2026-01-06 21:48:25
Welcome to the 847 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since 2025! Join 256,316 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
And today, for the first time ever, you can pay while you’re there to get even more not boring.
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Tuesday! Happy New Year! And HAPPY not boring world LAUNCH DAY.
I’ve been looking forward to today for a long time, so without further ado…
Let’s get to it.
Today, we’re launching not boring world: the paid section of not boring, where the world’s smartest founders, researchers, investors, creatives, and general geniuses, the ones I couldn’t hire as a full-time writer for a million bucks, write their best ideas.
Here’s the master plan.
Geniuses bring their genius ideas, I help write them. Call it a Cossay or a Joint or something. Whatever we call it, make it as easy to for busy practitioners to share their insights in the essay format those insights deserve as it is for them to spill them on a podcast.
We get all the geniuses in one place, and then we grow from there. This world is biological; your guess re: how it evolves is as good as mine. But it will, and I want you to be a part of it.
We are making a few bets. That ideas are meant to be written. That people who are out there doing things earn ideas you can’t find in LLMs. That the most biased narrator, the one betting his or her livelihood on his or her idea, is the most reliable narrator. That when it’s easier than ever to get mediocre outputs on-demand, the best thing you can feed your brain is high-quality inputs from high-quality people.
That the future can be full of both means and meaning, and that we can create the home for this good future online. A place that’s smart and weird and, hopefully a little magical.
I mean, it’s a newsletter, so we’ll see. But that’s what I’m going for.
Something that I keep writing about because I think it’s really important and becoming even more important is differentiation: doing the thing that only you can uniquely do.
not boring world is that, for me.
It is a bet on the written word when everyone is going all-in on video.
It combines two of my favorite things in the world: talking to smart people and writing.
And it works way better now than it would have when I started not boring.
Over the past six (6!) years of writing this newsletter, I’ve gotten the chance to know and work with some really smart people, people way smarter than me, who are out in the field building stuff and researching stuff and creating stuff. These people are betting their prime years on certain ideas that no one else understands (or believes) yet.
They are more motivated than anyone else could possibly be to understand every facet of the bet they’re making: the history, the technical details, the economics, where it could all go wrong, and what could happen if it goes right.
Meaning, the best person to learn about what’s happening in robotics from is the founder of a robotics company. Even better, from multiple founders of multiple robotics companies, each making a slightly different bet on the winning approach.
Unfortunately, because these people are busy building, and because they’re not necessarily writers (those who can’t do, write, or something), their very best, most core ideas don’t get to see the light of day.
I love to bring them out when I write Deep Dives, but I only write a few Deep Dives a year, often after years of knowing a founder and his or her company. I am only one person and I have only ten fingers. I am a bottleneck.
Most founders resort to a much lighter-weight way to get their ideas out in the world: podcasts.
I love podcasts. I listen to them all the time. I’ve made a couple of them.
Having said that… I think podcasts are a pretty terrible medium for ideas.
They’re great for getting to know people. They’re great for stories. They’re certainly great for putting on wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.
But quick: name the best idea you’ve heard on a podcast recently.
Aggregation Theory was written. Commoditize Your Complements was written (twice). The Bitter Lesson was written. Attention is All You Need was written, too. I, Pencil. Meditations on Moloch. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 1,000 True Fans. Do Things That Don’t Scale. The next big thing will start out looking like a toy. Why Software Is Eating The World. All written.
It has been said that reading is dead, that video won. And for most people, that’s probably true. Video is easy, and video is fun. But I can’t think of a single canonical idea born on a podcast or video, not one.
Ideas are meant to be written.
They are meant to be put to paper, cross-examined, torn apart, rearranged, supplemented with data, edited, packaged, placed next to shitty hand-drawn illustrations. They are meant to be quoted and shared and built upon.
So not boring world is doubling down on the written word.
One goal is to make it as easy for genius frontier practitioners to produce an essay as it currently is for them to go on a podcast and yap. To start, that will mean co-writing essays with them.
We have solid precedent. My two most popular essays of all time, The Electric Slide and Excel Never Dies, were co-written with founders! Sam D’Amico and Ben Rollert, respectively. I just realized this last night, long after deciding to do this. Literally the two most popular essays in not boring history.
The trade is simple: they’re smarter than me, I’m (usually) a better writer than them.
As Ben put it: “I have good ideas but somehow fail to bring them anywhere.”
My job is to bring them out. It’s what I love to do, truffle pig new ideas and shave them all over your inbox.
Hardware is a Fruit, which I co-wrote with Daylight’s Anjan Katta, was a more recent trial balloon. Anjan had a core idea against which he’s been building a company for years. He texted me a small version, then sent me a voice note with a longer version, and a couple of days later, we had an essay that he probably never would have written about an idea that I never would have had on my own.
I have a lot more in the hopper. All are ideas I never could have come up with myself, even using our new thinking machines. Which leads me to the second thesis behind not boring world…
We will write down ideas you can’t find in an LLM.
My co-authors are figuring out new knowledge in real time, and we’re going to share it fresh, before we’re even sure it’s right, while the hypothesis it still being tested.
Early last year, I wrote Long Questions/Short Answers, and I argued that finding the right questions will become extremely important as LLMs make it easier to get to answers.
not boring world is something similar. Like: Long Inputs / Short Outputs.
MSCHF’s Gabe Whaley went on Jackson Dahl’s Dialectic podcast last year and talked about employing a full-time person whose job it is to bring in fresh inputs and educate the rest of the team on them. That’s just about the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.
I want not boring world to feel kind of like that. A home for really good, well thought-out inputs, inputs that are so fresh, so frontier, that they’re not in the LLMs yet. Inputs that exist only as ideas trapped in geniuses’ heads. I intend to help get out as craftfully as I can.
To start, that will be through co-written essays with smart founders, researchers, creatives, industry insiders, etc… but I think this starts getting most fun as that network of collaborators grows and continues to contribute.
So Anjan wrote that essay on hardware, now he can share his inputs. The papers he’s reading. Tidbits from conversations he had. But more: art, too, and music, even meditations.
And it’s not just Anjan. Each contributor will enter the center of not boring world and be able to share their inputs, independently or in conversation with each other. They’ll debate each other. Maybe they’ll collaborate. All of a sudden, not boring world becomes this fascinating little network. At its best, it will help you learn things you can’t learn anywhere else. And it’ll help you see the raw inputs and thought processes behind these ideas, so you can form your own thoughts.
This is because our thesis is that you should come up with your own outputs — that’s your job — fed by great inputs — that’s ours.
If I just tell you to “buy Google” or whatever, there is exactly zero alpha in that. It’s much better for you to combine some new inputs from the frontier, your own experience, and inputs that you find yourself to come to your own conclusions.
As the Genie tells Aladdin, bee yourself.
The coolest part about my job has been stuffing my head with inputs directly from really smart people doing things, letting it all swish around, coming up with my own outputs, and through that process, as if by magic, developing my intuition. I want to share that magic with you.
But inputs can be messy, which is where not boring world comes in. I’ll curate the very best people I can find and present their ideas as coherently as possible, to balance the raw inputs with legibility.
Two things will help us do this.
The first is Editorial Infrastructure. I’m going to be hiring out a team to build a machine that helps the very best ideas and inputs shine and spread. Editors, illustrators, researchers.
