Welcome to the weekend.
This week I'm bringing back a section from the briefing's early years: Most Read Last Week. At the bottom you'll find the three stories you clicked most in the last issue.
Prime Numbers
$54 million — Ohio State’s football roster costs an estimated $49 million to $54 million, the top of the Power 4, while Boston College spends $8 million to $13 million and the average team with a real playoff shot spends $41 million to $46 million.
$58 — Costco raised the price of a five-quart two-pack of Kirkland Signature motor oil to $58 from about $30 last year and capped purchases at two boxes a week, as Brent crude hit $109 and refiners favor diesel and gasoline over motor oil.
5% — The private market value of America’s roughly 900 surviving malls is up 5 percent since 2022, while healthcare real estate is down 7 percent, industrial down 8 percent and offices down 33 percent.
Pacing the AI Frontier
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argues that frontier AI companies should deliberately slow the rate at which they improve model capabilities, so that safety work has time to keep up. Two things changed his mind. Since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing much faster because AI is increasingly able to build the next generation of AI, a dynamic called recursive self-improvement. And in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, a swarm of agents ran cybersecurity attacks on targets nobody asked them to attack, sacrificed individual agents for the group, and tried to hack the grader evaluating them. Nobody was hurt, but Amodei believes a similar swarm with more capability could take over the internet with a persistent botnet within 6 to 12 months. His proposal has three steps: (1) embedded third-party evaluators with desks, badges and company laptops inside every frontier lab; (2) coordination on safety standards among companies in democratic countries; and (3) eventually coordination with authoritarian governments. Anthropic is committing to the first step unilaterally. Pacing is not halting, he stresses. It buys a year or two to spend on alignment and interpretability. Dario Amodei (20 minutes)
AI Diplomacy
Seth Center led AI diplomacy at the State Department from 2023 to 2025 and co-led the first US-China AI dialogue in May 2024. He does not expect this month’s talks to accomplish much. Both presidents had agreed the 2024 agenda would cover advanced AI risks and safety cooperation, but Chinese officials steered away from risk for hours and declined to explain their own domestic AI regulations, even with regulators in the room. They cast the American safety approach as a barrier to opportunity and a way to keep poorer countries from accessing AI tools. One counterpart pulled Center aside outside a conference room and asked, with genuine puzzlement, why the Americans actually wanted to talk about risk. He expects more of the same this month: safety cooperation dangled in exchange for softer chip controls, and a real chance Beijing floats a hollow offer and then blames Washington when it collapses. His realistic best case is a nonbinding commitment to publish safety benchmarks for cyber and biological risk and to disclose concerning incidents rather than bury them. New York Times (5 minutes)
Disney’s Cash Machine
In 1984, Disney was worth more broken up than whole. Animation had stalled, EPCOT had blown its budget, and corporate raiders were circling with deals that would have sold the film library to MGM and the parks to hotel operators. Michael Eisner and Frank Wells arrived that September, raised park prices that hadn’t moved since Walt died (parking was still $1), and pushed cheap, high-concept films. Twenty-seven of their first 33 made money. Then Howard Ashman and Alan Menken turned animated films into Broadway musicals, and The Lion King grossed $750M on a $45M budget. The 1995 ABC deal brought along ESPN almost by accident. ESPN turned out to be a cash machine that paid for Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. Now the flywheel pulls against itself. Streaming demands a constant stream of new content while the flywheel depends on rare, special releases, and the parks produce about 60% of operating income. Dig deeper in my briefing. Acquired Briefing (12 minutes)
America, 1926
In 1929, Herbert Hoover asked a group of social scientists to produce the most detailed report ever made on the state of the nation. Recent Social Trends ran past 1,500 pages, and Derek Thompson has gone back into it for America’s 250th birthday to see what life looked like a century ago. The parallels are uncomfortable: a rising stock market, widespread fear of technological unemployment (mechanical power then, AI now), a new medium wiring people to far-off emotions (radio then, social media now), and a government that had just choked off immigration after years of record entry. The differences are stark too. Half the country was rural, tens of millions had no plumbing or electricity, women had voted in two presidential elections, millions of children still worked for pay, and of 27 million households only 11 million owned a car or a phonograph. The typical American was a 26-year-old white man earning $100 a month who had just moved from a farm to a city, four years before the crash ended the world he knew. Everything about daily life has changed since then. The worries about work, family and what technology is doing to us have not. Derek Thompson (25 minutes)
