Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

Sell One Less

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

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

Acquired Briefing

Corporate Terrorism

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

Robot Freud

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

Pancreatic Cancer Cracked?

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

Nukes For Progress

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

Inconceivable Winner

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

Own Your Failures

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

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

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

God and the Chatbot

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

The Finger on the Button

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

Demis Wants to Know God’s Thoughts

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

Not Dead Yet

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

Solitude’s Hidden Price Tag

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

$14 Ozempic

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

Masters Pimento Cheese

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

The Open Web Returns

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

Do Not Disturb

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

Training Your Replacement

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

Bubbles On Command

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

Trust But Verify

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

Scarcity ≠ Love

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

Holy Sh*t, The Moon

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

Welcome to the weekend and Happy Easter!

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

Jobs and Gender

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

$500 Beats $25M

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

The iDecade

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

Gambling Society

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

America’s Gas Addiction

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

Stephen of the Shire

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

27 Most Beautiful Places

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

Fink’s Hedge

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

AI Policy

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

The 45 Planets

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

The Oil Jugular

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

Freedom’s Hidden Cost

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

Night Knowledge

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

iPod Brain

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

Brain Fry

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

The Military’s AI Problem

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

What Silicon Valley Rewards

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

Antarctica’s Gravitational Sinkhole

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

European Regulatory Drag

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

Another Layer of Abstraction

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

Friction Is The Feature

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

Teens and AI

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

Boredom and Creativity

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

Becoming a Parent

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

Science’s New Engine

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

On Difficulty

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

The End of Mail in Denmark

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

The United States of Beauty

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

Welcome to the weekend. Check out my March playlist.

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

Making Babies in Space

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

Anthropic & the DoD

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

Trust at Scale

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

Returning to the Moon

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

How Africa Develops

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

Solar’s Growth

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

The Invisible Epidemic

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

Trust is built with consistency. - Lincoln Chafee

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

Teaching AI Morality

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

Zuck Takes the Stand

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

The Report That Tanked the Market

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

The Amber Alert Vaccine

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

The Omnipotence Dilemma

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

Team Human vs. Team Machine

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

The Best Drone Shots From the Olumpics

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

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

Nuclear War

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

Hasan Minhaj & Annie Jacobsen

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

A House of Dynamite

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

START Stopped

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

AI and the Nuclear Trigger

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

Hitting a Bullet With a Bullet

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

Nuclear Winter

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

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

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

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

Xi’s Loyalty Problem

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

AI and Ads

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

Backcountry Rescue

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

Seven

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

Swim For It

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

Can Society Function Without Alcohol?

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

Are All-Inclusive Resort Cool?

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

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

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

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

BUY HOW TO LIVE A MEANINGFUL LIFE

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

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

What’s the meaning of life?

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

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

Or rather, it sidesteps it entirely.

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

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

The Preposition Problem

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

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

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

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

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

Why We’re All Asking This Now

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

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

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

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

The Impact Trap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living in the Flow World

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

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

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

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

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

The Compass Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Paradox of Control

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

Let that land.

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

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

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

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

Catching Yourself in the Act

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the weekend.

Prime Numbers

11 — Americans now spend 11 hours per week watching social or creator videos compared to 19 hours watching television or movies, a shift from 2022 when they watched 10.8 hours of social videos versus 21.2 hours of TV/movies—representing a loss of 2.2 weekly hours of long-form entertainment.

3400 — Goodwill Industries surpassed $7 billion in revenue from its 3,400 stores in 2025, up 7% year-over-year and nearly 50% since 2019, as inflation-weary Americans hunt for bargains and younger shoppers embrace secondhand clothing as sustainable and fashionable.

1,600,000 — The 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics has produced nearly 1.6 million cubic meters of manufactured “technical snow” across all venues, with organizers constructing massive new high-elevation reservoirs including one holding 200 million liters to ensure consistent, safe racing conditions as climate change makes natural snowfall unreliable.

The Story of Porsche

Porsche is both quality and quantity. It owns the most prestigious brand in its market while churning out nearly half a million mass-market soccer mom SUVs per year. And like any good luxury brand, it’s packed with enough juicy family drama and creeping takeovers to fill a Netflix series. Yet behind it all lies perhaps the darkest origin story we’ve ever told on Acquired. Porsche wasn’t just started by Nazis. Adolf Hitler himself was deeply involved in its early fortunes. Following WWII, the Allies simply looked past these facts and essentially bestowed a license to generate wealth on Porsche and its owners, setting the stage for them to become one of the fifteen wealthiest families in the world today. Dig deeper in my briefing. Acquired Briefing (21 minutes)

Claude’s New Constitution

You can now train AI models by explaining principles in plain English rather than encoding good behavior as mathematical reward functions—a shift that matters because Claude has 20 million users doing unpredictable things, and you need the model to generalize values to contexts you didn’t anticipate. Anthropic’s approach treats their AI less like a calculator to be programmed and more like a precocious child to be reasoned with: the new “constitution” doesn’t just list desired behaviors but explains why Claude should refuse to help concentrate power illegitimately, even if Anthropic itself asks. The bet is that as models get smarter, understanding the reasoning behind rules will make them better at self-governance than memorizing a list—which becomes critical if they eventually exceed human intelligence. For builders: you can’t enumerate every scenario in advance, so teaching principles that transfer across contexts beats trying to hard-code every possible edge case. Time (7 minutes)

New Study on Social Media and Teens

A large UK study found that teens’ total social media hours didn’t predict mental health problems a year later—which critics of platform bans celebrated as vindication. But the study measured something narrow: whether screen time in general predicts self-reported emotional symptoms 12 months out, not whether Instagram’s recommendation algorithm introduces girls to pro-anorexia content, or whether Snapchat streaks wreck classroom focus and sleep. The real harms aren’t about time spent—they’re about predatory design choices that exploit specific vulnerabilities in specific kids, the same way casinos are banned for children not because longitudinal studies proved gambling causes depression, but because we recognize an environment built to exploit them. If removing phones from schools improves academic performance (especially for struggling students), removing algorithmic feeds designed to maximize engagement will likely produce similar gains—even if population-level surveys can’t detect them. Platformer (14 minutes)

Worth Beyond Work

You can save a million babies and still feel like you’re not enough. The speaker co-founded Embrace, a social enterprise creating low-cost incubators for premature babies, and spent a decade making it her entire identity—until the company shut down and she had no idea who she was anymore. The real breakthrough came when she traced her relentless drive back to childhood abuse: feeling powerless as a kid had pushed her to help the most powerless people in the world, but it also meant no amount of achievement could fill the void. She learned to stop achieving her way out of pain through three shifts: feeling emotions instead of numbing them with productivity, letting go of outcomes (you can’t control the waves, only how you ride them), and offering herself the compassion she’d been desperately seeking from external validation. If your worth depends on what you build, you’re one failure away from shattering—and even success won’t save you. Check out Jane’s TED Talk. TED (7 minutes)

Am I Fulfilled?