This team is not built out yet. By subscribing to not boring world today, in the very beginning, you’re helping the start of what I hope becomes a unique and world-class modern media organization that grows with the people actually making the news.
There is a fun secret behind all of this: I couldn’t pay any practitioner worth hearing from any amount of money to get them to come work for not boring full-time. If they were so easily bought, they wouldn’t be generating the types of ideas worth listening to.
But they’re certainly willing to spend a few hours (or less) to 1) get their favorite ideas in essay shape and 2) get those ideas in front of smart, curious people (who are potential employees, investors, customers, and partners). This is the Liquid Super Team at a higher level than I initially intended.
The risk here is that the message gets diluted. What is not boring world if it’s tech and architecture and book reviews and group meditations and …?
The answer to that question is the second thing that will help us build this universe: a coherent worldview.
not boring world publishes on behalf of the good future.
That means technology, but not only technology. The closest I’ve come to expressing this worldview is in Means & Meaning. not boring world covers both.
Means are obvious: how technologists give humans ever-greater means – including cutting edge research and the strategy it takes to scale enough to have a real impact.
Meaning is harder: what is worth paying attention to? How can we contribute? What are we doing here? How do we bring about Modern Magnificenza?
If we are zipping around the world on supersonic planes depressed and arguing about politics or whatever, we have failed.
Come join our world and make sure that doesn’t happen.
The truth is, I don’t know exactly where we’ll end up. I do know that this is as energized as I’ve been about not boring since the beginning. I have the most fun when we’re experimenting with new things, even and especially when they feel different, and this feels like something that doesn’t exist, but should, and that we’re in the best place to make it happen.
Turning on paid subscriptions was actually the plan from the very earliest days of not boring. Once I hit like 5,000 subscribers, I’d turn on a paywall, convert like 10%, and be off to the races. But on the way to 5,000 subscribers, then 10,000, then 100,000, then 255,000, I realized that I really liked it when those words I’d put so much effort into writing got into as many peoples’ brains as possible. So I kept the newsletter free, partnered with sponsors, and grew.
The thing is, I still like when the essays I pour my very best ideas into get to fly free, so those will remain free, along with the Weekly Dose. Everything you get from not boring today, you will still get for free.
not boring world is different and more.
Over the next few months, we’ll be dropping co-written essays every other week to paid members of not boring world. The roster is already full of some of the smartest and most creative people I know. No one I’ve asked has said no yet.
As I build out the team, and as co-writers become contributors, frequency will increase. We’ll figure out how to do that without overwhelming you. We’ll also open up a chat in the Substack app to discuss it all together. This isn’t going to be a one-sided thing. You’ll get to be a part of what I’m building. Book clubs? Possibly. Daily rituals? I hope so, eventually.
This is the maximalist version of what a newsletter can be. Newsletter as world container. Newsletter as jumping off point. Curation and creation combined. Our place to experiment with new formats. The last subscription you’ll ever need (jk please support my fellow substackers).
It’s a bet on the written word, that great new ideas are trapped in human heads, and that it’s possible to build a future that increases both means and meaning.
Welcome to not boring world: a newsletter, yeah, for now.
Big thanks to Meghna Rao for editing, Hanne Winarsky for helping me prepare to launch.
That’s all for today. We will be back in your inbox a BUNCH this week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-12-23 21:58:58
Hi friends 🎅,
Happy Tuesday!
With Christmas just two days away, and only one day to use the office printer to print very long documents, I wanted to share a few of my favorite not boring essays of the year.
I’ve heard rumors, concerning and thus far unsubstantiated, that not every one of you has read every word of every essay this year; a week or two off should give you ample time to catch up.
I have felt absurdly grateful that I get to do what I do this year, and it’s because you are willing to follow me down weird and seemingly disconnected rabbit holes, to great depths, wherever my curiosity leads.
2026 is going to be bigger and better. I have some fun things planned, including the biggest launch in not boring history since the newsletter started. I’m giddy.
Thank you, and I hope you all have a joyful holiday season.
Let’s get to it.
If you are a fintech, you cannot move fast and break things like most tech startups. Things need to be solid: underwriting, processing, infrastructure, and integrations. Moving money is consequential.
And the level of trust and stringent regulations required when it comes to finances are some reasons that a new report from Silicon Valley Bank found that AI adoption in fintech has lagged other industries. That lag is reflected in venture capital investment; currently, just 30 cents of every VC dollar invested in fintech goes to AI-enabled companies.
Check out the full Future of Fintech report for more on this and other challenges, and opportunities, within fintech.
This year, I changed the way that Not Boring worked in order to write fewer, deeper essays. After publishing relentlessly for five years, it was an adjustment, but once I got the hang of it, I think I wrote better than I’ve ever written. Choosing my five favorite essays was hard.
A couple of things I’m most proud of from this year are:
Even with many fewer company deep dives (Meter, Base Power Company, Ramp, Thatch, and Somos Internet / APD), I think if we look back in a decade, this year’s crop will have the highest combined market cap of any vintage to date. I’m setting the over/under at a quarter-trillion.
I began to form a worldview through writing, even if it meant writing stuff that stretches the boundaries of what a tech newsletter is. This is a newsletter about getting the amazing future. That future will require new research and technology that give humans greater means. I am obsessed with strategy and company building because for any of these innovations to make a difference in the world, they need to achieve scale. But a future in which we’re zipping supersonic around the world unhappily scrolling social media isn’t the amazing future. We need means and meaning.
Next year, I’m going to lean hard into building a little world here in not boring. The first couple of years of the newsletter were about freshness and zeitgeist. This year, I found a deeper, higher-quality level. In 2026, I’m going to try to do both. Stay tuned.
For now, enjoy my five favorite not boring essays of 2025.
This was, unexpectedly, the most popular not boring essay of 2025 by far. The night before I sent it, after spending a month researching and writing, I told my wife Puja, “It’s so long that I don’t think that many people will read it, but I hope that ten people read it and really love it.” I was off by a few orders of magnitude.
The point of the essay was that the future is going to be electric - that curves are destiny, and all of the curves are pointing to cheaper, better components with which to build electric products, and that electric products either outperform their combustive counterparts or do new things entirely - and that China is eating the West’s electric lunch.
What I loved most though, and what I think people appreciated, is getting to spend a month going unbelievably deep on the research, building my intuition from the ground up (literally, how does an electric motor work), and finding all the way down there the incredible stories of the people behind the curves.
Honestly, I just reread this and I was kind of surprised that I wrote it. It’s a banger and it’s very different from what I normally write.
The piece describes what might be the core philosophy behind not boring: that technology can and should provide means, but it can’t provide meaning. We need to do that for ourselves.
That’s why the newsletter has become more of a mix of technology and philosophy. We need both:
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. 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.
Speaking of Attention, the section on David Foster Wallace’s Something To Do With Paying Attention in this piece was my favorite thing to write all year, because I loved the book, because when I write about DFW I can almost feel myself writing a little more like him, and because it was such a weird thing to put in the middle of this piece but I think it worked.
Cable Caballero is the story of Forrest Heath III, the founder of two companies, Somos Internet and Autoridad Panandina, and the band of pirates he’s brought together to rebuild the world’s infrastructure, starting with better, faster vertically integrated internet in Colombia.
I love this for so many reasons. Forrest will go down as one of the founders of this generation. It is a case study in how to build a Vertical Integrator. And maybe most importantly, it shows that it’s possible to build really hard things lightly and with joy.