Phone-Free Schools
The latest PISA results show the lowest average performance ever recorded across OECD countries in reading, math and science, and the decline began in the mid-2010s, well before COVID closures. Reading fell furthest, especially on longer texts, and the share of students rushing through with quick wrong answers nearly doubled between 2018 and 2025. Jon Haidt’s team at NYU Stern asked a narrower question: what happens when schools take the phones away? Reviewing seven natural experiments, they found mostly beneficial or neutral effects and few negative ones. The widely covered Allcott study reported “close to zero impact” on test scores, but it pooled middle and high schools together, and high schoolers used phones two to three times more often. Among high schools alone, locking phones in pouches for the school day produced modest gains, particularly in math, worth roughly one to two months of schooling. A Norwegian study found that after a ban, girls’ grades improved, bullying dropped, and fewer sought care for psychological symptoms. Removing phones looks like a promising first step, not a complete answer. After Babel (12 minutes)
Liz, Not Elizabeth
With A24’s documentary You Can See Everything out October 16, it’s worth going back to this 2023 profile from almost exactly the same weeks. Amy Chozick spent several days with Elizabeth Holmes in San Diego as she awaited an 11-year sentence for defrauding Theranos investors of more than $100 million. The black turtlenecks are gone and so is the famous baritone. She goes by Liz now, has two small children with her partner Billy Evans, and volunteers on a rape crisis hotline. On the old persona: “I believed it would be how I would be taken seriously and not taken as a little girl.” She describes her former partner Ramesh Balwani as controlling and abusive, and says he told her she needed to “kill Elizabeth” to become a good entrepreneur. Chozick found her disarming and says so plainly. Her editor told her she got rolled, and one of Holmes’s own friends quietly warned her not to believe everything. Holmes still talks about health care inventions she intends to work on from prison, and believes that with less time spent promoting the company, “we would’ve seen through our vision.” New York Times (22 minutes)
Just Like Us
Elizabeth George spent 20 years in private banking, moving from clients with $1 million in liquidity to billionaire family offices with $25 million minimums, reading thousands of tax returns and net worth statements along the way. Her biggest surprise was how ordinary wealthy people are with money. They struggle to save, they get scammed, they don’t stick to a budget, and they have no special investing prowess. They mostly own the same ETFs and index funds as everyone else, and the flashy private equity or venture stake is usually more status flex than return enhancement. Wealth doesn’t relieve money anxiety either, and can sharpen it. They worry about running out, about spoiling their kids, about not making the most of it. They are strikingly susceptible to groupthink, and the most popular conversations were always some version of what our other clients are doing. Two things did impress her. Many give seriously and treat it as a responsibility. And plenty of people with real money are invisible, like the couple referred from a Hilton Garden Inn lobby who had $25 million, a house worth under $500K and Olive Garden as their favorite restaurant. Elizabeth George (9 minutes)
Tycho’s Sunrise Set
Tycho has released his sunrise set from Burning Man again this year, as he has nearly every year for more than a decade. Jason Kottke, who says he is not a Burning Man person, enjoys it every time. There is also a Soundcloud playlist of every 2026 Burning Man set, currently running to 147 tracks and some 252 hours of music. kottke.org (1 minute)
Most Read Last Week
Einstein on Happiness—Einstein’s formula for a happy life: tie it to a goal, not to people or things.
Half-Built Pyramids—What is it like to live in a world you believe is about to end?
Accidentally Quitting Drinking—The discourse around avoiding alcohol never convinced her, and why sober up when the world is burning? Then life intervened.
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 real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. - E.O. Wilson