Weekend Briefing No. 479

A Saturday morning briefing on innovation and society.

Welcome to the weekend.

I hope it’s warm wherever you are and that you’re getting outside today!

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Prime Numbers

14,000,000—Adobe estimates that there are 14 million people in the United States that make money by posting on social media.

88%—A majority (88%) of developers say they are more productive using Github’s AI Copilot. More than half (60%) find it increases job fulfillment, with 96% saying that it makes repetitive tasks faster.

5%—US inflation rose 5% year-over-year in March, the smallest 12-month increase in nearly two years, and marked the ninth consecutive year-over-year decline.

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Carbon Capture

About 50 miles southwest of Midland, Texas, deep in the oil-saturated Permian Basin, more than 100 workers are busy building an elaborate complex of fans, each as large as a tennis court. When they start running in 2024, the fans will suck massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air. The carbon will be funneled thousands of feet down deep wells into geological formations, where it should remain for centuries. The company behind this environmental moonshot is Occidental Petroleum Corp., one of the country’s most successful oil-and-gas producers. It hopes the enterprise will give it license to keep operating as an oil driller decades into the future. It is spending more than $1 billion to build the first in a planned fleet of plants using direct-air capture to pull the CO2 out of the air, a budding technology with fuzzy economics. Bolstering the move are generous tax incentives included in the climate package President Biden signed into law last year that cover up to 45% of Occidental’s expected initial costs per metric ton. Chief Executive Vicki Hollub, who has the blessing of the company’s largest investor, Warren Buffett, said the plan will help it reach net-zero emissions on all its operations, its own energy use and its customers’ use of its products, by 2050, and allow it to keep investing in oil extraction.

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What do you think about this method to achieving net zero emissions? Is it a disastrous idea that will destroy the planet? Is it a pragmatic approach to achieving net zero? Something in between?

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Free Speech at Stanford Law

There has been a contentious debate about free speech on the campus of Stanford Law School this spring. A talk from a conservative federal judge was disrupted by student hecklers. A video of the fiasco went viral. Eleven days later, the school dean named Jenny S. Martinez released a lawyerly 10-page memo that rebuked the activists. “Some students might feel that some points should not be up for argument and therefore that they should not bear the responsibility of arguing them,” she wrote. But, she continued, that “is incompatible with the training that must be delivered in a law school.” She added, “I believe that the commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion actually means that we must protect free expression of all views.” The question for Stanford and other institutions is whether the memo can ease tensions in this fraught and seemingly intractable political climate. In an era of high-pitched politics, living up to lofty free-speech principles can get messy on the ground. New York Times (11 minutes)

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77% of HNW Investors Are Bullish on this Market

Just this month, a stunning new report from UBS revealed that a record 77% of the world’s wealthiest investors have a positive outlook on one market in 2023. It might surprise you because it's not stocks, real estate or gold. It's fine art. But you don’t need to spend millions to get in on the action anymore. This is all thanks to Masterworks, an art investing platform with nearly $1 billion in assets under management and over 680,000 users. All of Masterworks’ offerings are qualified with the SEC, making it simple for investors with no art market experience to benefit from this $1.7 trillion asset class. In fact, investors have realized a profit from every one of Masterworks’ 13 exits, totaling more than $30 million in payouts. Weekend Briefing readers can skip the waitlist; claim a complimentary, no-obligation account; and get access to their latest offerings with this exclusive link. Masterworks (Sponsored)

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Life After Influencing

Fifty-four percent of Gen Z and Millennial Americans are interested in becoming influencers. (Eighty-six percent said they would be willing to post sponsored content for money.) But the dream—as report after report and tearful vlog after vlog has made clear—comes with its own costs. If social media has made audiences anxious, it’s driving creators to the brink. Many influencers just want a job—a boring job. New York Times (8 minutes)

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Loneliness in America

An estimated 44 million, or 17% of U.S. adults, report feeling loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday,” according to new Gallup polling data from over 100,000 Americans. That figure is actually down from a high of 65 million lonely adults in March 2021—a trend Gallup attributes to the nationwide lifting of COVID-19 restrictions. Some other key insights: 1) Loneliness is inversely related to population density (i.e. more people = more loneliness). Americans who live in big cities are the most likely population to report feelings of loneliness (20%), while those in rural areas are the least likely (12%). 2) Residents of New England (20%) report the highest levels of loneliness across all nine US sub-regions, while Americans living in the Mountain region—AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT and WY—have the lowest levels of loneliness (14%). Adults under the age of 30 and those earning less than $24,000 per year report higher levels of loneliness than their older and higher-income counterparts. Gallup (8 minutes)

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On Being Extraordinary

Most people often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course, with everybody else aiming there as well, that makes it very hard to hit. The alternative? Shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. Make the niches in which you finally reside. The lesson? Stop aiming for the same obvious target as everyone else. Figure out what makes you unique as a person—the Lego blocks of your talents, interests and preferences—and paint the target around them. These are qualities you suppress the most because they make you weird or different from other people. At some point in your life, you were probably shamed for embodying those qualities, so you learned to conceal them. But here’s the thing: We notice things because of contrast. Something stands out because it’s different from what surrounds it. If you blend into the background—if you show no idiosyncrasy, no fingerprints, no contrast, no anomaly—you become invisible. You become the background. It’s only by embracing, rather than erasing, your idiosyncrasies that you can become extraordinary. Ozan Varol (5 minutes)

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Ice, Ice, Matrix

Welcome to the future, where anything is possible, and you never know what to believe. The new thing is AI-generated video. This video is experimenting with AI voice trainers and lip flap technology in a way that will eventually open up some new doors for how we make videos. The result is a dope version of “Ice, Ice Baby” performed by the cast of The Matrix. It’s really fun. YouTube (4 minutes)

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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.

Check out my other briefing Founder Fridays - a Friday morning briefing that helps startup founders scale smarter.

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Weekend Wisdom

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else. – Walt Disney