In Means & Meaning, I wrote that technology can’t provide meaning. Cable Caballero shows that building it certainly can.
Differentiation has been a core theme in not boring since the very beginning.
Over the past year, it’s gotten so much easier to not differentiate, to do the same thing, to copy explicitly: “make me a landing page that looks like x.”
Which is why there’s so much opportunity in doing the opposite. In putting a little bit of effort in. In taking a few minutes to think about what makes you you in a way that others can’t easily be and then putting care into designing around that differentiation.
Because if you can’t figure out what makes you different from everyone else, then what are you even doing here?
The good news is, the more slop there is, the more value in differentiated craft.
The Great Differentiation is the race to be different. It is the salvation from slop.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is Newton’s Third Law of Motion. It is also an emergent Law of the Market.
Those self-correcting mechanisms are really easy to miss.
You see a lot of slop, and you think it’s all going to slop.
And you see AI getting smarter, and you think it’s going to replace all human value-creating activity. You think humans are done, commoditized. That all meaning will be lost as we lose our jobs.
I don’t know.
AI has been both incredibly impressive and underwhelming. So far, 2024’s The Goldilocks Zone is holding up really well. It feels no closer to agency.
The more machine-like tasks humans have been stuck doing that AI commoditizes, the more opportunities there are to move a layer up the stack, to something more interesting that takes advantage of the commoditization.
I wrote this piece in the beginning of the year, and over the past 11 months, I’ve gotten more confident that the future is going to be great for humans as long as we don’t let ourselves get sucked into endless AI generated waifu feeds and instead focus on having novel experiences, developing deeper human relationships, and discovering who we are.
“Most Human wins, not by competing with machines, but by becoming greater and greater versions of ourselves with whatever resources available. The more resources the better.”
In a lot of ways, 2025 was the year of AI. The thing that struck me this year, though, was the importance of people. The game, I think, is to become the best version of you and surround yourself with other people doing the same.
That’s all for today (and maybe for this year). We’ll be back in your inbox soon.
Thanks for reading, and happy holidays,
Packy
2025-12-19 21:43:52
Hey friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday! This is our last Dose before the holidays, and our penultimate Dose of 2025. It’s been a pretty unbelievable year, the kind of year that makes you want to live forever.
In which case, we have some good news for you.
And one more thing… X embeds are BACK on Substack! You can’t imagine the restraint it took not to litter this Dose with them.
Let’s get to it.
For decades, the best investors in the world have used a simple strategy to grow their wealth: buy great assets, hold them forever, and borrow against them when they need liquidity.
Lava makes this possible for bitcoin. They offer a flexible and secure line of credit backed by your bitcoin. No monthly payments, open terms, and your assets are never rehypothecated. Plus, they offer the lowest fixed interest rates in the market for bitcoin-backed loans, starting at just 5%.
Keith Rabois, Lava’s lead investor, sums it up nicely: “Borrowing against your assets is common practice in real estate and equities because it allows you to keep your upside exposure, avoid taxable events, and access liquidity. Lava makes this same strategy possible for the best-performing asset of the past decade: bitcoin.”
If you want to unlock your bitcoin’s purchasing power without having to sell your bitcoin, Lava is the place to go.
It really takes you from this world of conventional medicine and many of its very difficult problems to potentially a world of swappable parts.
The “swappable parts” that Science CEO Max Hodak (a Duke grad) is referring to in that quote above are human organs. Swappable human organs.
Science Corporation, the brain-computer interface company Hodak founded after leaving Neuralink, which he co-founded, just announced Vessel, a new division focused on organ perfusion.
The basic idea of organ perfusion is that instead of putting a donated kidney on ice and racing the clock (you’ve got maybe 24-36 hours before it’s no longer viable), you keep it alive outside the body, blood flowing, metabolically active, potentially for days or weeks.
Current perfusion systems exist but they’re expensive (TransMedics’ organ care system runs around $250,000 for the machine plus $40,000 to $80,000 per use) and require specialized staff. If organs have to travel far distances, they’re transported by the company’s fleet of private jets.
Science wants to build something smaller, cheaper, and smarter. A small team at Science has built a perfusion system from scratch and is now able to keep rabbit kidneys alive outside the body for up to 48 hours. They’re working to expand that to a month by next spring. Their prototype features integrated sensors to monitor blood oxygenation, flow rate, pressure, and temperature in real time, with closed-loop control that makes automatic adjustments where current ECMO machines require manual control.
What if organs could be banked, shipped like cargo, kept viable indefinitely while the right match is found? “Could you get to the point where you could check a kidney as luggage on a United flight to the East Coast?” Hodak asks in the WIRED piece.
If you can keep organs alive outside the body for weeks instead of hours, you could transform transplantation from emergency surgery into scheduled procedure. You would dramatically expand the geographic matching radius. You can potentially turn every donated organ into a usable one.
And maybe we get to a point where we swap out our old, tired organs for fresh young ones, like immortal Ships of Theseus.
Bryan Johnson, Don’t Die
After seeing the data from two doses, psilocybin offers unique longevity effects that complement the best performing therapies I’ve done to date including sauna, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, sleep, nutrition and exercise.
Swappable organs might be one way to extend lifespans. Shrooms may be another.
Bryan Johnson, the man who plans to not die and is willing to run experiments on himself in service of that mission, recently ran (and livestreamed!) two self-experiments with large doses of psilocybin. Took the internet by storm. It was fun, he was in love, and he had a hunch that mushrooms might be a useful tool in his quest for the fountain of youth.
Based on this n-of-1 experiment, the heroic kind run by psychonauts of old like Humphry Davy and William James, “the most quantified psychedelic experiment ever done,” it looks like he was right.
You should read the whole tweet, because the scope of benefits is compelling, but here’s the high level overview:
0. We observed broad benefits across mental, hormonal, metabolic, and anti-inflammatory systems. Since these are the primary drivers of biological aging, this multi-system signal offers a compelling case for longevity potential.
1. Psilocybin may be a metabolic reset button for the brain. We expected brain changes, but not a potential metabolic breakthrough. My blood sugar control improved from the top 2% of the population to 0.2%, better than 99.75% of 18-25 year olds.
2. Psilocybin reduced my inflammation (hsCRP) to below detectable levels one week post dose.
3. Psilocybin calmed my body and mind. Lower cortisol, and an inhibited HPA-axis in the days following the dose. Both my cortisol and DHEA (another product of the adrenal cortex) dropped 42% and 45% respectively, indicating an overall adrenal reset associated with rest and recovery.
4. Psilocybin increased brain plasticity, desynchronized default networks, resulting in enhanced creativity, playfulness, and openness, with reduced mental rigidity.
5. A second psilocybin dose built on the first and pushed sensory integration even further, increasing primary sensory-motor integration beyond the peak of the first dose.
6. Psilocybin induced an intense blend of joy, deep insight, and a subtle hint of melancholy, also detectable by thermal biometrics.
For a small portion of the population, mushrooms can be bad, so consult your doctor etc., but Johnson’s results were pretty tremendous: lower inflammation, lower cortisol, more creativity and joy.
Psilocybin is currently classified as a Schedule I controlled substance, one with high abuse potential and no accepted medical use, which increasingly seems like whoever is behind that classification must be trippin’.
