Weekend Briefing No. 616
The Coca-Cola System -- Counterculture’s Conservative Turn -- Bezos Bets on Physical AI
Welcome to the weekend.
It’s officially Christmas season. If you’ve been a reader for a while, you may know that I take my Christmas music very seriously. I’ve created The Ultimate Christmas Playlist, a collection of 96 songs and 5 hours 10 minutes of pure joy. I hope you and your family enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.
Prime Numbers
387,000 — About a third of U.S. adults say they’ve bought an item online that either never arrived or was counterfeit and wasn’t refunded, with online shopping fraud generating over 387,000 reports and $434.4 million in losses during 2024 alone.
29.6 — Korean instant noodle makers Nongshim and Samyang have captured nearly 29.6% of the U.S. market after growing 6.1 percentage points, chipping away at Japanese brands’ dominance in a global industry projected to reach $56.5 billion by 2030.
40 — Keene, New Hampshire replaced traditional traffic lights with roundabouts, reducing harmful airborne particulates by up to 40% while cutting vehicle accidents by the same percentage and injury crashes by 75 percent in the small city.
The Coca-Cola System
Most billion-dollar brands succeed by owning their supply chain. Coca-Cola built a $175 billion empire by giving theirs away, granting bottling rights for a dollar it never collected, then letting independent franchisees spend their own capital to blanket the globe. The genius wasn’t the secret formula. It was creating a structure where everyone from the bottling entrepreneurs to gas station owners profits when a can sells, turning potential competitors into an army of stakeholders fighting for your success. Acquired Briefing (45 minutes)
Counterculture’s Conservative Turn
Most people assume countercultures rebel leftward toward liberation, but the 21st century flipped this script—our most prominent countercultural movement rebelled rightward into nihilism and cruelty. The path from Vice magazine’s transgressive hipsterism to the Proud Boys reveals how cultural stagnation created a vacuum that reactionary forces eagerly filled. When the liberal mainstream became synonymous with bland celebrity monoculture—Taylor Swift reporters, endless Marvel reboots, algorithmic sameness—rejecting progress itself became the new rebellion. The lesson for anyone building culture or movements: when you stop innovating and rely on popularity as your only measure of value, you’re not creating stability—you’re fertilizing ground for those who promise to burn it all down. NYT (8 minutes)
Bezos Bets on Physical AI
While everyone chases chatbot breakthroughs, the world’s most successful company-builder is wagering $6.2 billion that the real AI revolution happens in atoms, not just bits. Project Prometheus aims to build AI that learns from physical experimentation—robots running countless real-world tests in manufacturing, aerospace, and materials science—rather than just pattern-matching text scraped from the internet. This matters because language models can explain theories, but they can’t actually design a better rocket engine or discover a new alloy; Bezos is betting that AI learning through physical trial-and-error will unlock breakthroughs that pure computation never could. For anyone building in AI or hardware, the signal is clear: the frontier isn’t making chatbots smarter—it’s making AI that can manipulate reality itself. NYT (5 minutes)
Open-Source Civilization Kit
Most people think abundance requires complex global supply chains, but one physicist proved you can rebuild modern civilization with 50 machines, local materials, and a wrench. Marcin Jakubowski’s Global Village Construction Set applies open-source software principles to hardware—tractors, brick presses, solar panels—designed to be built, repaired, and reconfigured by anyone using off-the-shelf parts and free online blueprints, at one-tenth the commercial cost. This isn’t just about saving money on farm equipment; it’s about reclaiming technological literacy in an era where proprietary tech has made us helpless dependents who can’t even fix our own tools. For builders and business leaders alike, the insight cuts deep: every time you lock users out of understanding or modifying your product, you’re not creating value—you’re creating fragility and resentment that will eventually fuel competitors who offer freedom instead. MIT Technology Review (7 minutes)
Compounding Tiny Choices
Most people think peak performance at 55 requires genetic luck or radical interventions, but Kevin Dahlstrom knows that the real secret is embarrassingly mundane: a million micro-decisions stacked over decades. Deep squats every morning, walking 15+ miles weekly, eight hours of sleep, saying no to trivial commitments—none of these actions feels transformative on day one, but each compounds into something irreversible over time. The lesson isn’t in any single habit but in understanding that vitality and success aren’t destinations you arrive at through one big breakthrough; they’re the inevitable result of choosing the slightly harder thing, consistently, when no one’s watching. For anyone building a career or life, this reframes everything: stop hunting for shortcuts and start asking which small, sustainable choices you’re willing to repeat for the next 20 years—because those choices are already building your future, whether you’re conscious of it or not. X (6 minutes)
Trust Through Motion
Most people think national fracture happens through dramatic breaks, but this mother-son journey up Interstate 95 reveals something counterintuitive: America’s deepest connections emerge not in our homes or online echo chambers, but in the liminal spaces where strangers pause mid-journey. At rest stops between Miami and Maine, 250 conversations expose a pattern that news headlines miss—the Confederate-flag trucker laughing with Mexican drivers at vending machines, the unhoused community creating neighborhood rituals in parking lots, the prosecutor from the Philippines seeking reassurance at a murder site. The central insight cuts against our moment’s prevailing narrative: proximity dissolves what distance amplifies. When you actually occupy the same bathrooms, share the same mosquito-thick air, wait at the same charging stations, the supposed civilizational collapse looks more like collaborative improvisation—messy, imperfect, but stubbornly functional. This matters because choosing presence over retreat, encounter over algorithm, becomes the practice that keeps a fraying nation from fully unraveling. The road teaches that belonging isn’t a settled state but a daily decision to stop, listen, and remain—even when trust requires clinging to iron rungs you can’t yet see. Atavist Magazine (8 minutes)
Monastery Without Walls
We believe focus requires more discipline, better systems, or stronger willpower—but Zen masters reveal the opposite: our attempts to control the mind create the chaos we’re trying to escape. The paradox dissolves when you understand what Thich Nhat Hanh called “monkey mind”—thoughts swinging wildly branch to branch—isn’t a problem to solve but a nature to observe. Monks don’t fight mental chatter; they train attention by patiently returning focus to an anchor (breath, present sensation) each time the mind wanders, strengthening the muscle through repetition rather than force. The transformative shift happens when you stop treating thoughts as enemies requiring combat and start treating them as clouds drifting across the vast sky of awareness—you are the blue expanse, not the weather passing through. This matters because attachment to outcomes, resistance to discomfort, and identification with mental noise generate the stress that productivity hacks can’t touch; releasing the grip on how things “should” be creates the calm that makes genuine focus possible. Postanly Weekly (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
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others. - Cicero