Weekend Briefing No. 646
Wegovy at Nine -- Useful But Untrusted -- No More Stars
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
312,000,000 — Toy Story 5 opened to $312 million globally in its debut weekend, combining $160 million domestically and $152 million overseas to score the year’s biggest opening and shatter the franchise’s previous record.
1,650 — A new Caltech-led radio telescope called the Deep Synoptic Array will blanket 1,650 dish-shaped antennas across 120 square miles of Nevada desert, surveying the sky 100 times faster than existing radio observatories — and processing it all in real time.
270 — Dispersing enough reflective aerosols to meaningfully cool the planet would require a fleet of 270 specialized aircraft flying in concert — enough to disperse a million metric tons of material annually and reduce global surface temperatures by 0.26 degrees Celsius.
Wegovy at Nine
Two nine-year-old twins in Georgia with a genetic mutation that blocks the feeling of fullness have tried karate, portion control, sugar substitutes, seizure medication, and stimulants, and none of it moved the needle on a BMI trajectory that was already producing elevated blood sugar, liver dysfunction, and worrisome cholesterol at age seven. Their doctors are now injecting them with Wegovy weekly, a drug approved for obesity only in patients twelve and older, in a decision that sits at the sharpest edge of a genuine medical dilemma. GLP-1s are producing BMI reductions of up to 30% in some young patients where behavioral programs typically yield 1-3%, but no one knows what decades on these drugs starting in childhood does to bone density, puberty, or brain development. Childhood obesity rates have quadrupled since the 1970s, kids are developing Type 2 diabetes at ten, and doctors are increasingly deciding that a known catastrophe in hand outweighs an unknown risk in the bush. WSJ (7 minutes)
Useful But Untrusted
Americans have doubled their use of AI chatbots since 2023, with about half of U.S. adults now using them and roughly one in four doing so daily, yet the same Pew survey reveals a striking paradox: the heaviest users are also the most pessimistic. Adults under 30 are more likely than any other age group to say AI will have a negative impact on both society and their personal lives over the next 20 years, even as they use these tools far more than their elders. Two-thirds of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly, seven in ten believe it will make their personal data less secure, and confidence in the government to regulate it effectively has dropped to just 33%, with Democrats growing dramatically more skeptical since 2024. The picture that emerges is less a technophobic public and more a pragmatic one: people are finding real utility in these tools for search, work, and even emotional support, while remaining clear-eyed that the institutions responsible for managing the risks are nowhere near ready. Pew Research Center (6 minutes)
Seven In Ten Fail
By long-cited Kellogg estimates, roughly 70% of family businesses fail to make it from the first generation to the second — and the strong ones fail alongside the weak. Usually, says Family Business Advisor Kile Graves, because four different things are being transferred (financial control, operational power, culture, and long-range vision), and they move on different timelines. That misalignment is the leading indicator of breakdown. Graves has coached dozens of family enterprises through this work. He’s teaching the diagnostic in a free 60-minute webinar June 23 and July 7. Everyone who registers gets The Torch, his framework guide. Click the link to sign up. Cornerstone (Sponsored)
No More Stars
SpaceX already has over 10,000 Starlink satellites streaking across the night sky, and astrophysicists have now modeled what the company’s proposed one million additional orbital AI data centers would actually look like: more visible satellites than stars, for large portions of the night, from every location on Earth, since the human eye can only see about 4,500 stars in an unpolluted sky to begin with. Beyond the aesthetic catastrophe, the proposal sidesteps serious questions about atmospheric pollution from daily satellite re-entries, escalating collision risk in increasingly crowded orbits, and the basic engineering problem that orbital data centers would need to dissipate enormous amounts of waste heat in an environment where SpaceX once fried a satellite simply by painting it black. The FCC accepted the filing and opened a public comment period within four days, giving astronomers, who typically spend months on peer-reviewed research, just four weeks to respond. Orbital space is a finite shared resource governed by international rules that were never designed for one private company to claim it at this scale. The Conversation (5 minutes)
Starving Science Slowly
A billion-dollar NASA x-ray telescope called AXIS didn’t get canceled, it just got quietly suffocated: DOGE buyouts gutted the engineering team, budget realignments redirected what was left, a government shutdown ate the remaining runway, and when the project came in over budget with no time to fix it, NASA pulled the plug on nine years of work. That story is playing out across American research right now, with the NIH issuing just 14 funding notices through mid-March of 2026 compared to its usual 850 per year, nearly 95,000 scientists having left federal employment, and 75 percent of researchers surveyed by Nature considering leaving the country entirely. The deeper story is that this didn’t come from nowhere: the postwar compact between government and science, in which tax dollars funded open-ended basic research in exchange for occasional world-changing breakthroughs, has been quietly eroding for decades as venture capital logic colonized innovation policy, and the current administration is simply the most aggressive expression of a long-building hostility. An economist’s model estimated that a 40 percent cut to NIH funding sustained over prior decades would have prevented roughly half of all drugs that exist today from ever being developed. Scientific American (12 minutes)
Reading The Room
A Michael Jackson biopic just opened to $217 million worldwide, the biggest biopic debut ever, despite decades of child sexual abuse allegations that ended Kevin Spacey’s career, pulled Woody Allen from streaming, and left Bill Cosby culturally untouchable even after his release from prison. A recent psychology study offers a surprisingly clean explanation: researchers found that people consistently support censoring artists accused of sexual misconduct while their private enjoyment of the art barely changes, suggesting that cancel culture is less about aesthetic or even moral judgment than about social signaling. The taste system, as the researchers frame it, is stable and private, a beautiful song stays beautiful, but the signaling system is public and reputational, tracking not the severity of a transgression but whether social consensus has formed clearly enough to make the wrong public stance costly. Jackson escaped that consensus partly because he died before #MeToo codified the modern cancellation script, and partly because his estate and fans have kept the case legibly contested, which is all the ambiguity the signaling system needs to stand down. Rob Henderson’s Newsletter (5 minutes)
The City Never Sleeps
When the Knicks completed the largest comeback in NBA Finals history just before midnight on June 10th, every New Yorker watching felt it, and Oura’s anonymized member data from across the city proves it was more than a feeling. From tip-off to the final buzzer, average heart rates stayed elevated 2 BPM above personal baselines for the entire game, spiking to 3.7 BPM above baseline in the closing moments. The physiological hangover was equally measurable: New Yorkers averaged 6.63 hours of sleep that night, down about 10 minutes from the prior week, with every stage of sleep taking a hit and overall recovery scores dropping 1 to 3 percent across the metro area simultaneously. The data is a small but vivid reminder that the body doesn’t distinguish between running a race and watching one. Oura (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
Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. - Stephen Hawking