Nanotechnology World
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have optimized and 3D-printed helix structures as optical materials for Terahertz (THz) frequencies, a potential way to address a technology gap for next-generation telecommunications, non-destructive evaluation, chemical/biological sensing and more.
There’s a chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum called the terahertz range that’s been frustratingly hard to work with. It’s too high-frequency for traditional electronics and too long-wavelength for conventional optics, stuck in a technological no-man’s-land. Which is a bummer, because terahertz waves are the backbone of 6G telecommunications, can see through materials like a gentler version of X-rays, and can detect the unique chemical signatures of everything from explosives to proteins.
The problem has always been components. You can’t just buy a terahertz waveplate off the shelf the way you can for visible light.
So researchers at Lawrence Livermore came up with a workaround: 3D printing. They printed microscale helixes that can reliably twist terahertz beams into circularly polarized light, something that previously required exotic optical crystals that don’t really exist for these wavelengths.
The tiny spirals, optimized through simulation, then precisely printed, do what no natural crystal can at these wavelengths. And by mixing left-handed and right-handed helixes into arrays, the LLNL scientists built the world’s first “chiral QR code,” encoding information in the polarization of light itself, invisible without the right filter at the right frequency.
TL;DR scientists are 3D printing new materials that unlock previously ~inaccessible ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Gavin Leech, Lauren Gilbert, and Ulkar Aghayeva with Arb Research & RenPhil
So, how did the world change this year? What happened in each science? Which results are speculative and which are solid? Which are the biggest, if true?
It’s that time of year, when chestnuts roast on open fires and new news gives way to annual reviews. This one, from Arb Research and sponsored by RenPhil, reviews 202 pieces of scientific news from the year and best guesses whether they generalize their impact if they do.
By that scoring method, the development with the highest expected value (P(generalizes) x big | true) is Waymo’s finding that self-driving cars are 10x safer than human drivers. The lowest expected value, but most fun, goes to “Can I run DOOM on my soup?”, a “Theoretical demonstration of the Turing completeness of certain exotic flows of fluid. This direction is part of Terry Tao’s proposed strategy for solving the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem.”
Going through the whole thing is a really cool look back on the things humans discovered and did this year, like:
“An embryo frozen in 1994 was brought to term and resulted in a healthy baby boy.”
“Diagnostics on a phone with no doctor needed.”
“Approval of a strong non-opioid painkiller targeting a pathway specific to pain neurons.”
“Synthesis of hexanitrogen, the most energy-dense molecule ever.”
“Extreme poverty drops from 27% of India to 5% in one decade.”
“Murder rates worldwide have fallen 25% since 2000.”
“We produce antimatter eight times faster than last year.”
There’s bad news, too, like “Artificial chimeras of bat coronaviruses, with up to 100% lethality, produced, on purpose, under BSL-2 conditions,” but that’s not our bag, baby.
If Theoretical Terry Tao Soup Computers were the least impactful thing that happened in 2025, we did great.
p.s. Gavin, Lauren, and Ulkar - how do we incorporate this method into 2026 Doses?
Tamara Winter for Stripe Press
A couple of months ago, I got to attend a preview of Stripe’s new series of mini-documentaries, Tacit.
The idea is to study and celebrate people who have developed tacit knowledge, knowledge you have but can’t easily articulate or transfer through words, in specific crafts. Fingal Ferguson makes knives. Christophe Laudamiel makes perfumes.
If tacit knowledge is hard to articulate or transfer through words, film is the best way we have to at least appreciate it. Watch the minute or so where Fingal Ferguson slices through butcher paper with his knives, not just feeling but hearing whether they’re cutting right.
Over the course of this year in the Dose, we have talked a lot about the amazing new things that AI has been able to do, the whole world has. But man is it beautiful watching humans do these very specific things they’ve earned the right to do well through natural talent and years and years and years of experience.
Plot twist though: Christophe Laudamiel, the master perfumer, joined AI smell startup Osmo in 2023 as its Master Perfumer. Why? “Simply put, science and technology allow the art to push beyond its own artistic frontiers – and ultimately to create new emotional rides for people. In turn, artistic projects allow scientists to put their new hypotheses or their new discoveries to test before making them viable in the commercial market.”
At the end of the documentary, he’s asked to “make me a scent that evokes optimism.” Here’s the recipe:
Optimism.
So I would have something super bright, super yuzu, citrus, lemon but twisted. I love the smell of lime, which is underrepresented in perfumery. And optimism it means the base is also very strong. But the base would come into the fragrance. So like strong woods or spices. Some spices I see them as very emphatic and very energetic and very warm also.
For me, optimism, there’s a big, big hug that takes you somewhere and opens your mind. So also abstract notes like floral ozone, like nitriles, like things like that, that brings you in the outer space.
And you don’t want to think of the past and it makes you think towards the future.
From JellyfishDAO for the ExistentialHope Meme Contest
Coincidentally, this is the future when Science Corp, Bryan Johnson, and the many other intrepid scientists tackling longevity win.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Aman and Sehaj, and to Lava for sponsoring. Welcome them to the Not Boring family and thank them for supporting optimism by not selling your bitcoin.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week. Ho ho ho.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-12-12 21:44:06
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday!
Bigggg week for the optimists. We have solar in space, $600M for cutting edge neuroscience, more Levin on aging (with a lil’ Telepathy Tapes), supersonic money-printing turbines, and math-solving AIs. Someone forgot to tell the good guys they’re supposed to take it easy in December.
Let’s get to it.
For decades, the best investors in the world have used a simple strategy to grow their wealth: buy great assets, hold them forever, and borrow against them when they need liquidity.
Lava makes this possible for bitcoin. They offer a flexible and secure line of credit backed by your bitcoin. No monthly payments, open terms, and your assets are never rehypothecated. Plus, they offer the lowest fixed interest rates in the market for bitcoin-backed loans, starting at just 5%.
Keith Rabois, Lava’s lead investor, sums it up nicely: “Borrowing against your assets is common practice in real estate and equities because it allows you to keep your upside exposure, avoid taxable events, and access liquidity. Lava makes this same strategy possible for the best-performing asset of the past decade: bitcoin.”
If you want to unlock your bitcoin’s purchasing power without having to sell your bitcoin, Lava is the place to go.
(1) Overview Energy Launches Space-Based Solar Power & Beams Power
Marc Berte for Overview
A solar panel on the ground sees the sun about 25% of the time, whereas if you’re in a high orbit in space, you can see the sun over 99% of the time.
Big week for doing things in space that we currently do on earth.
First, Elon joined into the space-based data center conversation and hinted that it might be bigger than Starlink. Gavin Baker went on Invest Like the Best to argue that “The most important thing in the next 3-4 years is data centers in space,” to which Elon responded “True.”
Then on Wednesday, Overview Energy came out of stealth to announce that “our team achieved a world first in power beaming: delivering energy from a moving aircraft at ~5 km altitude to solar panels on the ground.” This is the same basic technology they’ll use to beam power from geostationary orbit down to wherever on earth needs it.
A few thoughts:
WE ARE TALKING ABOUT GENERATING POWER IN SPACE AND BEAMING IT TO EARTH AND HAVE SHOWN THAT IT’S POSSIBLE.
Power beaming isn’t a new idea. Nikola Tesla wanted to use radio waves to beam power across the earth over a century ago. But this is a story of CURVE CONVERGENCE.
As CEO Marc Berte tweeted:
–satellites and launch got dramatically cheaper
–lasers became more efficient
–sensing & control matured
Old assumptions no longer apply.