Self-actualization—becoming everything you’re capable of becoming—sounds inspiring until you realize it assumes there’s one true you waiting to be optimized and validated by others. Allan spent a decade in project management feeling restless not because he failed to find himself, but because the premise was wrong: you’re too vast to be summed up in one lifetime, and chasing complete fulfillment sets you up for pressure and disappointment. Maslow himself figured this out late in life and added a higher level—self-transcendence—which isn’t about perfecting the self but connecting to something larger, and it’s available at any stage, not just after you’ve climbed every other rung. The shift from “Am I fulfilled?” to “Am I fully alive today?” changes the game: instead of mining inward for some discoverable essence, you show up outward with curiosity and compassion, meeting the world as the multitude you already are. Design Your Life (5 minutes)

Population Collapse

China had fewer births in 2025 than in 1776, when its population was one-fifth the size—a collapse so severe that even if it somehow froze births at current levels, the population would eventually stabilize at 625 million, less than half of today’s 1.4 billion. This isn’t just China: since the mid-2010s, fertility has accelerated downward everywhere with no apparent floor, and every coping mechanism people reach for crumbles under scrutiny—aging populations crush productivity and infrastructure, baby bonuses would require $10,000+ per child annually and still wouldn’t work, immigration can’t save us when the entire planet is approaching sub-replacement fertility, and hoping robots will replace all workers is just betting on a different kind of extinction event. We’re facing a threat as existential as any physical catastrophe, except this one requires figuring out how to make people want children again, which makes it harder but no less urgent than stopping a pandemic or feeding 8 billion humans. Noahpinion (14 minutes)

Starlings, Not Computers

Neuroscience used to hunt for where each mental function lived in the brain—emotion here, motivation there—but now researchers see the mind as networked ensembles firing across regions, like starlings forming patterns through local interactions rather than central command. This shift demolishes the ancient idea that reason should rule over primitive emotions and desires like a charioteer controlling wild horses. If your brain coordinates judgment by drawing on reason, emotion, desire, and body signals in constant collaboration, then treating any single faculty as supreme—especially reason—means you’re ignoring most of your decision-making apparatus. The stakes: phenomenally smart people do astoundingly stupid things precisely because they’re so smitten with their intelligence that they dismiss the signals their emotions and gut are sending them. NYT (8 minutes)

Should We Work Together?

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

Weekend Wisdom

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. — Hal Borland

Welcome to the weekend.

Acquired Briefing

Your briefing for the Acquired podcast.

By Kyle Westaway

Prime Numbers

260,000,000 — The Wizard of Oz show at the Las Vegas Sphere has generated over $260 million in ticket sales from more than 2 million tickets since opening in August, as Sphere Entertainment announces plans for a second, smaller U.S. venue outside Washington, D.C.

160,000 — The U.S. Forest Service manages roughly 160,000 miles of trails (85% of all federal trails), yet only 37% receive any maintenance each year, with districts reporting losses of up to 100% of trail staff and a $460 million maintenance backlog.

19 — U.S. vinyl sales grew for the 19th consecutive year in 2025, rising 8.6% to 47.9 million units and led by Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl,” which sold 1.6 million copies alone—nearly six times more than the second-place album.

The Secretive Empire of Mars Inc.

Mars Inc. is a $50 billion global powerhouse that remains 100% family-owned and notoriously private. While famous for M&M’s and Snickers, the company is actually a pet care titan in disguise; that segment generates 59% of its revenue ($29.5 billion) and employs roughly 100,000 of its 140,000-person workforce. Much of Mars’ dominance stems from Forrest Mars, who built a European empire in exile after a falling out with his father. He eventually returned to execute a hostile takeover of his father’s company. Since the 1930s, Mars has enforced a strict open-office policy with no executive perks. Every employee, including the CEO, must punch a time card to earn a 10% punctuality bonus. With the recent $35.9 billion acquisition of Kellanova, Mars continues to transform from a candy maker into a diversified CPG colossus, all while the family ($117 billion net worth) avoids the public eye. Acquired Briefing (22 minutes)

Naked & Inconsequential

Most people use extreme sports to feel alive, but Kílian Jornet—who has climbed Everest twice in a week without oxygen and runs up mountains for a living—does it to feel “naked and inconsequential.” His parents taught him not to visit nature but to be comfortable in it, turning off headlamps in the forest at night so he’d learn to trust his other senses. The shift came after watching his friend fall 600 meters to his death on a cornice: instead of pulling back, Jornet pushed harder, deliberately courting risk to test whether he was supposed to die that day instead. Now with three kids, he’s discovering that the real challenge isn’t surviving storms at 8,300 meters while hallucinating—it’s coming down from that simple, high-stakes clarity to choose between pasta and rice at the supermarket, where consequences feel meaningless and indulgence means refusing galas to watch the sunrise alone. NYT (7 minutes)

Clean Energy’s Tipping Point

Wind and solar now generate more electricity than coal globally, while electric vehicles claimed over a quarter of new car sales in 2025—milestones that arrived not from policy mandates but from economics. The price collapse is so complete that solar paired with batteries has become “anytime dispatchable electricity,” erasing the intermittency problem that was supposed to keep fossil fuels essential forever. China’s coal power is declining for the first time despite being the world’s largest emitter, and global gasoline car sales likely peaked back in 2017, suggesting the energy transition isn’t a future event but a current reality playing out faster than forecasts predicted. The implication is stark: the cost curves have already decided the winner, and betting against electrification now means betting against basic math. Yale e360 (3 minutes)

New Regulation for CRISPR

Baby KJ got a custom-built gene editor to fix his fatal liver mutation for under $1 million in six months—but under current FDA rules, fixing a different mutation in the same gene would require another decade-long, hundred-million-dollar approval process. The problem is we’re regulating genetic interventions like mass-produced pills when they’re actually more like surgery: personalized, high-stakes procedures using validated tools in new combinations. The shift is recognizing that FDA already knows how to handle this—they let hospital labs run custom diagnostic tests under CLIA certification instead of approving each one as a “product,” and they regulate surgical devices without treating every bypass as its own therapeutic. A16Z (5 minutes)

Nobody Reads Anymore

A professor kept cutting her reading assignments—fewer books, fewer pages, only the essential stuff—but students still weren’t doing it, and when they tried, they couldn’t understand what they read. This isn’t about laziness or phones (though distraction is “through the roof”); it’s that students are arriving at college without the foundational ability to parse complex text, and professors are caught between maintaining standards and acknowledging that asking for a 25-source research paper now gets called “unreasonable.” The underlying crisis is that reading isn’t just declining as a habit—it’s failing as a skill, which means the entire infrastructure of higher education (built on the assumption that students can extract meaning from written arguments) is suddenly standing on nothing. Chronicle (4 minutes)

Automating Independent Thinking

Students who offload their thinking to AI aren’t just getting lazy—they’re experiencing cognitive atrophy usually seen in aging brains, losing the ability to parse truth from fiction or build arguments because they’re “actually not engaging in the material.” The real damage isn’t that chatbots do homework; it’s that they’re designed to be sycophantic echo chambers that always agree with you, which means: kids raised on AI companions never learn the crucial skill of recovering from misunderstanding or disagreement (”Dude, I wash the dishes too—what are you complaining about?”). Additionally, one in five high schoolers has had or knows someone who’s had a romantic AI relationship, and the free AI tools accessible to poor schools are less accurate than premium versions, creating the first time in ed-tech history where schools must pay more for factually correct information. The fix isn’t banning AI but making it antagonistic instead of agreeable, shifting education away from transactional grade-chasing, and ensuring that while teachers save six hours a week automating emails, students aren’t automating away their capacity to think independently or feel genuinely challenged. NPR (5 minutes)

Havana Syndrome Weapon

The Pentagon recently ran an undercover operation and spent eight figures buying a backpack-sized device that emits pulsed radio waves—the kind some investigators think caused Havana Syndrome. For nearly a decade, the CIA and intelligence community insisted there wasn’t enough evidence to link the mysterious ailments (vertigo, extreme headaches, career-ending brain injuries) to foreign attacks, telling victims they were essentially imagining things while Russia was potentially targeting American officials worldwide. Now the core terror is proliferation: if this technology works and the US could buy one on the black market, how many other countries already have it, and how many more diplomats and spies are walking into invisible attacks? The victims who were called pariahs and forced into retirement are demanding public apologies, because the government’s “very unlikely it’s a foreign actor” assessment looks increasingly like either institutional incompetence or deliberate gaslighting—and either way, people lost their careers while officials debated whether the weapon pointed at their heads was real. CNN (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 first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different. - J.B. Priestley

Welcome to the weekend.

