Weekend Briefing No. 613
Climate's Real Success Metric -- Discipline Enables True Freedom -- Type 2 Growth
Welcome to the weekend.
Here’s my November playlist. It features my new favorite artist Jon Bellion along with Taylor Swift, Mumford and Sons, Of Monsters and Men, Mat Kearny and others.
Prime Numbers
37,000,000,000 — Rapper RBX alleges that approximately 37 billion of Drake’s 120 billion total Spotify streams between January 2022 and September 2025 were fraudulent bot activity, with some accounts listening to Drake exclusively for 23 hours daily and “fans” teleporting 500 kilometers between consecutive songs.
1,819 — U.S. imports of “super-premium” Irish whiskey surged 1,819% from 2003 to 2024, fueling a distillery boom that expanded Ireland’s whiskey makers from just four in 2010 to 50 by 2024 before tariffs and rising costs forced over 90 percent to pause or reduce production this year.
50 — New York City’s $1.5 billion purchase of 378 new Kawasaki subway cars will push the Japanese manufacturer’s share to over 50% of the city’s entire rolling stock, cementing a partnership that began in 1982.
Climate’s Real Success Metric
Bill Gates believes that measuring climate progress by temperature alone misses what truly matters: whether people can survive heat waves, afford food during droughts, and access healthcare after floods. The path forward requires driving the cost of clean technologies to zero across five key sectors—electricity, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and buildings—while simultaneously investing in health and agricultural improvements that lift people out of poverty. Economic growth in low-income countries could cut climate-related deaths by more than half, making prosperity itself a form of climate adaptation. Rather than diverting aid dollars to less effective emissions projects, resources should flow toward innovations with measurable impact per dollar spent: vaccines saving lives for $1,000-$5,000 each, AI-powered farming advice reaching 40 million farmers by text, and breakthrough fertilizers boosting crop yields by 20 percent while eliminating emissions. Gates Notes (18 minutes)
Discipline Enables True Freedom
The most alive people aren’t choosing between structure and spontaneity—they’ve discovered that rigid discipline actually creates the space for genuine freedom to emerge. Just as a jazz musician’s wild improvisation rests on thousands of hours practicing scales, your ability to seize unexpected opportunities depends on having automated the mundane through unbreakable habits. Build systems that handle sleep, nutrition, and deep work so your mind stays clear enough to follow sudden creative sparks without everything falling apart. The goal isn’t splitting your life fifty-fifty between order and chaos, but making discipline so second-nature that spontaneity becomes safe—your time isn’t micromanaged but fiercely guarded, your environment isn’t chaotic but intelligently designed to support flow states whenever inspiration strikes. Naval’s Archive (3 minutes)
42x: The ROI of Newsletters
Email delivers $42 for every $1 spent—if you do it right. Most newsletters get lost in the noise. The ones that don’t? They solve problems for readers. They build trust. They tell unique stories in an authentic voice. A few strategic changes can transform your newsletter from something people ignore to one they don’t want to miss. Take the Newsletter Health Check: 10 proven ways to boost open rates, engagement, and ROI. Future Forest (Sponsored)
Type 2 Growth
We’ve confused two meanings of “growth”—getting bigger versus getting better—and that confusion blinds us to technology’s real potential for solving climate change. Type 1 growth means more wine bottles sold; Type 2 growth means the same bottles contain superior wine, achieved by rearranging existing atoms into more sophisticated patterns, like evolution producing an agile lemur from the same mass as a jellyfish. Human civilization faces an unprecedented challenge: global population will peak around 2070 and then decline annually, forcing us to perfect systems that improve living standards with fewer customers, smaller markets, and less workers—something we’ve never done before. Degrowthers correctly identify limits to bulk expansion but miss that evolutionary growth—expanding intangibles like freedom, wisdom, and complexity—has no ceiling; betterment can continue indefinitely without consuming more resources. KK (4 minutes)
Your Margin, My Opportunity
Amazon’s rise to dominance stems from a cutthroat culture where survival demands winning at any cost—including creating secret war rooms filled with competitor products to reverse-engineer their success. When building Wickedly Prime to replicate Trader Joe’s top 200 items, Amazon recruited a senior manager from the grocer’s snack division and spent six months pressuring her to hand over proprietary sales data, with one manager screaming “You just have to give us the data!” until she burst into tears. The company’s stack ranking system cuts the bottom 6% of performers annually while delaying most stock compensation until year three and four, creating incentives for employees to access proprietary data from third-party sellers, entrepreneurs, and partners to gain competitive edges. Bezos famously told competitors “Your margin is my opportunity,” envisioning Amazon not as an occasional shopping destination but as a “daily habit” woven into customers’ lifestyle through music, video, and services across every profitable industry. Wall Street erased $22 billion from grocery chains the day Amazon bought Whole Foods, maintaining a “Death by Amazon” index tracking the company’s trail of corpses—yet CEO Andy Jassy tells deputies Amazon isn’t big enough, targeting $10 trillion valuation despite FTC lawsuits claiming its 40% e-commerce dominance creates a “50% Amazon tax” on sellers. WSJ (13 minutes)
When Technology Becomes Cheating
Super shoes with 80% energy return rates shattered marathon records and ignited a fundamental debate: when does equipment stop helping athletes and start replacing them? Nike’s prototype shoes—with carbon fiber plates acting like levers and special air pockets for bounce—helped Eliud Kipchoge break the “impossible” 2-hour marathon barrier, prompting regulators to impose 40mm foam limits and ban shoes unavailable for purchase four months before competition. The line between correction and enhancement gets messier with prosthetics: Blake Leeper qualified for the Olympics with the fifth-fastest time globally but was banned because his running blades made him “too tall” based on calculations from small studies of white and Asian men—despite being born without lower legs and having no natural height. Regulators ask if technology is dangerous, against the sport’s spirit, or artificially enhancing performance, but these questions expose deeper tensions: we allow goggles and grippy gloves while banning LZR swimsuits and aluminum bats, permit prescription shooting lenses but restrict prosthetic height using averages that ignore how Michael Phelps’ wingspan exceeds his height by three inches. The real question isn’t about sports—it’s about how far and in what direction we let technology push human potential forward. Youtube (15 minutes)
Life’s Inward Turn
Most people spend their first half climbing mountains driven by ego, external validation, and societal expectations—then reach the summit only to discover the real journey was never about the peak. Jung identified midlife as a profound psychological shift from “ego” to “self,” where external rewards lose their grip and existential questions emerge: “Who am I beyond the roles I play?” This “individuation” process demands confronting your shadow—the parts society deemed unacceptable that you’ve ignored—because “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” The transformation isn’t smooth; unresolved conflicts and buried emotions surface as restlessness, emptiness, or depression, making acceptance terrifying since “there’s no coming to consciousness without pain.” Practical steps include introspection through journaling or meditation, shedding outdated identities, pursuing activities that spark your soul regardless of expectations, and redefining success from promotions and salary to purpose, quality relationships, and contributing to something larger than yourself—because who looks outside dreams, but who looks inside awakens. Postanly Weekly (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
The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It’s harmful. -Bill Gates