Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

45 — Nearly 45% of all U.S. influencer marketing spending will go to creators with under 20,000 followers in 2026, up from just 19.5% in 2021, as brands chase authenticity over audience size.

30,000 — Japan’s traditional wedding cash gift, or go-shugi, has stayed fixed at 30,000 yen (about $183) for decades, even as inflation drives up hosting costs, because 40,000 evokes death and 50,000 is a steep 60% jump.

1,100,000 — The Green Bay Packers posted an operating loss of $1.1 million last season, their first non-pandemic-era loss since 1989, driven by a $130 million spike in player costs tied to the Micah Parsons trade.

Luddite Renaissance

Smashing a cardboard smartphone with a hammer named after the guy who built it turns out to be the perfect symbol for 2026’s tech backlash. A loose collective calling itself the Luddite Renaissance spent a week in New York running the “Summer of Ludd,” a festival of phone-free events, from offline dating workshops to a mock trial convicting OpenAI’s Sam Altman of algorithmic crimes, all organized entirely off social media through phone trees, wheat-pasted posters, and word of mouth. Their core bet is that public space itself, not viral infographics, is what actually builds movements, pointing to Tahrir Square as proof that a million people within ten miles of each other matters more than any platform. Whether playful anti-tech spectacle can outrun corporate co-optation and stay more than a nostalgic aesthetic trend is still an open question, but for one sweaty week, joy itself became the protest. 404 Media (11 minutes)

Face for Rent

Somewhere in China, a person’s face is currently earning them $15 an episode without them lifting a finger. New platforms let ordinary people license their likeness to AI drama and ad producers, who browse catalogs sorted by “girl-next-door,” “rugged,” or “supermodel,” then generate entire microdramas, a format so AI-saturated that over 95% of the 128,000 microdramas released in China this year used it, without hiring a single actor. The pitch is control: instead of having your face stolen and deepfaked into content you never agreed to, which has already spawned roughly 700 legal cases in one city’s courts alone, you get paid for it upfront. But lawyers warn the licensing contracts are often vague enough that once your face enters the marketplace, you may have no idea who ends up using it or how. It’s a tidy transaction dressed over a much messier question, whether anyone can meaningfully consent to what their own face becomes once AI gets hold of it. Rest of World (7 minutes)

Rosedale Fraudsters

A couple with a Range Rover, a Porsche Cayenne, and a rotating wardrobe of Prada and Gucci never once had a job, and that was the whole tell. Chakib Mansouri and Majdouline Alouah lived rent-poor but appearance-rich in a $10,000-a-month Toronto condo, funding it by using a UK-built spoofing tool called iSpoof to impersonate banks, trick victims into confirming their real PINs, then drain their accounts, a scheme that helped bilk more than $185 million globally before RCMP investigators traced one prolific user’s IP address back to their door. The couple’s own social media habit of humble-bragging about pool days and car detailing services ultimately let police triangulate their exact building and unit number. It’s a reminder that even sophisticated fraud rings get undone by the same instinct that makes them targets in the first place, the compulsion to broadcast a lifestyle that never quite added up. Toronto Life (22 minutes)

Canaries, Not Crash

The AI jobs apocalypse has a data problem, it hasn’t actually shown up yet. Overall unemployment in the occupations most exposed to AI is lower than in less-exposed ones, and there’s no sign of workers fleeing tech jobs for supposedly safer manual labor, but one group is genuinely getting hurt: 22 to 25 year olds in roles like software development and customer service, where Stanford researchers found entry-level headcount down 16% specifically in jobs where AI can work with minimal human oversight. Older workers in those same fields are doing fine, even gaining ground, because their experience-based knowledge is harder for AI to replicate than the classroom knowledge fresh grads bring. The unsettling possibility isn’t mass unemployment, it’s that the traditional career ladder, where young people are hired to do rote work while slowly absorbing real experience, may be quietly breaking. MIT Technology Review (10 minutes)

Space Truck, Not Mars Ship

The rocket that was supposed to colonize Mars might end up as a glorified delivery van. Starship’s booster, Super Heavy, has become the surprisingly reliable part of the system, catching itself on giant mechanical chopsticks and even flying twice, while the upper stage keeps getting redesigned every time SpaceX gets close to stability, its payload promises shrinking from 100 tons down to 15 along the way. Orbital refueling, the technology that would let Starship actually reach Mars, remains untested and increasingly sidelined now that SpaceX has pivoted toward data centers and AI, leaving NASA’s moon landing timeline dependent on a company that no longer has much financial incentive to solve it. What started as humanity’s ticket to Mars may simply end up as an excellent, if humble, truck for hauling satellites to orbit. Mars For The Rest of Us (14 minutes)

Self-Inflicted Decline

Britain didn’t get unlucky, it kept choosing the worst available option, over and over, for eighteen straight years. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the country slashed spending instead of stimulating growth, gambled on a Brexit referendum David Cameron actually expected to lose, and now spends more settling NHS malpractice claims than delivering maternity care, all while a rail line connecting London to Birmingham has tripled in cost to over £100 billion and still isn’t finished. Output per person outside London now sits below Mississippi’s, wages have stagnated for two decades, and the political response has been to cycle through six prime ministers while blaming immigrants rather than fixing the housing shortage or grid connection delays that make building almost anything impossible. The lesson isn’t really about Brexit or austerity specifically, it’s what happens when a country facing hard tradeoffs keeps flinching toward the option that feels safest and turns out to be the most self-destructive. The Atlantic (30 minutes)