This week in my other newsletter, Acquired Briefing, I’m covering one of my favorite companies of all time. It’s also, in my opinion, Acquired’s best episode ever. I’ve been looking forward to sharing this one with you for months. If you aren’t subscribed yet and you love business deep dives, join our rapidly growing community and subscribe below to get these directly to your inbox every Thursday.

Acquired Briefing

Your briefing for the Acquired podcast.

By Kyle Westaway

Prime Numbers

762,400,000 — Print book sales at tracked U.S. outlets reached 762.4 million units in 2025, up 0.3%, sustaining post pandemic gains but remaining well below the 2021 peak of 839.7 million copies when pandemic reading habits drove a publishing boom.

19,000,000 — U.S. Bible sales hit 19 million units in 2025, marking a 21-year high with a 12% jump from 2024 and double the 2019 figure, as people increasingly seek spiritual anchors amid global uncertainty and social upheaval.

200 — A study of nearly 200 working adults found that intentionally shaping hobbies through goal-setting and learning boosted workplace creativity and meaning more than personal life satisfaction, suggesting organizations should support employees’ leisure activities through development funds and recognizing “me-time” commitments.

IKEA!

IKEA may be the most singular company in business history. A globally scaled, $50B revenue business with no direct competitors, yet only ~5% market share. One of the world’s largest retailers, yet selling only their own products. Generating billions in free cash flow annually, yet having no shareholders. Ingvar Kamprad’s vision and discipline are extraordinary. He had a clear mission to bring well-designed furniture to the masses and executed flawlessly, building a $50 billion empire purely off profitability without ever taking external capital beyond an initial 500-krona loan. The evolution from matches and pens to global furniture dominance is remarkable. Kamprad’s strategic frugality and long-term thinking created a company that defies conventional business logic at every turn. This folksy Swedish mail order business ended up in living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and garages around the globe. And yes, they even sell hot dogs cheaper than Costco. IKEA is a masterclass in counterintuitive strategy executed with relentless consistency. Check out my briefing on the Acquired episode that covers this enigmatic company. Acquired Briefing (23 minutes)

Patagonia’s Donations

Patagonia famously “made earth its only shareholder” over a year ago. In doing so they dedicated their profits to a non-profits working on environmental issues. Patagonia sent $80 million to the Holdfast Collective in 2024—a network of five trusts that funnel the company’s profits to environmental causes instead of shareholders. The filings reveal something odd: Holdfast took in $80 million but only gave away $41 million, with $20 million going to a philanthropic middleman where the trail goes cold. The biggest named recipients were The Nature Conservancy ($7.2M), a Patagonia-linked political group ($7.5M), and Leonardo DiCaprio’s rewilding nonprofit ($3.25M). If you’re building a business where purpose matters, here’s the tension: the structure lets you avoid being a billionaire while controlling exactly where the money goes—but transparency lags a year behind and some destinations stay hidden. David Gelles (7 minutes)

Housing Breaks Everything

The median first-time homebuyer aged from 29 to 40 since 1981, but the real damage isn’t about real estate—when young people can’t achieve the life-defining step of having their own place, they don’t marry, don’t have kids, experience worse mental health, and adopt extreme politics because they’re not financially invested in their community’s future. The insight: virtually every social pathology we’re dealing with flows downstream from this one constraint. For builders, the implication is stark: we should be constructing millions of homes as fast as possible, because no other intervention has this much leverage on societal wellbeing. Collaborative Fund (4 minutes)

Debt as Dissociation

Gen Z’s consumer debt surged 30% last year—not because they’re reckless, but because they’re watching the traditional markers of adulthood (homeownership, job security, retirement) recede into impossibility while algorithms show them the top 1% of lifestyles as baseline expectations. The insight: doom spending isn’t irrational consumption, it’s a trauma response—when you’re told to make decisions for a future that’s been “pulled out from under you,” buying the $80 manicure or the concert tickets becomes an act of claiming agency in the only timeframe that feels real. For anyone building consumer products or financial services, understand that you’re not competing with rational cost-benefit analysis—you’re up against existential hopelessness, and “spend-less-save-more” advice lands like telling someone to budget for a house that would take 40 years to save for. Maclean’s (15 minutes)

Ice Thicker Than Satellites

Antarctica’s sea ice has hit near-record lows three years running after decades of stability, and scientists still aren’t sure why—partly because satellites can tell us the area covered by ice but struggle to measure thickness and volume, leaving crucial gaps in understanding heat and water movement through polar oceans. The breakthrough work: collecting cylindrical ice cores near Thwaites Glacier to create better methods for inferring thickness from satellite data, essentially teaching orbital sensors to see in three dimensions. For anyone building climate tech or working with remote sensing, this matters because without volumetric data we’re flying blind on a system that reflects sunlight, regulates ocean heat absorption, and anchors the entire Antarctic food chain—measuring surface area alone is like tracking your bank account by counting credit cards. NYT (4 minutes)

Small Modular Nuclear

Every nuclear plant today is custom-built for its site, which makes them ruinously expensive and slow—but small modular reactors could bring factory production to an industry that’s been stuck in bespoke mode since the 1950s. The shift that matters: combining smaller size with HALEU fuel (5-20% uranium-235 instead of 3-5%) and alternative coolants like molten salt, which run at 500°C instead of 300°C but near atmospheric pressure instead of 100x, eliminating the need for massive high-pressure containment while extending refueling intervals. If you’re building anything in energy or climate tech, this matters because standardization is how costs collapse—but the real test isn’t whether these reactors work, it’s whether they can operate safely and economically for decades after bypassing all the hard-won lessons embedded in water-cooled gigawatt behemoths. MIT Technology Review (7 minutes)

The Productivity Mirage

US GDP per capita is 35% higher than the EU’s, but this gap isn’t productivity—Europeans work fewer hours, take more vacation, and produce $71-83 per hour worked versus America’s $81.80, meaning the difference is leisure time, not output. The shift: once you adjust for cost of living (which has exploded in the US, fueling Trump’s rise and fall), US and EU GDP per capita have grown at virtually identical rates since 1990—1.6% versus 1.5%—and both have seen their share of global GDP fall from 20% to 15%. For builders, the stakes are existential: if you’re optimizing for GDP growth while sacrificing health outcomes, equality, carbon emissions, and free time, you’re not winning—you’re just measuring the wrong thing, and the deregulatory agenda built on “American miracle” mythology is solving for a problem that doesn’t exist while ignoring the investments (education, infrastructure, energy transition) that actually drive lasting prosperity. Le Monde (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

Time is your most important resource. You can do so much in ten minutes. Ten minutes; once gone is gone for good. - Ingvar Kamprad

Welcome to the weekend.

Here’s my January playlist featuring Gracie Abrams, The Lone Bellow, Olivia Dean, Jon Bellion, Bruce Springsteen and others.

The first story this week is a briefing on the history of Rolex as told on the Acquired podcast. It’s not a story about jewelry. It’s a story about branding, survival, and the brilliance of Hans Wilsdorf.

As you may know, I have another newsletter called Acquired Briefing, where I take in-depth notes on Acquired episodes. Over the next month or so, I’m covering some of their most popular episodes, and some of my favorites. Rolex was this week; the surprisingly fascinating story of IKEA is next. I think you’ll really dig it, so sign up to get those briefings directly.

Acquired Briefing

Capturing brilliant insights from the Acquired podcast in a written briefing.

By Kyle Westaway

Prime Numbers

82 — The top 19% of American readers—those who read at least 10 books in 2025—account for 82% of all books read in the U.S., while 40% of Americans didn’t read any books at all, revealing stark inequality in reading habits.

