2025-08-15 20:00:59
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 156th Weekly Dose of Optimism. Packy here. Dan is out in California doing creatine gummy things so I’m filling in for him. This is also penance: I haven’t published an essay since Means & Meaning a couple of weeks ago, because I started writing what I thought was going to be a short essay and has become the deepest I’ve ever written. I hope to have it to you next Tuesday, but at this point, your guess is as good as mine.
So in the meantime, a lot of optimism. Really good week. The optimism gods smiled on me, made it easy. We have advanced nuclear reactors, rare earth magnets, cloud seeding, good news on climate, and AI-designed antibiotics. Not bad for mid-August!
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Department of Energy Announces Initial Selections for New Reactor Pilot Program
US Department of Energy
Seeking DOE authorization provided under the Atomic Energy Act will help today’s selected companies— Aalo Atomics Inc., Antares Nuclear Inc., Atomic Alchemy Inc., Deep Fission Inc., Last Energy Inc., Oklo Inc., Natura Resources LLC, Radiant Energy Inc., Terrestrial Energy Inc., and Valar Atomics Inc.
The race to critical advanced nuclear reactors by July 4th, 2026 is on and I don’t know who to root for.
This week, the Department of Energy announced its selection of eleven companies to participate in the New Reactor Pilot Program, which will expedite the testing of their designs at sites beyond DOE facilities.
Why is this important? In the piece I wrote on Radiant, we talked about the race to the DOME, a DOE testing site at Idaho National Lab. Getting to the DOME is important, because DOE sites have been the only place to test new reactors. Everywhere else, in order to let you test, the NRC wants to see data, which you can’t generate unless you test, which you can’t do unless you have data, which you can’t generate… you get the problem.
Now, these ten companies (I guess one has two projects?) will be allowed to test.
It’s an excellent group of companies, featuring one Not Boring Deep Dive subject (Radiant), five Age of Miracles guests (Matt Loszak of Aalo Atomics, Jordan Bramble of Antares, Bret Kugelmass of Last Energy, Jake Dewitte of Oklo, and Isaiah Taylor of Valar Atomics), a cool one I’ve gotten to know since the podcast (Deep Fission) and my Age of Miracles co-host, Julia Dewahl of Antares!
Meet them here:
(Pardon my face)
And here:
The country’s energy future is in good hands with this group. We’re gonna need a lot of TRISO!
(2) Rare-Earth Magnet Maker Raises $65 Million in Push to Counter China
Hannah Miao for WSJ
Vulcan, which said it previously raised about $10 million in seed funding, opened a pilot manufacturing facility this March in Durham, N.C., and has made initial magnets for military and commercial clients. Vulcan said it doesn’t use any material, equipment or software from China, only from the U.S. and its allies.
Speaking of startups solving critical challenges that America has ignored for too long… Vulcan Elements announced a $65 million raise led by Altimeter Capital to manufacture rare earth magnets fully decoupled from China.
John Maslin and team already have a pilot facility up and running in the America’s greatest city (Durham, NC) and have delivered fully decoupled magnets to customers. This round is going to go to a new facility, where they’ll scale up production to meet the seemingly bottomless demand for the neodymium magnets that are in everything from your iPhone to EVs.
Rare earth elements — at least the first four lanthanides, including neodymium — aren’t actually that rare. The ability to refine them and manufacture them into the powerful magnets that make the world spin is. China absolutely dominates this process; they produce over 90% of the world’s rare earth magnets.
Whether you believe war with China is imminent or you just believe that the US should be able to make electric things, being able to make neo magnets here is critical. Vulcan is America’s best shot at making that happen.
(3) Why Rainmaker is Fighting to Save Cloud Seeding
Abundance Institute x Jason Carman
Everybody that uses water stands to benefit from cloud seeding.
The Abundance Institute x Jason Carman partnership is the gift that keeps on giving.
I’m drawn to solutions to problems that don’t seem as neat as you’d want solutions to be - that don’t sound quite right - but that actually solve the problem. Nuclear provides clean, safe, abundant energy. Juul gets people to stop smoking. And cloud seeding can replenish dried out areas and support life.
In The Great Differentiation, I used Rainmaker as an example of a company whose brand was differentiated by the nature of what the company does. Jason captures that beautifully in this video. The best content you just can’t fake: like founder Augustus Doricko going around the country, educating state legislatures on the differences between cloud seeding and chemtrail conspiracies.
This video is a good look at the technology we have at our disposal to make life better for humans, and at all of the very non-technical, human-to-human things it takes to make sure that technology sees the light of day.
(4) Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist
Despite close to a degree and a half of warming over the last century or so, global mortality from climate and weather extremes has fallen by a factor of 25 or more on a per capita basis. As Pielke documented recently, the world is on track this year for what is almost certainly the lowest level of climate related mortality in recorded human history, not only on a per capita basis but on an absolute basis as well.
In 2007, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger published a book on climate change called Break Through, in which they wrote:
Over the next 50 years, if we continue to burn as much coal and oil as we’ve been burning, the heating of the earth will cause the sea levels to rise and the Amazon to collapse, and, according to scenarios commissioned by the Pentagon, will trigger a series of wars over the basic resources like food and water.
Nordhaus wrote an essay this week in which he admitted he no longer believes that. “Yes,” he writes “the world will continue to warm as long as we keep burning fossil fuels. And sea levels will rise. About 9 inches over the last century, perhaps another 2 or 3 feet over the course of the rest of this century. But the rest of it? Not so much.”
At the time he wrote the book, he explains, he and most climate scientists believed that business as usual emissions would lead to 5 degrees of warming by the end of the 21st century. Now, he says, estimates have lowered to 3 degrees, not because we’ve done anything particularly well on the climate front, but because 5 degrees never made sense in the first place. That estimate was based on a trio of assumptions - “very high population growth, very high economic growth, and slow technological change” - that have not individually tracked with global trends and, he argues, don’t occur together.
High economic growth is strongly associated with falling fertility rates. Technological change is the primary driver of long term economic growth. A future with low rates of technological change is not one that is consistent with high economic growth. And a future characterized by high rates of economic growth is not one that is consistent with high rates of population growth.
If 5 degrees was catastrophic, 3 degrees should be cause for celebration, but “Climate advocates have arguably become more catastrophic about climate change in recent years, not less.”
Even more heartening, he links to an article by Roger Pielke Jr that suggests that “the world is on track this year for what is almost certainly the lowest level of climate related mortality in recorded human history, not only on a per capita basis but on an absolute basis as well.”
A big reason for that: we have gotten better at using technology to protect ourselves from a climate that can be naturally harsh to humans. A long time ago, our ancestors built houses and sewed clothes. More recently, we’ve developed heating and air conditioning. A heat wave or a harsh winter is not the mass death sentence it once was. When Malthus was worried we wouldn’t be able to feed a growing population, Haber and Bosch figured out how to make nitrogen fertilizer. Now, we might even be able to make it rain over farms that have been dried out.
None of this means that climate change isn’t real (it is) or that we should stop transitioning to clean energy (we should accelerate), but we should also celebrate the fact that this year, the climate is killing fewer people than it has in world history.
As I argued in The Morality of Having Kids in a Magical, Maybe Simulated World, the fear around climate change has been a blessing in disguise because it accelerates our transition to better energy sources and better electric products: “climate change is a very real challenge with very real negative impacts on people and the planet. But climate change is solvable, and by solving it, we unlock the next phase of civilization’s growth.”
Time to unlock.
(5) AI designs antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA superbugs
James Gallagher for BBC discovered via AI Opportunity
But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team behind it say AI could start a "second golden age" in antibiotic discovery.
If people had sex anymore, this would be huge news!
Researchers at MIT used AI to design “atom-by-atom” two new potential antibiotics that could kill drug-resistant gonorrhoea and MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). In lab and animal tests, the AI-designed drugs successfully killed the superbugs.
Gonorrhoea and MRSA are bad, but the bigger problem is that drug-resistant bacteria now kill over one million people per year. Humanity has gone a little antibiotics happy, and as we dose ourselves with the drugs, bacteria evolve and adapt. The next time we try to kill them with antibiotics, the antibiotics no longer work.
Using AI, the MIT team was able to interrogate 36 million compounds “including those that either do not exist or have not yet been discovered” to come up with non-drug-resistant solutions.
"AI can enable us to come up with molecules, cheaply and quickly and in this way, expand our arsenal, and really give us a leg up in the battle of our wits against the genes of superbugs," MIT Professor James Collins told the BBC.
These two drugs need years of refinement and trials before they can hit the market, and other AI-designed drugs will be similarly bottlenecked. There are regulatory and business model concerns to be worked through before these machines of loving grace cure everything that ails us, like, for example, would it make sense to build up a bench of antibiotics and send them through trials so that as soon as bacteria becomes resistant to one, we send in the next?
Either way, if we’re in an arms race against the superbugs, a tool that helps us experiment over superhuman amounts of data is a useful tool.
Thanks to Louis Anslow and his AI Opportunity for flagging this story.
Bonus: My Book "The Origins of Efficiency" is Now Available for Preorder
Brian Potter with Stripe Press
After several months of this, I was able to condense down the mass of information I had collected into a relatively simple framework: a small number of specific things you can do to make a process more efficient.
I’m a simple man. Stripe Press publishes something, I buy it. Brian Potter writes something, I read it. A cover features a drawing of a jet engine with an old-timey workshop inside of it, I judge the book by it.
When all three converge in one book? Come on. That’s Christmas.
Brian is one of my favorite writers on the internet. No one explains complex physical processes better. To understand what I mean, check out his blog, Construction Physics, or our conversation on Hyperlegible.
But before you do any of that, go pre-order his book. I did, and I’d bet that if you like Not Boring, you’ll love The Origins of Efficiency.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring. Go get your company enterprise-ready to welcome WorkOS to the Dose!
We’ll be back in your inbox next Tuesday (hopefully).
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-08-08 20:39:51
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 156th Weekly Dose of Optimism. This one practically wrote itself: DOE is making big nuclear moves, OpenAI and Google dropped new models, ElevenLabs is taking their tech to music, and researchers may have found a simple Alzheimer’s therapeutic. The Optimism Gods lobbed me a softball this week. Hopefully we knocked it out of the park.
Let’s get to it.
Every venture-backed company — you, yes, you — should work with Stripe Startups.
Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and it’s working. Last year, 1.3% of global GDP flowed through Stripe, over $1.4 trillion and growing. 78% of the Forbes AI 50 use Stripe’s financial infrastructure to monetize faster, experiment with pricing, and grow revenue.
Startups need to monetize faster, experiment with pricing, and grow revenue, too, so that they can become big companies faster and grow the GDP of the internet. That’s why Stripe launched Stripe Startups.
Stripe Startups is the company’s new program designed to support early-stage, venture-backed businesses as they build, iterate, and scale. Founders enrolled in Stripe Startups get access to credits to offset Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe.
You’re going to use Stripe anyway. Get the white-glove experience.
(1) Energy Department Announces First Pilot Project for Advanced Nuclear Fuel Lines
From the U.S. Department of Energy
DOE has conditionally selected Standard Nuclear as the first U.S. company accepted into the recently announced fuel line pilot program, announced in July 2025.
The DOE selected Standard Nuclear, a Not Boring Capital portfolio company, to lead the first pilot project under its new nuclear fuel line program. The initiative, backed by a 2025 Trump EO, will reduce reliance on foreign enriched uranium and support the deployment of high-efficiency reactors by mid-2026. Standard Nuclear will develop fabrication facilities in Tennessee and Idaho to produce TRISO fuel, while sourcing uranium through the DOE’s HALEU program.
TRISO fuel is made of uranium particles individually coated with multiple layers of carbon and ceramic, creating a robust, heat- and radiation-resistant structure. It’s designed to be inherently safer than conventional fuel, capable of withstanding extreme conditions without melting or releasing radioactive material. Basically, nuclear was already extremely safe and TRISO fuel reduces the risk even more.
This announcement is big for Standard Nuclear (obviously) as it’s a really strong signal that it can effectively work with the federal government and that its approach is feasible. But it’s also big news for America. The tide has been shifting on nuclear for a few years now, but now we’re also seeing real, government action being taken and private companies win business by supporting those actions.