The Only Female Yakuza

At 19, a former juvenile-prison inmate cut down five attackers with a baseball bat to save a pregnant friend, and that single act of violence launched her into becoming the only woman in Japan ever to formally join a yakuza syndicate. Mako Nishimura ran sex workers, sold methamphetamine by the kilo, and once sliced off the tip of her own finger with a sword as an apology to her boss, all while the broader yakuza empire she’d joined, once 184,000 strong, collapsed under anti-gang laws, a burst economic bubble, and competition from foreign crime syndicates until membership shrank below 30,000. Meth addiction cost her custody of her two sons and years of estrangement from her mother, and it wasn’t until she met a former yakuza enforcer running a nonprofit for gang dropouts that she found a path out, one built on street cleaning and helping other ex-members escape the same trap. Her story tracks the yakuza’s own arc almost exactly, from feared institution to fading relic, both looking for a way to become something other than what violence made them. The Guardian (20 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

Freedom is not the ability to do what we like, but the right to do what we ought. - Pope John Paul II

Welcome to the weekend.

Here’s my July playlist. Enjoy!

Prime Numbers

38,940,000 — Fox’s broadcast of Spain’s extra-time win over Argentina in the World Cup final averaged 38.94 million viewers, making it the most-watched soccer match on record in the U.S.

232 — 232 Romance-focused bookstores have opened across the U.S. in the past three years, spreading from small towns like Bardstown, Ky., to Anchorage, Alaska, as the once-stigmatized genre goes mainstream.

27.3 — Long-term unemployment is flashing warning signs: people jobless for 27 weeks or more made up 27.3% of all unemployed Americans in June, up four percentage points from a year earlier.

Bee Brains

Forget the “mindless robot” stereotype: bees turn out to be some of the sharpest thinkers in the animal kingdom, capable of counting, tool use, and possibly even something like optimism and dread. Researchers have taught bumblebees to pull strings, roll balls to hidden targets, and even “play soccer,” all while watching queens outlearn worker bees in color-association tests. In one of the most striking findings, bees ambushed by a robotic spider grew warier afterward, echoing something like PTSD, while bees given unexpected rewards acted more optimistic. As beekeepers face record die-offs from mites and pesticides, some are betting that the smartest path forward isn’t more chemicals, but breeding bees resilient enough to solve their own problems. National Geographic (13 minutes)

AI Mafia

For $60 a night, you can sleep in Mark Zuckerberg’s old bedroom, now a crash pad for the Chinese engineers quietly powering Silicon Valley’s AI boom. The Facebook House in Los Altos has become an informal hub where math olympiad champions, Tsinghua and MIT dropouts, and future founders network over roasted lamb and hotpot, while Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia dangle seven and eight figure packages to poach them. Many trace their edge to China’s brutal, math-obsessed education system, which prized scientific achievement as a matter of national pride since the fall of the Qing dynasty. Yet even as they build billion dollar startups and dominate research conferences like NeurIPS, most stay deliberately out of the spotlight, caught between AI’s staggering financial upside and the political suspicion of being Chinese in an increasingly tense US-China moment. Rest of World (26 minutes)

The Pink Palace

Streaming won the war against piracy, but ask anyone who was a member of What.CD and they’ll tell you it doesn’t feel like a victory. Private trackers like Oink and What.CD built meticulously curated libraries, run by volunteer communities obsessed with audio quality, ratio, and record keeping, that let members access virtually the entire history of recorded music, complete with hand built genre collages and word clouds linking related artists. When French authorities seized What.CD’s servers in 2016, ending a run that included the legendary leak of an unpublished Salinger manuscript, its 165,000 members lost something no $10 a month subscription has replicated. Spotify may have solved piracy, but as Nine Inch Nails’ Rob Sheridan puts it, the middlemen are getting rich while the artists who actually make the music can’t pay their bills. Pigeons & Planes (18 minutes)

Rubber Duck Science

Every year, a few thousand shipping containers vanish into the ocean, and oceanographers have quietly turned that disaster into one of the best tools they have. When the Hansa Carrier lost four containers of Nike sneakers off Japan in 1990, spilling 60,000 pairs into the Pacific, researchers tracked where they washed ashore and used the data to build far more precise models of ocean currents. Toy cars, Lego figures, hockey gloves, and sealed candy have since done the same job, each accidental spill acting like a giant experiment no lab could ethically design on purpose. It’s a strange loop where global trade’s failures end up mapping the very system that keeps it running, turning waste into one of oceanography’s richest data sets. The Reader (7 minutes)

Sunscreen Wars

A guy on Instagram sets a bottle of Banana Boat spray on fire to prove sunscreen is “toxic,” and somehow millions of people are listening. Fueled by a confusing 2019 FDA study on chemical absorption and a wave of wellness influencers (one of whom turns out to be a forensic psychiatrist, not a dermatologist), 16 million American adults now say they’ve cut back on sunscreen because of online claims. The actual science hasn’t changed. Regular sunscreen use still reliably lowers skin cancer risk, and the endocrine-disruption fears trace back mostly to rodent and cell-culture studies, not real-world human data. It’s a case study in how a legitimate regulatory gap and a handful of confident influencers can undo decades of public health progress in just a few years. Men’s Health (16 minutes)