62 — Americans rank nursing as the top college major for students entering today, with 62% calling it a very good decision, followed by engineering (58%) and computer science (57%), though 74% say student interest should be the most important factor when choosing a major.

7.2 — Goldman Sachs projects the live entertainment business will grow 7.2% annually, prompting tour companies to recruit roadies by marketing the work as recession-proof, creative, and resistant to automation amid rising audience demand for high-quality production.

The History of Rolex

Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history! Their products are comparable to a Hermès Birkin bag in price, luxury status and waitlist times… yet they produce over 1m units / year (roughly 10x annual Birkin production). They make the most universally recognized and desired Swiss watches… yet their founder wasn’t Swiss and didn’t start the company in Switzerland! If Rolex were publicly traded, they’d almost certainly be among the top 50 market cap companies in the world… yet they’re 100% owned by a charitable foundation in Geneva that (among other things) literally just gives away money to local people in the city. This is one of the most fascinating and admirable companies Ben and David have ever covered on Acquired and one of my favorites. Check out my briefing on Rolex including some iconic Rolex print ads. Acquired Briefing (18 minutes)

Rising Strong

Rising Strong by Brene Brown is one of my favorite books on living a whole-hearted and courageous life, I read it every January. Most of us think courage is about not falling—but everyone from Fortune 500 leaders to artists to clergy who live brave lives fall just as hard as anyone else. What separates them is that they’ve learned to treat emotional upheaval not as something to avoid but as raw material: they 1) reckon with what they’re feeling, 2) rumble with their stories until they find truth, then 3) turn that process into daily practice. The pattern holds whether you’re grieving a divorce or nursing a workplace slight—the magnitude changes but the method doesn’t, and it’s in that repetition where you stop performing resilience and start becoming someone who actually gets back up. This isn’t about bouncing back to who you were before; it’s about using the fall to forge what you’ll become next. Amazon (8 minutes)

Fake News Powered By AI

A Reddit whistleblower claimed a food delivery app calculates “desperation scores” to exploit drivers, amassing 86,000 upvotes and fooling a tech reporter with an 18-page AI-generated technical document and a fake Uber Eats badge. What used to require days of effort to fabricate—convincing internal documents, employee credentials, corroborating materials—now takes minutes with AI, turning every anonymous source into a potential hoax that still demands hours of verification. The old journalism rules still work (if it’s too good to be true, get a second source, beware outrage bait), but they require time and skepticism that AI-generated lies are specifically designed to overwhelm. If you’re building anything that depends on verified information—journalism, due diligence, trust and safety—the cost of verification just went up while the cost of fabrication dropped to zero, and “I don’t have time to check this” is exactly the exploit the hoaxsters are counting on. Platformer (14 minutes)

Kenya’s Great Energy Valley

Kenya’s Great Rift Valley produces vast geothermal energy—steam that currently escapes unused into the atmosphere—and startups like Octavia Carbon are betting they can harness it to power direct air capture machines that suck CO₂ from the air and lock it underground in volcanic rock. The central tension is whether DAC can scale from removing 10,000 tons annually worldwide to the billions needed for climate impact, especially when carbon credits cost $450 per ton versus $84 for alternatives, Trump is killing US funding, and corporations are quietly abandoning their climate pledges. For Kenya, the promise is green industrialization and jobs for 6 million underemployed youth, but the Maasai communities displaced by geothermal plants still lack electricity themselves, and critics argue the entire premise gives polluters an excuse to delay transitioning off fossil fuels while Africa deepens its debt financing someone else’s climate solution. If you’re building climate tech, the lesson cuts both ways: find the places where natural advantages intersect with real problems (geothermal energy meeting carbon removal need), but understand that “solving climate change” means nothing if the people living on top of your solution can’t turn on their lights. MIT Technology Review (12 minutes)

Humans Want Humans

AI seems poised to replace every job—coding, manufacturing, even content creation—yet the author argues the doomsday scenario of extreme inequality misses what humans actually value: other humans. The economic logic is sound: once AI builds self-replicating robots that harvest their own materials and work at zero marginal cost, capital owners would capture all value while labor gets nothing, creating permanent dynastic wealth—except this assumes humans will accept robot-generated abundance over human-made imperfection. History shows humans constantly invent new work (podcasters didn’t exist thirty years ago), and right now individual creators uniquely reach audiences at scale while AI scales compute to individuals—opposite dynamics that suggest humans will keep paying premiums for human-made things precisely because they’re human-made, from sex to art to cathedrals, status games that persist regardless of material abundance. If you’re building anything in AI, the paradox cuts deep: you’re creating tools that might devalue human labor while humans demonstrably prefer human-created content (Sora ranks 59th while human social apps dominate), which means the real opportunity isn’t replacing humans but freeing them to do what only humans can—create the imperfect, unique things other humans actually want, even when perfect robot versions exist for free. Stratechery (10 minutes)

What Now for Liberals?

Liberalism’s 1980s dreams became reality, from poverty reduction to gay marriage to expanded healthcare. Then it became progressivism and overreached into failure: discrimination-fighting became institutionalized discrimination, environmental mandates underperformed deregulation, education standards collapsed, academia chose activism over truth. Conservative implosion left no check on excess. But the ideals still have power. Diversity will only increase, economic security remains unfinished, tolerance and free expression are still necessary for any future worth wanting. You learn from dead-end paths and try again. Noahpinion (7 minutes)

Expensive Pain

George Bell walked out of his brownstone at nineteen, saw more squad cars than he’d ever seen in his life, and didn’t return for twenty-four years. A detective threatened to use his head as a hockey puck until the terrified teenager confessed to a double homicide he didn’t commit—no gun residue, no physical evidence, just a lying informant seeking reward money and cops who needed someone Black to blame for killing one of their own. Now he drives a $300k Lamborghini between his suburban mansion and the maximum-security prison where he visits friends still inside, depositing cash in their commissary accounts because he knows what it’s like when the world forgets you exist. The old-timers on Astoria Boulevard shake their heads—”he blowin’ all his money”—but George has wealth advisors at the biggest banks, seven college credits earned by studying with earplugs in while chaos erupted around him, and teeth reconstructed because prison dentists just pull them out. The $17.5 million settlement made headlines, the largest wrongful conviction payout New York City ever gave, but George calls his cars and clothes and house “expensive pain.” What George needs isn’t your judgment about diamond Cartier sunglasses or how a wrongly convicted man should perform gratitude for compensation that can never return what was stolen. He needs you to understand that he still showers thinking about being attacked, still sleeps with his head away from where bars used to be, still can’t process that his phone talks back or that people walk around with invisible earbuds. He tries to live every day like Christmas—the holiday he spent twenty-four years crying through in his cell, replaying the arrest—which means living with open heart and generosity, even though Christmas 1996 lives in every single day and no amount of joy erases the hockey stick, the confession beaten out of a teenager, the moment society decided a Black kid from Queens was guilty before anyone bothered with evidence. Esquire (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

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt

Welcome to the 1st weekend of 2026.

Prime Numbers

760 - The price of new vehicles in the United States is up 33 percent since 2020. As of November, the average monthly payment for a new car clocked in at $760.

84 - NFL kickers now convert 84% of attempts from 40-49 yards, up from 70% a quarter century ago, as the league's specialists outperform historical baselines by 6.1% and have even begun excelling in clutch situations where they previously faltered.

30 - Nearly 30% of Americans in their 70s say they're living their best decade right now, part of a survey finding that every age cohort disproportionately picks their current years as their finest, defying nostalgia and suggesting happiness may be less about age than we assume.