Trust the curves.
(2) Doris Tsao Joins Astera Institute to Lead Neuroscience Program
Astera
At the heart of our new effort is the conviction that true understanding of the brain’s internal model means being able to manipulate it in a controlled way. Towards this goal, we are betting that the brain’s representational architecture is compositional, built from elemental units and a neural syntax for combining them. By identifying these fundamental units and the rules that create and link them, we can uncover the brain’s infinitely generative internal code. This, in turn, would provide a principled way to construct or modify internal representations, much as knowing the words and grammar of a language allows the creation of an unlimited range of sentences and meanings. Such capability would mark a profound advance in understanding.
Our friends at Astera, whose homepage reads, “The future, faster,” announced that they hired Dr. Doris Tsao from Berkeley to lead Astera Neuro.
The new team’s goal is to solve one of the longest-standing, most fundamental questions: how the brain produces conscious experience, cognition, and intelligent behavior.
Dr. Tsao and her team will have the time and resources to figure it out. Jed McCaleb and Seemay Chou are backing the new effort with $600M over a decade and building a team across neuroscience, ML engineering, and systems building.
Astera Neuro hopes to use its work to inform AGI, and to be able to predictably produce brain states and capabilities, like restoring full, rich sight to the blind. They also plan to share their research “exclusively outside traditional journals as a forcing function for developing faster, more open, and more useful outputs that represent the full scientific process.”
Jed and Seemay are right at the top of my favorite billionaire list. Commercial space stations, Astera generally, cutting edge neuro research, and fighting against the scientific journal industrial complex.
And you can work with them. They’re looking for a COO for Astera Neuro.
(3) Atavistic Genetic Expression Dissociation (AGED) During Aging
Léo Pio-Lopez and Michael Levin in Aging Cell
Similarly to the atavistic model of cancer, in which cells revert to unicellular-like behavior, aging may result from the breakdown of coordinated morphogenetic control, leading organs and tissues toward less integrated, ancient unicellular states.
Look, I don’t mean to make it Michael Levin week every week here. But in my defense, (1) the dude keeps dropping some of the most interesting science in the world and (2) I didn’t even realize this was Michael Levin when Aman & Sehaj sent me this tweet and still thought it was very cool because (3) I was listening to the most recent Telepathy Tapes episode on Tuesday and it was all about using energy healing practices to restore cellular coherence.
Then bam, the science to back it up.
Coherence refers to the intricate, organized state of cellular and tissue-level systems that is necessary to maintain their optimal function and survival.
Basically, during aging, tissues lose coherence and begin to drift back toward earlier evolutionary attractor states. Like, they remember when they were just unicellular organisms and try to get back to that, which means decohering from the other cells around them.
The attractor state concept, borrowed from dynamical systems theory, suggests that biological systems naturally converge toward stable configurations. Young tissues occupy attractor states corresponding to optimal function and survival. During aging, cellular and tissue-level systems gradually lose the coherence necessary to maintain these optimal states and drift toward alternative, less healthy attractors.
Understanding all of this, most importantly, could be a bridge to figuring out how to stabilize young tissue states or reverse transitions towards degenerated states, which could mean preventing or reversing aging.
(4) Boom Supersonic Launches Superpower Turbine for AI Data Centers
Blake Scholl
I texted @sama, who had been a Boom investor for more than a decade. Would a 42MW nat gas turbine be helpful? The answer was a resounding yes. 90 days later, we had a launch order for 1.21GW and well over $1.25B in backlog
In this house, we support Astro Mechanica in the Supersonic Race. Even still, we gotta admit that Boom Supersonic cooked with this one.
The idea is this: there’s such a power bottleneck thanks to the datacenter boom, specifically for natural gas turbines, that companies like XAI and OpenAI have started building their own power plants with converted jet engine turbines. Overall, according to Halcyon, there are 91 gigawatts of gas plants being planned in the US.
Boom, which is planning to make its own supersonic jet engines, turbines and all, is going to make a power turbine: Superpower, a 42MW natural gas turbine.
They realized that they could kill more birds with this one stone than a jet engine does in flight.
First, it helps solve the power shortage.
Second, and most importantly, it could generate a lot of cash fast, which is crucial because one of the biggest challenges that Boom is going to face is that it costs upwards of $10 billion to certify a new aircraft and where the hell were they going to get all that cash?
Third, using the turbine for power actually gives Boom a way to test their engine on the ground that actually generates revenue.
Gotta hand it to Blake and Co. This is a pretty brilliant solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem. Now, they just have to make them. As Elon replied:
(5) AxiomProver Scores 9/12 Putnam Math Competition Autonomously
Carina Hong
The William Lowell Putnam Exam is the world’s most prestigious university competition. The median score is often 0.
Axiom is a 4-month-old startup in Palo Alto. We’re building the starting point for reasoning: an AI mathematician.
I was really good at math in middle school and then got less good at math in high school. I like to tell myself it’s because I had a bad teacher and I messed around and I didn’t care enough, but all of that is in the past now, doesn’t matter, who cares for real.
Not wasting my precious time getting really good at math was the real genius solution all along, because this week, Axiom, a 4-month-old startup that recently bought its first couch, beat 99.9% of the humans smart enough to even take the Putnam Exam in the first place.
Hope all you mathematicians enjoy hobbies and fun and doing whatever you wish.
BONUS: Solo Founders Report
My friend Julian Weisser and his Solo Founders put out a report with Carta on the state of solo founding, or starting a company with one person.
Accepted wisdom in Silicon Valley, and Y Combinator’s stated preference, was that companies with two or more founders do better. Like most dogma, that fails to stand up to scrutiny. Julian & Co. have brought the receipts. Which means that if you want to start a company but were just waiting on the right co-founder, stop waiting.
(Julian pointed out that Anjan Katta, who wrote Hardware is a Fruit with me yesterday, is a Solo Founder.)
DOUBLE BONUS: Cuby is Building
Lil’ update on what Cuby’s been up to since I wrote about them last year.
TRIPLE Bonus: XMTP brings messaging and group chats to World App
We love to see two Not Boring Capital portfolio companies team up to make the internet better for humans. `
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Aman and Sehaj, and to Lava for sponsoring. Welcome them to the Not Boring family and thank them for supporting optimism by not selling your bitcoin.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-12-11 21:58:19
Welcome to the 494 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 255,469 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Thursday! I want to try something new, which might grow into something bigger. A little seed of an idea, if you will.
One of the coolest parts of my job is that I get to talk to really smart people who are building products and companies based on the thoughts in their head. Sometimes, I write long essays on these people and their companies. Typically, the easiest way to get their ideas out into the world is by going on a podcast and yapping for an hour.
But there are a lot of ideas that deserve more than a passing mention on a podcast and less than a 10k word deep dive, and that are better expressed by the person whose idea it is than by me once-removed.
So I’m playing around with different ways to host those ideas, starting by co-writing an essay with Anjan Katta, the founder of Daylight Computer, on something he mentioned in passing when we were texting over the weekend.
If this series sticks around, Anjan will probably be a recurring voice. He’s one of the most original thinkers I know, and happens to be interested in a lot of the same weird stuff I am. I highly recommend his conversation with Jackson Dahl on Dialectic, the video he did with Jason Carman last year, and the conversation he had with Mario Gabriele and his mentor / computer legend Alan Kay.