Foot Phones

An elephant can hear its herd coming from six miles away, and it’s not using its ears the way you’d expect. When elephants send out their signature low-frequency rumbles, the sound also travels underground as seismic vibrations, which other elephants pick up through sensitive tissue in their feet before the signal races up through the legs and skull into the inner ear. Researchers found the secret lies in oversized anatomy, middle-ear bones nine times heavier than a human’s and eardrums seven times larger, tuned to catch vibrations around 400 hertz rather than the higher frequencies humans hear best. It turns out an elephant’s massive ears are just the visible part of a communication system that runs through the whole body and straight into the ground. Discover (3 minutes)

Melting Wax

Your memories aren’t files sitting in storage, they’re more like wax dioramas that soften every time you touch them. When neurons fire together strongly enough, thanks to novelty, repetition, or emotion, the hippocampus saves a rough blueprint of that pattern and files it away, but even a formed memory has to keep firing or it fades, which is why you can’t recall what your coffee tasted like on some random Monday. The catch is that every time you actually recall something, the memory goes soft again and absorbs whatever mood, context, or story you’re telling right now, which means the more often you replay a memory, the further it drifts from what actually happened. It’s a strange trade-off: the brain never built memory to be an accurate record, it built it to keep updating your past so it still makes sense with who you are today. Youtube (13 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

We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace. -Aristotle

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

216 billion — The world consumes 216 billion pounds of bananas annually (12 kilograms per person), but Fusarium wilt fungus and climate change threaten the dominant Cavendish cultivar, which could see suitable growing land in Latin America shrink 60 percent by 2080.

17.9 — Despite accounting for fewer total goals, headers that successfully assist plays are becoming more accurate. 17.9 percent of World Cup goals came from headers through the round of 16 this year, down from 23.7 percent in 2018, suggesting players are getting more disciplined with this technique.

10 — China’s half-century effort to fight desert expansion through the “Green Great Wall” program has worked. Desertified land has decreased by 10 percent overall, with forest cover in the program area rising from 5 percent in 1978 to 14 percent in 2022.

Act Now on AI

More than 200 economists, AI researchers, and tech executives signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence could drive “an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution” over the next decade. The risks include large-scale job displacement, but the signatories—including 16 Nobel Prize winners—argue institutions have a choice. AI researcher Yoshua Bengio emphasized that the transformation is “highly plausible,” and urged collective action. “We must be intentional and make collective, democratic choices, rather than letting market forces play out and risking leaving most citizens behind.” The letter calls on leaders to build guardrails and institutions that steer AI toward complementing humans and benefiting society. AP News (5 minutes)

Road Markers

A metallurgist named John V.N. Dorr spent years championing a simple idea in the 1950s. a white line painted on the right side of the road. His invention saved lives by giving drivers a focal point on dark highways instead of oncoming headlights. Over decades, this modest stripe of paint reached billions of people across the planet. It was cheap, incredibly effective, and utterly anonymous. His great-granddaughter noted that almost nobody knows his name, yet everyone depends on his creation. Wall Street Journal (8 minutes)

What If China Hacked Our Water?

China’s Volt Typhoon hackers have quietly embedded themselves inside U.S. critical infrastructure for years, not stealing data or causing immediate damage, just waiting. An insurance industry war game simulated what would happen if 5,000 water utilities got compromised simultaneously. The scenario was sobering. Hospitals evacuate. Supply chains break. Water systems fail. Federal officials fear Volt Typhoon is preparing disruptive capability in case of a Taiwan crisis or U.S. conflict escalation. Small rural utilities are attractive targets precisely because they have minimal cybersecurity resources. The threat is no longer theoretical. WIRED (12 minutes)

The State of American Christianity

When Thomas Jefferson helped enshrine the separation of church and state, he didn’t know he was creating a religious marketplace. Free from government control, American Christianity had to compete for believers. Revivalism democratized faith. Charismatic preachers like Billy Graham reached millions by making salvation accessible and tangible. But the market rewarded spectacle over theology, and over the past 50 years, muscular evangelical Christianity with explicitly political aims dominated the landscape. Today, Christian nationalism merges faith with grievance politics, shaped by the same market forces Jefferson’s First Amendment unleashed. The question remains. What does the marketplace reward next. The New Yorker (14 minutes)

Efficiency’s Hidden Cost

California voters passed Prop 12 in 2016, requiring breeding sows have at least 24 square feet of floor space and room to turn around. It was a modest moral choice, then the pork industry spent millions trying to override it in Congress via the Save Our Bacon Act. The bill would make it illegal for any state to set welfare standards affecting out-of-state producers. Senator Chris Murphy asks. Efficient for whom. Compassion, he argues, is a form of attention that atrophies when we’re forced to participate in systems we find morally objectionable. Prices hide costs. When they’re artificially low, someone else is paying. New York Times (11 minutes)

Making, Not Consuming

Most people aren’t trying to save time, they’re trying to spend it. The past century’s technology was built to deliver efficiency. More with less. But AI belongs to a different category, alongside the paintbrush and printing press. It lets us express ourselves and make things feel possible. Oliver Sacks observed that alive people are soaked in past and future at once, remembering and dreaming. That’s what making does. It stretches you across time. When execution gets cheap, the bottleneck shifts from skill and capital to having something to say. Your quirks stop being private and become the point. Expect lots of people making beautiful, slightly pointless things and sharing them. a16z (14 minutes)

Mechanical Mastery

Bartosz Ciechanowski built an interactive explainer that walks you through assembling a mechanical watch from first principles. Mainspring to balance wheel to escapement. Over 100 interactive illustrations let you manipulate each component and see exactly how it works. The piece is almost as impressive as the engineering it describes. A mechanical watch is a feat of miniaturization and creative problem-solving. Springs, levers, and gears orchestrate together to keep time without electricity. There’s real elegance in machinery that precise. ciechanow.ski (20 minutes)