Essentialism

I just finished reading Essentialism by Greg McKeown. It’s the firs book I read every January. At this point it’s a ritual that reminds me to do less better. Essentialism, as Greg McKeown frames it in his 2014 book, is a philosophy built on three moves: explore what actually matters to you, eliminate everything that doesn’t align with that, and execute on the vital few things that remain. It’s not quite minimalism, though they’re cousins. Minimalism tends to focus on physical possessions. Essentialism is broader: it’s about attention, commitments, and how you spend your time. The core premise is that most of what we do is noise, and the disciplined act of saying no to almost everything creates space to do the essential things well. It’s less a productivity system than a filter for asking: is this thing I’m about to do actually connected to who I want to be? Essentialism (8 hours)

Boring Builds Wealth

The largest source of income for America’s top 1% isn’t hedge funds or unicorn startups. It’s owning regional businesses that sell car mats, rip up elementary school carpet, and distribute beer. Since 2001, the number of these owners worth $10 million or more has more than doubled, as favorable tax treatment and low rates quietly boosted valuations. The pattern suggests a counterintuitive path: find the niche nobody knows about that everybody needs, then own the whole thing. Wall Street Journal (7 minutes)

Watched, Tracked, Targeted

People in Gaza stopped carrying backpacks, switched to transparent bags, and began extinguishing their own thoughts, as if the listeners could see inside their heads. The piece’s haunting turn: during the author’s interrogation, a soldier asked about his son’s lung infection from a hospital stay in Dubai two years earlier, something he’d never written about or told anyone. The file existed before he did. This is what surveillance becomes when wielded by those with unlimited power over a captive population, built in part with American tech, and it’s not ending with the cease-fire. It’s expanding into who gets to go home at all. New York Magazine (35 minutes)

The Reading Apocalypse

Half of teenagers now say they “hardly ever” read for fun, a complete reversal from the 1990s when daily readers outnumbered non-readers. This isn’t about kids being lazier—it’s about everything converging into streamed video, where YouTube now commands more viewing time than Netflix, Paramount, and Warner Bros combined. The stakes: we’re watching the cognitive infrastructure of an entire generation shift from text-based processing to visual consumption, and early research on short-form video shows “moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory” among heavy users. If you’re building anything that requires sustained attention or deep thinking from users, you’re swimming against a current that’s been building for 25 years. Derek Thompson (4 minutes)

Your Accidental Operating System

The author’s chaotic work period accidentally created a coffee ritual—same mug, same timing, same two-minute silence—that became the calmest part of her day, and she didn’t understand why until studying neuroscience years later. The insight: rituals aren’t just habit or tradition, they’re psychological software that quiets your amygdala (calm), activates your prefrontal cortex to reduce decision fatigue (clarity), and triggers oxytocin during shared experiences (connection). Most people passively inherit rituals from culture, but you can deliberately design micro-rituals for your specific stress points—transition moments when you feel scattered or disconnected. If you’re building products or teams, recognize that people’s brains are already wired to respond to patterned behavior; you’re either intentionally designing those patterns or letting chaos design them by default. Big Think (3 minutes)

The Motivation Equation

Motivation isn’t mysterious—it’s math: Value × Probability × Return on Effort ÷ Distance. The insight that resolves every contradictory piece of motivational advice: harder goals can simultaneously demotivate (lower self-efficacy) and hypermotivate (higher marginal value of effort), and which effect dominates depends entirely on your starting position. Most procrastination isn’t anxiety or perfectionism but psychological distance—your brain treats “write an essay due in two weeks” as fundamentally different from “write one sentence right now,” even though the latter compounds into the former. For builders creating tools or systems: productivity software fails when it doesn’t collapse distance, and goal-setting features backfire when they lower self-efficacy more than they raise perceived value. The real work is diagnosing which variable in the equation is broken, not applying generic advice about discipline versus enthusiasm. Scott H. Young (3 minutes)

The Energy Equation

High-achievers don’t have one kind of exhaustion—they’re simultaneously experiencing physical fatigue (body depletion), cognitive fatigue (mental fog from decisions and focus), and emotional fatigue (psychological drain from managing people and expectations), all while hidden drains like decision fatigue and context switching burn through reserves invisibly. The framework that cuts through generic wellness advice: COM-B (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation) must align simultaneously—knowing what to do (capability) and desperately wanting change (motivation) fails completely if your calendar is structurally impossible (opportunity). Most professionals waste their 3-4 peak cognitive hours daily on email and meetings, then attempt strategic thinking when cognitively fried, which is like trying to write code on a dying laptop battery. For anyone building productivity tools or managing teams: you’re not fighting laziness, you’re fighting chronotype mismatches, decision budget depletion, and environments that make energy-draining behavior the default path—fix the system architecture, not the person. LifeHack (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

Less but better. - Dieter Rams

Welcome to the Weekend.

I hope you’re taking some time to reflect on the last year and set your intentions for next year. If so, you may want to check out the framework I use. It generally takes about 2 hours to get through and is probably the most important practice I have annually.

As an end of the year recap, you’ll see some of my favorite media and articles of 2025 below. Enjoy!

Prime Number

270,350 - In 2025 the Weekend Briefing audience grew 17.6% to 270,350 readers. Thanks for continuing to show up and share the briefing with your friends!

Best Media of 2025

Best Podcast: Acquired

It will come as no surprise that my favorite podcast of the year is Acquired. I’ve listened to over 100 episodes this year, many of them twice and I even attended their SOLD OUT live performance at Radio City. It’s become my go-to source for business strategy wisdom, and I’ve applied countless lessons to my own practice. Hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, Acquired tells the stories and strategies behind great companies. It’s the #1 technology show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, with each episode reaching over one million listeners. The Wall Street Journal calls it “the business world’s favorite podcast,” and that’s no exaggeration. What sets Acquired apart is its commitment to depth. These aren’t quick hit episodes. They’re better described as conversational audiobooks, often running three to four hours as they unpack every layer of a company’s journey from founding to dominance. Acquired

Best Podcast Episode: Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s breaks every rule of modern retail. No e-commerce. No delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They stock just 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at typical supermarkets. Their parking lots are notoriously terrible, and they’re constantly out of your favorite items. Shoppers brave long lines and cramped aisles while overly friendly employees in Hawaiian shirts try to chat them up. Everything about the experience seems designed to drive modern consumers away. And yet they generate over $2,000 per square foot in sales, double Whole Foods and nearly 4x the industry average. Americans are obsessed with them. This episode tackles a fascinating question: how did a company that so steadfastly refuses to participate in the 21st century build the most beloved grocery chain in America? The answer involves brilliant product strategy, cult-like culture, and a counterintuitive bet on scarcity. Acquired

Best Book: Like a Wave We Break

On paper, Jane Chen was the embodiment of success. A Harvard and Stanford graduate, she co-founded a company that developed a groundbreaking incubator saving hundreds of thousands of newborns worldwide. Her work earned recognition from presidents and pop stars. Yet underneath it all, she was burning out, consumed by self-doubt and a relentless need to prove herself. Then Embrace collapsed. Jane lost more than a dream. She lost the identity she had built her life around. Feeling utterly broken, she embarked on a global quest for healing, from silent retreats in the Indonesian jungle to sessions with world-renowned therapists to a frog poisoning ceremony. Her search ultimately led her to confront the one thing she had spent a lifetime avoiding: the trauma of her upbringing as a first-generation Taiwanese American. This memoir is candid, funny, and wise, offering a powerful invitation to embrace the messy truth of who we are. I did an interview with Jane here. Like a Wave We Break

Best Album: SABLE, fABLE

This was a tough call given how much I enjoyed Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl, but I have to give best album to Bon Iver. Their fifth studio album, SABLE, fABLE, released on April 11, 2025, marks a radiant turning point for the project. Moving away from the “man-in-a-cabin” isolation that defined Justin Vernon’s early career, the record is a luminous celebration of healing and newfound connection. For the first time, fans finally get to hear Vernon sounding genuinely happy. The album was conceived as a journey from shadow into light. The sparse, confessional SABLE EP gives way to the soul-drenched vibrancy of the fABLE tracks. It’s a record about emerging from darkness, and you can feel that transformation in every layer of the production. A stunning evolution from one of music’s most emotionally intelligent artists. SABLE, fABLE