I will also say that while I’m not an investor in Daylight, I bought one and I use it every day, and if you’re thinking of a Christmas gift for your favorite nerd… here.
If you buy one, you might just be supporting a world of much better software.
Let’s get to it.
We are living through of one of the most interesting periods in startup history. Revenue is growing faster, rounds are bigger, funds are bigger, and companies are burning billions. Some categories are red hot and others can’t buy a bucket.
That’s why I found SVB’s new State of the Markets H2 2025 report so fascinating. It highlights a complex and uneven recovery across tech. While some sectors are experiencing renewed growth, others face persistent challenges with stagnant deal activity, depressed valuations, and limited exits.
50% of VC-backed tech companies having less than a year of cash remaining. Series A companies burn $5 to generate every $1 of revenue. One-third of US VC investment has come from deals involving the six largest funds. Things are changing fast.
A Conversational Essay With Anjan Katta
There is this challenge in software, and in capitalism, that new products, especially those designed to do anything but compete and win, start their life at a disadvantage, like naked seeds.
An example. Last week, my friends Alex Komoroske, Aishwarya Khanduja, and collaborators released the Resonant Computing Manifesto.
“Regardless of which path we choose, the future of computing will be hyper-personalized,” they write. “The question is whether that personalization will be in service of keeping us passively glued to screens—wading around in the shallows, stripped of agency—or whether it will enable us to direct more attention to what matters.”
Their vision is the good future, and the question they ask is an important one, one that I’ve been writing about. I signed the Manifesto. I want to see the future go the way they do, as I suspect most of us do.
But there’s a chasm between writing a manifesto and seeing it manifest. I tweeted, “This is going to be one of the most fascinating things to figure out in the next few years, how to build software that both wins capitalism and is good for us.”
That was a myopic framing. This isn’t a next few years thing, although AI makes it more urgent. This is a forever thing, an always has been thing.
This is one of the tensions at the heart of capitalism: the market doesn’t account well for externalities, negative or positive, and so trying to do the “right thing” is disadvantageous.
If a social media product gets the most people to spend the most time in it, it wins. It is not penalized for brainrot and depression. Brainrot and depression are just negative externalities, borne by society.
But what if we all agree those are bad? And social media developers decide, hey, we’re not going to do that bad stuff anymore? What if we all decide just to do the good thing, the Resonant Computing thing?
This is the subject of one of the internet’s greatest essays, Meditations on Moloch. Multipolar traps, situations in which everyone is competing against everyone else, lead to races to the bottom where no one can unilaterally stop even when everyone agrees the outcome is bad. Everyone cooperates until someone takes advantage of those soft goody two-shoes, makes the brainrottiest version of all, and steals all the customers.
“Good for you” stuff, stuff with positive externalities usually gets its ass handed to it in the market. There are no healthy snacks in the top 10.
Anjan Katta, the CEO of Daylight and one of the most individual thinkers I’ve met in tech, has been thinking a lot about this problem. A lot. For seven years, as he’s built Daylight Computer, “A new kind of computer, designed for deep focus and wellbeing.” It’s sort of like if Kindle and iPad had a baby, to do computer-y things you can feel good about.
Anjan texted me when he saw that I signed the Manifesto like he did. We got to talking, and I realized that Daylight and the Resonant Computing movement go together like apples and seeds.
This whole essay is based on his ideas, kind of a mashup of the thoughts he’s mined over seven years and my forcing them onto the page.
What I learned from Anjan is that one point of hardware is to be a fruit.
Consider the apple: an apple tree wraps its reproductive code (the seed) in an animal-tempting package (the fruit). The seed rides along for free, gets distributed, and only needs to get to work once it’s already in fertile ground, later. Nature asks no one to value the seed.
Hardware can play a similar role for new software.
Right, and so the problem with trying to do the right thing, as Anjan explained it, is that a lot of well-meaning companies have tried to build defaults into their software that ultimately have positive externalities, that are pro-social, and either those companies fail or they throw out the defaults for more competitively fit ones.
By the “right” thing, here, the “good for you defaults,” we mean those like the Resonant Computing Manifesto’s five principles: Private, Dedicated, Plural, Adaptable, Prosocial.
These “good for you” defaults tend to fail on their own because in the short-term, they cost more than they’re worth to the people deciding whether or not to use them, namely developers and customers.
Take privacy. There is a dedicated mausoleum in the startup graveyard for companies that have tried to compete on privacy alone. Ensuring privacy, and security, costs friction, and the people vote with their thumbs: the cost today isn’t worth the maybe one day benefit. “123456” is still the world’s most common password.
The challenge for good-for-you defaults is that the people who benefit aren’t the people who decide. Decisions are immediate and individual; benefits are long-term and societal.
It’s not that people don’t want Privacy or Adaptability. All else equal, they do! It’s that the promise of their future benefits isn’t strong enough to overcome their costs today, for most people, the same way that you would have a hard time convincing a bear to disperse apple seeds by paw even if it might mean delicious apples one day in the future.
Which is why evolution created the apple, and why Anjan thinks hardware can bridge the gap for good-for-you software.
For one thing, hardware provides activation energy and overpowers friction.
People will buy hardware because it’s new and shiny and bold, because it does something very specific they want to do (or says something very specific that they want to say about themselves). They will often pay a lot of money for good new hardware, at a good margin.
A screen with no blue light and a high refresh rate is so valuable to certain customers that they’re willing to trade a little software friction to get it.
Hardware allows you to solve the problem of resonant software not providing a benefit for the user immediately, it not having a benefit for the dev immediately, and being able to survive the valley of death that is the three to five to seven, 10 years before this actually serves to accrue value for your ecosystem, for your community, for the customers, for the devs, whatever it may be.
Come for the hardware, stay for the software. Come for the “don’t rot your brain with blue light,” stay for all the other stuff.
“And that to me is the sort of a-ha moment of what we’re doing at Daylight,” Anjan voice memo’d from El Salvador.
Hardware generates cash flow, too.
The reMarkable tablet, the predecessor to Daylight, does around $400+ million in revenue at ~50% margins. You don’t have no 5G, you ain’t got no titanium, you ain’t got no A19 crazy processor. And you know, those are the most expensive parts of a computer. And so…
That’s $200 million of annual cash flow, up for grabs from reMarkable, but probably many times more than that because Daylight does more than reMarkable, does it better, and expands the market. You could imagine kids using Daylight as their first computer. Maybe $1 billion in cash flow a year eventually? More? Whatever the number, all that cash can support the software ecosystem as it develops enough to stand on its own two feet.
Which means customers don’t have to notice underlying protocols, because they’re not paying for them. They’re not making that decision. It’s bundled into the hardware purchase.
The cool part of hardware is I don’t need to gain revenue from the particular software because what I’m ultimately playing for is to build the next ecosystem, right?
And it’s like what Jeff Bezos says, your margin is my opportunity. I’m like, your negative externalities are my opportunity.
In the longer-term, I think society is going to orient in that way. And it will ultimately then be best for the customer and for business, not just in general for society. But for all three. You just need to have enough patience to be able to get to that.
Hardware provides the bridge, crosses the chasm, seeds the future.
Hardware, this beautiful fruit, can be differentiated, 10x better on some dimension, in a way that’s very hard for software to be at this point. You can put hardware under the Christmas tree, too, which is to say, people are used to paying for hardware and getting a thing.