Tweens in America

Mira is 12. She lives in San Francisco’s Avenues with her nurse practitioner mom, job-free dad, and younger sibling. She wears cargo sweatpants and Manic Panic hair. She’s learning to navigate the thrilling, terrifying space between childhood and adulthood, where you’re aware enough to see the world’s cruelty but not yet old enough to look away. She goes to circus training five days a week and performs aerial hoop tricks. She reads smut novels and refuses to use TikTok. She budgets her $12 weekly allowance in an Excel spreadsheet with Patrick’s help. The middle-school dance came. She wore a pink ruffle dress and Air Force 1s. She did the worm to “Million Dollar Baby.” The glimpse into Mira’s world reveals the brief window when kids are shedding childhood and trying on adulthood at the same time. Within the next few years, she’ll be pulled into drama, secrecy, insecurity. But for now, she’s in the in-between. The New Yorker (25 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

Creativity is intelligence having fun. - Albert Einstein

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

13 — Red cards have more than tripled at this World Cup, with 13 issued so far compared to just four each in 2018 and 2022, driven partly by faster VAR review technology.

500 — Japan approved construction on a maglev line that would connect Tokyo and Osaka at 500 kilometers per hour, cutting the current 2-hour-20-minute Shinkansen trip down to just 67 minutes.

450,000,000 — Fox is on pace to earn roughly $450 million in ad revenue from World Cup hydration breaks alone, nearly covering the network’s entire $485 million rights fee for the tournament.

The Answer Trap

More than 60 percent of Google searches in the US now end without a single click, since people read an AI summary and walk away with their answer in seconds. That speed feels like a win, but neuroscience research shows curiosity itself depends on a gap between asking a question and getting the answer, a window during which the brain’s reward circuits activate and the hippocampus primes itself to absorb not just the answer but everything nearby. Close that gap instantly, as AI summaries do, and you lose the wandering, the adjacent article, the unexpected tangent, the exact kind of incidental exploration that led Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson to discover the Big Bang’s leftover radiation instead of dismissing it as radio noise. Nobody is forced to stop exploring, but when every question becomes an endpoint instead of a starting point, we quietly trade the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask for the convenience of instant answers. NYT (5 minutes)

Dark Palace

Ninety-nine percent of the bacteria you could see swimming under a microscope in a water sample would refuse to grow in a lab dish, a mismatch discovered as far back as 1932 and confirmed for decades after. Everything changed once scientists learned to read a universal fragment of ribosomal DNA instead of trying to culture organisms directly, a technique that let Carl Woese discover an entirely new domain of life in 1977 and later let researchers survey wild microbial populations without growing a single cell. As sequencing costs collapsed by roughly five orders of magnitude in under a decade, that trickle of discovery became a flood, revealing dozens of new phyla, a “candidate phyla radiation” that may make up a fifth of all microbial life, and gene-swapping ecosystems where organisms borrow metabolic machinery from neighbors like sugar from next door. The most sobering lesson is that we still can’t reliably identify a microbe picked at random, even at the broadest level, which is a humbling thing to admit before sending equipment to hunt for life on Mars or Venus. Mars For The Rest of Us (10 minutes)

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Sending people newsletters they actually want to read can change your business. I‘ve seen this personally as I’ve watched how much the Weekend Briefing has helped me grow my law firm Westaway. That’s why I recently cofounded Future Forest: an end-to-end newsletter service for business owners who want a steady stream of loyal clients. Interested? Take this 1-minute quiz to see how your newsletter is doing, and specific tips for how to improve it. Future Forest (Sponsored).

The Effort Economy

AI was supposed to hand humans a lighter workload, but early adopters are working harder than ever. Researchers tracking more than 10,000 workers found that once people started using AI, their time on email, messaging, and business software surged, with some categories nearly doubling, because tasks that used to get outsourced suddenly felt doable solo. Instead of freeing up hours, AI pulled work into evenings, weekends, and waiting rooms, with people juggling multiple bots at once like a manager running several projects simultaneously. The real dividing line in this new world of work isn’t raw intelligence, it’s whether someone has the appetite and stamina for sustained mental effort. The Atlantic (12 minutes)

Alpine Divorce

When a climb goes wrong and only one partner comes home, a court has to decide where a tragic mistake ends and a crime begins. In January 2025, chef Thomas Plamberger and his less experienced girlfriend Kerstin Gurtner got caught in freezing pre-dawn conditions near the 12,461-foot summit of the Grossglockner, Austria’s highest peak. Plamberger tied Gurtner to a rock and descended to find help, and she froze to death before he returned. This February an Innsbruck judge convicted him of grossly negligent homicide, handing down a five-month suspended sentence and a 9,400 euro fine while telling him “I don’t see you as a murderer.” The case turns on the mountaineer’s grim shorthand for a partner left behind in the death zone, the “alpine divorce,” and on how much responsibility the stronger climber owes the weaker one when hundreds die in these Alps every year and charges almost never follow. The New Yorker (25 minutes)