Best Track: The Older I Get

Released in October 2025, “The Older I Get” by Missouri singer-songwriter Bryan Andrews became a viral sensation for its unflinching social commentary. Shifting away from traditional Nashville tropes, the track delivers a raw critique of systemic issues, including the human impact of ICE raids and the fight for a living wage. Its most striking lyric, “I wish the Christians tried to be a little more like Jesus,” captures Andrews’ challenge to modern religious and political hypocrisy. The song’s commercial performance was swift, peaking at #1 on the iTunes Country charts and accumulating millions of streams. Reaction has been intensely polarized. While some traditional listeners dismissed it as “woke,” it earned massive acclaim on platforms like Reddit for its truth-to-power message. The track has established Andrews as a leading voice in the rising progressive country movement. I wrote a response to it here. The Older I Get

Best Newsletter: Acquired Briefing

Acquired Briefing

Capturing brilliant insights from the Acquired podcast in a written briefing.

By Kyle Westaway

I read a lot of newsletters, but I’ll be self-serving here and say my favorite was one I’ve been building since June: Acquired Briefing. I clearly have a newsletter problem. I’m now up to three weekly publications, and this one is a newsletter about a podcast. Ridiculous, I know. It transforms the brilliant insights from Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal’s legendary Acquired podcast into actionable written briefings. Each issue distills the most valuable business lessons, strategic frameworks, and historical insights from their deep-dive company stories. If you love Acquired but can’t always commit to a four-hour episode, or if you want a written reference to revisit the key takeaways, this newsletter delivers exactly that. It’s become a useful resource for founders and operators who want to have written notes to refer back to. We’re kicking off the new year with a bang. The first episodes next year will be: Meta, Rolex, IKEA, Mars, Porsche, Microsoft. Acquired Briefing

Best Articles of 2025

Dirtbag Billionaire

I sat down with New York Times journalist David Gelles to discuss his new book “Dirtbag Billionaire,” which chronicles how Yvon Chouinard built Patagonia by embracing contradictions that defy conventional business wisdom. The defining moment came in the early 1960s when Chouinard stopped selling pitons—his company’s main product—because they were damaging Yosemite’s granite walls, choosing environmental responsibility over short-term profits. After experiencing devastating layoffs during “Black Wednesday” in the late 1980s, Patagonia permanently changed its approach to maintain cash reserves and deliberately restrain growth to avoid future mass firings. The company embodies unresolvable paradoxes, running “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaigns while needing customers to buy gear, and pursuing both profitability and environmental activism simultaneously. In 2022, Chouinard gave away his $3 billion company through an unprecedented structure that preserved its independence while directing all profits to environmental causes, proving that embracing contradictions between profit and purpose can be both productive and influential. You can watch the entire interview to learn more about Chouinard’s remarkable journey and the lessons it offers for building values-driven companies. YouTube (40 minutes)

Asking the Right Questions

In a world where artificial intelligence can instantly provide answers, the true competitive advantage lies in knowing which questions to ask. While most leaders understand that interrogative skills matter, research reveals five distinct types of questions that can revolutionize strategic decision-making: investigative questions that dig deep into what’s known, speculative questions that explore what’s possible, productive questions that determine what’s needed, interpretive questions that make sense of findings, and subjective questions that uncover emotional undercurrents. The art of leadership increasingly depends not on having all the answers but on asking these different types of questions at the right moment, as illustrated by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s evolution to spending entire days primarily asking questions rather than providing solutions. Most crucially, the questions that derail organizations are often the ones left unasked — those that don’t naturally arise from our expertise, habits or comfort zones. Harvard Business Review (23 minutes)

The Wrong Definition of Love

The modern definition of love has it completely backwards. We’ve turned love into a transaction where we seek to feel good about ourselves rather than genuinely caring for another person. Today’s popular understanding focuses on being “seen” and understood, but true love is actually about self-abnegation and active service to someone else’s flourishing. Our therapeutic culture has replaced the ideal of pouring yourself out for another with protecting yourself from others, producing a generation of people too self-focused to experience real intimacy. The paradox is profound: you don’t learn to love yourself first and then love others. You discover your own lovability by observing yourself in the act of genuinely loving someone else. NYT (7 minutes)

The Asexual Revolution

Young men have lost interest in having sex. Over 60% of young men today have little to no interest in sex. Think about that for a second… More than half of young men don’t want to have sex. There’s no clear cause, but it’s this dramatic shift likely stems from multiple factors including: 1) Widespread pornography consumption that normalizes unrealistic behaviors, making real-life encounters seem boring by comparison, and contributing to a 26% erectile dysfunction rate among men under 40. 2) Dating apps, rather than increasing connections, have created overwhelming environments where the good looking people are inundated with opportunity and the rest of men see little opportunity. 3) The prevalence of young adults living with parents further complicates intimate relationships. The concerning statistics show sexual activity at a 30-year low, with 28% of adults aged 18-30 reporting no sexual activity in the prior year, suggesting profound societal implications that warrant serious attention. Wit & Wisdom (10 minutes)

Falling Elites Fuel Revolutions

The most dangerous people in society aren’t the desperately poor—they’re the college-educated children of wealth who expected to inherit their parents’ status but didn’t. Fewer than four in ten kids born into the richest fifth of American households stay there, and this downward mobility among the privileged is the psychological fuel behind modern progressive activism, from Occupy Wall Street to the lionization of Luigi Mangione. History reveals that nearly every major revolutionary leader—from Robespierre to Lenin to America’s founders—was a well-educated, ambitious person close enough to power to see its flaws but excluded enough to burn with resentment. The cruel irony is that while upward mobility built America’s mythology, downward mobility among elites armed with degrees, platforms, and cultural fluency may be what tears it apart, as their rage at falling short of inflated expectations gets channeled into tearing down those just one rung higher. Rob Henderson’s Newsletter (9 minutes)

Saharan Railway

The world’s most extreme commute involves clinging to a 1.8-mile freight train crawling across the Sahara Desert for survival rather than convenience. This iron beast connects Mauritania’s mining heartland to the Atlantic coast, serving as both the nation’s economic lifeline and the only transportation option for desert communities who literally hop aboard moving cargo cars, where daytime temperatures often exceed 40°C and deaths from falls are common. The railway transforms from industrial necessity into human drama as passengers navigate sandstorms, scorching heat and precarious perches atop iron ore cars. What emerges is a stunning portrait of how infrastructure designed purely for commerce becomes a vital artery for human connection across one of Earth’s most unforgiving landscapes. Watch National Geographic’s short film This Sahara Railway Is One of the Most Extreme in the World to experience this incredible journey. National Geographic (13 minutes)

Wallace & Gromit’s Breakfast Machine

Could Wallace & Gromit’s wildly impractical breakfast contraption actually work in the real world? One determined engineer brought this beloved animation sequence to life through remarkable ingenuity and precision timing. The recreation begins with the creator dramatically falling out of bed directly into a waiting pair of trousers before landing perfectly seated in a chair, followed by automated sleeves and vest placement in faithful homage to the original. Most impressively, he mastered what he called “probably the hardest part of all” — the physics-defying feat of launching a spoonful of jam through the air to intersect perfectly with toast mid-flight after ejection from a toaster. Through countless attempts and calibrations, this passion project transforms whimsical cartoon physics into astonishing reality, delighting fans with its “cracking toast” finale that would make Wallace himself proud. Joseph’s Machines (2 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

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. - Confucius

Welcome to the weekend.