And speaking of enriched uranium…
This week, General Matter signed a lease with the DOE to establish the nation’s first U.S.-owned, privately developed uranium enrichment facility at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where they plan to enrich uranium by the end of the decade.
Enrichment is upstream of TRISO fabrication. Pull the uranium from the ground, enrich it to various (sub-weapons-grade) levels depending on the type of reactor it’s going to feed, and if it’s an advanced reactor, pack it into tiny, inherently safe TRISO pellets for use anywhere from data centers to remote communities to utilities to the moon.
These are big steps in re-establishing a nuclear fuel supply chain in America, which we once had but, like so many other now-critical industries, gave up. Before Standard Nuclear, there was no independent TRISO fabrication company (i.e. without its own reactor) in the US, and before General Matter, there was no uranium enrichment company in the US. We import most of our enriched uranium from Russia, even while sanctioning them in other areas.
For a history of how we let this happen, and what it’s going to take to bring it back, we highly recommend Mike Solana’s piece on General Matter for Pirate Wires, American Power.
(2) GPT-5 is Here
Our smartest, fastest, and most useful model yet, with thinking built in. Available to everyone.
From OpenAI
OpenAI released GPT-5 yesterday, and while the reviews from those who had early access were fairly breathless, the general sentiment seems to be that OpenAI made a bunch of product improvements and very little in the way of progress towards a digital god that replaces the need for humans altogether. That’s great news! It’s exactly what we should be rooting for: better tools for humans. Goldilocks zone, baby!
I’m no AI expert (I only play one on LinkedIn), but this feels like the shape of AI launches for a while: marginally faster, smarter, prettier, easier, and cheaper. GPT-3.5 was the once-in-a-decade magic moment: it paired a model with a UX in ChatGPT that turned AI into a mass-market phenomenon. GPT-4o spread that magic across the multimodal features consumers now expect. GPT-5 mostly made those capabilities better: more reliable, more performant, more consistent. The magic is being refined into something you can actually depend on. And that’s OK.
Something, something, Louis CK airplane wifi bit something, something. The magic is that airplane wifi even existed, even if it was unreliable, slow, and glitchy. Now it’s faster, more stable, and in some cases, thanks to companies like SpaceX, you can stream video, make calls, or work in real time from a private jet over the middle of nowhere.
Magic, improved incrementally over time, compounds into real-world, life-changing utility. And maybe, just maybe, one of these iterations will bring another leap whether that’s GPT-6, GPT-7, or something we haven’t even named yet.
(3) Genie 3: A new frontier for world models
From Google Deepmind
Today we are announcing Genie 3, a general purpose world model that can generate an unprecedented diversity of interactive environments. Given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds that you can navigate in real time at 24 frames per second, retaining consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720p.
Not to be outdone, Google DeepMind dropped what might be the most “magic” AI release of the week: Genie 3. It’s what they call a “world model,” an AI that can simulate entire environments, including physics, visuals, and how those worlds respond to your actions. Feed it a text prompt, and Genie 3 generates a fully interactive world you can explore in real time at 24 frames per second, with surprisingly strong consistency that lasts for minutes. I haven’t had a chance to play around with it yet, but the demo videos are extremely impressive and I am looking forward to exploring it myself this weekend.
Unlike traditional 3D engines, Genie 3 doesn’t use prebuilt assets. It generates each frame on the fly, adapting dynamically as you move or interact. You can also change the world mid-experience by prompting events like storms or new objects. The results range from photorealistic coastal walks and deep-sea dives to surreal fantasy scenes and animated characters.
I am not sure how immediately valuable this is for gaming studios or Hollywood or even hobbyists, but the ability to dynamically and realistically generate and change the virtual world around you seems like a key building block for next-gen gaming, metaverse, and whatever comes after AGI.
Long-time readers of the Dose will know that we have been long-time “Google DeepMind is way more impressive than it gets credit for” truthers. After its upgrades and OpenAI’s somewhat underwhelming GPT-5 release, predictors on Polymarket now assign an 85% chance to Google having the best AI model at the end of August. What a TRANSFORMation.
From ElevenLabs
With Eleven Music, businesses, creators, artists, and every single one of our users can generate studio-grade music from natural language prompts.
Let the music drop.
ElevenLabs, the company behind some of the most realistic text-to-speech and voice-cloning tools on the market, just launched Eleven Music. Eleven Music lets users create studio-quality songs from natural language prompts, with full control over genre, structure, and instrumentation. Users can generate everything from instrumental scores to vocal tracks in multiple languages, then fine-tune lyrics or individual sections with precision editing tools. It was trained on a dataset of studio-recorded music, vocals, and lyrics, and was developed in collaboration with artists, publishers, and music producers.
AI music isn’t a new concept, but Eleven’s take stands out for how polished and flexible the output is and, importantly, for the fact that it's cleared for nearly all commercial use cases, from advertising to film to social content to just cooking up bangers. Public access is now available. Excited to jam out to some chart-topping Eleven Music soon.
(5) Lithium deficiency and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease
Aron et al in Nature
Replacement therapy with lithium orotate, which is a Li salt with reduced amyloid binding, prevents pathological changes and memory loss in AD mouse models and ageing wild-type mice. These findings reveal physiological effects of endogenous Li in the brain and indicate that disruption of Li homeostasis may be an early event in the pathogenesis of AD. Li replacement with amyloid-evading salts is a potential approach to the prevention and treatment of AD.
We cover Alzheimer’s more than just about any other area of medical research. Partly because it runs in the family…so yes, we’re hoping science beats the clock. But also because Alzheimer’s research is some of the most dynamic and high-stakes out there. It’s got everything: big breakthroughs, public failures, weird theories, and some of the best clues we have into how the brain actually works. So when something big drops, we pay attention.
This week something big dropped: researchers discovered that lithium levels in the brain, not the bloodstream, drop early in people with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s. It’s not just a symptom, either. Lithium gets pulled into amyloid plaques, the hallmark gunk of Alzheimer’s, which keeps it from doing its job. When researchers fed mice a lithium-deficient diet, things got worse fast: more plaques, more tangled proteins, more inflammation, and faster cognitive decline.
Then they flipped the script. The team gave mice lithium orotate, a low-dose, brain-accessible form that avoids plaque traps, and saw major improvements. Less plaque, fewer tangles, preserved synapses and memory. Even healthy aging mice benefited. Lithium deficiency also triggered gene activity eerily similar to what’s seen in human Alzheimer’s brains. The takeaway: lithium might play a much more important role in brain aging than anyone realized, and very low, targeted doses could become part of future prevention or treatment.
Now if only there were a gummy entrepreneur out there that could put this lithium orotate into a gummy…
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Stripe Startups for sponsoring. Love these guys, we don’t say that enough.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-08-01 20:53:26
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 155th Weekly Dose of Optimism. This marks one hundred and schfifty-five editions sent piping hot into your inbox. And we have a doozy of a week to celebrate: self-improving AI, deployed iron-air batteries, AI designed gene editors, Figma’s IPO, and some Zipline content. Couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate.
Let’s get to it.
Every venture-backed company — yes, you — should work with Stripe Startups.
Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and it’s working. Last year, 1.3% of global GDP flowed through Stripe, over $1.4 trillion and growing. 78% of the Forbes AI 50 use Stripe’s financial infrastructure to monetize faster, experiment with pricing, and grow revenue.
As I wrote in my original Deep Dive, Stripe’s strategy from the earliest days has been to make it as easy as possible for startups to begin accepting payments, and then grow with them as they get really big. Little companies become big companies become public companies.
With Stripe Startups, they’re making it even easier.
Stripe Startups is the company’s new program designed to support early-stage, venture-backed businesses as they build, iterate, and scale. Founders enrolled in Stripe Startups get access to credits to offset Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe.
You’re going to use Stripe anyway. Get the white-glove experience.
(1) Personal Superintelligence
From Meta
Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.
The age of Superintelligence is nigh.
In a public memo, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Meta has recently observed its AI self-improving, a key step in developing superintelligence. Self-improving AI means recursive progress, meaning the models can iteratively enhance their own capabilities without human intervention accelerating performance well beyond human-level.
In sharing this update, Zuck also laid out Meta’s AI business strategy called “Personal Superintelligence” or AI embedded in everyday devices (like AR glasses) that deeply understand and assist individuals. According to Zuck, unlike those big bad Other AI labs that just want to automate your work and steal your jobs (good framing, Meta PR), Personal Superintelligence is designed to empower billions of people to pursue their own goals using AI tailored to them.
Meta’s stock popped 10% Wednesday evening into Thursday (adding about ~1 Anthropic to its market cap), but it wasn’t even on this news. They just, as they are wont to do, crushed earnings. And a company that is crushing earnings from its core business, is given a bit more (like hundreds of billions of dollars more) leash to pursue longer-term research initiatives that may not have immediate payback, like Personal Superintelligence.
A few takes here:
If Meta is observing self-improving AI, the other labs probably are not far behind.
I am not sure I want to live in world of Reels powered by Personal Superintelligence, but hopefully an aligned Superintelligent AI will come up with other more fulfilling or productive ways to spend my time.
With Meta’s stock pumping and adding ~$175B overnight, Zuck’s talent acquisition spree is looking a lot more reasonable.
I have one basic rule that I live by: never doubt Zuck.
Packy note: I’m mixed on this one! We included it because Zuck’s vision for Personal Superintelligence is great, and he’s pulled together an All-Star team to build it. BUT there’s what Zuck says, and the job AI is currently doing for Meta. In its Q2 earnings Prepared Remarks, the company wrote:
This is not great. Zuck is saying “that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose,” but it is hard to argue that souping up the algorithms to pull people even deeper into their Reels feeds gives people greater agency. It’s the opposite. No one wants to spend 20% more time watching Reels. It wasn’t as if that was peoples’ goal but they just couldn’t figure out how to do it until Meta’s AI helped them spend 20% more time in the app.
This is exactly what David Foster Wallace warned about:
Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.
As it stands, Meta is using regular AI to up the dose. Here’s hoping he means what he says when and if his new team really does build Superintelligence.
(2) Ore Energy connects world’s first grid-connected iron-air battery in Delft
Cate Lawrence for Tech.EU
Ore Energy, a Netherlands-based energy startup pioneering iron-air long-duration energy storage, today announced that it has successfully connected its flagship iron-air battery system to the electric grid in the city of Delft — the first iron-air system to be grid-connected and fully operational anywhere in the world.
Netherlands-based startup Ore Energy connected the world’s first grid-ready iron-air battery system in Delft, offering up to 100 hours of clean energy storage using only iron, air, and water. Unlike lithium-ion systems, which max out around 4–8 hours, iron-air batteries allow for multi-day load shifting.
Iron-air batteries store energy by using a simple chemical reaction: when the battery discharges, iron reacts with oxygen from the air and forms rust, releasing electricity. To recharge, electricity is used to reverse the reaction—turning the rust back into iron and storing energy again. It’s kind of like breathing in and out, but with metal and air instead of lungs.
Batteries are a key piece of the clean energy transition and they just keep getting better and cheaper. Iron-air batteries are even better: they have higher capacity and use cheap and abundant materials (like air and iron), which means places like the Netherlands and the U.S. are less reliant on the rare materials needed to power lithium-ion batteries.
In simulations, Ore’s system slashed renewable energy curtailment by 44% and reduced system-wide energy costs by up to 63%. The company has plans to scale to 50 GWh/year by 2030 and, unsurprisingly has to jump through a ton of EU regulatory hurdles to get there. In the U.S. the leading iron-air battery player is Form Energy, which has built some great infrastructure but, to my knowledge, has not yet deployed its batteries.
(3) Design of highly functional genome editors by modelling CRISPR–Cas sequences
Ruffolo et al in Nature
Here, using large language models2 trained on biological diversity at scale, we demonstrate successful precision editing of the human genome with a programmable gene editor designed with artificial intelligence. To achieve this goal, we curated a dataset of more than 1 million CRISPR operons through systematic mining of 26 terabases of assembled genomes and metagenomes. We demonstrate the capacity of our models by generating 4.8× the number of protein clusters across CRISPR–Cas families found in nature and tailoring single-guide RNA sequences for Cas9-like effector proteins.