So hardware can be this carrier that generates enough cash flow to sustain both itself and the software it’s carrying until, in the longer-term, the initial bet, that a mature ecosystem built on those principles is actually better once it matures, pays off.
At which point, you have been spending years building this vertically integrated user experience, which should mean a better user experience, because the more dimensions of reality I have access to, the better I can make the UX, over time.
Because hardware gives you access to more dimensions of reality.
This is all a bet of course, but one with positive EV. If the software bet is wrong, you still have the differentiated hardware; you can still run Android. If it’s right, your devices become synonymous with technology that works for you.
Even though “hardware is hard,” building hardware makes a lot of other things easier, once you’ve done it. It would be structurally very difficult, at this point, to do any of what we’re describing as a venture-backed software startup alone.
It would be hard for anyone to do this alone, because it is an ecosystem.
And hardware can serve as a physical home to a new digital ecosystem.
Hardware overcomes the immediate consumer benefit problem because people like buying great new hardware.
That helps overcome the immediate developer benefit problem, because developers want to build where the customers are, and where customers will notice them.
Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store are so unbelievably saturated that it’s practically impossible to stand out, even if you’re building something genuinely better than what already exists.
On Daylight, there is very little competition and direct access to all these Daylight users who, if they’ve spent a bunch of money to buy this thing, they’re basically all people who are willing to pay for a particular type of experience.
If you haven’t used a Daylight, what is that experience? It’s calm, humane, resonant, Anjan uses the word “poetic” and it works. It has this gentle orange glow. I use it to read and take notes and think and it doesn’t grab at me to do more when I’m done doing those things. It’s trying to do in hardware what Resonant Computing wants to do in software.
It’s less noisy, by design, so Daylight becomes a really attractive place where the developers of new software who face incumbent distribution advantages and straight noise on existing platforms finally have a chance to compete on product quality on the new platform. It’s a very attractive proposition if you’re the reader app number 52, if you’re the meditation app number 66, if you have a great app that just can’t compete in the noise of the existing app stores.
And because of that, Daylight can get developers to build on good-for-you defaults.
Daylight offers the normal Google Play Store, the people want what the people want, but for any dev who wants to develop for Daylight specifically, as part of the base SDK, as part of the base set of standards for developing in Daylight, you can ask them to implement this protocol.
And sure, maybe there’s some friction to do that. But as long as the customer experience doesn’t suffer, it’s not a big ask to developers: adopt these defaults to reach Daylight’s customers.
Those customers won’t know or care what’s under their software in their new hardware in the beginning, and they don’t have to. No one thinks about the seeds, but they do spread them, give them the chance to grow.
Even if immediately there is no value prop to the user, we can have basically a ton of people with apps that have this underneath. And slowly over time, maybe it gets revealed to the user.
Maybe it creates interesting emergent behaviors. Maybe it creates certain AI workflows and use cases and applications that are really useful. Right? All the things that Alex is trying to do with Common Tools.
I think in a couple years, we’ll be able to create fun, new user experiences. And I can survive until then. The point is I’m not dependent. It’s not a dependency. It’s an optionality.
I’m able to make that work because I’m getting my cashflow from hardware and I think it’ll be better for customers in the long run, a better user experience than anywhere else, and so, yeah, I think that just allows us to solve a canonical set of problems here.
It’s really straightforward, but I don’t know if you don’t take this approach, that you can do this.
Hardware is a fruit, a delicious carrier of fragile seeds that might one day grow into something delicious themselves. Anjan’s logic flows a little something like this.
Hardware lets you do three things: own the OS, create a better UX, and generate hardware revenue.
Owning the OS means that you get to set the standards for your ecosystem, which developers adopt if they want to reach your customers. Your customers are there because, by building hardware and software, you’ve built a product that is meaningfully better for them on things that matter to them. And because it’s hardware, they’re willing to pay cash now, which means that your ecosystem can survive until it matures.
Of particular importance, that cash represents the fact that customers are paying the hardware manufacturer to do a job for them. If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. If you’re paying for the product, the product is the product!
Which means that the hardware revenue isn’t funding the ecosystem out of altruism, but in order to deliver the best version of the product that customers have paid for, even if it takes time to come to fruition.
This is a bet that compounds over three, five, seven, ten years. You can bake in constraints and incentives that are genuinely healthy for users and society, even if they don’t pay off this quarter. Healthier defaults → better apps → better UX → a stronger ecosystem that eventually throws off huge economic value.
The endgame is a business model built on aligned incentives, not exploitation. Users, developers, and the company all benefit, and the platform generates positive externalities for the world.
In short: you can be more idealistic with your software when the hardware is paying the bills.
What we’ve discussed in this essay is a specific category of solution to a specific category of problem: how to give software that has short-term friction and long-term benefits the chance to bloom by wrapping it in hardware.
But I think it applies more generally, which is why we wrote it.
It’s Pace Layering. Hardware is the nature layer, a firm base that creates room for freedom and experimentation at the higher layers.
And it’s an exploration of how to fight capitalism with capitalism, or how to give the future and society a say in decisions made today by individuals.
That’s one of the most fascinating questions in the world to me. If you believe that capitalism is one of humanity’s greatest inventions and that it can be improved, small improvements can have a massive societal impact.
It’s why I’ve been so fascinated by crypto: can you program incentives into software to overcome the mismatch?
There’s something beautiful about the idea that hardware is a potential solution.
It’s hard. It’s slow. It’s expensive. But because of all that, there’s less of it. It’s easier for hardware to stand out. The people who want it are willing to pay for it.
Building your own hardware gives you room to improve on every piece of its stack.
For Vertical Integrators, that might mean building hardware in order to write your own firmware, software, and OS, so that the whole system works perfectly for your specific use case. As Alan Kay, who is mentoring Anjan and Daylight, said: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
But in software, we’ve seen that ecosystems build better apps than any single hardware maker can. You run very few Apple apps on your iPhone, I bet. Knowing that, the smart move, and the prosocial one, may be taking some of your hardware credit and gifting it to the ecosystem, to bootstrap it into what you want it to become.
There’s a built-in plurality to this approach, too. Hardware doesn’t scale into every nook and cranny the way that hyperadapted software can. Each piece of consumer computing hardware can develop its own little ecosystem, almost physically, like little countries running competing economic and governance experiments. America had to control its own hardware before it could throw out British software and write its own.
Best, none of this requires anyone to do anything they don’t want to do, now or in the future. The bear doesn’t need to care about the seed. He just needs to desire the apple. The rest of this shit flows from there.
Thanks to Alex and Aishwarya for the Manifesto that sparked this, and to Anjan for jamming.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with a Weekly Dose.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-12-05 21:50:29
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday! I hope you didn’t miss us too much last week. We’re back.
December is one of the best months of the year. Holiday parties. Santa. A few final sprint weeks and then a few days to relax and plan the year ahead. And, of course, humans squeezing as much good progress into the last bit of 2025 as they can.
Let’s get to it.
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Zipline co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn
Over the weekend, Zipline co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn tweeted that the company has seen all of its numbers going up and to the right except one… ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) for kids.
A couple of years ago, “Rwanda made eliminating childhood malnutrition a national priority, and with better logistics they succeeded almost immediately, reducing cases of severe malnutrition by up to 89%.” Zipline has to delivery fewer of the RUTFs used to fight malnutrition because it’s helped practically eliminate the issue in two years. In their place, Ryan said, Zipline is delivering more products like vaccines and supplements that help kids have a healthier childhood instead of simply surviving.
