Weekend Briefing No. 625

The Story of Porsche -- Claude's New Constitution -- New Study on Social Media and Teens

Welcome to the weekend.

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Prime Numbers

11 — Americans now spend 11 hours per week watching social or creator videos compared to 19 hours watching television or movies, a shift from 2022 when they watched 10.8 hours of social videos versus 21.2 hours of TV/movies—representing a loss of 2.2 weekly hours of long-form entertainment.

3400 — Goodwill Industries surpassed $7 billion in revenue from its 3,400 stores in 2025, up 7% year-over-year and nearly 50% since 2019, as inflation-weary Americans hunt for bargains and younger shoppers embrace secondhand clothing as sustainable and fashionable.

1,600,000 — The 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics has produced nearly 1.6 million cubic meters of manufactured “technical snow” across all venues, with organizers constructing massive new high-elevation reservoirs including one holding 200 million liters to ensure consistent, safe racing conditions as climate change makes natural snowfall unreliable.

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The Story of Porsche

Porsche is both quality and quantity. It owns the most prestigious brand in its market while churning out nearly half a million mass-market soccer mom SUVs per year. And like any good luxury brand, it’s packed with enough juicy family drama and creeping takeovers to fill a Netflix series. Yet behind it all lies perhaps the darkest origin story we’ve ever told on Acquired. Porsche wasn’t just started by Nazis. Adolf Hitler himself was deeply involved in its early fortunes. Following WWII, the Allies simply looked past these facts and essentially bestowed a license to generate wealth on Porsche and its owners, setting the stage for them to become one of the fifteen wealthiest families in the world today. Dig deeper in my briefing. Acquired Briefing (21 minutes)

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Claude’s New Constitution

You can now train AI models by explaining principles in plain English rather than encoding good behavior as mathematical reward functions—a shift that matters because Claude has 20 million users doing unpredictable things, and you need the model to generalize values to contexts you didn’t anticipate. Anthropic’s approach treats their AI less like a calculator to be programmed and more like a precocious child to be reasoned with: the new “constitution” doesn’t just list desired behaviors but explains why Claude should refuse to help concentrate power illegitimately, even if Anthropic itself asks. The bet is that as models get smarter, understanding the reasoning behind rules will make them better at self-governance than memorizing a list—which becomes critical if they eventually exceed human intelligence. For builders: you can’t enumerate every scenario in advance, so teaching principles that transfer across contexts beats trying to hard-code every possible edge case. Time (7 minutes)

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New Study on Social Media and Teens

A large UK study found that teens’ total social media hours didn’t predict mental health problems a year later—which critics of platform bans celebrated as vindication. But the study measured something narrow: whether screen time in general predicts self-reported emotional symptoms 12 months out, not whether Instagram’s recommendation algorithm introduces girls to pro-anorexia content, or whether Snapchat streaks wreck classroom focus and sleep. The real harms aren’t about time spent—they’re about predatory design choices that exploit specific vulnerabilities in specific kids, the same way casinos are banned for children not because longitudinal studies proved gambling causes depression, but because we recognize an environment built to exploit them. If removing phones from schools improves academic performance (especially for struggling students), removing algorithmic feeds designed to maximize engagement will likely produce similar gains—even if population-level surveys can’t detect them. Platformer (14 minutes)

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Worth Beyond Work

You can save a million babies and still feel like you’re not enough. The speaker co-founded Embrace, a social enterprise creating low-cost incubators for premature babies, and spent a decade making it her entire identity—until the company shut down and she had no idea who she was anymore. The real breakthrough came when she traced her relentless drive back to childhood abuse: feeling powerless as a kid had pushed her to help the most powerless people in the world, but it also meant no amount of achievement could fill the void. She learned to stop achieving her way out of pain through three shifts: feeling emotions instead of numbing them with productivity, letting go of outcomes (you can’t control the waves, only how you ride them), and offering herself the compassion she’d been desperately seeking from external validation. If your worth depends on what you build, you’re one failure away from shattering—and even success won’t save you. Check out Jane’s TED Talk. TED (7 minutes)

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Am I Fulfilled?

Self-actualization—becoming everything you’re capable of becoming—sounds inspiring until you realize it assumes there’s one true you waiting to be optimized and validated by others. Allan spent a decade in project management feeling restless not because he failed to find himself, but because the premise was wrong: you’re too vast to be summed up in one lifetime, and chasing complete fulfillment sets you up for pressure and disappointment. Maslow himself figured this out late in life and added a higher level—self-transcendence—which isn’t about perfecting the self but connecting to something larger, and it’s available at any stage, not just after you’ve climbed every other rung. The shift from “Am I fulfilled?” to “Am I fully alive today?” changes the game: instead of mining inward for some discoverable essence, you show up outward with curiosity and compassion, meeting the world as the multitude you already are. Design Your Life (5 minutes)

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Population Collapse

China had fewer births in 2025 than in 1776, when its population was one-fifth the size—a collapse so severe that even if it somehow froze births at current levels, the population would eventually stabilize at 625 million, less than half of today’s 1.4 billion. This isn’t just China: since the mid-2010s, fertility has accelerated downward everywhere with no apparent floor, and every coping mechanism people reach for crumbles under scrutiny—aging populations crush productivity and infrastructure, baby bonuses would require $10,000+ per child annually and still wouldn’t work, immigration can’t save us when the entire planet is approaching sub-replacement fertility, and hoping robots will replace all workers is just betting on a different kind of extinction event. We’re facing a threat as existential as any physical catastrophe, except this one requires figuring out how to make people want children again, which makes it harder but no less urgent than stopping a pandemic or feeding 8 billion humans. Noahpinion (14 minutes)

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Starlings, Not Computers

Neuroscience used to hunt for where each mental function lived in the brain—emotion here, motivation there—but now researchers see the mind as networked ensembles firing across regions, like starlings forming patterns through local interactions rather than central command. This shift demolishes the ancient idea that reason should rule over primitive emotions and desires like a charioteer controlling wild horses. If your brain coordinates judgment by drawing on reason, emotion, desire, and body signals in constant collaboration, then treating any single faculty as supreme—especially reason—means you’re ignoring most of your decision-making apparatus. The stakes: phenomenally smart people do astoundingly stupid things precisely because they’re so smitten with their intelligence that they dismiss the signals their emotions and gut are sending them. NYT (8 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.

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Weekend Wisdom

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. — Hal Borland