Weekend Briefing No. 614
Solarpunk in Africa -- Bubbles Build the Future -- Swarms Beat the Titan
Welcome to the weekend.
My wife sent me this song - The Older I Get - on Thursday. It’s clear and powerful. Give it a listen, then take a second to read my reflection below.
The Older That I Get
Bryan Andrews’ “The Older That I Get” cuts straight to something most of us hide: “They say you’ll get it when you’re older. But I just understand it less.” We grew up believing that age would bring wisdom, clarity, and the leverage to fix broken systems. Instead, most of us just watch the world get colder.
I spent my twenties drunk on possibility. I really believed that my peers and I in the social enterprise movement were going to be the generation that change the world through some blend of innovation and justice. That was beautiful. It was also incomplete.
Now I understand something I couldn’t have known then: the brokenness isn’t a bug to be fixed. It’s architectural. Systems designed by broken people to serve broken incentives. Andrews sees this too. Politicians lining pockets. Cancer still uncured despite resources. Churches that claim to follow Jesus while abandoning the poor. The bad guys wear suits and sit in clean offices making bureaucratic decisions. They call it business.
C.S. Lewis captured this in The Screwtape Letters: “The greatest evil is not now done in sordid dens of crime. It is conceived and ordered in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Not melodrama. Just systems prioritizing their own perpetuation over human flourishing.
When you’re young, you believe you can fight this. When you’re older, you realize it’s everywhere.
Do the Good Guys Ever Win?
The song asks: “Do the good guys ever win?” The answer seems to be no. Not at the scale we imagined.
But the Stoics offer something crucial. Epictetus, who lived as a slave, wrote: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and whatever are our own actions.”
You don’t control political systems, corporate earnings, insurance decisions, or institutional corruption. You can’t control climate change or wealth inequality. You can’t control most of the big, heartbreaking things.
But you absolutely control what you do. How you act. Who you are when no one is watching.
This sounds like resignation. It’s actually the opposite. It’s the clarity that allows you to be effective.
On Being the Counter-current
Good guys don’t usually win by overthrowing systems. They win by being the counter-current.
Good guys win in families. Your kids watch you choose integrity when it costs something. They see you admit mistakes. They watch you care for people who can’t do anything for you. They learn there’s another way to be human.
Good guys win in offices. You refuse to cut corners. You mentor younger people in a system designed to make them cynical. You treat contractors and assistants with dignity when extraction is rewarded. It changes the world for the people around you.
Good guys win in communities. You show up. You build relationships. You participate in flawed institutions. You know real change happens at the scale where you see faces. You plant trees whose shade you won’t sit under.
Good guys win by writing things that help people think clearly. By building businesses on different principles. By refusing the grift. By being the person your kids want to become.
These are small victories. They don’t make headlines. They won’t solve cancer or fix politics or bring justice everywhere it’s owed.
But they’re real. They’re reproducible. They compound. They change culture over time.
What does pragmatic hope look like in your life? Where is your actual sphere of influence, and what would it mean to be exceptional there? In family, work, community, craft. What would it look like to win where you can actually win, knowing these small victories are the only real victories?
Prime Numbers
1,200,000,000 — Christian music artist Forrest Frank has racked up 1.2 billion on-demand streams in the U.S. this year, leading a crossover surge that pushed the genre’s market share from 1.7% to 2% as acts like Brandon Lake and Josiah Queen bring faith-based music into mainstream pop culture.
250 — Women in their 70s running the NYC Marathon have surged by 250% over the past decade, part of a broader age polarization trend where both under-30 and over-60 runners have nearly doubled as Gen Z embraces run clubs and Boomers from the 1970s running boom age into their 60s.
15 — “Golden” by HUNTR/X from Netflix’s animated hit KPop Demon Hunters tops the Billboard Global 200 for a 15th consecutive week, tying Harry Styles’ “As It Was” for the third-longest No. 1 run since the chart launched in 2020.
