Weekend Briefing No. 640
Artists Incorporated -- Riding The Leopard -- The Last 20%
Welcome to the weekend.
I’ll be in San Francisco next week and would love to meet up IRL. I’m hosting a happy hour on Wednesday click here to sign up. See you then!
I’ll also be at the Praxis Summit. If you’re there shoot me a note. I’d love to say hi.
Prime Numbers
37 — Over 37% of action lead roles in the 2020s are going to actors aged 50 and over - more than double the share from the turn of the century, and the highest on record.
28.6 — NASA’s Curiosity rover got a surprise on April 25 when it drilled into a 28.6-pound Martian rock named Atacama — and the rock hitched a ride, lodging itself on the drill arm until controllers finally shook it loose six days later by tilting, rotating, and spinning the bit.
11,190 — Chile’s solar boom has reached 11,190 megawatts of installed capacity — and attracted a new kind of attention, with criminal organizations now systematically targeting farms for copper wire in 85.7% of cases and the panels themselves in over half.
44,000,000,000 — US ad spending on creators is projected to hit $44 billion in 2026, up from $37 billion the year prior, as brands race to follow audiences shifting from traditional TV to creator-driven platforms like YouTube.
Artists Incorporated
Colorado just gave artists something they’ve never had: a business structure built specifically for them. The Colorado Artist Company Act, which passed the full House 49-14 after clearing the Senate 31-3, creates a new kind of LLC called an A-Corp, where an artist’s stated mission is legally protected, intellectual property counts as capital, and artists must retain at least 51% of voting shares. It also allows fractional ownership from the start, meaning collaborators and contributors can hold real equity in a creative enterprise. Once Governor Polis signs it, any artist, including those outside Colorado, will be able to register an A-Corp by early 2027. Metalabel Studios (3 min)
Riding The Leopard
The meaning of life, drawn from mystics, mathematicians, psychonauts, and non-verbal autistic children, turns out to be the same thing: you are a sliver of the universe experiencing itself, and your job is to experience it in a way no one else can. The Upanishads, Rumi, Teilhard de Chardin, and Claude Shannon’s information theory all converge on the same point, that a predictable signal carries no information, and a universe of identical people produces nothing new. Joseph Campbell put it most vividly: the goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces. In an age when AI can do more and more of what humans once did, the answer isn’t to do less, it’s to be more irreducibly, surprisingly yourself, because differentiation isn’t just a personal virtue, it’s a moral obligation. Not Boring (13 min)
The Last 20%
Everyone who has watched AI write code, draft a contract, or analyze a spreadsheet has had the same thought: this replaces someone’s job. Box CEO Aaron Levie thinks that instinct is almost always wrong, because what people are watching is the first 80% of the job, the text generation, the calculation, the first draft, and mistaking it for the whole thing. The last 20%, the domain expertise, the judgment calls, the security response at 2 AM, the client relationship, is where all the actual value lives. His bigger argument is that AI won’t shrink the number of workers so much as multiply the number of agents working alongside them, and that the engineer of the future is less likely to be at Meta and more likely to be automating drug discovery at Eli Lilly. Platformer (32 min)
The Final Frontier
The history of space exploration has a chapter no one puts on a poster: for the first twelve years of human spaceflight, astronauts went to the bathroom into plastic bags and spent an hour kneading antimicrobial powder into the contents. The engineering challenge is real, since zero gravity eliminates every mechanism that makes toilets work on Earth, and NASA has spent five decades iterating on suction-based systems, training astronauts to aim using cameras mounted in toilet bowls, and once deploying a robot arm to knock a large mass of frozen urine off the hull of the Space Shuttle before reentry. A Mars mission raises the stakes considerably: four astronauts over 700 days will generate three to four tons of waste that has to be stored safely for fifty years, and one promising solution is to roast it into inert tiles that double as radiation shielding in the habitat walls. Mars For The Rest of Us (14 min)
Data Center Suburb
A San Francisco startup called SPAN wants to bolt a small, liquid-cooled GPU node to the side of your house, use your spare electrical capacity to run AI workloads around the clock, and in exchange pay your utility and internet bills. Each XFRA node packs 16 Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPUs and draws on the 80 amps of unused capacity that most modern American homes already have sitting idle, with a backup battery to smooth over any conflicts with your own electricity use. SPAN claims it can deploy 8,000 of these units at one-fifth the cost of a traditional 100-megawatt data center, and plans to scale to 80,000 nodes by 2027 for more than a gigawatt of distributed compute, focused on AI inference rather than model training. The obvious complications, from GPU theft (each card retails around $10,000) to HOA fights to local grid strain, haven’t been solved yet, but a 100-home pilot is already underway. Ars Technica (5 min)
America’s Best Free Bread
The premise is simple and the promise is ironclad: after 555 restaurant visits, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of obsessive research, one writer has determined the best free bread in America, and he will tell you, somewhere in this piece. The quest doubles as a taxonomy of Americans, sorted into those who light up at the question (they remember every good bite they’ve ever had), those who have apparently never retained a single sensory memory, and a third type who takes the question seriously and argues for something specific. What unfolds is a portrait of a country through its bread baskets, the warm focaccia, the cold dinner rolls, the popovers nobody asked for but everyone is glad to have arrived. The Atlantic (8 minutes)
Japan’s Ghost Houses
Japan has 9 million vacant homes, and by 2038 one in three properties in the country is projected to sit empty, a crisis driven by forces that go well beyond simple demographics. An aging, shrinking population and rapid urbanization explain part of it, but a quirk in Japan’s tax code makes it cheaper to build new on vacant land than to leave it bare, so developers keep adding supply even as demand collapses. Cultural attitudes compound the problem: unlike in the US, older Japanese homes carry almost no premium, most depreciate to near zero within 32 years, and many families refuse to sell properties containing ancestral altars. The result is a country dotted with sub-$10,000 homes that foreign buyers are snapping up on TikTok, while Japan quietly confronts what happens when a society ages faster than its housing stock can disappear. The Hustle (6 min)
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
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. - Gustave Flaubert