Weekend Briefing No. 647

Ghost In The Room -- Beef, Not Beltway -- Judges Before Lunch

Welcome to the weekend.

As is my tradition, here’s my annual 4th of July country music playlist. It’s 21+ hours of country music including the top 10 songs from 1990-2025 + new stuff from this year. It’s best enjoyed by a BBQ or a lake.

Also, I just recently interviewed Eric Reis, author of The Lean Startup on his new book Incorruptible about building businesses that last. The first story below is and article I wrote for Forbes on that, but if you want to see the full interview check it out on YouTube (and subscribe to my channel while you’re there).

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Prime Numbers

35 — BTS grossed $127.8 million in May, beating The Rolling Stones’ previous record for the biggest monthly gross by a group in Boxscore history by 35%.

66,123 — Aerial Illuminations broke a Guinness World Record in Manvel, Texas, by launching 66,123 drones over one week for an Easter-themed light show depicting the crucifixion of Christ.

103,632 — Downloads of the phone-locking app Brick jumped from 14,000 last October to 103,632 in January, as growing screen-time anxiety fuels demand for gadgets designed to disable your other devices.

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Ghost In The Room

Keeping founder control feels like protecting your mission, but it’s actually a guardian with an expiration date. Eric Ries calls the market pressure that slowly erodes a company’s principles “financial gravity,” and his fix isn’t a stronger leader, it’s a stronger structure: a “governance fortress” built on a public benefit corporation charter, a supermajority vote of all outstanding shares rather than just those cast, and a self-reinforcing lock that stops that supermajority from ever being quietly repealed. Twilio never built one, and once founder Jeff Lawson’s supervoting shares expired, it took activist investors owning less than half a percent of the company just 199 days to force him out, while Costco’s fortress, poured in 1985, still holds. The real question every founder has to answer isn’t whether they can hold the line themselves, it’s whether their company can hold it without them. Forbes (8 minutes)

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Beef, Not Beltway

A family of four earning $130,000 a year, comfortably above the national median, is now in the red after covering just housing, health insurance, and day care, over $1,000 worse off than 18 months ago. Groceries, not rent or gas, are the single biggest source of financial stress for Americans, and meat is the biggest culprit within that, cited six times more often than the next contender. Beef prices alone are up roughly a third in two years, driven by the smallest U.S. cattle herd in decades, a concentrated meatpacking industry, tariffs, and a livestock parasite spreading across the Americas. Fixing the herd could take years, so the more immediate fight is over tariffs, grocery sales taxes, and the shrinkflation tricks that quietly raise prices without ever changing the sticker. NYT (6 minutes)

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Judges Before Lunch

Israeli judges granted parole to 65% of prisoners at the start of a work session, but that number crashed to nearly zero by session’s end, only to snap back to 65% right after lunch. It had nothing to do with the case, the crime, or the prisoner’s record. It was simply a matter of how many decisions the judge had already made since the last break, since the brain treats a decision about lunch or a mundane email the same way it treats a major call, drawing down the same limited pool of mental energy. The fix isn’t finishing every task, it’s deciding what to do about it, since a concrete plan for a pending task is often enough to quiet the intrusive thoughts and free up the mind, even before the task itself gets done. FacileThings (7 minutes)

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The Baton Drops Often

Per long-cited Kellogg research, only 3% of family businesses survive to the fourth generation. The baton, it turns out, drops more often than it gets passed. Family Business Advisor Kile Graves coaches family-owned enterprises through generational transitions at Cornerstone Coaching with his father, Steve, and frames this as identity work — not succession. “The baton doesn’t just pass,” he writes. “It’s handed — and received. Both actions require intention.” His free 60-minute webinar for family business leaders at any generation runs June 23 and July 7. Registrants get a copy of The Torch. Click the link to sign up. Cornerstone (Sponsored)

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Blogger, Prophet, Skeptic

A man who wrote emails to friends about mobile internet because his magazine editor didn’t want the stories ended up inventing an entire way of covering Silicon Valley. Om Malik started Gigaom in 2001 almost by accident, and it grew into one of the 50 most influential blogs on the internet, mixing hot scoops with blunt opinion in a way that pulled tech journalism away from stodgy institutions and toward singular voices like his own. He had an eye for what mattered before anyone else did, championing Slack early and writing the first serious blog coverage of Twitter, even though he wasn’t a fan of it at the time. He died this week at 59, having spent two decades insisting that Silicon Valley owed the world more honesty about its own power than it was ever inclined to give. NYT (7 minutes)

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The Woman Across The Street

A Toyota Highlander parked across the street turned out to be less an eyesore than a locked door with a person trapped behind it. A Seattle homeowner noticed a woman named Elysia living in her dead car with two dogs, and instead of calling it in, he introduced himself, discovering she’d grown up nearby, earned a degree from the University of Washington, and had been steadily undone by an abusive ex, an autoimmune disease, and a string of small bureaucratic disasters, unpaid tickets turned into a warrant, an uninsured accident, a suspended license. What actually got her unstuck wasn’t a shelter or a program, it was neighbors pooling a few thousand dollars for a used Toyota Sienna, converting it into a livable camper, and paying off the tickets and insurance she needed to legally drive again. Sometimes the difference between someone staying stuck forever and someone climbing out is nothing more than a handful of people deciding to actually look. Wallyhood (14 minutes)

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Letting Go Of The Wheel

Getting everything he wanted in his twenties left Sasha Chapin miserable, so he tried something that sounds almost irresponsible: he stopped choosing. He calls it surrender, the practice of noticing the pull of your life instead of forcing it toward a plan, on the theory that the ambitious, goal-setting part of the mind is a tiny sliver of a much larger intelligence, poorly suited to running the whole show. Discovered goals, the ones that show up because people keep reacting to you a certain way, tend to work better than the ones you privately decided on years ago and never let go of. It’s a strange argument for less control, but the case is that happiness was never really about getting what you want, it’s about how often you insist that things should be different than they are. Sasha’s Newsletter (9 minutes)

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Gipsying To Glory

Long before bunk beds and lanyards, summer camp began as a 30-mile walk. In 1861, an abolitionist schoolteacher named Frederick Gunn led about 30 boys and a dozen girls from his Connecticut boarding school to the shores of Long Island Sound, where they spent 10 days boating, fishing, and running military drills in what they called “gipsying.” The idea took off because it combined something Victorian Americans were newly anxious about, city life softening children, with the belief that nature alone could rebuild toughness and self-reliance, and by the 1880s camps like Camp Chocorua in New Hampshire had turned that instinct into an entire institution. More than 160 years later, kids still swim, hike, and sit around a fire for the same reason Gunn’s group did, because a summer spent outside the usual rules of home still seems to shape a person the classroom never quite can. HISTORY (5 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

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - The Declaration of Independence