2026-05-29 20:32:20
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday, and welcome to our 195th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Man, just when I thought it was going to be hard to top last week’s Dose, we have an LDL cholesterol-fighting gene therapy, evidence that GLP-1s slow cancer, supersonic flight, and nanotech, and a Moon Base. We also have the coolest Science Breakthroughs roundup yet. Even a massive Blue Origin explosion can’t slow us down.
If you get through this and want even more optimism injected into your veins, check out this week’s essay:
Let’s get to it.
Hiring globally doesn’t have to be complicated
Hiring globally can unlock growth, but local laws, payroll, and compliance often slow startups down.
Deel’s free guide breaks down what an Employer of Record (EOR) is, how startups use EORs to hire internationally without opening entities, and when it makes sense to use one so you can scale with confidence.
For those keeping score at home, this is the second week in a row that we’ve led off with Eli Lily. Last week, their Reta Phase 3 trials showed astonishingly good results, and this week, they published the results of a phase 1, open-label, single-ascending-dose study on the VERVE-102 gene therapy targeting PCSK9, which is responsible for LDL cholesterol, which is in turn responsible for a lot of heart disease and deaths.
Now this is just a phase 1, and there were only 35 people involved, but a single dose gene therapy reduced PCSK9 levels “from 51% at the 0.3-mg-per-kilogram dose to 88% at the 1.0-mg-per-kilogram dose,” and showed corresponding reductions in the LDL cholesterol level “from 9% at the 0.3-mg-per-kilogram dose to 62% at the 1.0-mg-per-kilogram dose.”
This is a big deal! Globally, about 4.4 million deaths a year are attributable to high LDL cholesterol, roughly 7.8% of all deaths. Cardiovascular disease causes roughly 18.6 million deaths a year worldwide, so high LDL accounts for somewhere around a quarter of those.
Now, we might be able to knock out 4.4 million deaths a year with a shot.
PCSK9 inhibitors are not new. On a recent Invest Like the Best episode, Braidwell Managing Partner Alex Karnal called PCSK9 medicines “pretty much a free lunch”:
The headline here is PCSK9 medicines are amazing, because what they do is they today can lower our bad cholesterol, that LDL cholesterol, by 50%. And we now have outcome studies in patients at different degrees of having high cholesterol, having significant protection from ever developing and having a heart attack or a stroke. And so in patients that have previously had a heart attack or stroke, we can reduce that risk by over 20% in the future. And for people that are at high risk of having a heart attack or a stroke, the medicines that are approved and on the market today can lower that risk by about 25%.
With previous PCSK9 medicines, people would have to stay on them forever to continue to eat that free lunch. Now, if Lily’s early results hold, they will get all of the benefits in a one-and-done shot. Essentially, the drug edits your gene to be like the “population of people in the world that have a genetic mutation that conveys a massive advantage. They have a mutation in their PCSK9 gene, which means they don’t produce the PCSK9 protein.”
We are still a few years away from this miracle drug hitting the market, and there are still trials to be done, but this is a really big deal, not only because it’s an assault on LDL cholesterol and therefore heart disease, but also because it’s another example of our ability to see an advantageous mutation in a certain population, make a drug to mimic it, and knock more and more diseases off the list.
Plus, as the WSJ reported, a number of pharma companies are developing drugs to attack LDL’s cousin, Lp(a), or lipoprotein(a). Lp(a) is almost entirely genetic and currently untreatable. About 90% of a person’s Lp(a) level is fixed at birth, diet and exercise don’t lower it, and statins can actually raise it. So unlike LDL, which we have many tools for, there’s essentially no approved therapy for high Lp(a) today. Roughly one in five people globally have dangerously high levels, and that’s bad. Lp(a) hardens arteries and promotes clotting, which is why it’s so noxious in driving cardiovascular events.
So far, science has been powerless against Lp(a), both in treating it and in proving that lowering a person's Lp(a) will actually reduce heart attacks and strokes. Earlier drugs lowered the particle moderately but failed to reduce events in studies. The current bet from Novartis, Amgen, and, you guessed it, Eli Lilly is that new technologies can cut Lp(a) far more dramatically, with late-stage trials underway and Novartis's first Phase 3 results (pelacarsen) expected this year. Human genetics suggests it should work, but they don't know for sure.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, and now we have even more data points suggesting that you should really figure out how to stay alive for the next few years, because thereafter, you may be able to stay alive for a very long time. “Medicine keeps getting better and better.”
Xavier Martinez for The Wall Street Journal
You thought we were done with Eli Lily? We’re not done with Eli Lily.
Just as the ink was drying on last week’s Dose, The Wall Street Journal published an article about GLP-1s’ cancer-fighting abilities. “A suite of four new studies suggest that people taking so-called GLP-1 drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro saw reductions in tumor progression, lower overall chance of death and less risk of developing breast cancer.”
In lung cancer patients, the rate of progression to advanced disease was cut roughly in half—10% in GLP-1 users versus 22% in the comparison group. Breast cancer patients showed a similar pattern, with progression rates of 10% versus 20%. Colorectal and liver cancers also showed statistically significant reductions.
These studies are from places like UT MD Anderson, University of Pennsylvania, and Cleveland Clinic, and while researchers don’t yet understand the mechanism, the research points to yet another miracle for this miracle drug.
I’m not even sure what to say at this point, so say it with me… get fucked, cancer.
In Riding the Leopard, I wrote, “I would like to live in the future in which we have spaceships and abundant energy and supersonic planes, the future in which car crashes and cancer are a thing of the past.”