Profluent Bio has released OpenCRISPR-1, the first gene editor designed entirely by an AI model (not discovered in nature or derived from a bacterial protein). The model, which was trained on over 1 million CRISPR systems mined from 26 terabases of genomic data, generated proteins with greater functional diversity than exists in the wild. OpenCRISPR-1 edits the human genome with precision equal to or better than SpCas9, but with fewer off-target effects and lower immunogenicity.
Profluent says it’s already being used in research and commercial applications, from drug discovery to cell therapies to crop engineering. The company’s goal is to replace trial-and-error discovery with bespoke design using its steerable, general-purpose protein models. I don’t know exactly what biotech and medicine will look like in the next 10–20 years, but I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that it’s going to make our current approaches look medieval.
(4) Figma more than triples in NYSE debut after selling shares at $33
Jordan Novet for CNBC
Figma’s first trade at $85 valued the company at about $50 billion. The stock, trading under ticker symbol FIG, was halted after it soared past $112.
The IPO window is open, baby.
Figma, the infrastructure that supports the Not Boring design engine, priced its IPO at $33, for a market cap right below the $20 billion price tag for which Adobe tried to acquire it before Lina Khan spoiled the fun. Whatever, same price, no blood, no foul.
Then! As Bill Gurley clutched his stomach, put the back of his hand to his forehead, and fainted onto the couch like a cartoon character (presumably), it first traded hands at $85 before rocketing to $112, getting halted, opening back up, soaring to $122, and closing at $117.59. At that price, its market cap is $69 billion (nice), or 3.46 Linas.
In pre-market trading this morning, it’s at $138.48, $81.5 billion or 4.07 Linas.
A few weeks ago, we covered Figma filing its S-1. It was going public. We were optimistic but we still didn’t know how the market would react. Now we know. The market wants high-growth, high-margin, AI-exposed, founder-led tech stocks. Circle ripped. Figma ripped. If you’re a strong tech company, the market wants to meet you.
This is good for the venture market. LPs will be getting some real liquidity, and some hope that more is to come, which they can redeploy into venture, which means more companies fixing more problems (someone please fix Newark Airport, eg) and increasing humanity’s means.
And if you want to squint with us and get really optimistic, this may be the biggest wealth creation event for good designers in world history; billions and billions of dollars with which to make the world a little more beautiful.
(5) Zipline
From The Abunadnace Institute
We were promised flying cars; instead, we got flying delivery drones.
Zipline is one of our favorite companies. It’s been grinding away at a massive, hard problem for well over a decade: making vital and wanted product delivery cheaper, more accessible, and cleaner. It started with the vital products, delivering blood and other medicines throughout Rwanda via drones, and that business has since expanded globally.
Now it’s making a massive push into wanted products: quick commerce and food delivery, right here in the U.S. It even kicked off a partnership with Walmart a couple of months ago to offer fast (<30 min), autonomous drone delivery of thousands of products directly to customers’ homes.
Zipline is one of those companies that, on paper, makes so much sense. Why wouldn’t we want faster, cheaper, cleaner delivery of goods directly to our homes? Why would we want to lock up billions of human hours each year simply delivering food and convenience store items?
The demand for Zipline, in theory, has always been there. But now the company is starting to work through the execution and regulatory hurdles that have slowed it down in the past. Drones are getting cheaper, safer, and better, and the software running them is getting smarter. And now the FAA is starting to take notice: Zipline has amassed millions of miles of pristine safety data.
Demand + technology advancements + regulatory compliance might just = fast, nearly free delivery of Chipotle for Dano.
s/o to the Abundance Institute (where Packy is an Senior Advisor) and Jason Carman for putting together this awesome video on Zipline.
And as for me, I’ll be ziplining right onto my couch for the weekend.
Bonus: Means and Meaning
Packy here. I wrote one of my favorite essays I’ve written in a while this week, and sent it out at a weird time mid-morning Tuesday. It’s probably best read on a weekend morning with a big cup of coffee and a nice view. Enjoy!
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Stripe Startups for sponsoring. Love these guys, we don’t say that enough.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-07-29 23:12:59
Welcome to the 1,148 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 247,246 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Tuesday!
I’m getting into the bad habit of sending these essays whenever I finish them. Maybe it’s a good habit.
This one is about an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while. Over the last few weeks, I’ve read as much as I could in order to try to put some more rigor around it.
The idea is that technology creates means, but that we shouldn’t expect it to create meaning. That’s up to us.
To realize the amazing present and future we want, we need both means and meaning. I want Not Boring to be about both. This is the manifesto. Read the whole thing here.
Let’s get to it.
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I recently read Anna Karenina.
No no, I appreciate it, but please hold your applause. I didn’t do it for a medal. Really, it was nothing. Yeah sure it’s like 864 pages of Russian literature or whatever, but Tolstoy is such a magnificent writer it really didn’t feel that long. Lots of people have read it. It’s no big deal, really.
Where was I? Ah, yes.
It struck me, towards the end (I’m a little slow), that what the book is about is getting what you want and finding yourself asking, “Cool, now what?”
I bring this up not to brag – again, lots of people have read Anna Karenina! – but because it’s a theme that, mostly unintentionally, I’ve been playing with in Not Boring over the past few months.
It’s there in The Return of Magic:
The Return of Magic isn’t a rejection of reason and science. Reason and science have gotten us here, and we need science to expand. But we must simultaneously rediscover the wonder and intuition that we’ve forgotten, so that we might see the universe as alive, connected, and full of possibilities.
It’s there in Long Questions/Short Answers:
Actually, fuck answers, the more I think about it. The best questions don’t have answers. The point of the question isn’t to find an answer. The best questions are organizing principles, magnets, ways of seeing.
It’s there quite literally in Most Human Wins:
In the AI bull case Roon and Elon discuss, when sufficiently smart AI can do anything humans can and more, AI will cure cancer, improve crop yields, and speed up travel.
Humans, in our divine discontent, will say, “Cool, now what?”
Now what? is the fundamental question of the modern era.
To be certain, it is an old question. Anna Karenina is not a new book.
Before Tolstoy, Aristotle distinguished between “instrumental goods” like wealth, tools, and health and “intrinsic goods” like virtue, contemplation and friendship. He argued that contemplative life (bios theoretikos) was the highest form of human activity because it was meaningful in itself, and that the active life (bios praktikos) was necessary but subordinate.
The Ancient Greeks, however, assumed scarcity. For them, having enough instrumental goods was a prerequisite for philosophical contemplation. Recall Maslow’s Hierarchy: humans need their basic needs covered before they can spend time on self-actualization.
We, however, live in an age of abundance. And contra Maslow, it doesn’t seem to be making us more actualized. We have not filled our lives with meaning and contemplation.
It turns out that instead of Maslow’s linear progression, there is a complex dynamic relationship between instrumental goods and intrinsic goods, the active life and the contemplative life, or physiological needs and self-actualization.
“Again I tell you,” preached Jesus, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”
More generally, the greater our means, the harder it may be to find meaning.
Why? Anna Karenina might suggest a mechanism: there is thrill in striving. Purpose in striving. Even those who have put in decades of work are overcome by a sense of melancholy when they finally achieve their aim.
Michael Phelps felt lost and depressed after his 2012 Olympics, perhaps the greatest of all time. Harper Lee barely published after the overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird. J.K. Rowling compared her sense of loss upon completing the Harry Potter series to bereavement. In Losing My Virginity, Richard Branson shared that business successes left him feeling unexpectedly empty.
Now what?
Now, it is easier than ever to get what we want, or what we think we want, or a simulacrum of something that simulates what we want. Want adoration? Get 1,000 likes on a tweet. Want riches? Build the fastest company ever to reach $100 million in ARR. Want the answer? Ask AI. Want to get skinny? Take Ozempic.
Technology’s magic is that it can produce means. It lets people do more with less. Technology, however, cannot provide meaning. In fact, the greater our technological powers, the more challenging and urgent our search for meaning becomes.
But just because it is harder does not doom it to impossibility. The inverse relationship is not deterministic. Means and meaning were never perfect substitutes.
Here, modern philosophers correctly diagnose the problems of modernity but leave a big, pessimistic hole when it comes to solutions.
Byung-Chul Han calls ours The Burnout Society. “The capitalist economy absolutizes survival,” Han writes. “It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living.”
That is not an illusion! It’s just incomplete.
Capital can support more life, which means a greater capacity for living.
My working model for the meaning of life is based on the Perennial Philosophy, that we’re all a piece of a universal consciousness, the One knowing itself, and in this model more people having more unique experiences is the point.
But simply because capitalism produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living does not guarantee that we are fully utilizing that capacity. That is up to us.
And it is hard to argue that we are utilizing that full capacity. We have both greater means and less meaning.
This is the great challenge of the modern era, and of all future eras: to shrink the gap between means and meaning as our means continue to grow.
One of my favorite speculative essays of all-time is Isaac Asimov’s Whatever You Wish, which begins:
The difficulty in deciding on what the professions of the future would be is that it all depends on the kind of future we choose to have. If we allow our civilization to be destroyed, the only profession of the future will be scrounging for survival, and few till succeed at it.
Suppose, though, that we keep our civilization alive and flourishing and, therefore, that technology continues to advance.
Asimov’s belief, then, is opposed to Han’s. A flourishing society means one with technological advancement.
In such a future, he imagines, the logical jobs like “computer programming, lunar mining, fusion engineering, space construction, laser communications, neurophysiology, and so on” won’t actually be necessary. Robots will do all of that for us. So what will we do?
Consider that there have been times in history when an aristocracy lived in idleness off the backs of flesh-and-blood machines called slaves or serfs or peasants. When such a situation was combined with a high culture, however, aristocrats used their leisure to become educated in literature, the arts, and philosophy. Such studies were not useful for work, but they occupied the mind, made for interesting conversation and an enjoyable life.
These were the liberal arts, arts for free men who didn't have to work with their hands. And these were considered higher and more satisfying than the mechanical arts, which were merely materially useful.
Perhaps, then, the future will see a world aristocracy supported by the only slaves that can humanely serve in such a post—sophisticated machines. And there will be an infinitely newer and broader liberal arts program, taught by the teaching machines, from which each person could choose.
Asimov was, perhaps, inspired by Aristotle. In The Scent of Time (2017), Han writes:
Aristotle distinguished between three kinds of life. A free man may choose between them. The highest form of life is the bios theoretikos, a life dedicated to contemplation. As a free man, the master does not come into direct contact with the resistance exerted by things, as he leaves all work to the slave. This freedom enables him to have an entirely different relationship to the world, one that is not determined by the world as an object of work or domination. The contemplative relationship to things presupposes freedom from work. It interrupts the time that is work. According to Aristotle, the vita contemplativa is divine because it does not suffer any compulsion and is free from any interest.
Work is necessary. Humanity needs means to survive. But per both Asimov and Aristotle, if others do the work for us, we are free to live a richer, more divine contemplative life. A life of leisure, as Han describes in his 2023 book, Vita Contemplativa:
The activity of the God, ‘which surpasses all others in blessedness’, is contemplative activity (theoretike),” The activity of contemplation is an inactivity, a contemplative calmness, leisure (schole) to the extent that, unlike active life (bios politikos), it does not act; that is, it does not have its purpose outside of itself. In its inactivity, its leisure, life relates to itself. Life is no longer estranged from itself. Aristotle therefore associates bios theoretikos with self-sufficiency: ‘And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity.’ Only vita contemplativa promises divine self-sufficiency and perfect blessedness.
This is the leisure of St. Augustine – “The attraction of a life of leisure ought not to be the prospect of lazy inactivity, but the chance for the investigation and discovery of truth.” – and to ground it in reality, the leisure the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan sought, not for no purpose, but to dedicate himself to his math:
What he wanted, Ramanujan replied, was a pittance on which to live and work. Or, as Ramachandra Rao later put it, “He wanted leisure, in other words, simple food to be provided to him without exertion on his part, and that he should be allowed to dream on.”
He wanted leisure . . . The word leisure has undergone a shift since the time Ramachandra Rao used it in this context. Today, in phrases like leisure activity or leisure suit, it implies recreation or play. But the word actually goes back to the Middle English leisour, meaning freedom or opportunity. And as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, it’s freedom not from but “to do something specified or implied” [emphasis added]. Thus, E. T. Bell writes of a famous seventeenth-century French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, that he found in the King’s service “plenty of leisure”—leisure, that is, for mathematics.