If you’re looking for Christmas tunes this week, check out my Ultimate Christmas Playlist.

Prime Numbers

3,000 — Climate models predict the world will lose 3,000 glaciers annually by 2040 (up from 1,000 per year currently) even if countries meet emission targets, threatening water supplies for 2 billion people who depend on mountain snow and ice melt.

326 — Louisiana waived $3.3 billion in sales taxes (enough to build 33 high schools or pay every public school teacher for a year) to attract Meta’s Hyperion data center, which will create just 326 permanent jobs after construction ends.

20 — Songs released after 1990 take an average of 20 years to enter the classic rock canon, according to analysis of Q104.3’s annual countdown, as the genre slowly shifts forward with 1990s songs growing from 6.3% of the list in 2005 to 11.2% in 2025.

AI Cult Violence

A group of tech-savvy effective altruists convinced they alone could prevent humanity’s extinction by artificial intelligence descended into a years-long spree of murders, attempted murders, and disappearances—all while insisting they were the rational ones. The story tracks from masked protests at a Bay Area retreat center to stabbing attacks, shootouts with federal agents, and the execution-style murder of a key witness, with the group’s leader faking her own drowning to evade capture before resurfacing armed in a Maryland box truck. What makes this chilling isn’t just the body count (at least six dead, two missing, countless traumatized), but how a philosophy designed to save all sentient life became justification for eliminating anyone who got in the way—and how the broader rationalist community struggled to recognize the danger until it was far too late, revealing the thin line between believing you can optimize the world and believing you have permission to destroy anyone who disagrees. Wired (7 minutes)

Laws of Media

Marshall McLuhan thought his greatest achievement wasn’t “the medium is the message”—it was discovering that every human invention, from safety pins to AI, follows the same four-part pattern. Any technology enhances something (gloves protect hands), obsolesces something (the iPhone killed the house as a fixed home base), retrieves something from the past (highways brought back rivers as transportation routes), and reverses when pushed too far (information overload paralyzing decision-making instead of enabling it).This isn’t just pattern recognition—it’s predictability. If you know these four things will happen with any new technology, you can anticipate effects before they become “unforeseen consequences,” which means you can actually build or invest with your eyes open instead of being reshaped by forces you didn’t notice. a16z (7 minutes)

The Blue Book Burglars

Ray Flynn robbed roughly 500 homes belonging to America’s wealthiest families by treating the Social Register—an exclusive directory of high society—as a shopping catalog, cherry-picking estates filled with obscure eighteenth-century paintings small enough to fit in a briefcase and silver services worth tens of thousands. The brilliance wasn’t just the audacity (calling homes fifty times to confirm they were empty, then cutting phone lines to trigger alarms and watch police leave), but Flynn’s self-taught connoisseurship: over years of work, he trained his eye to spot the exact kind of marketable-but-not-famous art his fence wanted, becoming possibly the hardest-working art thief in American history—active from 1965 to 2010, responsible for $40 million in losses, and spending less time in prison than most one-time offenders. What matters for anyone building systems of trust or security: the most dangerous threats aren’t the dramatic museum heists that make headlines, but the patient professionals who study your patterns, exploit your assumptions about safety, and operate just below the threshold where anyone notices there’s even a problem. Atavist Magazine (7 minutes)

The Gender Admissions Gap

Elite colleges now accept male applicants at rates 60% higher than equally qualified women—at Brown, men had a 7% admission rate while women faced 4.4%—and administrators openly admit they’re doing it to maintain “gender balance” on campus. The perverse logic: universities fear that if they admitted purely on merit, their campuses would become 60-70% female (reflecting how women now dominate academic performance at every level), which might hurt their “yield rate” since applicants supposedly prefer gender parity for dating purposes. This matters because we’ve created a quiet system where institutions publicly committed to equality are systematically discriminating against their best applicants, using the exact same “holistic admissions” machinery that was just ruled unconstitutional for race—except this version is perfectly legal due to Title IX carve-outs, operates in near-total secrecy (schools won’t release comparative SAT data by gender), and solves nothing at scale since boosting male enrollment at Harvard just means worse ratios at state schools while doing nothing to address why boys are genuinely falling behind in K-12 education. Yascha Mounk (7 minutes)

America’s Civic Downgrade

The U.S. just dropped from “Narrowed” to “Obstructed” in global civic freedom rankings—the same category as Hungary and Brazil—after deploying 700 Marines to police immigration protests, arresting journalists covering demonstrations, revoking NPR/PBS funding while launching state media, and using terrorism accusations to investigate pro-Palestine campus groups. What’s remarkable isn’t that any single action crosses into authoritarianism (plenty of democracies struggle with protest policing or campus speech), but the systematic pattern: military deployment against peaceful gatherings, financial punishment of critical media, visa weaponization against foreign academics, and the speed of deterioration—a six-point drop in one year following Trump’s return, joining 14 other countries downgraded in 2025. This matters because civic space erosion follows predictable trajectories, and the U.S. is now exhibiting the institutional playbook (control media, militarize dissent, exploit emergency powers, target vulnerable communities) that typically precedes democratic backsliding—a trajectory that’s especially dangerous when it happens in a country other democracies have historically used as a reference point for their own freedoms. Civicus (7 minutes)

The Toaster Camera

Steve Sasson built the first handheld digital camera at Kodak in 1975 by stealing parts from supply bins—a movie camera lens, a $12 voltmeter, a cassette deck—creating an 8-pound contraption that took 23 seconds to save a single 0.01-megapixel black-and-white image to tape, and when he demonstrated it to executives asking “why would anyone want this?”, he predicted it would take 15-20 years to match cheap film quality (it took exactly 18). The tragedy wasn’t that Kodak ignored the invention—they patented it and earned billions in licensing—but that Sasson had arrived too early: digital photography needed personal computers, the internet, and Moore’s law to catch up before consumers would trade instant film for waiting half a minute to see a grainy face on a TV screen. What matters for anyone building transformative technology: being right about the future means nothing if the infrastructure to support your vision doesn’t exist yet, and the people asking “why would anyone want this?” often aren’t wrong at the time they’re asking—they’re just measuring your prototype against today’s alternative rather than tomorrow’s possibility. BBC (7 minutes)

Hibernation Works

We expect ourselves to maintain August energy in December, but chronobiology shows our hormones, sleep patterns, and motivation naturally shift with the seasons—a mismatch that leaves us exhausted and guilty for feeling half-speed. The insight isn’t that you should power through; it’s that rest is when your brain does its most important work, consolidating memories and repairing stress damage while you think you’re doing nothing. For builders, this means the foundation for your next sprint gets built during the downshift, not despite it. Create a corner for intentional rest, cut non-essential commitments, and choose presence over performance—because operating at 100% year-round doesn’t make you productive, it makes you brittle. Ness Labs (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

Maybe Christmas (he thought) doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more. - The Grinch

Welcome to the weekend.

Introducing: Acquired Briefing

The Acquired podcast tells the stories and strategies of great companies. It’s the #1 technology show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, reaching over one million listeners per episode. The Wall Street Journal calls it “the business world’s favorite podcast.”

Episodes prioritize depth—they’re better described as “conversational audiobooks” than podcasts. Each one is packed with insights on how iconic companies actually built their businesses.

If you’re a fan, you know how valuable these episodes are. I’m such a believer that I launched a new newsletter—Acquired Briefing—as a way to share my detailed notes on each episode.

Today I’m highlighting the post on Hermès below.

Over the next few months, I’ll be breaking down the most popular episodes of all time: Meta, IKEA, Rolex, Microsoft, Porsche, Starbucks, and more. These aren’t summaries—they’re deep dives into the strategic decisions, and playbooks that made these companies what they are today.

