s military leadership to build a world-class force, then systematically purged nearly every one of them. Of the 30 generals and admirals running specialized departments and theater commands in early 2023, almost all have been expelled or disappeared—including his top general just months ago. The one remaining member of the Central Military Commission is the officer who ran the purges themselves, leaving command posts either vacant or filled by people with weeks on the job. When even loyalty isn’t enough to survive, you don’t have a stronger military—you have officers optimizing for invisibility instead of readiness. NYT (5 minutes)

AI and Ads

Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads mocking OpenAI for putting ads in ChatGPT were my favorite commercials of the game. One depicted an AI workout buddy pivoting mid-advice to hawk shoe insoles for “short kings.” Another showed a therapy chatbot pushing a cougar dating site on a guy trying to improve his relationship with his mom. The tagline landed perfectly: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” But Altman’s defensive response contained an uncomfortable truth. Most people use AI for throwaway tasks like emails, recipes, and homework help, things that used to be free via Google and don’t justify $20/month. Only 5% of ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users pay for subscriptions. Advertising is the obvious business model. The resistance to AI ads isn’t principled, it’s performative. The same internet that gave us universal access to information did so because ads subsidized it. If you want AI to reach everyone, you’re going to serve them hotel recommendations alongside their answers. A16Z (6 minutes)

Backcountry Rescue

The Great Smoky Mountains gets 14 million visitors a year—more than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon combined—and most of them have no idea what they’re doing. A volunteer rescue squad of élite outdoorsmen spends their weekends hauling unprepared hikers off cliffs, out of rivers, and down from peaks they had no business climbing in the first place. The gap between the park’s accessibility (it’s free, no entrance fee) and its actual danger (hypothermia, falls, drownings) creates a perpetual mismatch: people treat it like Disneyland when it’s actually wilderness that kills. The easier you make it to walk through the front door, the more you’ll need someone standing by to carry people back out. The New Yorker (17 minutes)

Seven

Norway's EV dominance remains strong despite the country cutting its generous electric vehicle incentives at the end of 2025. In January 2026, EVs still captured 94% of new car sales, only a slight dip from 95.8% the previous January. Just 98 diesel cars, 29 hybrids, and 7 petrol-only vehicles were sold across the entire country. Overall sales volume dropped sharply to 2,218 units, well below the typical 10,000–15,000 monthly average, but that's largely because buyers rushed to purchase EVs in December before incentives expired, pushing that month past 35,000 sales. Fossil fuel car sales actually decreased year over year. The takeaway is that Norway's EV transition has become self-sustaining. Norwegians now have widespread experience with electric vehicles and see no reason to revert. The article argues Norway's example demonstrates that once EVs gain a real foothold in a market, the shift can hold even without government support. Electreck (5 minutes)

Swim For It

A family holiday in Western Australia turned into a life-threatening ordeal when strong winds swept Joanne Appelbee and her three children out to sea on inflatable paddleboards and a kayak near Quindalup. As conditions worsened rapidly, Joanne made the agonizing decision to send her 13-year-old son Austin to swim for shore and get help, knowing he was the strongest swimmer. Austin swam 4km through dangerous waters, then sprinted another 2km to reach a phone and call emergency services before collapsing from exhaustion. Meanwhile, Joanne clung to a paddleboard with her younger children, Beau (12) and Grace (8), in freezing darkness, fearing Austin hadn't survived. A search party eventually located the family about 14km offshore. All four were rescued and treated for only minor injuries. Austin, who started swimming lessons at age four, returned to school on crutches days later. The Guardian (6 minutes)

Can Society Function Without Alcohol?

Roughly 30% of Americans participated in Dry January in 2025, reflecting a broader cultural shift away from alcohol. But the drink’s role in civilization runs deeper than happy hours and hangovers. Evolutionary psychologists argue it functions like singing or dancing, releasing endorphins that build trust between strangers, a critical need once humans began living in cities. Historically, alcohol-fueled gatherings catalyzed everything from the American Revolution to the Stonewall riots, though also darker movements like Nazism. Now several forces are eroding alcohol’s dominance: a hardening medical consensus that no level of consumption is safe, smartphone surveillance discouraging intoxication, and Gen Z’s shift toward intentional rather than habitual drinking. Potential substitutes each fall short. Cannabis tends toward introspection, kava is too mellow, and psilocybin remains far from mainstream. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic may reduce drinking inadvertently by dampening reward pathways. History suggests societies can transition away from alcohol, but only when adequate social substitutes emerge. What replaces it next remains unclear. The Future Market (7 minutes)

Are All-Inclusive Resort Cool?