So it was with Ramanujan. It was not self-indulgence that fueled his quest for leisure; rather, he sought freedom to employ his gifts. In his Report on Canara, Malabar and Ceded Districts, Thackeray spoke of the “leisure, independence and high ideals” that had propelled Britain to its cultural heights. The European “gentleman of leisure,” free from the need to earn a livelihood, presumably channeled his time and energy into higher moral and intellectual realms. Ramanujan did not belong to such an aristocracy of birth, but he claimed membership in an aristocracy of the intellect. In seeking “leisure,” he sought nothing more than what thousands born to elite status around the world took as their due.
It is the type of leisure that Asimov envisioned: that we will all be technologically-enabled Ramanujans, if not in skill then in desire.
Won't people choose to do nothing? Sleep their lives away?
If that's what they want, why not?—Except that I have a feeling they won't. Doing nothing is hard work, and, it seems to me, would be indulged in only by those who have never had the opportunity to evolve out of themselves something more interesting and, therefore, easier to do.
There’s this funny quirk in sci-fi where its authors imagined technologies like flying cars, robots, fusion, and AI, but not social media. They pictured us largely being… us, but with better technological capabilities. With more means, and the same meaning.
David Foster Wallace, however, saw what was coming. Our relationship with media and technology, and with our ability to pay attention, suffused his work.
Infinite Jest featured The Entertainment, a videotape so compelling people just watched it until they died. Something to Do With Paying Attention has everything to do with paying attention. And in a conversation with Rolling Stone’s David Lipsky, during a five-day road trip at the end of his Infinite Jest book tour that would become a book, which became a movie, DFW addressed the challenge head-on:
DFW: And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.
Lipsky: But you developed some defenses?
DFW: No. This is the great thing about it, is that probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. You know? For us, it’s gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.
Did you skip over the block quote? Don’t. Go back and read it. Pay attention.
DFW’s 1996 prediction must have seemed prescient when The New Inquiry posted it as an excerpt in 2010. It feels downright clairvoyant in 2025.
When he said that, in 1996, only 16.4 in every 100 Americans used the internet. Today, 93.1 out of 100 of us do.
In 1996, when they finally connected to the ‘net after waiting dozens of seconds for their 28.8k modems to dial up, those pioneering netizens found websites that looked like this…
Or this…
While it might surprise a modern reader that Pepsi’s website was so much radder than Apple’s, it shouldn’t. Back then, PepsiCo was worth $45.6 billion. Apple was worth only $2.6 billion.
Today, PepsiCo is worth $184.3 billion, good for a respectable 4x over the period. Apple, meanwhile, has grown its value 1,207x to $3.14 trillion, with a T, thanks in large part to the fact that it has put an internet-superhighway-connected-supercomputer in all of our pockets.
According to Business of Apps, 155 million Americans own an iPhone (and most of the rest own Android pocket internet-superhighway-connected-supercomputers). More than 5x more people carry an internet computer with them everywhere they go today than used the internet at all in 1996. We millions connect to the internet at something like 1,000 - 70,000x faster speeds than we did in 1996.
And our pocket computers not simply to passively consume entertainment, but to scroll apps that actively consume us.
Each of us has our own addiction. Some scroll Instagram. The kids like TikTok. My drug of choice is Twitter.
I deleted Twitter from my phone a couple weeks ago. Again, hold your applause. I do this sometimes. I always come back, but right now, I’m pretty pleased with myself. That weekend, I hung out with my family and went to the FIFA World Club Cup Finals and so wasn’t at my computer, and therefore not on Twitter. On Monday, when I signed on for the first time in over 24 hours, I was greeted with “Recent post” notifications in my feed, which, presumably, if I’d had the app installed and notifications on, would have pinged me, luring me back.
Later that day, Elon Musk announced that xAI/X launched Companion Mode in SuperGrok.
Companion Mode is AI waifus and AI Chads, animated avatar experiences currently exclusive to iOS users who subscribe to SuperGrok Heavy for $300 a month. Those who fork over 25% more than the per capita Gross National Income of Burundi each month can both speak to the avatar and hear her respond. And watch her respond. The animations sync, creating an immersive, spoken conversation feel. Mike Solana wrote about the implications in Goonpocalypse.
The internet is no longer a thing we can choose to distract ourselves with. It is its own organism with its own desires, and chief among those desires is to wrest our attention away from us.
DFW was right. The technology got better and better and better and better, and easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.
Asimov was probably right, too, that we won’t sleep our lives away. And, technically, he might have been right that people won’t choose to do nothing. He assumed choice. He didn’t know about social media, and he didn’t know about Companion Mode.
Neither did Jean Baudrillard, but he certainly anticipated them.
In 1981, the French philosopher published Simulacra and Simulation, in which he argues that in contemporary society, we live in a world of simulations that have become more real than reality itself, that have irreversibly replaced reality.
To give you some sense of his view, the book inspired The Matrix, but Baudrillard himself didn’t like The Matrix, because it allowed for the possibility that there was any underlying reality to return to at all.
To Baudrillard, we've moved so far beyond the original referent that the very concept of an authentic, underlying reality has become meaningless. We live in hyperreality: a world in which Disneyland, television, consumer brands, and media representations actually constitute reality.
We photograph meals to craft an image of our lives. Instead of being present at the meal with friends, our mind is in the internet. The Instagram post becomes more real than the meal itself.
Within an hour of this week’s Blackstone shooting, people (bots?) began tweeting their theories that it was a “false flag” operation, because BlackRock was actually founded out of Blackstone and the shooter reportedly yelled, conveniently, “Free Palestine!” The shooting became more about the conspiracies than the victims.
When the Astronomer CEO was caught on Coldplay camera canoodling with the company’s head of HR, the story became the memes. Only the übermeme, Gwenyth Paltrow’s Thank You For Your Interest in Astronomer, could resolve the situation. It was never, of course, about the actual people cheating or being cheated on.
In each case, the simulation doesn't just represent reality but becomes it. This is what Baudrillard meant by hyperreality.
Baudrillard's is not a purely anti-technological position.
What set him off in the first place was the May 1968 student and worker uprising in France that nearly brought down de Gaulle’s government. Radical on the surface, he was appalled by how quickly and totally it was absorbed and neutralized by the media and consumer system. Its revolutionary symbols were immediately commodified, its radical energy channeled into lifestyle consumption, its political demands transformed into cultural products. Think Ché t-shirts and posters, adorned by would-be revolutionaries who will never revolt. The system didn’t need to defeat the revolution by force; it simulated revolution so effectively that real revolution became impossible to distinguish from its media representation.
Certainly, though, Baudrillard would not be surprised to see people yelling at and talking dirty to bots. He wrote that there are “three orders of simulacra” (simulacra (n): a copy or representation that no longer refers to any original reality but instead becomes a self-contained truth in a hyperreal realm):
Simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God’s image;
Simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production—a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire belongs to the utopias related to this order of simulacra);
Simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game—total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.
It is not, he would argue, that we are spending too much time scrolling social media and gooning to AI Companions instead of spending time in the real world, but that social media and AI companions have become the real world, or the hyperreal world. They form our reality.
These third-order simulacra are, like Infinite Jest’s Entertainment (and there is evidence that DFW both read and taught Baudrillard), so alluring and so devoid of meaning that even as we create the means (second-order simulacra) to give ourselves more time for meaning, we will instead get sucked, inevitably and irreversibly, further and further into the simulation.
On our current path, many will take the time afforded to them by the miracles of modern capitalism and fake jobs and sleepwalk through life glued to increasingly alluring screens.
So what do we do?
Modern critical theorists are frustratingly empty here. They identify problems but provide very little in the way of practical solutions.
Han is devastatingly good at diagnosis and frustratingly weak on cures. He proposes a return to the vita contemplativa, thinking to think, reflecting on beauty, and the like. It feels like a call to withdraw from society and the economy (especially the economy) in order to contemplate. Ironically, in doing so, he embodies the uselessness of vita contemplativa without vita activa.
This is a uselessness Han himself touches on, briefly, almost as if acknowledging the necessity of the vita activa to fend off critique without dwelling on it long enough to taint the purity of the vita contemplativa. He cites Meister Eckhart and quotes Gregory the Great:
Be aware: while a good plan for life requires that one moves from the active to the contemplative life, it is often useful if the soul returns from the contemplative to the active life, in such a way that the flame of contemplation which has been lit in the heart passes on all its perfection to activity. Thus, active life must lead us to contemplation, but contemplation must set out from what we inwardly considered and call us back to activity.
“A vita contemplativa without acting is blind,” Han admits, “a vita activa without contemplation is empty.”
This is the tension at the heart of The Glass Bead Game, which Herman Hesse began writing in Germany as the Nazis were rising to power and completed during World War II. The book follows Joseph Knecht, a brilliant young man who is recruited to Castalia, a secluded intellectual province dedicated to pure learning and the mysterious Glass Bead Game from which the book gets its title, and rises to become its master, the Magister Ludi.
Hesse’s Castalians proudly engage in the most useless work possible, the purely theoretical, on purpose, in order to avoid the taint of reality. Similarly, Han proposes contemplation outside of capitalism, because contemplation in the service of productivity is a form of auto-exploitation that defeats its purpose.
What Knecht realizes (spoiler alert), but Han fails to, is that pure intellectual contemplation is meaningless without a connection to actual human life and responsibility. As he tells his friend and Castalian colleague, Tegularius:
Your love for culture and the products of the mind does you credit. But it happens that cultural creativity is something we cannot participate in quite so fully as some people think.
A dialogue of Plato's or a choral movement by Heinrich Isaac — in fact all the things we call a product of the mind or a work of art or objectified spirit — are the outcomes of a struggle for purification and liberation. They are, to use your phrase, escapes from time into timelessness, and in most cases the best such works are those which no longer show any signs of the anguish and effort that preceded them.
It is a great good fortune that we have these works, and of course we Castalians live almost entirely by them; the only creativity we have left lies in preserving them. We live permanently in that realm beyond time and conflict embodied in those very works and which we would know nothing of, but for them. And we go even further into the realms of pure mind, or if you prefer, pure abstraction: in our Glass Bead Game we analyze those products of the sages and artists into their components, we derive rules and patterns of form from them, and we operate with these abstractions as though they were building blocks.
Of course all this is very fine; no one will contend otherwise. But not everyone can spend his entire life breathing, eating, and drinking nothing but abstractions. History has one great strength over the things a Waldzell tutor feels to be worthy of his interest: it deals with reality. Abstractions are fine, but I think people also have to breathe air and eat bread.
In the end, Knecht chooses to leave Castalia and re-engage with the real world. I will leave it to you to read how that turns out.
Baudrillard would have laughed at Knecht’s naive attempt to take the Red Pill and leave the Castalian Matrix. Both life inside Castalia and life outside, to Baudrillard, would be mere simulacra. When it comes to solutions, the Frenchman makes Han look like a bushy-tailed optimist.
He spends the last chapter of Simulacra and Simulation, On Nihilism, making the case that classical nihilism is no longer pessimistic enough.
Nihilism! Nihilism requires that there be truth, meaning, or reality to reject. Baudrillard says that truth, meaning, and reality no longer exist! They, too, have been replaced by simulacra.
He ends the book with this uplifting message:
There is no hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or nonmeaning itself.
This is where seduction begins.
Enjoy the simulation, because it’s all we have left.
But meaning here has a very specific connotation. It refers to the Enlightenment project of rational interpretation, the idea that phenomena point to deeper truths and systematic representations. Meaning as signification, the entire apparatus of rational analysis that treats the world as a text to be read. It is, to borrow from Iain McGilchrist, left-brain thinking.
I think this ending, intentionally or not, points to the way out.
Because meaning in the way that we normally use it, and certainly in the way that I’m using it, is almost precisely the opposite of meaning in the Baudrillardian / Enlightenment sense. It is right-brained: not analyzing reality but being moved by it, not understanding our place in the system but experiencing our aliveness within it. It is what makes life feel worthwhile, even magical.
Philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann makes a diagnosis similar to Han’s and Baudrillard’s. His “device paradigm” calls out that modern technology transforms everything into optimized, efficient systems that deliver commodified experiences while hiding the underlying reality. But unlike Han and Baudrillard, Borgmann offers a way forward.