One Video Every Three Minutes

Hand a thirteen-year-old a fresh Snapchat account and, without searching for anything, the app will start feeding them sextortion, drugs, and strangers. Test accounts run for research collected 244 sexual videos, 256 drug and alcohol videos, 95 violent videos, and 53 self-harm videos in roughly twelve hours, all served up by the recommendation engine. In a survey of real teen users, one in three reported an unsafe experience at least weekly, 36% got unwanted contact from strangers, and 4% were targeted by sextortion, a rate that extrapolates to some 800,000 American teenagers a year. Most kids stay quiet, with only 39% telling a trusted adult while 54% said nothing because they were “used to it.” The reflex is to demand more parental vigilance or tougher kids, but the numbers point at a product built to maximize engagement no matter who gets hurt. After Babel (12 minutes)

Your Life, Unlived

Picture yourself at seventy looking back, and the great love affair of your life turns out to be the screen six inches from your face. Written as a letter from 2063 to a person who scrolled through their one wild youth, it tallies the quiet trades: the lukewarm acai bowl photographed instead of eaten in Bali, the fifty-dollar Pilates class attended for the story, the adolescent pictures deleted out of insecurity. By one reckoning, four to seven hours a day of screen time adds up to roughly fifteen years spent nose-to-glass by age seventy. The satire lands because none of it feels like a decision, just a thousand small defaults that were never actually chosen. The warning isn’t that phones are evil, it’s that a life can be fully consumed without ever being lived, and no single moment will announce that it happened. Liz Leatrice (6 minutes)

Why Messi Walks

The best soccer players on Earth spend much of a match walking, and that is exactly why they are the best. Elite performers win not by running harder but by anticipating, reading patterns they have absorbed since childhood so they know where the ball is going before it moves, a mental shortcut researchers call “chunking.” Lionel Messi drifts and strolls while quietly mapping the geometry of the field, spending his energy on prediction rather than motion, and Cristiano Ronaldo has headed balls accurately in total darkness because he has internalized the trajectory thousands of times. The same pattern library shows up in a hitter like Albert Pujols, reacting to a pitch too fast for conscious thought. Mastery in any field looks less like effort and more like seeing further ahead, the expert making the hard thing look slow. Youtube (13 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 important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. -Albert Einstein

Welcome to the weekend.

As is my tradition, here’s my annual 4th of July country music playlist. It’s 21+ hours of country music including the top 10 songs from 1990-2025 + new stuff from this year. It’s best enjoyed by a BBQ or a lake.

Also, I just recently interviewed Eric Reis, author of The Lean Startup on his new book Incorruptible about building businesses that last. The first story below is and article I wrote for Forbes on that, but if you want to see the full interview check it out on YouTube (and subscribe to my channel while you’re there).

Prime Numbers

35 — BTS grossed $127.8 million in May, beating The Rolling Stones’ previous record for the biggest monthly gross by a group in Boxscore history by 35%.

66,123 — Aerial Illuminations broke a Guinness World Record in Manvel, Texas, by launching 66,123 drones over one week for an Easter-themed light show depicting the crucifixion of Christ.

103,632 — Downloads of the phone-locking app Brick jumped from 14,000 last October to 103,632 in January, as growing screen-time anxiety fuels demand for gadgets designed to disable your other devices.

Ghost In The Room

Keeping founder control feels like protecting your mission, but it’s actually a guardian with an expiration date. Eric Ries calls the market pressure that slowly erodes a company’s principles “financial gravity,” and his fix isn’t a stronger leader, it’s a stronger structure: a “governance fortress” built on a public benefit corporation charter, a supermajority vote of all outstanding shares rather than just those cast, and a self-reinforcing lock that stops that supermajority from ever being quietly repealed. Twilio never built one, and once founder Jeff Lawson’s supervoting shares expired, it took activist investors owning less than half a percent of the company just 199 days to force him out, while Costco’s fortress, poured in 1985, still holds. The real question every founder has to answer isn’t whether they can hold the line themselves, it’s whether their company can hold it without them. Forbes (8 minutes)

Beef, Not Beltway

A family of four earning $130,000 a year, comfortably above the national median, is now in the red after covering just housing, health insurance, and day care, over $1,000 worse off than 18 months ago. Groceries, not rent or gas, are the single biggest source of financial stress for Americans, and meat is the biggest culprit within that, cited six times more often than the next contender. Beef prices alone are up roughly a third in two years, driven by the smallest U.S. cattle herd in decades, a concentrated meatpacking industry, tariffs, and a livestock parasite spreading across the Americas. Fixing the herd could take years, so the more immediate fight is over tariffs, grocery sales taxes, and the shrinkflation tricks that quietly raise prices without ever changing the sticker. NYT (6 minutes)

Judges Before Lunch

Israeli judges granted parole to 65% of prisoners at the start of a work session, but that number crashed to nearly zero by session’s end, only to snap back to 65% right after lunch. It had nothing to do with the case, the crime, or the prisoner’s record. It was simply a matter of how many decisions the judge had already made since the last break, since the brain treats a decision about lunch or a mundane email the same way it treats a major call, drawing down the same limited pool of mental energy. The fix isn’t finishing every task, it’s deciding what to do about it, since a concrete plan for a pending task is often enough to quiet the intrusive thoughts and free up the mind, even before the task itself gets done. FacileThings (7 minutes)

The Baton Drops Often

Per long-cited Kellogg research, only 3% of family businesses survive to the fourth generation. The baton, it turns out, drops more often than it gets passed. Family Business Advisor Kile Graves coaches family-owned enterprises through generational transitions at Cornerstone Coaching with his father, Steve, and frames this as identity work — not succession. “The baton doesn’t just pass,” he writes. “It’s handed — and received. Both actions require intention.” His free 60-minute webinar for family business leaders at any generation runs June 23 and July 7. Registrants get a copy of The Torch. Click the link to sign up. Cornerstone (Sponsored)