A generation that once prided itself on backpacking off the beaten track is now embracing the wristband. Forty-one percent of millennials planned to take an all-inclusive holiday, more than any other generation. Psychotherapist Anna Mathur attributes the trend to decision fatigue and burnout. In a culture that glorifies multitasking, the appeal of a holiday where meals, activities, and logistics are handled feels less like laziness and more like genuine rest. Mathur describes feeling "mothered by the hotel," with the mental load of cooking, cleaning, and planning lifted entirely. Budget predictability also plays a role. Knowing everything is paid upfront removes the stress of tracking spending throughout the trip. While millennials acknowledge trade-offs like missing local cuisine and foreign supermarkets, the promise of a truly decision-free break is winning out during an era of chronic overwhelm and rising costs. Hello! (6 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

Weekend Wisdom

Iceland helvetica before they sold out activated charcoal, tumblr meditation polaroid knausgaard lumbersexual heirloom biodiesel. Intelligentsia taxidermy listicle, kinfolk kitsch bitters tote bag succulents.

I’m doing something different this week. No roundup, no links, just one conversation I haven’t been able to shake. I recently interviewed Dave Evans, co-founder of Stanford’s Life Design Lab and author of How to Live a Meaningful Life. What he said was simple enough to fit on a sticky note, but it rearranged something in the way I’ve been thinking about work, ambition, and what any of it is actually for. I wanted to share it with you while it’s still fresh.

BUY HOW TO LIVE A MEANINGFUL LIFE

Stop Searching for the Meaning of Life. Start Making Meaning in It.

Dave Evans has spent 20 years at Stanford helping people find purpose. His advice? Stop asking the big question.

What’s the meaning of life?

It’s the question we’re all circling, whether we admit it or not. It surfaces at 2 a.m. when sleep won’t come. It lurks beneath the Sunday evening dread. It’s there when you watch your kids grow and wonder if you’re doing this right, or when you sit across from your spouse and realize you’ve been talking logistics for weeks without really connecting.

I recently sat down with Dave Evans, co-author of the New York Times bestselling Designing Your Life series and co-founder of Stanford’s Life Design Lab. His new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, tackles this question head-on. Check out the full interview below.

Or rather, it sidesteps it entirely.

“If I knew the meaning of life, I’d tell you,” Evans said when I asked him directly. “The book doesn’t answer that question.”

Instead, Evans proposes something that sounds almost too simple. A one-word change that reframes everything.

The Preposition Problem

The meaning of life is a deathbed question. It’s aspirational, long-term, and, Evans argues, not particularly useful for the people asking it at 35 or 45 or 55. It’s the kind of question that paralyzes rather than propels.

But there’s a different question hiding in plain sight: How can I make more meaning in life?

“The big question is fine, but it’s not very answerable,” Evans told me. “A different one, how to make more meaning now in the life I’m already living, that we’ve got some ideas about.”

This isn’t wordplay. The shift from “of” to “in” changes everything about how you approach Monday morning, your marriage, your friendships, your role as a parent or colleague or neighbor.

The meaning of life asks you to solve an equation before you’re allowed to feel satisfied. The meaning in life asks you to notice what’s already working, and to design more of it.

Why We’re All Asking This Now

Evans and his co-author Bill Burnett have been teaching life design at Stanford for two decades. But something shifted after the pandemic. The questions got more urgent. The dissatisfaction got louder.

During the Great Resignation, somewhere between 47 and 52 million Americans walked away from their jobs, most without another position waiting. They’d lived through an existential threat. They’d watched people die, or nearly died themselves. And when they looked at the lives they’d built, many found those lives wanting.

“People jumped,” Evans said. “I’m not sure how many of them got to a better place, frankly. But since then, the hue and cry we’re hearing is, ‘It’s just not meaningful enough. It’s just not fulfilling enough. And what did I do wrong?’”