In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, he writes (emphasis mine):
As long as we overlook the tightly patterned character of technology and believe that we live in a world of endlessly open and rich opportunities, as long as we ignore the definite ways in which we, acting technologically, have worked out the promise of technology and remain vaguely enthralled by that promise, so long simple things and practices will seem burdensome, confining, and drab. But if we recognize the central vacuity of advanced technology, that emptiness can become the opening for focal things. It works both ways, of course. When we see a focal concern of ours threatened by technology, our sight for the liabilities of mature technology is sharpened.
I read this as: if we mistake means for meaning, if we believe that we will find meaning in the next technological breakthrough, we will ignore the things that provide real meaning as boring and antiquated. But if we realize that technology itself cannot provide meaning, then we can focus on the things that can.
If we have reached the simulation’s end-game, as Baudrillard would almost certainly argue we are with AGI or even its Companion facsimile, and it has not created meaning, then we can put technology in its right place as something that provides means and get on with the hard work of creating our own meaning.
We can engage with that existential question: Cool, now what?
No, seriously, now what?
The problem with philosophers like Han and Baudrillard, too, is that they’re all analysis and no soul. For the soul, we need writers, people willing to engage with the billions of individual people who make up the systems.
And their answer has something to do with paying attention.
Something To Do With Paying Attention, a novella hidden within DFW’s unfinished The Pale King which he’d considered publishing as a standalone work, is one of my favorite things I’ve ever read. It’s a beautiful onion. You should read it (it’s short), and I don’t want to spoil it for you, but frankly, I think it would be impossible. A simulacra of DFW will never approach the real thing. My real concern here is that I won’t do it justice, because it’s both about attention and a meta-commentary on attention, as in, you’ve got to pay close attention to the book to really get it.
Anyway, the book is about a self-described wastoid who we apparently discover in The Pale King is Chris Fogle, aka “Irrelevant Chris” and his journey from wastoid to IRS accountant.
Irrelevant Chris throws his away for most of his life – “I tended to realize again that I wasn’t even really aware of what was going on, most of the time. Like taking the train instead of actually driving yourself somewhere and having to know where you were and making decisions about where to turn” – until, at 24, an accidental lecture from a Jesuit accountant, which hits him in just the right spot at just the right time, given the macro and micro circumstances of his life (his accountant father had died in a subway accident; his recent realization, upon hearing “You’re watching As the World Turns,” “that whatever a potentially ‘lost soul’ was, I was one—and it wasn’t cool or funny.”) he takes control of his own attention and directs it towards obtaining a career at the Internal Revenue Service.
The macro and micro circumstances, plus the Jesuit substitute accounting professor’s bearing and speech – “Gentlemen, prepare to wear the hat. You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As you will be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it’s needed, in the codified form in which it’s apposite. You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. It is you—tell them that. Who ride, man the walls, define the pie, serve. Gentlemen, you are called to account” – wake Irrelevant Chris up – George Saunders calls DFW, in a tribute, a “wake-up artist” – and fill him with panic, that he’s figured it out too late, that he won’t be able to pay for more college, particularly now that his father can’t pay for it, now that he finally actually wants to stay in college, so he can complete all of the courses that he needs to complete, and actually learn all that he needs to learn, for a career in the IRS, which he was drawn to as one of a common type of person who are “almost a special kind of psychological type, probably. It’s not a very common type—perhaps one in 10,000—but the thing is that the sort of person of this type who decides that he wants to enter the Service really, really wants to and becomes very determined, and will be hard to put off once he’s focused in on his real vocation and begun to be actively drawn to it,” but now that he’s focused on this real vocation, now that he’s started paying attention, the solution to his financial situation wrt college payments finds him.
Maybe he heard about the IRS’ aggressive recruiting drive on WBBM-AM, but he also has a “partial memory of actually first seeing an advertisement for this recruitment program in a sudden, dramatic way that now, in retrospect, seems so heavily fateful and dramatic that perhaps it is more the memory of a dream or fantasy I had at the time.”
“Anyhow, according to this memory,” (I love this, according to this memory, which those four words make seem like not quite his, or certainly not in his control, but which he faithfully reproduces anyway), “I was sitting at one of the many stylized plastic tables in the Galaxy Mall’s food court, looking absently down at the table’s pattern of star-and-moon shaped perforations, and saw, through one such perforation, a portion of the Sun-Times that someone had evidently discarded on the floor beneath the table, which was open to the Business Classified section, and in the memory involves seeing this from above the table in such a way that a beam of light from the food court’s overhead lighting far above fell through one of the star- shaped perforations in the tabletop and illuminated—as if by symbolically star-shaped spotlight or ray of light—one particular advertisement among all the page’s other ads and notices of business and career opportunities, this being a notice about the IRS’s [note: I’m realizing I used IRS’ earlier] new recruitment-incentive program under way in some sections of the country, of which the Chicagoland area was one.”
To me, this sounds like a synchronicity – “a meaningful coincidence that suggests an underlying pattern or connection beyond normal causality,” first coined by Jung – but Irrelevant Chris calls it “another illustration of how motivationally ‘primed’ I seemed to be, in retrospect, for a career in the service.”
Synchronicity or motivationally primed, it is the type of thing that you can only notice if you’re paying attention, which is pretty much the point of the novella.
I’m not sure if he did this on purpose, although I’m sure he did because it was DFW, these revelations make you realize that you, the reader, weren’t really paying attention, either. That although Chris was a self-described wastoid, although he seemed to be much more like his account father, who was always “squeezing his shoes,” than his mother, who was always defending him, he was actually more like his father, deep down in his genes, than either of them would have admitted; he was destined to become an accountant, once he started paying attention.
Right there, on page 11, in what seems to be just another example of his waistoidness and his mother’s sticking up for him despite or because of that, Chris recounts “the past trouble I’d had with reading in primary school when we’d lived in Rockford and my father had worked for the City of Rockford. This was in the mid-1960s, at Machesney Elementary. I went through a sudden period where I couldn’t read. I mean that I actually couldn’t read—my mother knew I could read from when we’d read children’s books together. But for almost two years at Machesney, instead of reading something I’d count the words in it [emphasis mine, with the benefit of hindsight], as though reading was just the same as counting the words. For example, ‘Here came Old Yeller, to save me from the hogs’ would equate to ten words which I would count off from one to ten instead of its being a sentence that made you love Old Yeller in the book even more.”
This accountant’s tic shows up throughout the novella; he learns to read again, but he’s always counting at the same time. “For instance,” he says on the next page, “I’ve said 2,752 words right now since I started,” adding, with an accountant’s precision, “Meaning 2,752 words before I said, ‘I’ve said,’ versus 2,754 if you count ‘I’ve said’ — which I do, still.” Later, during the Jesuit substitute accounting professor’s rousing ode to accountants, he admits, “It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea how many words he’d spoken since that 8,206th one at the conclusion of the review.” It took a speech on accounting to command his full attention, which had always been at least partially divided by word counting. Later still, however, in the IRS recruiting office, he’s counting again: “Overall, despite comprising scarcely more than 5,750 total words, the initial recruiting presentation lasted almost three hours…” Attention is something that needs to be constantly directed.
There’s this one spot next to which I scribbled “so good” in the margin, mid-Jesuit substitute accounting’s speech, when he wrote/Chris said, “However transfixed I still was, I was also aware [aware], by this point, that the substitute’s metaphors seemed to be getting a bit jumbled—it was hard to imagine the remaining orientals making much sense of cowboys and pies, since they were specifically American images.” Now that I write it, though, even that speaks to awareness. He’d become, during the speech, so aware as to not get fully swept up in its emotions. Like an accountant might avoid getting swept up in emotions, I guess.
The speech’s impact on him, which like the newspaper classified seemed directed right at him, was itself a payoff on a long trademark DFW digression a few pages earlier, in which he pokes holes in his Chrisitan roommate’s born-again Christian girlfriend’s story of being saved, when, lost and hopeless – “Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as—and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be—lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason to go on living, before they were ‘saved’” – “driving around in one of her parents’ AMC Pacer, until, for no particular reason she was aware of inside herself, she turned suddenly into the parking lot of what turned out to be an evangelical Church” [fuckkk no way. is this a callback to / refutation of his earlier point that driving and turning requires awareness unlike riding a train? it couldn’t be… unless…] “which by coincidence happened to be right in the middle of holding an evangelical service, and—for what she again claimed was no discernible reason or motive she could have named—she wandered aimlessly in and sat down in the rear of the church in one of the plushly cushioned theater-type seats their churches tend to use instead of wooden pews, and just as she sat down, the preacher or father or whatever they called them there evidently said, ‘There is someone out there with us in the congregation today that is feeling lost and hopeless and at the end of their rope and needs to know that Jesus loves them very, very much,’ and then—in the social room, recounting her story—the girlfriend testified as to how she had been stunned and deeply moved, and said she had instantly felt a huge, dramatic spiritual change deep inside of her in which she said she felt completely reassured and unconditionally known and loved, and as though now suddenly her life had meaning and direction to it after all, and so on and so forth, and that furthermore she had not known a down or empty moment since, not since the pastor or father or whatever picked just that moment to reach out past all the other evangelical Christians sitting there fanning themselves with complimentary fans with slick full-color ads for the church on them and to just kind of verbally nudge them aside out of the way and somehow address himself directly to the girlfriend and her circumstances at just that moment of spiritual need,” which of course annoyed Irrelevant Chris at the time, and after hearing which he asked her “just what exactly had made her think the evangelical pastor was talking to her directly, meaning her in particular, as probably everyone else sitting there in the church audience probably felt the same way she did, as pretty much every red-blooded American in today’s (then) late-Vietnam and Watergate era felt desolate and disillusioned and unmotivated and directionless and lost, and that that if the preacher or father’s [note: he drops ‘or whatever’ for this one] saying ‘Someone lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way they’re surely the only person who is feeling like that. In other words, I was only pretending to ask her a question—I was actually giving the girlfriend a condescending little lecture on people’s narcissism and the illusion of uniqueness, like the fat industrialist in Dickens or Ragged Dick who leans back from a great dinner with his fingers laced over his huge stomach and cannot imagine how anyone in that moment could be hungry anywhere in the whole world,” but which then of course Chris has almost the exact same experience, priest and all, with the Jesuit substitute accounting teacher.
It’s less a story of uniqueness, he realizes, and more a story of awareness, or the awareness that unique circumstances create which in turn makes the message unique to the receiver even if they can be equally unique to other receivers. Or as he says, “Anyhow, it seems like a very long time ago. But the point of even remembering the conversation, I think, is that there was an important fact behind the Christian girl’s ‘salvation’ story which I simply hadn’t understood at the time—and, to be honest, I don’t think she or the Christian did, either. It’s true that her story was stupid and dishonest, but that doesn’t mean the experience she had in the church that day didn’t happen, or that its effect on her wasn’t real. I’m not putting it very well, but I was both right and wrong about her little story. I think the truth is probably that enormous, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, life-changing experiences are not translatable or explainable to anyone else, and this is because they really are unique and particular—though not unique in the way the Christian girl believed. This is because their power isn’t just the result of the experience itself, but also of the circumstances in which it hits you, of everything in your previous life-experience which has led up to it and made you exactly who and what you are when the experience hits you. Does that make any sense? It’s hard to explain. What the girl with the meadow on her boots had left out of the story was why she was feeling so especially desolate and lost right then, and thus why she was so psychologically ‘primed’ to hear the pastor’s general, anonymous comment in that personal way.”
All of which seems like a non-sequitur at the time of reading, but which pays off when Chris absentmindedly walks into the wrong building’s room 311 and wonders whether it “might not have been one more bit of unconscious irresponsibility on my part.”
“You cannot analyze sudden, dramatic experiences like this this way, though—especially in hindsight, which is notoriously tricky (though I obviously did not understand this during the exchange with the Christian girl in the boots).”
What matters isn’t the specific words or experiences. Each person can hear them or experience them in totally unique ways. What matters is how you, in that moment, in the midst of a lifetime of words and experiences, hear or experience them, which just has something to do with paying attention.
My takeaway from Something To Do With Paying Attention is that the exact same situation can provide completely different meaning to different people depending on whether and how each is paying attention.
This is the death of meaning in the Enlightenment / Baudrillardian sense. There is no way to run a scientific experiment that determines who will respond to what how.
This is the birth of meaning in the sense that we’re talking about.
