Welcome to the Labor Day weekend. I hope you’re squeezing the last drops out of Summer.
Prime Numbers
1,200,000 — Bank of America projects annual humanoid robot shipments will hit 1,200,000 by 2030, up from just 20,000 units last year, with China already driving 95% of that volume and government purchases jumping from $6 million to $230 million in two years.
70 — Among 18 to 29 year-olds, 70% believe they spend too much time on their smartphone, well above the 53% of all U.S. adults who feel the same, and only 25% of adults who tried cutting back this year called it a success.
14 — Dollar sales of nonalcoholic beer, spirits, and wine in the US jumped 14% over the past year, even though "nonalcoholic" isn't truly zero-proof, regulations allow up to 0.5% alcohol under that label.
Give It While Alive
The most effective form of charity might just be cash, handed directly to people and trusted to do the right thing with it. Dolly Parton built a $141 million foundation not through galas or naming rights, but by mailing $500 checks to graduating seniors, a move that helped cut her home county’s dropout rate from 35 percent to 6 percent. She sent $1,000 a month to families burned out of their homes by 2016 wildfires, put $1 million into early Covid vaccine trials at Vanderbilt before major funders had, and shipped 305 million free books to kids through her Imagination Library. Her giving wasn’t about polish or prestige, it was about spotting a need early and filling it before anyone thought to ask. NYT (7 minutes)
Human Reserved
Some jobs should stay off limits to AI, not because a robot couldn’t do them, but because something would be lost if it did. Bill Gates argues the AI transition will hit faster than the shift from farms to offices, wiping out entry level jobs across law, customer service, and manufacturing within a decade rather than generations, while automated attacks on hospitals and power grids grow easier to launch than to defend against. His fix isn’t to slow AI down, since he doubts anyone credibly can, but to tax robots and AI tokens the way we tax human payrolls, and to carve out a category he calls “Human Reserved,” roles like elder care and delivering a terminal diagnosis that we choose to keep human even when a machine could do them. The real risk isn’t that AI fails to deliver benefits, it’s that those benefits accrue to a wealthy few while everyone else absorbs the disruption. Gates Notes (12 minutes)
The Off Switch
Most drugs fail not because scientists picked the wrong target, but because chemistry can’t reach it, roughly 80 percent of human proteins have no pocket a small molecule can grab onto. siRNA sidesteps the problem entirely by attacking the messenger RNA instructions for a protein instead of the protein itself, silencing any gene whose sequence you know. The real breakthrough wasn’t the RNA, it was delivery, since naked siRNA gets destroyed in the bloodstream in minutes. Chemists solved it by armoring the molecule against degradation and tagging it with a sugar called GalNAc that liver cells vacuum up automatically, turning what used to be a three week IV infusion into a shot needed four times a year, with drugs now approved for amyloidosis, high cholesterol, and hemophilia, and Alzheimer’s, kidney, and lung versions already in trials. Works in Progress (11 minutes)
Prison Innie
Sam Bankman-Fried is terrified of enjoying commissary Oreos, not because he dislikes the taste, but because caring about them at all would mean the prison has rewired his brain into something smaller. Two years into a 25-year sentence for stealing roughly $8 billion in FTX customer funds, he still maintains his innocence, still takes Adderall for ADHD, still plays a dungeon-crawler game some 6,000 times, and has become an unlikely prison favorite, teaching inmates chess and winning a pickleball tournament while refusing to join any of the racially organized “cars” that structure daily life. He’s also rebranded himself as a Trump supporter and filed for a presidential pardon, a bet that looks longer every month, especially after Trump told reporters he has no plans to grant one. Whether his old utilitarian math was a smokescreen for greed or the actual cause of his downfall, Bankman-Fried still refuses to accept the one outcome his philosophy can’t route around: that he might just be wrong. New York Magazine (40 minutes)
The Aging Score
Every longevity supplement on the market has the same problem, nobody can prove it works without waiting decades to see who dies first. Researchers are betting on a workaround called intrinsic capacity, a single score built from five measurable traits, cognition, strength, vision and hearing, mood, and energy, that tracks how a body and mind are actually functioning rather than whether disease is present. It’s already being tested in France and New Mexico, where declining scores trigger an early referral to a doctor, and the US government’s ARPA-H is funding research to see if the metric moves with exercise or drugs like GLP-1s. If it works, it could hand the FDA a way to approve the first drug that treats aging itself, something it currently can’t do because aging isn’t classified as a disease. NYT (6 minutes)
Don’t Die
A generation ago the rich bragged about how little they slept, now they brag about how much, and that shift says more about America than any workout trend. Wearables like the Oura ring turn the body into a scoreboard, so a glass of wine after 8pm tanks tomorrow’s Readiness score while the same glass at dinner does nothing, and once you’re tracking, you start optimizing your calendar around the metric instead of your life. This “Enhanced Self” culture, GLP-1s, peptide stacks, continuous glucose monitors originally built for diabetics, is spreading precisely as socializing collapses, young people now spend 70 percent less time at parties than they did at the start of the century, even as they exercise more than any generation on record. The pursuit of a longer life, taken far enough, can quietly crowd out the people who make that life worth living. Derek Thompson (13 minutes)
Do As I Say
Peter Thiel once told an Aspen audience he limits his young kids to 90 minutes of screen time a week, and the room audibly gasped, because most toddlers hit that number before lunch. He’s not an outlier, Mark Zuckerberg keeps his own children away from passive video consumption, Bill Gates withheld cellphones until 14, and Steve Jobs was famously a low-tech parent, even as their companies spent billions engineering products to capture everyone else’s attention. The same pattern is repeating with AI, Sam Altman says he’d rather be late than early letting his son talk to a chatbot, even while publicly pitching ChatGPT-generated family podcasts to everyone else. When the people building the technology are the most careful about keeping it away from their own kids, that’s not hypocrisy so much as the clearest product review available. NYT (9 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
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. — Bruce Lee