This is huge, that we’re at this point in civilization. For some reason, I clearly remember talking to somebody in line at Alpine Bagels in college about this idea: that all of these interventions that could help people in developing countries were actually cheap and simple, but that getting those cheap, simple solutions to people was the problem.
Now, we live in a world in which we can put those cheap, simple solutions in an autonomous drone that navigates itself to the remote areas in need. Just fly right over the challenge.
Half of childhood deaths are linked to malnutrition, per Our World in Data: “In 2021, 4.7 million children under the age of five died; 2.4 million of those were attributed to child and maternal malnutrition.” We can save millions of kids’ lives every year not with miracle drugs, but with logistics.
Zipline and Waymo might be two of the best longevity drugs we have.
More good news, then: last week, Zipline announced a $150M pay-for-performance deal with the US State Department to expand its medical drone delivery across Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire over the next three years. The goal is to triple network coverage from 5,000 to 15,000 health facilities and reach up to 100 million people who will now be able to receive lifesaving drugs and food from drones that fly themselves through the sky like little avian miracles. What a world.
Michael Dell on X
Susan and I believe the smartest investment we can make is in children. That’s why we’re so excited to contribute $6.25 billion from our charitable funds to help 25 million children start building a strong financial foundation through Invest America.
This one is exactly what it sounds like: Michael and Susan Dell are contributing $250 to 25 million children, a total of $6.25 billion, through the new Invest America program.
Invest America accounts are tax-advantaged accounts for children under 18 that must go into low-cost, diversified index funds tracking the broad stock market, like the S&P 500. Championed by Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner, the idea is that the country is stronger when more people own a piece of its success. Instead of feeling left behind, kids might come into adulthood feeling like they’re benefiting from growth, too. The money is locked until the kids are 18, at which point it can be withdrawn for things like education, a down payment on a home, or to start a business.
There is some criticism of the plan, which I kind of get, because I sold the Savings Bonds my grandparents gave me almost as soon as I could, before they’d fully matured, to buy beer. So is Invest America going to turn every little kid into Warren Buffett? Maybe I was an outlier…
But there was also a surprising amount of criticism of the Dells’ gift, from Rationalists and Effective Altruists who want to optimize all the joy and expressiveness out of giving. Yes, $6.25 billion could save the shrimp until the heat death of the universe, but have you considered how cool it is to give 25 million kids1 $250 each and introducing them to the joys of compounding? of having a little cash sitting there waiting for you?
Now even with a roaring next two decades in the S&P 500, $250 won’t turn into enough to pay for college (which in 18 years will either not exist or cost $7 trillion per semester). What’s most exciting about the gift, though, is that it sets a precedent.
Through the plan, anyone (parents, grandparents, friends, employers, philanthropies) can contribute, up to a max of $5,000/year for each kid. The federal government is seeding kids born during Trump’s second presidency with $1,000 bucks, but I think seeing one private philanthropist fill the kids’ coffers will inspire others to do something similar.
Ted Cruz and newly-married Cory Booker recently sent a cross-aisle letter asking CEOs to consider contributing to the accounts. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick plans to prioritize legislation in the 2027 session to create a “New Little Texan Savings Fund” that would give Texan kids an extra $1,000 in the S&P 500. You gotta imagine that local businesspeople will do a little something in their home zip codes.
And let’s just say that if someone at Pampers isn’t figuring out, this very minute, how to swaddle each and every newborn’s Invest America account in $100 bills, heads will roll at 1 Procter & Gamble Plaza.
Dude, you’re getting a $250.
via Perplexity
Amazon is launching its next-gen Trainium chip, which it’s positioning as a cheaper alternative to NVIDIA. The more interesting story is that Amazon, following Google’s recent move in TPUs, is competing so directly with Jensen & Co.
I think Mohit Agarwal did the best job predicting that something like this would happen and explaining why over a year ago.
TL;DR Vertical Integration Rules Everything Around Me. VREAM get the money.
Even beyond chips, Amazon is getting feisty. Maybe it was seeing their founder with his new love interest.
Just last week, they announced three new satellite internet terminals under the rebranded Amazon Leo (fka Project Kuiper) in a bid to compete with Starlink. Ultra in particular looks pretty speedy: 1 gbps up, 400 gbps down.
It’s no Somos, but we just love to see the titans compete on the commercial gridiron.
NASA
Scientists led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan found sugars essential for biology on Earth in the Bennu samples, detailing their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience. The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found. Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system.
This week, scientists published three new papers with findings from asteroid Bennu.
The one we want to talk about is the one from Yoshihiro Furukawa and team of Tohoku University in Japan published in Nature Geoscience: Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu.
As the name would suggest, the team found sugars essential to life - the five-carbon sugar ribose (used in RNA), which has been found on other space objects before, and the six-carbon glucose, which gives life energy and which had never previously been found in an extraterrestrial sample.
Ribose and glucose aren’t evidence of life, any more than a wood plank is evidence of a house. The sugars are building blocks, and along with the amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids already found on Bennu, suggest that building blocks of biological life are spread throughout the solar system.
Parmita Mishra captured my feeling cleanly:
what the actual fuck
how are people not talking about the fact that they found bio-essential sugars on an asteroidOf course this is not proving actual life but come on, guys. That’s obvious. What it is proving is an abundance of the chemicals needed for life to happen. similar findings in meteorites have been known but often ignored because people assume it is earth’s contamination driving such results.
This is the most pristine example. It is hard to argue this is a conflated result due to earth contaminants.
After some research, she followed up: “the NASA Asteroid Bennu Samples, if real, kinda make it hard for me to ignore the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.”
Right after Age of Disclosure dropped and Rogan went on American Alchemy… Probably nothing. 👽
Lex Fridman & Michael Levin
But I mean, what is life, right?
Every couple of years, Michael Levin comes on Lex Fridman to give the most plain English overview of everything he and his lab have been thinking up and proving out over those couple of years (which is decades in normal lab years). Intelligence as cognitive lightcone. Minds beyond biology. Unexpected agency in trivial algorithms.
I don’t want to spoil it. This dude is just operating on a different level. Enjoy.
I haven’t watched this yet, but I’ve heard great things and plan to this weekend. Even with Claude Opus 4.5 coming off the top rope to bodyslam Gemini, the Weekly Dose remains a Google DeepMind / Demis Hassabis fan account. This is their story.
As one friend with a much higher IQ than mine (but still lower than Demis’) texted: “main takeaway is that IQ matters a lot.” Shit.
Radical AI comes out of stealth with Jason Carman materials video
Retro Biosciences is raising at a $5B valuation to add 10 years to healthspan
Unlimited Industries raises $12M for automated infrastructure construction
Bastion2 announces $14.6M in funding and fresh Sony Bank stables partnership
Steven Levy for WIRED
I got to try this hearing aid a few months ago, and it’s remarkable. To oversimplify, current hearing aids amplify all the sound around you (I could hear water running in pipes and footsteps on the floor above), but Fortell’s picks out the sound you want to hear, like the voice of the person you’re talking to, so it sounds like a normal conversation. Ya gotta hear it to believe it, but it sounds like getting old just got a little bit better.
Have a great weekend y’all.
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Thanks for reading,
Packy
Kids under 11 living in Zip Codes with average income under $150k.
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