Weekend Briefing No. 642
Babel vs. Jerusalem -- AI Jobs Hysteria -- Who Gets The Pie
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
889,000,000 —Bluey logged 889 million viewing minutes on Disney+ in a single week — enough to top Nielsen’s streaming charts even during the quietest week of the year, when no title cracked the billion-minute mark for the first time in 2026.
500,000 — The company behind Shibumi shade screens has sold 500,000 of the $255 beach shades, but knockoffs have pushed the total even higher — and their explosive popularity is now getting them banned at beaches across the Carolinas.
39 — Chinese companies are on track to control 39% of global lithium production by 2030 — up from about one-third in 2020 — as Beijing-backed firms finance mines across Africa, Australia, and South America to tighten their grip on battery supply chains.
Babel vs. Jerusalem
The new pope just became the most powerful voice in the AI safety debate. Drawing on 2,000 years of Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo XIV released his first major encyclical framing AI not as a technology question but as a civilizational choice: humanity can either build a new Tower of Babel, a top-down system driven by pride and profit that reduces people to “cogs,” or it can rebuild Jerusalem, where diverse communities work together toward a common good. He called for binding legal frameworks, independent oversight, and an end to autonomous weapons, arguing that AI-driven warfare lowers the moral threshold for violence and slips beyond human control. With over a billion Catholics worldwide and a growing coalition of workers, graduates, and residents already pushing back against AI’s disruptions, the pope may be uniquely positioned to reframe a debate that Silicon Valley has largely controlled. WSJ (9 minutes)
Citizen’s Dividend
Samsung’s chipmaking workforce just turned a routine bonus dispute into a global referendum on who deserves a cut of the AI gold rush. Nearly 48,000 South Korean workers came within hours of walking out before executives agreed to a tentative deal, after the union argued that record AI-driven operating profits weren’t reaching the people actually fabricating the chips going into Nvidia, OpenAI, and the rest of big tech. The dispute prompted a senior Korean policymaker to publicly float a “citizen’s dividend,” a slice of AI windfall profits paid out across the country’s 52 million people to stabilize the social fabric as automation reshapes work. From Kenyan data annotators forming associations to Hollywood pushing a “Tilly tax” on AI-generated performers, an old, stubborn question is showing up everywhere at once: who gets paid when machines do the work, and who decides? Rest of World (6 minutes)
AI Jobs Hysteria
The AI jobs apocalypse isn’t showing up where the economists actually know how to look for it. Despite the wave of layoffs at Meta, Cisco, and Coinbase, US labor data shows that unemployment for the jobs most exposed to AI is currently lower than for less-exposed occupations, and only one in five companies report using AI in any business function at all. The real squeeze is narrow and generational, a 16% decline in entry-level work for 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed fields like software development, which looks less like a mass replacement and more like the death of the “earn while you learn” model in which new grads built tacit experience by doing the codable parts of the job. The honest reading is that we still have time to plan, but we’re spending hundreds of billions deploying AI and less than one percent of that figuring out what it’s actually doing to the economy. MIT Technology Review (9 minutes)
Skip Mars
Mars is forever twenty years away because no rocket can shorten the two-year round trip, and the only abort plan is "press the red button and wait." A more useful next rung on the ladder, weirdly enough, is Venus, where an orbital flyby is roughly Moon-difficulty, the radiation is gentler, the communications delay is short enough for actual conversation, and the upper-atmosphere clouds sit in a temperate, pressure-friendly band where probes have already detected anomalies that hint at either alien chemistry or, possibly, microbial life. The experiment to settle it isn't a billion-dollar lander, it's essentially a party balloon, simple enough that a private team is already flying a version of the mission with RocketLab. There may be a near-guaranteed Nobel Prize floating in the skies of our scariest planetary neighbor, and we're stubbornly aiming everything we have at the one planet we can't safely abort from. Mars For The Rest of Us (12 minutes)
The Group Chat
A friend apologized three times in a row for not being more active in a low-stakes group chat, not because the screenshots mattered, but because he was worried about slipping out of the friendship itself. According to a recent Glamour survey, 93% of respondents say they're in a group chat they check at least weekly and 90% credit those threads with enriching their social lives, even as a Surgeon General advisory names loneliness a public health crisis. Group chats have quietly become "social architecture," the place where modern friendships are built, tested, misread, repaired, and sometimes quietly iced out, rather than at brunch or weddings. When the basic unit of friendship is no longer the dinner or the phone call but the persistent, vibrating thread on your phone, going dark for a week stops feeling like a normal life rhythm and starts feeling like a kind of soft exit. Glamour (5 minutes)
Struggle Is The Point
The modern instinct to optimize away friction, using GPS, skipping the hard book, defaulting to the easy game, is quietly working against your brain. Neuroscientists consistently find that what actually builds cognitive resilience is novelty and difficulty: learning a musical instrument builds measurable gray matter in motor, auditory, and visuospatial regions of the brain, while bilingualism is associated with a 4 to 5 year delay in dementia onset, and dance is the only physical activity shown in a large prospective study to have protective effects against dementia specifically. The unifying principle across all eight hobbies the experts recommend, including book clubs, volunteering, language learning, and game nights, is that passive consumption doesn’t move the needle; what matters is whether an activity forces the brain to adapt to something it doesn’t already know how to do. The good news is you don’t need new hobbies, just new friction: ditch the GPS on your regular walk, swap your usual puzzle for chess, or take a different route home. Real Simple (4 minutes)
Six Strings
Country singer Eric Church returned to Chapel Hill and delivered the rarest of commencement speeches, one that wasn't really a speech, it was a guitar lesson. Church organized his address around the six strings of a guitar, mapping each to a principle for the Class of 2026, with faith as the deep low E and family as the A, working up through heart, ambition, community, and a sense of self. His sharpest line was aimed at the smartphone generation specifically, that they face "a temptation no generation before has ever faced. The temptation to perform to everyone and belong to no one," and the prescription was to plant themselves somewhere, learn actual names instead of usernames, coach the team, build the thing the community needs. At a moment when most graduates are being told the future is portable, optimized, and increasingly virtual, a Carolina kid stood at Kenan Stadium and told them the most subversive thing they could do is grow roots. YouTube (18 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
There is no path. The path is made by walking. -Antonio Machado