Blogger, Prophet, Skeptic

A man who wrote emails to friends about mobile internet because his magazine editor didn’t want the stories ended up inventing an entire way of covering Silicon Valley. Om Malik started Gigaom in 2001 almost by accident, and it grew into one of the 50 most influential blogs on the internet, mixing hot scoops with blunt opinion in a way that pulled tech journalism away from stodgy institutions and toward singular voices like his own. He had an eye for what mattered before anyone else did, championing Slack early and writing the first serious blog coverage of Twitter, even though he wasn’t a fan of it at the time. He died this week at 59, having spent two decades insisting that Silicon Valley owed the world more honesty about its own power than it was ever inclined to give. NYT (7 minutes)

The Woman Across The Street

A Toyota Highlander parked across the street turned out to be less an eyesore than a locked door with a person trapped behind it. A Seattle homeowner noticed a woman named Elysia living in her dead car with two dogs, and instead of calling it in, he introduced himself, discovering she’d grown up nearby, earned a degree from the University of Washington, and had been steadily undone by an abusive ex, an autoimmune disease, and a string of small bureaucratic disasters, unpaid tickets turned into a warrant, an uninsured accident, a suspended license. What actually got her unstuck wasn’t a shelter or a program, it was neighbors pooling a few thousand dollars for a used Toyota Sienna, converting it into a livable camper, and paying off the tickets and insurance she needed to legally drive again. Sometimes the difference between someone staying stuck forever and someone climbing out is nothing more than a handful of people deciding to actually look. Wallyhood (14 minutes)

Letting Go Of The Wheel

Getting everything he wanted in his twenties left Sasha Chapin miserable, so he tried something that sounds almost irresponsible: he stopped choosing. He calls it surrender, the practice of noticing the pull of your life instead of forcing it toward a plan, on the theory that the ambitious, goal-setting part of the mind is a tiny sliver of a much larger intelligence, poorly suited to running the whole show. Discovered goals, the ones that show up because people keep reacting to you a certain way, tend to work better than the ones you privately decided on years ago and never let go of. It’s a strange argument for less control, but the case is that happiness was never really about getting what you want, it’s about how often you insist that things should be different than they are. Sasha’s Newsletter (9 minutes)

Gipsying To Glory

Long before bunk beds and lanyards, summer camp began as a 30-mile walk. In 1861, an abolitionist schoolteacher named Frederick Gunn led about 30 boys and a dozen girls from his Connecticut boarding school to the shores of Long Island Sound, where they spent 10 days boating, fishing, and running military drills in what they called “gipsying.” The idea took off because it combined something Victorian Americans were newly anxious about, city life softening children, with the belief that nature alone could rebuild toughness and self-reliance, and by the 1880s camps like Camp Chocorua in New Hampshire had turned that instinct into an entire institution. More than 160 years later, kids still swim, hike, and sit around a fire for the same reason Gunn’s group did, because a summer spent outside the usual rules of home still seems to shape a person the classroom never quite can. HISTORY (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

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - The Declaration of Independence

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

312,000,000 — Toy Story 5 opened to $312 million globally in its debut weekend, combining $160 million domestically and $152 million overseas to score the year’s biggest opening and shatter the franchise’s previous record.

1,650 — A new Caltech-led radio telescope called the Deep Synoptic Array will blanket 1,650 dish-shaped antennas across 120 square miles of Nevada desert, surveying the sky 100 times faster than existing radio observatories — and processing it all in real time.

270 — Dispersing enough reflective aerosols to meaningfully cool the planet would require a fleet of 270 specialized aircraft flying in concert — enough to disperse a million metric tons of material annually and reduce global surface temperatures by 0.26 degrees Celsius.

Wegovy at Nine

Two nine-year-old twins in Georgia with a genetic mutation that blocks the feeling of fullness have tried karate, portion control, sugar substitutes, seizure medication, and stimulants, and none of it moved the needle on a BMI trajectory that was already producing elevated blood sugar, liver dysfunction, and worrisome cholesterol at age seven. Their doctors are now injecting them with Wegovy weekly, a drug approved for obesity only in patients twelve and older, in a decision that sits at the sharpest edge of a genuine medical dilemma. GLP-1s are producing BMI reductions of up to 30% in some young patients where behavioral programs typically yield 1-3%, but no one knows what decades on these drugs starting in childhood does to bone density, puberty, or brain development. Childhood obesity rates have quadrupled since the 1970s, kids are developing Type 2 diabetes at ten, and doctors are increasingly deciding that a known catastrophe in hand outweighs an unknown risk in the bush. WSJ (7 minutes)

Useful But Untrusted

Americans have doubled their use of AI chatbots since 2023, with about half of U.S. adults now using them and roughly one in four doing so daily, yet the same Pew survey reveals a striking paradox: the heaviest users are also the most pessimistic. Adults under 30 are more likely than any other age group to say AI will have a negative impact on both society and their personal lives over the next 20 years, even as they use these tools far more than their elders. Two-thirds of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly, seven in ten believe it will make their personal data less secure, and confidence in the government to regulate it effectively has dropped to just 33%, with Democrats growing dramatically more skeptical since 2024. The picture that emerges is less a technophobic public and more a pragmatic one: people are finding real utility in these tools for search, work, and even emotional support, while remaining clear-eyed that the institutions responsible for managing the risks are nowhere near ready. Pew Research Center (6 minutes)

