Weekend Briefing No. 594
Non-opioid Painkiller Approved -- Freedom Requires Cheap Decisions -- The NVIDIA Story (2006-2022)
Welcome to the weekend.
Each year, I curate a 4th of July country music playlist for my family's lake gatherings in Tennessee—it's become something of a tradition. This year's collection is my most ambitious yet:
50 country songs from 2025
Top 10 tracks from each year (1990-2024)
375 total songs
22 hours and 24 minutes of music
I hope you enjoy it as much as we do, and I'd love to hear which tracks become your favorites!
Prime Numbers
80 — The Sphere in Las Vegas, an 18,000-seat immersive venue with a massive LED screen, is hosting a new adaptation of The Wizard of Oz starting in late August, featuring a completely re-recorded soundtrack performed by an 80-piece orchestra
35 — The average annual cost of child care reached $13,128 in 2024, up 29% since 2020, with single parents now spending 35 percent %of their income on child care while married couples spend 10%.
30 — Namibia is positioning itself as a green industry powerhouse with a production site in the Namib Desert that averages only 30 hours of overcast skies per year, using solar and wind power to target 10-12 million tons of hydrogen production annually by 2050.
Non-opioid Painkiller Approved
The first non-opioid painkiller in human history was just approved, targeting pain sensors in your body rather than flooding your brain's reward system with dopamine-spiking euphoria. Journavx blocks sodium channels exclusively in peripheral nerves, preventing pain signals from ever reaching your brain — eliminating the addiction, tolerance and life-threatening respiratory depression that plague opioid users. Clinical trials revealed zero signs of drug abuse, withdrawal or the need for escalating doses that trap millions in cycles of dependency. After 27 years and billions in research, Vertex finally cracked the code by isolating a molecular target that silences suffering without hijacking the neural pathways that make opioids simultaneously life-saving and life-destroying. Works of Progress (7 minutes)
Freedom Requires Cheap Decisions
The web welcomed artists and misfits because decisions were cheap enough to take risks. Today's economy demands you choose your life path before you know who you are, turning existence into a soul-crushing rail system where living must be "earned" rather than explored. An art school graduate in 1991 could emerge with $7,000 in debt and rent a $100 Austin apartment on minimum wage, creating space to stumble into web design when "no one was trained to do web shit" and curiosity could build careers. Today's students face six-figure debt loads and $2,000 monthly rent that demand immediate return on investment — no more degrees in liberal arts, no more exploring emerging fields, no more taking weeks off to chase airplane graveyards or new technologies. Late-stage capitalism has murdered the wandering career by making exploration financially impossible, forcing 20-year-olds onto predetermined rails toward jobs that guarantee $100K salaries rather than allowing them to discover careers that don't even exist yet. Freedom requires cheap decisions, and we've priced an entire generation out of the luxury of not knowing what they want to be when they grow up. Mike Monteiro’s Good News (7 minutes)
The NVIDIA Story (2006-2022)
By 2012, NVIDIA was on a decade-long road to nowhere. Or so most rational observers of the company thought. CEO Jensen Huang was plowing all the cash from the company’s gaming business into building a highly speculative platform with few clear use cases and no obviously large market opportunity. And then a miracle happened. A miracle that led not only to NVIDIA becoming the eighth largest market cap company in the world, but also nearly every internet and technology innovation that’s happened in the decade since. Machines learned how to learn. And they learned it on NVIDIA. Acquired Briefing (12 minutes)
The Math on AI’s Energy Consumption
A single ChatGPT query uses as much energy as running a microwave for eight seconds. But when multiplied by billions of daily users, artificial intelligence now consumes 4.4% of all U.S. electricity — and that's just the beginning. By 2028, AI could devour enough power to supply 22% of American households annually, forcing tech giants to resurrect nuclear plants and build stadium-sized data centers while keeping their actual energy usage completely secret. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory warns that this unprecedented surge lacks transparency or planning, potentially leaving consumers to subsidize Big Tech's power bills through higher electricity rates. Most troubling: Today's relatively simple AI tasks represent the smallest energy footprint we'll ever see, as the industry races toward autonomous agents and reasoning models that require exponentially more power. MIT Technology Review (15 minutes)
The Window of Opportunity
Silicon Valley's most successful companies weren't built during stable times — over 80% of $50+ billion companies emerged during major technological platform shifts like the browser or smartphone era. Bret Taylor, founder of Sierra and former CTO of Facebook, argues we're in another narrow window where AI agents will become as essential as websites, but only best-of-breed companies can move fast enough to capture it before incumbents adapt. His company charges only when AI successfully resolves customer problems autonomously, representing a fundamental business model shift that's harder for established players to adopt than new technology. The key insight: While Google Maps could be rewritten in a weekend during the early web era, today's corporate processes and scale make such breakthrough innovation nearly impossible at big tech companies. Stratechery (18 minutes)
Space Solar
Aetherflux's satellites collect solar power and feed it into fiber laser diodes that convert electricity back into concentrated beams, creating surgical precision that traditional microwave transmission can't match. While conventional space solar concepts required "city-sized" satellites with complex phase coordination between thousands of microwave elements, fiber lasers eliminate that complexity entirely — just point and shoot concentrated light at 5-10 meter ground targets. This laser approach solves space solar's fundamental scaling problem: Instead of building enormous geostationary platforms, you can deploy smaller, nimble satellites that deliver baseload renewable energy 24/7 to any spot on Earth. The military gets fuel-free forward bases, but the real game-changer is bypassing terrestrial power infrastructure entirely — disaster zones, remote locations, anywhere sunlight from space can reach becomes energy-independent. TechCrunch (6 minutes)
YAMA
The human brain wasn't designed to handle 50,000 annual concerts, 5,000 Netflix films, and 275,000 new book releases — yet here we are, drowning in infinite options that trigger ancient survival anxieties. You’re always missing out (YAMA) offers a radical alternative to fear of missing out (FOMO) by accepting that missing out is simply the human condition, not a problem to solve. Rather than manufacturing the joy of missing out (JOMO), YAMA suggests flowing with your choices since you're already missing countless experiences anyway. Practice it by acknowledging missed opportunities before activities, staying present during them and resisting post-experience evaluation — transforming choice anxiety into curiosity-driven decision making. Ness Labs (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.
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Weekend Wisdom
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" - The Wizard of Oz