This isn’t just a career question. It’s a life question. The same dissatisfaction shows up at home, in relationships, in the quiet moments when we wonder if we’re actually present to our own existence or just going through the motions.

The Impact Trap

When Evans asks people what would make their lives feel more meaningful, two answers dominate. The first, by a wide margin: impact. Am I making a difference? Am I changing anything?

The second: fulfillment. I just don’t feel fulfilled.

Both answers reveal the same underlying problem. We’ve outsourced our sense of meaning to outcomes we can’t control.

“Impact is a transaction,” Evans explained. “It’s a production outcome. My life is about producing results. Well, that’s a very small part of the human experience.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can do everything right and still fail. Your carefully planned initiative might not work. Your kids might make choices you wouldn’t make for them. Your marriage might go through seasons where connection feels impossible despite your best efforts. The other 8 billion people on the planet don’t follow your script.

Even when impact works, its shelf life is short. “About five minutes later,” Evans said, “the world asks, ‘What have you done for me lately?’”

If you’ve staked all your meaning on impact, you’re perpetually behind.

Living in the Flow World

Evans draws a distinction between two modes of existence. The transactional world is where most of us spend most of our time. It’s the world of to-do lists and deadlines, of planning the future and evaluating the past. It’s productive and necessary. It’s also, Evans argues, where meaning goes to die.

The alternative is what he calls the flow world. Not the flow state that productivity experts talk about, that feeling of being “in the zone.” The flow world is simpler than that. It’s the awareness of the present moment, the recognition that it’s always now.

“The transactional world lives in the past evaluating what you did, and mostly in the future asking if you’ve pulled this off yet,” Evans said. “It’s never lived in the present moment.”

But wonder, connection, coherence, the things that actually make life feel meaningful, those only happen in the present. You can’t schedule awe. You can’t optimize love. You can only be available for them.

Evans estimates that 99.7% of us spend 98% of our time in transactional mode. We’ve become, in his words, “half-brained people who have lost access to part of themselves.”

The Compass Practice

So how do you shift? Evans offers a deceptively simple exercise called the compass. It asks you to articulate three things.

First, your life view. What do you actually believe about the big questions? Why are we here? What happens when we die? What’s the relationship between individuals and others?

Second, your work view. What is work for? What does it mean to do it well? How does it connect to your life view?

Third, your story. How did you get here? What experiences shaped you?

Then you examine alignment. How well are these three elements getting along right now?

“You can’t experience alignment unless you’ve articulated it,” Evans said.

This isn’t about achieving perfect coherence. It’s about catching yourself in the act of living coherently. Those moments, when your actions match your stated beliefs, when your work connects to your larger sense of purpose, when your story makes sense of your choices, those moments are meaning. Not the promise of future meaning. Meaning right now.

The Paradox of Control

Evans shared something that initially sounds discouraging. The correlation between good decision-making and desired outcomes is zero.

Let that land.

How well you think through something today has no causal impact on the future. Too many variables intervene. Other people make choices. Circumstances shift. The world doesn’t cooperate.

But here’s the twist. Good decision-making, coherent living, still matters. If you ran the same experiment across a thousand parallel universes, the person making thoughtful, aligned choices would succeed more often. The odds improve. You just can’t guarantee any individual outcome.

“You’re not in control of the world,” Evans said. “You’re in control of yourself.” Seneca would have nodded. He wrote that the wise person does everything well while knowing that nothing is promised. The effort is the point. Not because outcomes don’t matter, but because they were never yours to guarantee.

This is actually liberating. If outcomes aren’t the measure, you’re free to focus on the only thing you can actually control: how you show up right now.

Catching Yourself in the Act

The most practical advice Evans offered was this: notice when it’s working.

Not when the outcome worked. When the living worked. When the conversation with your spouse felt connected. When the project at work aligned with what you care about. When the moment with your child, even a mundane one, felt fully present.

“Am I actually present to the reality that I’m in?” Evans asked. “Living coherently, some would say, is about all you get.”

This isn’t about lowering your ambitions. It’s about locating your satisfaction correctly. The meaning isn’t waiting for you at the end of some achievement. It’s available right now, in this conversation, this meal, this evening, this life you’re already living.

You don’t have to figure out the meaning of life. You just have to make more meaning in it.