Solarpunk in Africa
Africa isn’t waiting for the electrical grid that will never arrive—it’s leapfrogging directly to distributed solar power through a revolutionary financing model. Over 400,000 solar installations happen monthly across Africa because three breakthroughs converged: solar hardware costs dropped 99.5%, mobile money eliminated transaction fees, and pay-as-you-go financing turned $1,200 systems into $0.21/day subscriptions that cost less than kerosene. Companies like Sun King (23 million products sold) and SunCulture (boosting farm revenues from $600 to $14,000 per acre) now dominate with 50%+ market share by mastering the full stack—manufacturing, distribution, mobile payments, IoT monitoring, and carbon credit monetization—creating a template for how all 21st-century infrastructure will be built: modular, distributed, digitally-metered, and privately financed rather than centralized and government-led. Climate Drift (18 minutes)
Bubbles Build the Future
The infrastructure powering today’s internet was built by bankrupt companies during a bubble investors thought was foolish. The real benefit of bubbles isn’t in the companies that fail, but in the physical infrastructure (fiber, power plants, foundries) and the shared belief in a radically different future that drives thousands of teams to innovate in parallel, creating breakthroughs that would take decades to develop separately. Today’s AI bubble is likely wasteful in the short term, but if it forces massive investments in power generation capacity and chip manufacturing in the United States while funding a thousand experimental approaches to AI architecture and chip design, it will have created the foundation for decades of downstream innovation. The alternative to bubbles isn’t careful, rational investment. It’s stagnation, where big companies play it safe and the frontier of what’s possible stops moving altogether. Stratechery (15 minutes)
Swarms Beat the Titan
China was so restricted from accessing advanced American chips that it relied on free, open-source models from Meta to enter the AI race, a handicap that instead forced breakthrough innovation. Chinese companies are now bundling thousands of weaker chips together to match Nvidia’s best systems at a fraction of the cost, a strategy they call “swarms beat the titan.” This reveals a counterintuitive truth: the winner in the AI race won’t be determined by who has the most capital or smartest engineers, but by which system, centralized state coordination or decentralized private markets, can mobilize resources and execute faster under pressure. For business leaders building in tech, this means the next five years determine not just market dominance, but whose values and model of innovation will reshape the entire global technology landscape. WSJ (7 minutes)
Sweden’s Digital Reversal
A quarter of Swedish babies under 12 months were using the internet, and the nation that gave children outdoor freedom mistakenly applied the same philosophy online—until test scores crashed and teachers became “smartphone police” trying to teach algebra to kids hooked on Roblox. Sweden’s government reversed course dramatically: issuing the country’s first screen-time guidelines (zero for toddlers, 1-2 hours for elementary kids), banning phones from schools entirely by 2026, replacing digital tools with physical textbooks, and considering social media age limits while parents across 200 towns signed pledges delaying smartphones until 14. By 2025, daily device use dropped 40 minutes among tweens, cell phone ownership among 9-year-olds nearly halved, and “dumb phone” sales tripled—proving that policy guidance, national school bans, and community action can shift cultural norms faster than expected and provide a blueprint for reversing the phone-based childhood. After Babel (11 minutes)
Find Your Work Pleasure
Career misery often stems not from being in the wrong field but from environments that misalign with your core pleasures—the specific aspects of work that energize rather than drain you. Instead of asking “What do I want to be?” identify your top pleasure points from twelve categories: making money, beauty, creativity, understanding, self-expression, technology, helping others, leading, teaching, independence, order, and nature. Rate statements in each category to discover your unique constellation of work pleasures, then seek roles where these intersect with the world’s needs rather than changing careers entirely. The author nearly abandoned her nine-year field for psychology until this framework revealed she didn’t need a new profession—just different clients, formats, and boundaries that honored her pleasures of understanding, creativity, self-expression, and helping others, transforming “Will I ever do anything good?” despair into work where she feels genuinely valuable. Nathalia Montenegro (9 minutes)
Master Framing, Master Influence
Before you can persuade anyone, you must define how they perceive the problem itself—this invisible art of framing determines what people consider at stake and what they believe is possible. Rational framing speaks to logic through evidence and causal chains (anchoring in data, showing trade-offs, using models like cost-of-delay), while emotional framing connects to identity and meaning through story structure, named emotions, and contrast between present and possible future. The most effective leaders integrate both: “We’re not expanding the budget, we’re reducing long-term maintenance risk” maintains truth while shifting meaning from deficiency to agency. Practice by slowing your thinking to surface hidden assumptions, crafting metaphors that translate abstraction into memory, and reviewing every communication through dual lenses—does it withstand scrutiny AND make anyone care—because influence isn’t about explaining facts but architecting belief. PM Researcher (10 minutes)
Embrace Your Limits
Perfectionism promises that with enough effort and the right system, you’ll finally get on top of everything—but this belief itself is the trap because being human means permanently facing infinite possibilities and finite time. The liberating truth is that mastering life isn’t difficult, it’s literally impossible, and accepting this shifts you from productivity debt (needing to justify your existence through output) to starting each day at zero where everything accomplished is bonus credit. History’s most prolific creators worked only 3-4 focused hours daily because deep work is inherently tiring and creative breakthroughs happen during rest, yet modern productivity systems define so many moments as “distractions” that they turn life’s best parts—like your child bursting in excitedly—into problems simply because they clash with your plan. The weight lifts when you stop trying to eliminate all interruptions and spontaneity, put down the burden of needing control, and walk forward doing a few things that actually matter rather than chasing an ever-receding finish line. Big Think (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
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. - C.S. Lewis