If you like Founder Fridays, you’ll love these company strategy breakdowns. The insights are directly applicable to how you build and grow your own business.

Sign up for Acquired Briefing below – Don’t miss the upcoming deep dives.

Acquired Briefing

Capturing brilliant insights from the Acquired podcast in a written briefing.

By Kyle Westaway

Prime Numbers

7,000 - Hermès employs 7,000 artisans (80% women, average age 30), training them via schools to scale production 7% yearly without factories, preserving a dying craft.

300 - Each Hermès silk scarf requires 300 moth cocoons and hand-screening with up to 20 masks.

20 - Birkin and Kelly bags generate 25%-30% of Hermès revenue, made by one artisan in 20 hours from 36 leather pieces, with 120,000 produced annually.

Scaling Craft

Most luxury brands chase growth through celebrity endorsements and aggressive marketing, but Hermès achieved a $200B valuation by doing the opposite—they spend just 4.5% of revenue on communication while LVMH spends 12%, employ no marketing department, and maintain multi-year waitlists by deliberately producing fewer bags than people want to buy. The counterintuitive insight: they solved luxury’s central paradox by making scarcity itself scalable, training 7,000 artisans (up from 250 in the 1980s) in dying crafts like saddle-stitching through proprietary schools, adding just 7% production capacity yearly while competitors chase 20%+ growth through outsourcing. Their pricing strategy defies economics—Birkin bags appreciate 7% annually and resell for up to $500,000 despite $12,000 retail prices, yet Hermès intentionally leaves billions on the table by not raising prices to market-clearing levels, instead using below-market pricing to build customer relationships across their entire product line. This “cornered resource” in human craftsmanship creates an unassailable moat: no competitor can replicate two years of apprenticeship per artisan or the institutional knowledge that keeps employee turnover at 6% (versus 33% retail average), proving that in an age of automation, the rarest competitive advantage might be preserving what machines cannot do. Acquired Briefing (8 minutes)

The Cloud’s Dark Mirror

When Microsoft’s CEO met Israel’s top spy chief in 2021, he approved moving “sensitive workloads” to Azure servers—corporate speak that concealed a surveillance apparatus now capturing a million phone calls an hour from Palestinian civilians. The collaboration reveals how cloud computing’s infinite storage doesn’t just enable new possibilities; it erases old constraints that once limited mass surveillance, transforming what governments can do when physical servers no longer bound their ambitions. Unit 8200 explicitly sought Microsoft’s cloud because their own infrastructure couldn’t handle recording an entire population’s conversations; the partnership solved a capacity problem that inadvertently made indiscriminate surveillance operationally feasible where it previously wasn’t. Microsoft claims ignorance about storing Palestinian call recordings despite internal documents showing engineers worked “daily, top down and bottom up” with Unit 8200, understood they were handling “audio files” requiring extreme security, and projected hundreds of millions in revenue—a willful blindness that lets tech giants profit from authoritarian uses while maintaining plausible deniability, forcing us to confront whether “we just provide infrastructure” remains ethically tenable when that infrastructure fundamentally changes what’s possible. Guardian (6 minutes)

Elevate Your Newsletter In 2026

The best time to build trust and awareness with your target audience was five years ago. The next best time is right now. Kick off 2026 by transforming your newsletter into your most valuable trust-building asset. See how your newsletter stacks up with the Newsletter Health Check: 10 proven ways to optimize your newsletter. Future Forest (Sponsored)

Automation Creates Jobs

Most companies use robots to cut headcount, but Newell Brands spent $2 billion automating their Sharpie factory while keeping every employee—then raised average wages 50% by retraining packers as automation engineers who now fix the robots instead of filling boxes. This counterintuitive approach reveals that offshoring and automation aren’t really about labor costs; they’re about whether management views workers as disposable expenses or appreciating assets worth developing. By investing in career training programs (including paying for college degrees) and converting manual roles into technical positions, Newell tripled production speed, improved quality, eliminated price increases, and now manufactures 500 million Sharpies annually in Tennessee faster and cheaper than Chinese factories could. The playbook works because robots don’t eliminate the need for human judgment—they multiply it: someone still needs to troubleshoot when vision systems fail or design the sealing process that prevents markers from drying out, creating higher-value jobs that justify 50% wage increases while making domestic manufacturing cost-competitive with Asia for the first time in decades. WSJ (5 minutes)

When Everyone’s a Scammer

India’s scam economy isn’t underground—it’s mainstream, with nineteen-year-olds earning three times the average formal wage by lying over the phone, operating openly enough to recruit journalists mid-scam. The counterintuitive reality: widespread fraud isn’t a sign of moral collapse but of rational adaptation to a broken social contract, where the top 10% control 80% of wealth and formal employment offers survival wages while scammers promise Rs 45,000 monthly for spreading misinformation. What makes someone choose fraud over honesty isn’t desperation alone—it’s when legitimate paths disappear entirely, when college graduates spend years seeking Rs 12,000/month jobs while scam call centers hire immediately at higher wages, creating an alternate economy where “Section 420” (India’s fraud statute) becomes a casual descriptor rather than criminal stigma. The victims aren’t wealthy elites but cleaning ladies losing Rs 25,000 and laborers throwing themselves under trains, yet scammers feel no guilt because hierarchy determines morality: cheating Western strangers earns pride, defrauding government officials becomes honor, and only stealing from fellow strugglers triggers doubt—revealing how extreme inequality doesn’t just create crime, it rewrites the entire moral framework around survival. The Dial (6 minutes)

Rebuilding From Digital Zero

Syria’s tech entrepreneurs spent 14 years in exile running companies from Turkey while their homeland had electricity 30 minutes daily, GitHub banned, and video calls impossible—then the regime fell overnight and they rushed back to build Airbnb competitors and ride-hailing apps in a country where 64% still aren’t online. The paradox: catastrophic infrastructure collapse creates unexpected advantages because there’s no legacy systems to migrate, no entrenched incumbents to displace, no regulatory capture to unwind—Syria can leapfrog directly to modern fintech and digital government while developed nations spend decades untangling bureaucratic spaghetti code. These founders aren’t handicapped by starting from zero; they’re liberated by it, able to architect payment systems, identity infrastructure, and public services using 2025 technology patterns that countries stuck with 1990s foundations can only dream of implementing. The real challenge isn’t technical capability—exiled Syrians worked at Google and Apple, know current best practices, and secured Trump’s sanction lifting for international funding—it’s whether a 15-year gap can become a strategic reset where absence of infrastructure becomes permission to build it right the first time, proving that sometimes the fastest path to the future runs through complete destruction of the past. Rest of World (5 minutes)

The Strenuous Life

A father takes his sensitive son to Theodore Roosevelt’s Badlands hoping to teach resilience through “the strenuous life,” but discovers the kid already possesses courage—just not the kind that involves punching people. True toughness isn’t about tolerating pain or confronting bullies; it’s about knowing which kinds of strength matter for your life, not someone else’s template of masculinity. Roosevelt transformed himself from asthmatic “wretched mite” to cowboy president by embracing physical brutality, even punching a drunk holding two guns—but he also suppressed all mention of his dead wife, suggesting his celebrated resilience came with psychological costs the father doesn’t want to replicate. What the son teaches the father is that you can scale buttes fearlessly, remain unfazed by blood, and build authentic confidence without ever needing to enjoy watching someone get their ribs shattered—that boyhood obsessed with Junior Ranger badges and first-aid kits isn’t weakness requiring correction but a different, equally valid form of courage. The real lesson isn’t that kids need toughening up; it’s that we project our own unresolved traumas (a mugging at 13, shame about avoiding fights) onto children who may never face those exact demons, mistaking our path to self-acceptance for the only path available. The NYT Magazine (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

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. - Theodore Roosevelt