Take running. In Simulation and Simulacra, Baudrillard decries it as a Disneyland-like simulacra: “They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc.” Borgmann, on the other hand, includes running as an example of a focal practice: a sustained and engaging human activity that orients life by fostering competence, excellence, and a way of life that shelters meaningful focal concerns through regular and mindful participation:
The great run, where one exults in the strength of one's body, in the ease and the length of the stride, where nature speaks powerfully in the hills, the wind, the heat, where one takes endurance to the breaking point, and where one is finally engulfed by the good will of the spectators and the fellow runners.
Same activity, two very different ways of paying attention to it. Crucially, how you look at running, how you pay attention to it, shapes how you relate to the world in that moment. If you view it as a vapid simulacrum of walking, you will find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity of it all every time you chance upon someone out for a jog. If you view it as a way for a human to focus his mind and body against a hard task, you will find yourself impressed by human capacity each time you watch a runner zip by. The experience is more impactful, of course, if you’re the one running.
This is a little thing, but I think that meaning consists of the way you pay attention to millions or billions of little things.
And I think that one of the reasons that with more means, we seem to find less meaning, is that means give you permission to pay less attention.
In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford compares the old Mickey Mouse cartoons to the more modern Mickey Mouse Clubhouse:
In the old Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, by far the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration, or rather demonic violence. Fold-down beds, ironing boards, waves at the beach, trailers (especially when Goofy is at the wheel of the towing vehicle, on a twisty mountain road), anything electric, anything elastic, anything that can become a projectile. Anything that can suffer termite damage that remains hidden until the crucial moment. Springs are especially treacherous, as are retractable blinds. Snowballs can be counted on to grow by a couple orders of magnitude on their way down the slope toward your head. At any given moment, the odds of being seized by the collar by a severely overwound grandfather clock are nontrivial. Icicles: don’t stand anywhere near them. Bicycles tend to become unicycles, unpredictably, and rubber cement is easily mistaken for baking powder. Why do they have nearly identical labels?
“Those early cartoons,” Crawford writes, “present a rich phenomenology of what it is like to be an embodied agent in a world of artifacts and inexorable physical laws.” Then there’s today’s Mickey Mouse Clubhouse:
There are four problems per episode, and each can be solved using one of the four tools [offered by the Handy Dandy machine when a character says “Oh Tootles!”]. This assurance is baked into the initial setup of the episode; no moment of helplessness is allowed to arise. There is never an insoluble problem, that is, a deep conflict between the will and the world. I suspect that is one reason these episodes are not just unfunny, but somehow the opposite of funny…
…To be a Mouseke-doer is to abstract from material reality as depicted in those early Disney cartoons, where we see the flip side of affordances. Perhaps we should call unwanted projectiles, demonic springs, and all such hazards “negative affordances.” The thing is, you can’t have the positive without the negative; they are two sides of the same coin. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.
This is, of course, just a kid’s show, but Crawford’s point is that one, this is what we’re raising our kids to expect, and two, actual technology promises this, too: “As we ‘build a smarter planet’ (as the IBM advertisements say), the world will become as frictionless as thought itself; ‘smartness will subdue dumb nature. But perhaps even thinking will become unnecessary: a fully smart technology should be able to leap in and anticipate our will, using algorithms that discover the person revealed by our previous behavior.”
Crawford published the book in 2016. He anticipated by nine years the advertisements for any number of AI agents that promise to anticipate and do everything for us so that we can… what, exactly?
Which is fine, sometimes great even, except that, as Crawford argues, the more we expect technology to do things for us, the less we pay attention. He points to Mercedes’ driver assist features and the inconvenient fact that roads designed to be safe are home to more accidents. “Emily Anthes writes that among traffic engineers”:
In the last decade or so, a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous—narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.
Mickey Mouse and roads are extreme examples. The roads have clear consequences and measurable statistics. But I think that our ability to engage in almost everything with less attention has an equally significant, if less measurable, impact on our felt sense of meaning.
If your phone holds a world of entertainment an arm’s length away, why engage in conversation? If ChatGPT reveals all of the answers at the tap of a few keys, why think? Better yet, if it can do that annoying work your boss assigned you, why do it?
With each reach for the convenient – each engagement with Baudrillard’s third order simulacra – we give away a little bit of our attention, and a little bit of our agency.
And sometimes, that is a fine trade to make! Even Han and Baudrillard would agree that there are many things we do that are not worthy of our time, attention, or agency. While Han and Baudrillard would disagree, Borgmann and Crawford, I think, would agree that using technology as a tool can help us move past things that aren’t really worth doing to focus on the things that are. People have annoying responsibilities. Removing yourself from the system is impractical and undesirable.
The question, then, is what you choose to pay attention to instead.
Because now we have cars that not only assist us, but drive us. I was in San Francisco last week and I took half a dozen Waymo rides. I love it. And the stats suggest self-driving cars really are safer. But instead of driving, do you scroll Twitter or TikTok? Or do you meditate, think, call your parents, or simply take in the neighborhoods as you drive through?
Twitter and TikTok often win. Twitter wins for me too often, which is why I have to delete it.
“Odell [Jenny, author of How to Do Nothing] believes that periodically stepping away is a temporary, not permanent break from reality: a sort of mental reset that reminds us what our lives are really for. But this reminds me of the social media addicts who cycle through deleting and re-installing apps on their phone,” Nadia Asparouhova writes, not at me specifically but at me, in Antimemetics, “Instead of learning to cultivate a fluid sense of control in the world they’ve been given.”
Nadia explains that she’s unsatisfied by Odell’s calls to “extricate ourselves from this system” as “a means of reclaiming our attention, but in a way that seems disconnected from our responsibilities to the network.”
Here, she may as well be writing a response to Han: the answer is not to steal away to a contemplative life, but to engage with the world in order to make it one we want to live in.
In Antimemetics, and in a conversation with Jackson Dahl on Dialectic, Nadia provides the best argument for engaged attention this side of DFW. In both, she reframes attention from a thing that we must fight to protect from forces beyond our control to a magical power that we can wield.
Nadia writes (emphasis mine):
Attention is not something we merely own; it is what we are. Learning to wield it isn’t just about returning to the “present moment,” but rather about creating infinite, dazzling realities – because what we choose to see in the present moment is unique to each of us.
I want to talk about us as magical wizards of attention, capable of waving a wand and transforming our worlds in astonishing ways. That seems a lot more fun to me than playing slots at the casino.
The world, after all, is more than just what we inherit. It’s what we choose to notice, nurture, and build. Everything around us – for worse, yes, but also for the better – is made up of where we direct our attention. If we learn to channel it wisely, we can decide what type of future we want to see.
Two popular, opposing beliefs dominate the modern narrative around technology.
One argues that we are the victims of a heartless system - call it capitalism, neoliberalism, technology, or whatever the boogeyman of the day is – and that the best we can do, if we can do anything at all, is to retreat. This belief is deeply pessimistic; it paints individuals as impotent cogs in a heartless machine. It offers diagnoses, often accurate ones, but no solutions.
The other argues that technology will solve all of our problems. This falls short, too. While I am a capitalist and a techno-optimist, I believe that the best technology can do is provide means. It can help us live longer, healthier lives, see more of the world and eventually the universe, and free us from dull, repetitive work so that we can do whatever we wish.
Contra Han and Baudrillard, I believe that more means, while potentially making it harder to find meaning, are inherently good.
Ramanujan died of Tuberculosis, after spells in dreary, moldy English sanitoriums. The onset may have been caused by his inability to get Vitamin D, far as he, a vegetarian, was from South Indian food and South Indian sun. At the time, milk was not yet enriched with Vitamin D. His wife’s letters barely reached him. Communication with home was slow and inconsistent. When he finally arrived back in India, he was sick, shriveled, and angry. Then he died, at just thirty-two. With another half-century of leisure, who knows what he would have given the world?
It is an illusion, Han says, “That more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living.” Count me in the camp who would prefer more life, more years for more Ramanujans, so that we might figure out how to do more living. Life doesn’t necessarily equal aliveness, but death guarantees its absence. Baudrillard’s contention that we are already dead, or whatever, is cute wordplay that fails in the face of lived experience.
DFW, too, predicted the possibility that, if we kept letting ourselves be passively entertained instead of making hard choices minute-by-minute, “then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.” But he left open an if, a choice.
While his technological prognostications have proven prescient, we are not dead yet. I am writing this. You are reading it. We are alive.
By arguing that, that self-evidence to the contrary, we are already dead, Baudrillard falls into the same trap of which he accuses society: analysis at the expense of the real.
To me, his analysis, and Han’s, smacks not of the end of the world, but of late stage materialism, of the last gasps of the belief that what’s real comes from matter, that consciousness is a weak and secondary thing.
But consciousness is the thing. Attention is what we are.
Meaning isn't found in things. It never has been, and never will be. We create it through attention.
A newspaper under a mall food court table is garbage to most people, destiny to one.
A preacher’s sermon is blandly meaningless to most people, deeply meaningful to one.
Both Irrelevant Chris and the Christian Girlfriend stayed alive long enough to find the thing that brought them meaning. Neither had to farm every day for their food; both had the leisure, however small, to put themselves in meaning’s path.
This is the great challenge of the modern era, and of all future eras: to shrink the gap between means and meaning as our means continue to grow.
There will be depressed people on Mars. Others will take supersonic planes halfway around the world for an Instagram photo. Others still will be cured of cancer only to continue an unhappy life for an extra two or three decades. When the machines provide every human with the opportunity to choose what to do, some will choose to do nothing, to sleep their lives away. Humans are “divinely discontent.”
We will always ask, “Cool, now what?”
But it is far better to have the opportunity to grow our sense of meaning to match our means than to shrink it to the limits of limited means. Han and Baudrillard romanticize what was in reality a brutish past by failing to consider the individuals.
You could imagine a simple formula for total meaning.
Total Meaning = Number of Human Hours * % of Hours Spent Meaningfully
Technology will increase the number of human hours (assuming Elon’s Companions and their third order simulacra siblings don’t accelerate the population decline that he warns about). More people will be able to live longer lives. The question is whether we spend those hours more or less meaningfully, whether we spend them as the burnt-out, auto-exploiting automatons Han and Baudrillard view us as, or whether we choose to pay attention.
Attention is a more tractable problem than meaning, which is vague and personal, and my hypothesis is that directing the former increases the latter.
So it is up to us, to you specifically, for yourself, to to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. It is up to you to be the wizard of your own attention.
How?
I think it starts with Nadia’s reframing. As she told Jackson on Dialectic:
This is where I really want to drive home that when we talk about the buying and selling of attention online, it's often framed as, "This person owns my attention now" or "This person will own my attention." But you can own your own attention. You can also do cool things with it and make crazy experiences.
She talks about her experience doing the jhanas, which helped her realize that, “If you don't want to feel a certain way about something, you can actually just not feel that way if you want to. You can move around the little levers in your mind. Attention is crazy.” Stuck in traffic or at the DMV, she’ll ask herself, “How can I make this the most joyous moment possible?” Doing that moves an hour from the negative to the positive in our “% of hours spent meaningfully” variable.
Personally, I’ve been doing little things, although I’m not perfect.
I didn’t only delete my Twitter app, I replaced the doomscroll impulse with an impulse to read. I would not have read Han, Baudrillard, Crawford, Borgmann, DFW, and others over the past few weeks if I hadn’t. Engaging deeply with this idea that’s been floating in my brain has felt meaningful. Instead of asking Claude for an answer, I ask it for a book recommendation.
On weekend mornings, I take my kids to get croissants and go to the playground. Last weekend, on a particularly sunny morning, I caught myself just staring at the sun hitting the leaves.
I meditate at least twenty minutes a day, if only to get myself in the focusing mood.
After getting too locked into the COVID-mode of Zooming whenever possible, I got a small office in the city and try to meet with people in-person whenever possible, ideally for a long walking meeting with no set end time.
In everything I do, I’m trying to do fewer, better. This is my first essay in three weeks.
I used to listen to something whenever I was on the move. Now I try to walk without headphones. I try to notice the people I walk past, or the way that light hits a building. It’s delightful.
And I’ve started noticing little synchronicities, nothing as life-changing as Irrelevant Chris or the Christian Girlfriend experienced, but little things that make the world feel a little more magical.