Seven In Ten Fail

By long-cited Kellogg estimates, roughly 70% of family businesses fail to make it from the first generation to the second — and the strong ones fail alongside the weak. Usually, says Family Business Advisor Kile Graves, because four different things are being transferred (financial control, operational power, culture, and long-range vision), and they move on different timelines. That misalignment is the leading indicator of breakdown. Graves has coached dozens of family enterprises through this work. He’s teaching the diagnostic in a free 60-minute webinar June 23 and July 7. Everyone who registers gets The Torch, his framework guide. Click the link to sign up. Cornerstone (Sponsored)

No More Stars

SpaceX already has over 10,000 Starlink satellites streaking across the night sky, and astrophysicists have now modeled what the company’s proposed one million additional orbital AI data centers would actually look like: more visible satellites than stars, for large portions of the night, from every location on Earth, since the human eye can only see about 4,500 stars in an unpolluted sky to begin with. Beyond the aesthetic catastrophe, the proposal sidesteps serious questions about atmospheric pollution from daily satellite re-entries, escalating collision risk in increasingly crowded orbits, and the basic engineering problem that orbital data centers would need to dissipate enormous amounts of waste heat in an environment where SpaceX once fried a satellite simply by painting it black. The FCC accepted the filing and opened a public comment period within four days, giving astronomers, who typically spend months on peer-reviewed research, just four weeks to respond. Orbital space is a finite shared resource governed by international rules that were never designed for one private company to claim it at this scale. The Conversation (5 minutes)

Starving Science Slowly

A billion-dollar NASA x-ray telescope called AXIS didn’t get canceled, it just got quietly suffocated: DOGE buyouts gutted the engineering team, budget realignments redirected what was left, a government shutdown ate the remaining runway, and when the project came in over budget with no time to fix it, NASA pulled the plug on nine years of work. That story is playing out across American research right now, with the NIH issuing just 14 funding notices through mid-March of 2026 compared to its usual 850 per year, nearly 95,000 scientists having left federal employment, and 75 percent of researchers surveyed by Nature considering leaving the country entirely. The deeper story is that this didn’t come from nowhere: the postwar compact between government and science, in which tax dollars funded open-ended basic research in exchange for occasional world-changing breakthroughs, has been quietly eroding for decades as venture capital logic colonized innovation policy, and the current administration is simply the most aggressive expression of a long-building hostility. An economist’s model estimated that a 40 percent cut to NIH funding sustained over prior decades would have prevented roughly half of all drugs that exist today from ever being developed. Scientific American (12 minutes)

Reading The Room

A Michael Jackson biopic just opened to $217 million worldwide, the biggest biopic debut ever, despite decades of child sexual abuse allegations that ended Kevin Spacey’s career, pulled Woody Allen from streaming, and left Bill Cosby culturally untouchable even after his release from prison. A recent psychology study offers a surprisingly clean explanation: researchers found that people consistently support censoring artists accused of sexual misconduct while their private enjoyment of the art barely changes, suggesting that cancel culture is less about aesthetic or even moral judgment than about social signaling. The taste system, as the researchers frame it, is stable and private, a beautiful song stays beautiful, but the signaling system is public and reputational, tracking not the severity of a transgression but whether social consensus has formed clearly enough to make the wrong public stance costly. Jackson escaped that consensus partly because he died before #MeToo codified the modern cancellation script, and partly because his estate and fans have kept the case legibly contested, which is all the ambiguity the signaling system needs to stand down. Rob Henderson’s Newsletter (5 minutes)

The City Never Sleeps

When the Knicks completed the largest comeback in NBA Finals history just before midnight on June 10th, every New Yorker watching felt it, and Oura’s anonymized member data from across the city proves it was more than a feeling. From tip-off to the final buzzer, average heart rates stayed elevated 2 BPM above personal baselines for the entire game, spiking to 3.7 BPM above baseline in the closing moments. The physiological hangover was equally measurable: New Yorkers averaged 6.63 hours of sleep that night, down about 10 minutes from the prior week, with every stage of sleep taking a hit and overall recovery scores dropping 1 to 3 percent across the metro area simultaneously. The data is a small but vivid reminder that the body doesn’t distinguish between running a race and watching one. Oura (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

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. - Stephen Hawking

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

8 — The NBA has crowned 8 different champions in the last 8 seasons, and the Knicks — who ended 53 years of frustration without a superstar or a traditional superteam — are the perfect embodiment of the most unpredictable era in league history.

60 — China has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016, reaching nearly 60 gigawatts of total power capacity — and is on course to overtake both the US and the EU in installed nuclear capacity by 2030, while the US has built just two new reactors in that same span.

68% — In a major analysis of 25 studies across Africa and Asia, insecticide-treated nets cut malaria cases by up to 68% — but researchers warn that growing insecticide resistance threatens to erode those gains unless countries adopt locally tailored, multi-intervention strategies.