None of this means that I am now a glowing, meaning-filled ball of pure aura. I’m a little tired right now, actually, as I write this. It’s hot outside, and my legs got sticky and sweaty in my pants on the walk in, which felt gross. As soon as I hit send on this essay, I’m going to be maniacally checking both the views and the twitter likes.
But I do feel happier, even if my circumstances haven’t changed much. I love my family, and love that I get to spend time with them every day. Investing in and writing about complex, ambitious businesses that are creating the means with which people have the potential to live better lives feels like exactly what I am supposed to be doing. I get to write this long, philosophical essay in what is ostensibly a tech blog for work. Some of you might even still be reading it.
None of this requires me to drop out of the capitalist system and shun technology. I only get to do all of this because of the capitalist system and technology. If anything, I’ve only gotten more competitive and ambitious since I started paying closer attention. If this is what I’m here to do, I want to do it as well as I possibly can.
Any critique of modern society that blames a faceless system and shrugs its shoulders is, if interesting, useless.
The beauty of the system that Han and Baudrillard dismiss is that it creates markets for solutions. Individual attention faces weapons-grade distractions, and will demand industrial-grade support. My model here is climate change: turning off your AC doesn’t solve the problem, solar, nuclear, and batteries are.
I suspect that there is an opportunity for something similar here, even if it doesn’t look like “technology” as we currently define it. It’s not surprising, for example, that religion is making a comeback, and I would love to see more funding for consciousness and non-materialist research. As Nikola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” Understanding and expanding our wizard powers is so much more interesting to me than making simulacra of our brains.
What I am after is the growth of both means and meaning. Not Boring started as a newsletter about technology businesses, but the main question is: how do we make being a human more amazing?
Technology is part of the answer, but it’s not the whole answer. That’s why, as you may have noticed, I’ve gotten a little more philosophical and even mystical over the past year or so.
It feels more urgent now. AI is the final boss of technologies that Baudrillard, Asimov, Crawford, and DFW warned us about. We can either use it to create space to become more human or to turn our agency and attention over to the machines. It can become a second-order or third-order simulacrum.
AI will neither kill us nor save us. Technology will neither kill us nor save us. The system will neither kill us nor save us. What happens next is up to us.
So bring on the flying cars and the self-driving ones. Bring on atomic energy, both fission and fusion. Bring on the drones and supersonic planes. Bring on the factories that build houses and the cloud seeders that make it rain. Bring on the robots that do the things we don’t want to so we can do whatever we wish.
Bring on the means. We will bring the meaning.
This is the greatest challenge of our era, and our greatest opportunity.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox on Friday with a Weekly Dose.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-07-25 20:45:21
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 154th Weekly Dose of Optimism. Solid week in this neck of the woods; some AI news, a healthy dose of biotech updates, and a slate of solid content. Just another pretty astounding week that we’ve become relatively accustomed to.
Let’s get to it.
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Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and it’s working. Last year, 1.3% of global GDP flowed through Stripe, over $1.4 trillion and growing. 78% of the Forbes AI 50 use Stripe’s financial infrastructure to monetize faster, experiment with pricing, and grow revenue.
As I wrote in my original Deep Dive, Stripe’s strategy from the earliest days has been to make it as easy as possible for startups to begin accepting payments, and then grow with them as they get really big. With Stripe Startups, they’re making it even easier.
Stripe Startups is the company’s new program designed to support early-stage, venture-backed businesses as they build, iterate, and scale. Founders enrolled in Stripe Startups get access to credits to offset Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe.
You’re going to use Stripe anyway. Get the white-glove experience.
From The Trump Administration
America is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI). Winning this race will usher in a new era of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people. Recognizing this, President Trump directed the creation of an AI Action Plan in the early days of his second term in office. Based on the three pillars of accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, and leading in international diplomacy and security, this Action Plan is America’s roadmap to win the race.
The White House dropped its much anticipated AI Action Plan this week. The draft, issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), outlines a broad rethinking of how the U.S. should build, regulate, and lead in AI. It covers topics like upgrading infrastructure and investing in R&D to redefining how AI tools are tested and deployed. It emphasizes innovation-first policies like regulatory “sandboxes,” public-private data-sharing partnerships, and state-led experimentation zones. Notably, the proposal walks back some of the stricter oversight moves from the Biden era, favoring flexibility over federal mandates, and speed over caution.
The Action Plan has three key pillars:
Accelerate AI Innovation: support frontier research, foster public-private partnerships, and streamline regulatory pathways for AI development and deployment.
Build American AI Infrastructure: invest in compute, data access, energy, and workforce development to ensure broad, equitable access to AI capabilities.
Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security: shape global norms, align allies, and safeguard against adversarial AI threats to uphold democratic values.
There are a bunch of specific actions against each of these pillars that are meant to animate these plans into the real world. We certainly should not count our chickens before they hatch, and there is a ton the U.S. needs to get right on this topic over the years and decades to come, but it seems like we’re in the pole position and the government is taking proactive steps to avoid fumbling the opportunity.
There is much to criticize about the Trump Administration. However, its handling of the ongoing AI boom has been pretty exceptional. First, the Administration put a highly competent tech operator (and decent podcaster) in charge of the operation in David Sacks, and surrounded him with friends like Dean Ball and Sriram Krishnan. And, because of that, this project seems to be moving with tech industry speed and is based more in real world practicality than theoretical regulation. In my view, getting AI right in this moment doesn’t excuse shortcomings elsewhere in the Trump White House, but could over the long arc of history prove to be the defining achievements of the administration, along with the nuclear EOs, crypto legislation, and this week’s deregulation of general aviation with the MOSAIC rule (see Eli Dourado’s tweet for more).
(2) Aeneas transforms how historians connect the past
From Google DeepMind
Introducing the first model for contextualizing ancient inscriptions, designed to help historians better interpret, attribute and restore fragmentary texts.
DeepMind released Aeneas, an AI model that helps historians restore, date, and geolocate ancient Roman inscriptions. Aeneas tackles fragmentary inscriptions, predicts missing words, estimates the date of origin within ±13 years, and suggests geographic provenance. Previously, this process was done relatively manually by historians and was slow and inconsistent.
Aeneas was trained on nearly 200,000 Latin texts and tested with 23 professional historians, with its top predictions being accepted 72% of the time and considered at least partially useful over 90% of the time. In one case, it re-dated the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (a first-person account of Emperor Augustus’ life and accomplishments) to AD 15, a timeline shift that could ripple through Roman history.
Much of human history remains fragmented, literally carved into weathered stone or buried in half-legible texts or burned up in ancient scrolls. Aeneas gives historians a new lens for interpreting what’s left behind.
Meta may have gotten Nat Friedman to build its models, but Google DeepMind turned Nat Friedman into a model. Your move, OpenAI.
(3) Genome engineering in biodiversity conservation and restoration
Oosterhout et al in Nature Reviews
Advances in genome engineering offer a transformative solution by enabling the targeted restoration of genetic diversity from historical samples, biobanks and related species. In this Perspective, we explore the integration of genome editing technologies into biodiversity conservation, and discuss the benefits and risks associated with genetic rescue via genome engineering.
Recently, we’ve covered how companies like Colossal Biosciences (and oddly enough, people like Peter Jackson) are working to de-extinct animals, like the moa and the wooly mammoth. That is some sci-fi level work and we’re excited to watch it progress. But there is still a ton of work to be done in preventing species from going extinct in the first place.
A new Nature Reviews paper outlines how gene editing could help save endangered species, not by bringing back extinct ones like the wooly mammoth, but by repairing the genetic damage in those still around. Many threatened species suffer from inbreeding, low genetic diversity, and harmful mutations that make them vulnerable to disease and changes in climate. The research proposes using targeted edits to restore lost genetic variation, remove harmful mutations, or introduce beneficial traits using CRISPR and other precise editing tools. In some cases, reference genomes from historical specimens or closely related species could guide the edits, effectively “rewinding” evolution to a healthier genetic baseline.
Gene editing isn’t not a replacement for habitat protection or traditional conservation, but it could be a useful complement. For species like the cheetah, Tasmanian devil, and climate-stressed corals (which Packy, maybe embarrassingly, was obsessed with as a kid), gene editing could offer a lifeline, helping them adapt faster than evolution normally allows.
In the words of the Million Dollar Man’s creators: We can rebuild them. We have the technology.
(4) First Hormone-Free Male Birth Control Pill Shown Safe in Early Human Trial
Hannah Seo in Scientific American
In the first clinical trial of its kind, a nonhormonal oral contraceptive that reversibly stops sperm production has just been deemed safe for human use. The daily pill, called YCT-529, blocks a vitamin A metabolite from binding to its receptor in the testes; this prevents the chain of gene-expression changes that are required to start the sperm-making process.
For the billions of men that are allergic to latex, there is hope on the way.
A male birth control pill just cleared its first major hurdle towards FDA approval. In a Phase 1 trial, YCT-529, a non-hormonal oral contraceptive, was shown to be safe and well-tolerated in vasectomized men. The plan is for the Boy Pill to be used by anyone, vasectomy or not, but given the newness of the drug, the researchers didn’t want to put long-term fertility at risk for those who might want to conceive at some point.
Unlike previous male pill candidates that relied on hormones (and brought unwanted side effects), YCT-529 targets a protein tied to vitamin A metabolism that’s crucial for sperm production. The trial determined the drug was safe, but was not meant to determine the drug’s efficacy (although results showed the drug achieved blood concentrations likely high enough to suppress fertility…which will need to be actually proven in a Phase 2 Trial).
I have some mixed feelings on all of this. First, it doesn’t seem fair to me that women alone are responsible for taking birth control. It takes two to tango, so having an option for male contraceptive makes sense to me. Second, IDK with all of the infertility issues men and women have faced over the last couple of decades, introducing a new male contraceptive, even if proven safe, feels a bit suss to me. I am not a tin foil hat guy, but I can’t imagine getting America’s men on the male pill is going to result in positive fertility outcomes.
My view on this stuff is that it’s better to have the scientific ability and optionality, than to not. For some people, this may be a tremendously useful and safe drug that prevents unwanted pregnancies. I, however, will not be hopping on this new little blue pill anytime soon.
(5) Driving a protective allele of the mosquito FREP1 gene to combat malaria
Li et al in Nature
Malaria remains a substantial global health challenge, causing approximately half a million deaths each year1. The mosquito fibrinogen-related protein 1 (FREP1) is required for malaria parasites to infect the midgut epithelium2. The naturally occurring FREP1Q allele has been reported to prevent parasite infection, while supporting essential physiological functions in the mosquito3. Here we generate congenic strains of Anopheles stephensi, edited to carry either the parasite-susceptible FREP1L224 or the putative-refractory FREP1Q224 alleles. The FREP1Q224 allele confers robust resistance to infection by both human and rodent malaria parasites, with negligible fitness costs.
The gene drives are here.
Mosquitoes aren’t inherently evil, but they do kill over 600,000 people a year by spreading malaria. It’s not intentional! They’re just doing what their genes tell them to do. Unfortunately, those genes make them highly effective carriers of one of the deadliest parasites on Earth.
But now, researchers have now engineered Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes to carry a naturally occurring gene variant, FREP1Q, that makes them much worse at transmitting malaria. FREP1 is a protein that helps Plasmodium parasites cross the mosquito’s gut and begin their life cycle. A single amino acid change (leucine to glutamine) disrupts that process. Mosquitoes with two copies of the FREP1Q allele showed drastically reduced infection rates for both human and rodent malaria parasites, with little to no impact on their health or reproduction.
Now we need this mosquitos to spread their updated genetic profile (keep them away from the YCT-529!).
The research team built a linked allelic-drive system, a subtle genetic trick that biases inheritance in favor of FREP1Q without resorting to a full gene drive. It’s a more targeted and potentially safer approach for use in the wild.
This method doesn’t kill mosquitoes or disrupt ecosystems. It just removes their ability to carry malaria. We’re all fine with some annoying mosquito bites here and there, just as long as those mosquito bites aren’t transmitting malaria and killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. I want to live in a world where all mosquitos carry the FREP1Q gene variant.
Bonuses:
Two great pieces of content we’d recommend:
Zach Dell on Invest Like The Best. Zach, Justin, and the team at Base are building a generational company, as we’ve written about here and here. Zach does a brilliant job explaining how the grid works (not easy to compress!), how Base works (not easy to compress!), and how he works. Great companies are made of special people building important products to fix big problems. This conversation shows off all three.
New York: A Documentary Film. I am obsessed with Ken Burns style PBS documentaries (it’s how I’ve managed to get so many chicks over the years) and I am obsessed with New York City. This 8 part, 17.5 hour documentary film combines those two obsessions. It covers the history of New York City from Henry Hudson’s exploration of the area in 1609 to the aftermath on 9/11 up through 2003. Understanding the history of the city makes living in it feel like your making history each day. Greatest city in the world, 416 years running.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Stripe Startups for sponsoring. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-07-18 20:42:17
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 153rd Weekly Dose of Optimism. Pretty electric week for our little corner of the internet: Windsurf drama, Grok models, Epstein files, and Coldplay concerts. If you’re chronically online and enjoy some good gossip, this was a busy week for you. Luckily, there’s some pretty important stuff work happening outside of the X-sphere. We’re here to cover that stuff.
Let’s get to it.
Packy here. I have been a big Stripe fan for a long time, and wrote about the company all the way back in August 2020, so I’m proud to welcome them as our newest sponsor and tell you about Stripe Startups.
Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and it’s working. Last year, 1.3% of global GDP flowed through Stripe, over $1.4 trillion and growing. 78% of the Forbes AI 50 use Stripe’s financial infrastructure to monetize faster, experiment with pricing, and grow revenue.
As I wrote in my original Deep Dive, Stripe’s strategy from the earliest days has been to make it as easy as possible for startups to begin accepting payments, and then grow with them as they get really big. With Stripe Startups, they’re making it even easier.
Stripe Startups is the company’s new program designed to support early-stage, venture-backed businesses as they build, iterate, and scale. Founders enrolled in Stripe Startups get access to credits to offset Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe.
You’re going to use Stripe anyway. Get the white-glove experience. Apply to Stripe Startups today.
(1) Trump Touts Billions in Investments to Create AI Hub in Pennsylvania
Amrith Ramkumar and Brian Schwartz for WSJ
Google said it would put $25 billion into data centers needed to train AI models and related infrastructure in Pennsylvania and the surrounding region over the next two years. Private-equity firm Blackstone promised another $25 billion. AI startup CoreWeave announced a $6 billion investment.
Power companies FirstEnergy and Constellation Energy are part of a group pouring billions more into increasing electricity generation in the area, according to the White House.
The Trump Administration announced a bigly investment from the private sector into AI infrastructure, with the majority of the investment into (notable swing state) Pennsylvania. At the event organized by PA Senator David McCormick (no relation, despite being a McCormick from PA), executives from Google, Anthropic, Blackstone, and Exxon pledge their allegiance and wallets to the initiative. It appears to be a combination of data center build outs energy infrastructure to feed those data centers, with Google and Blackstone footing most of the bill.
This fresh $56 billion in energy and $36 billion in data center investments comes on the heels of Amazon’s $20 billion commitment to the Keystone State.
We love to see a good public<>private partnership like this, and Dave McCormick is particularly well-suited to make it happen having split his career in politics and as the President/CEO of Bridgewater, one of the world’s largest hedge funds.
We particularly love to see this partnership happening in Pennsylvania, our home state, where projects like this will generate thousands of jobs. It’s also a big win for our boy Josh “Rebuild I-95 in 12 Days” Shapiro. I guess there are some pretty serious perks of being the swing state. Go Birds.
(2) Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is building a 5GW AI data center
Maxwell Zeff for TechCrunch
Meta is currently building out a data center, called Hyperion, which the company expects to supply its new AI lab with five gigawatts (GW) of computational power, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Monday post on Threads.
Not to be outdone, Zuck is planning a massive data center build out, the scale of which has never been seen before. The new wave of superclusters, including one called Hyperion, could reach 5 gigawatts or about 5x the size of the largest existing data centers. In a Threads post, Zuck posted an animation showing that the data center will be almost the size of Manhattan.
Zuck and team are moving quickly here, even planning to build some of the centers under temporary tents in order to meet surging demand for AI compute. Just this year alone, Meta is planning to spend approximately $70B in capex in support of its AI initiatives. $70B!
The overall strategy is coming together. Attract and assemble a world-class team of AI researchers and operators, with the help of $100M+ comp packages. Invest extremely heavily in AI infrastructure and compute. In the short term, monetize its AI investment through its existing family of cash-gushing apps and in the long term pull ahead in foundational model work, fuse AI into its new hardware products (Glasses, VR, etc), and use its massive footprint to spin up its own cloud computing business.
The strategy, if it works, will be good for Meta. The strategy, even if it doesn’t work, will be good for everyone else, pulling forward data center buildouts and pushing forward AI research. Call him GigaZuck.
(3) Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics with $80M to automate construction
Kirsten Korosec for TechCrunch
Bedrock Robotics, an autonomous vehicle technology startup founded by veterans of Waymo and Segment, has been operating quietly for more than a year. Now, it’s breaking cover with an $80 million funding round from investors Eclipse and 8VC. Bedrock Robotics is focused on developing a self-driving kit that can be retrofitted to construction and other worksite vehicles, according to the company.
A team of former Waymo and Google X engineers launched Bedrock Robotics, a company focused on automating physical labor in construction, with a cool $80 million in Series A funding. Bedrock is building robotic systems designed to take on repetitive, labor-intensive tasks like drilling, lifting, and positioning materials and its starting with rebar installation. Every infrastructure project needs rebar, and it’s super time intensive and repetitive. Perfect first use case.
Unlike traditional factory robots, Bedrock is not designed to execute against tightly controlled instructions, but rather to dynamically operate in a messy construction environment. This is the new thing in robotics. You don’t just want a robot that does a task, you want a robot that understands the task and then does it.
We hope we’re building a lot in this country over the coming decades. Data centers, houses, roads, etc. A lot of that work can and will be done by humans. But a lot of that work should and will be done by robots. It’d be a lot safer, cheaper, and faster.
IT’S TIME FOR ROBOTS TO BUILD.
(4) ‘Landmark’ study: three-person IVF leads to eight healthy children
Ewen Callaway in Nature
The procedure has been dubbed three-person in vitro fertilization (IVF), because the resulting children carry nuclear DNA from a biological mother and father, alongside mitochondrial DNA from a separate egg donor.
In a scientific twist on the classic ménage à trois, UK researchers reported the first long-term results from a regulated “three-person IVF” technique that combines DNA from three individuals to prevent inherited mitochondrial disease. The procedure involves transferring nuclear DNA from a fertilized egg with faulty mitochondria into a donor egg with healthy ones, effectively bypassing the mother’s disease-causing mitochondrial DNA.
The latest data, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that eight children born through this technique are all developing normally, with only minor unrelated health issues in a few cases. This marks the first peer-reviewed evidence that the method can produce not just live births, but healthy toddlers. The UK remains the only country with explicit regulations allowing mitochondrial donation, but these results will likely change that. For families with a history of mitochondrial disorders, this represents a nice step towards healthier reproduction, with a little help from a third DNA donor.
(5) The Quest for a Hangover-Free Buzz
Kristen V. Brown For Bloomberg
At its core, the idea is to amplify the effects of gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter that, in lay terms, carries chemical messages to your nerve cells telling your brain to chill out. The molecule aims to bind to a GABA receptor, increasing the flow of negative ions that inhibit neuronal activity. By enhancing the brain’s GABA function, the molecule is meant to deliver a version of alcohol’s pleasant, relaxing high without the downsides.
Trust tree: I’m a lil hungover writing this. Had a friendly steak dinner last night with the boys that included 2 beers and 2 glasses of a bold, full bodied red. Nothing crazy in the moment, but I am certainly feeling a bit groggier than I’d prefer this AM. It was a tradeoff I made though: I got to feel a little looser at dinner with some friends and in return I feel a bit crappier this morning. It’s a tradeoff many of us confront on a near-weekly basis. It’s kind of part of life.
But perhaps this isn’t a necessary tradeoff. GABA Labs is developing a synthetic molecule called Alcarelle designed to mimic the relaxing, social effects of alcohol without the hangovers and health risks. The molecule works by selectively activating a specific GABA receptor in the brain linked to sociability, aiming to produce the effects of a glass of wine (calm, connected, mildly euphoric…the feeling I was aiming for at dinner last night) without impairing motor skills, triggering addiction, or setting you up for a slow next morning.
The company is still working towards regulatory approval, but plans to sell/license its technology to beverage makers. It won’t be commercially available until at least 2027. So in the meantime, get out there this weekend and enjoy a few good ole fashioned pops, if that’s your thing.
Bonus: Notes from Reindustrialize
Packy here, reporting live from Detroit, where I spent the past couple of days at Reindustrialize. I don’t like conferences, and I love this one. Hats off to the organizers: Aaron Slodov, Austin Bishop, Falon Donahue, Gregory Bernstein, Kate Moon, and Mike Slagh. The density of people building incredible companies is through the roof.
I’ll be writing more about a bunch of the companies that presented in the months to come, but wanted to share some quick thoughts here.
First off, Detroit really impressed me. If you haven’t been in a while, it’s worth a trip. The city is a symbol: once great, then left to rot and left for dead, now revitalized. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan addressed the conference, and said that what made the turnaround possible was that the city didn’t try to become the next Silicon Valley or the next bio hub. California and Boston are really good at that. Instead, it returned to its manufacturing roots and went all hands on deck to attract manufacturers back to the city. Its unemployment rate dropped from 20% to 8%. People are moving back into Detroit. And downtown is awesome; my hotel overlooks Comerica Park, everything is within walking distance, the people are Midwest nice, and it feels fresh, clean, and vibrant. It’s possible to turn things around. Detroit is winning by differentiating.
That is, of course, a metaphor. A few years ago, the question was: should we Reindustrialize? Now, the question is: can we?
After a couple of days here, my answer is yes. But it won’t look like China, and it shouldn’t. We’re not going to be manufacturing iPhones. Instead, we’re going to Reindustrialize by doing what we do best: letting thousands of companies innovate and compete, and create millions of good jobs and new capabilities in the process.
There’s no silver bullet, and it’s hard to imagine a task as big as reindustrialization top-down. Bottoms-up, though, things look good. Hadrian announced a fresh $260 million in funding to build new factories and create thousands of jobs. Nuclear companies - both fission and fusion - are making rapid progress and will need a lot of smart people to scale against aggressive timelines. Companies at the conference are building flying cars and supersonic planes and drones and all manner of new, fast things that will need a lot of skilled hands and big brains to make fly. Some are even building new cities.
Many of these companies will fail. Some will succeed, enormously, and their success will mean new jobs, new supply chains, and new capabilities. From the front lines, it’s easy to feel the momentum. The government wants to make this happen. The talent is flocking to hard things. The capital allocators are allocating.
There’s a lot of work left to be done. Let’s get to work.
Bonus Bonus: Flounder Mode with Brie Wolfson
Packy again. I loved this conversation with Brie Wolfson. It’s about her wonderful profile on Kevin Kelly, Flounder Mode, and it’s also about what it’s like to work on Flounder Mode.
Isaac Asimov attempted to predict the professions of future in his classic essay, Whatever You Wish. He wrote:
But to most people the field of choice might be far less cosmic. It might be stamp collecting, pottery, ornamental painting, cooking, dramatics, or whatever. Every field will be an elective, and the only guide will be "whatever you wish."
Each person, guided by teaching machines sophisticated enough to offer a wide sampling of human activities, can then choose what he or she can best and most willingly do.
Is the individual person wise enough to know what he or she can best do? —Why not? Who else can know? And what can a person do best except that which he or she wants to do most?
Won't people choose to do nothing? Sleep their lives away?
If that's what they want, why not?—Except that I have a feeling they won't. Doing nothing is hard work, and, it seems to me, would be indulged in only by those who have never had the opportunity to evolve out of themselves something more interesting and, therefore, easier to do.
In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile.
Reflecting on the conversation, I realized that this is how people like Kevin Kelly and Brie Wolfson work today. They do “whatever they wish,” which doesn’t mean that they do nothing. They do “that which he or she wants to do most,” “all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile.”
If this is the way that more and more of us will work, learning how Kevin and Brie do it seems like a lovely way to spend a weekend hour.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Stripe Startups for sponsoring. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