CRISPR The Destroyer

For decades, cancer researchers have been trying to fix broken tumor suppressor genes, and for decades they’ve failed, because you can’t drug something that has no pocket to put the drug in. A new CRISPR-based technique from UC Berkeley flips the entire logic: instead of repairing the mutated cell, it destroys it entirely, programming the CRISPR enzyme to detect a cancer-specific RNA signature and then shred all the genetic material inside that cell until it dies. The system is precise enough to distinguish cells that differ by a single nucleotide, leaving healthy cells almost completely untouched, and it has already shown promise against p53 mutations, which appear in nearly half of all cancers and up to 90% of some of the hardest-to-treat types, including ovarian and pancreatic. The deeper breakthrough may be the programmability: when a new cancer mutation emerges, researchers can design a new guide RNA in days rather than the years it takes to develop a traditional drug. Innovative Genomics Institute (6 min)

AI as Intern

The most clarifying thing anyone has said about AI’s effect on work came from a journalism nonprofit CEO who described his custom-built AI briefing tool not as a replacement for his editors, but as “a student or an intern.” The automation-apocalypse framing, pushed by Altman, Amodei, and Suleyman, turns out to be the wrong analogy entirely. What’s actually happening looks more like the original dream of personal computing: in the 1970s, early computers shipped with BASIC so anyone could write their own programs, but the language was too hard, and the software industry took over instead. Generative AI has quietly revived that original vision, letting a shipping-logistics CFO automate 80% of a payment-matching headache, or a dumpster-rental company vibe-code a fraud-detection tool that outperforms the commercial platform it replaced, without a single software engineer on staff. The New Yorker (10 min)

One Hundred Twenty-Four Trillion

Over the next two decades, an estimated $124 trillion will pass from one generation to the next — the largest intergenerational transfer in history, per Cerulli Associates. A meaningful share of it sits inside family-owned businesses, and most of those businesses won’t survive the handoff. Family Business Advisor Kile Graves coaches family enterprises through exactly that transition at Cornerstone Coaching, alongside his father, Steve. This summer he’s running a free 60-minute webinar for family business leaders at any generation. Two sessions: June 23 or July 7. Everyone who registers gets a copy of The Torch, his framework guide. Cornerstone (Sponsored)

The Hidden Forest

Beneath every wild grassland on Earth, packed into the top six inches of soil, runs a fungal network so vast that if you stretched it into a straight line it would span 10% of the Milky Way. These aren’t passive threads. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form two-way nutrient pipelines with nearly every land plant on Earth, trading nitrogen and phosphorus for carbon, and in the process absorbing an estimated 4.3 billion tons of CO2 per year, roughly 11% of global fossil fuel emissions. Researchers just published the first global map of this network, built from over 16,000 soil cores and an AI model that predicted fungal density across every square kilometer of topsoil worldwide, and the most striking finding is what’s missing: croplands show 50% lower fungal density than wild grasslands, almost certainly because fertilizers and fungicides are quietly dismantling the system. Wild grasslands, which are being converted to agriculture faster than forests, turn out to harbor the densest fungal biomass on the planet, making them a carbon sink that almost nobody is protecting. Live Science (5 min)

The New American Dad

Having a child is, by almost every short-term measure, bad for you: less sleep, less free time, smaller brain volume, and a persistent sense of never finishing everything you wanted to do. And yet American fathers are doing dramatically more of it than ever before, with millennial dads spending over 80 minutes a day on active childcare compared to barely 30 minutes for their fathers in 1965. The reasons are layered: women entering the workforce created a structural need for fathers to pick up slack, but the data shows that educated, wealthy fathers, men who could easily outsource everything, are actually the ones driving the increase, which suggests genuine enjoyment is part of the story. The darker undercurrent is competitive anxiety, with college admissions pressure turning childhood into an investment project and parental involvement into a status signal, so that the surge in “involved dads” is simultaneously an expression of love, a rational economic hedge, and an arms race that has quietly made intensive parenting the new baseline for everyone. Derek Thompson (10 min)

Coffee In Space

An espresso machine that costs $150 on Earth became a 20-kilogram, single-digit-million-dollar engineering project when the Italian space agency decided ISS astronauts deserved better than instant coffee, and the reason why explains almost everything about why space exploration is still so brutally expensive. The culprit isn’t launch costs, it’s certification: every component headed to the ISS must prove it won’t interfere with electronics, leak boiling droplets into the cabin, shatter into eye hazards, or trigger any of dozens of other failure modes that are merely annoying on Earth and potentially fatal in orbit. The author illustrates the problem with a story from his own solar-powered home in New Mexico, where a Japanese toilet with slightly mismatched voltage expectations somehow destabilized his entire electrical system and repeatedly killed his furnace, which is exactly the class of invisible, cascading fault NASA spends billions trying to rule out before anything reaches orbit. The uncomfortable implication for the Starship era is that cheap launches solve only the cheapest part of the problem: as long as humans are aboard, the equipment inside the rocket still has to be certified to the same brutal standard, and until we’ve accumulated hundreds of person-years of experience living in space, there’s no shortcut around that. Mars For The Rest of Us (12 min)

Victimhood As Strategy

At Stanford, four in ten students are officially registered as disabled, a figure that approaches absurdity until you understand the incentives: extended test time, flexible deadlines, priority housing, and moral authority that is nearly impossible to challenge. The rise is sharpest at the most selective schools, with only 3 to 4 percent of community college students receiving accommodations compared to 30 to 40 percent at places like Amherst and Stanford, which strongly suggests the gap reflects strategic diagnosis-seeking rather than any real difference in health between student populations. A 2021 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people with narcissistic and manipulative personality traits are disproportionately likely to pursue resources through victim claims, but the more unsettling possibility is that the causal arrow also runs the other direction: habitually framing yourself as disadvantaged may itself cultivate those traits. The deeper problem is that elite universities are training their future leadership class, the people who will run institutions and set cultural norms, to treat rules as obstacles and fragility as leverage. Rob Henderson’s Newsletter (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

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. - Bruce Lee

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