I wasn’t expecting that future to come quite so soon. While GLP-1s go to work on cancer, Hermeus became “the world’s first privately developed, unmanned supersonic jet and the fastest unmanned aircraft flying today” when its Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 went supersonic at Mach 1.21 in an unmanned test flight. Huge congrats to AJ and the Hermeus team. I got chills watching the video.
Now, they’ll have more fuel to go even faster, more often. Yesterday, they announced that the Defense Innovation Unit expanded its contract by $159M to $219M to tackle high-Mach flight and payload release.
I may have dreamed too small. Hermeus is now gunning for hypersonic flight.
One thing that I forgot to mention in my vision for the future, but that I would like to add now and would very much like to see, is nanotechnology.
At the end of Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall paints a picture of the future we could have with abundant energy: flying cars, utility fog, the Weather Machine, a “space pier,” and maybe most tantalizingly, atomically precise manufacturing (nanotech), nanofactories and self-replicating machines that build objects atom by atom, collapsing the cost of physical goods the way semiconductors collapsed the cost of computation.
Nanotech is the vision Richard Feynman laid out in Plenty of Room at the Bottom, the one Eric Drexler theorized in Nanosystems, the one Hall imagines in Where Is My Flying Car?, and the one Neil Stephenson painted in The Diamond Age. If you can manipulate atoms one-by-one, you can build anything you can dream up.
Until now, though, it’s remained a dream. Drexler’s theory of positional mechanosynthesis, alongside Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas, was attacked, most famously in the Drexler–Smalley debate, where Smalley's "fat fingers / sticky fingers" objection held that you couldn't do controlled positional chemistry at that scale.
Well, we can tell Smalley exactly where to stick his fat fingers now.
On Tuesday, Merkle, Freitas, and a number of researchers published a paper demonstrating simultaneous spatial and chemical control over the mechanosynthetic fabrication of carbon structures. Concretely, using a technique they call inverted-mode STM, carbon dimer (C₂) units are donated from surface-deposited molecules onto pre-patterned reactive sites on a hydrogen-passivated Si(100) surface. They show three escalating things: single-site C₂ donation, spatially patterned multi-site donation, and the stepwise assembly of polyyne structures through successive C–C bond formation. Their framing is that this establishes controlled mechanosynthetic donation as a foundational capability for programmable atomically precise fabrication.
For roughly forty years, Mechanosynthesis— using mechanical positional control to drive site-specific chemistry, building structures atom by atom — lived almost entirely in theory and computational chemistry. The canonical proposed primitive was a "dimer placement tool" that deposits C₂ units onto a workpiece to grow diamondoid structures. That is almost exactly what this paper demonstrates experimentally!
There is still a massive gap between this work and Hall’s nanofactory. They've built short carbon chains, one dimer at a time, with an STM tip, which is a primitive. The chasm to the vision is throughput and dimensionality: a single tip placing dimers serially is astronomically slow versus the massively parallel, self-replicating systems APM actually requires, and going from 1D polyyne chains to 3D diamondoid objects is its own huge challenge.
But come on! This thing that people said was impossible was just demonstrated to be possible! I am going to spend the weekend dreaming up all of the things I want to order from the nanofactory, like my own APM island a la The Diamond Age.
In the meantime, if you want to get smart on nanotech, I recommend Hall’s primer for the Abundance Institute and Jacob Rintamaki’s A Technical Review of Nanosytems.
On Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and the NASA team held a press conference at its HQ in Washington to provide updates on the Moon Base program, a long-term lunar exploration and infrastructure initiative under the Artemis program aimed at enabling sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity at the lunar South Pole.
It also launched a Moon Base Website, complete with the hype video above and a timeline for the Moon Base. Because we are establishing a Base, on the Moon.
Isaacman & Co laid out the plan for three initial Moon Base missions. Moon Base I, targeted for no earlier than fall 2026, will use Blue Origin’s privately funded Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander to deliver NASA science payloads, including the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies instrument and a Laser Retroreflective Array, to the Shackleton Connecting Ridge. Moon Base II, planned for later in 2026, will use Astrobotic’s Griffin lander to deliver more than 500 kilograms (over 1,100 pounds) of cargo, including Astrolab’s FLIP rover, to mature lunar terrain vehicle mobility, autonomous operations, and logistics. Moon Base III will prioritize scientific payloads to expand understanding of the lunar surface.
Then, eventually, we’ll have people living on the Moon, which is a harsh mistress but a potentially perfect launchpad for humanity’s mission to Mars. What a universe.
Quick note: I think this might be the coolest Science Breakthroughs yet, with entries on the genetic architecture of complex traits, hallmarks of aging and mortality, homing pigeons relying on superparamagnetic macrophages for navigation, and armadillo-inspired morphing skeletons for robots. Science Breakthroughs is a roundup of the bleeding edge, the stuff that’s even earlier in its development than what we cover in the Dose.
I think it’s worth the subscription alone, and in general, I’m trying to share a lot more value with not boring world subscribers, including recent pieces like Riding the Leopard, Cowboy Space Corporation Case Study, and Thank God for Data Centers. I hope you’ll subscribe and join us.
2026-05-28 03:19:05
Welcome to the 2,232 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 267,788 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Wednesday!
A couple weeks ago, I asked if you wanted me to start sharing more off-the-cuff notes with not boring world subscribers, and the response was great, so we’re back. It’s a Wednesday afternoon, not my normal send time, but these are meant to be less formal and more, “I noticed something interesting, here are my quick thoughts.” This one happens to be a little longer than it is quick, but it’s one I wanted to get out for two reasons:
People hate AI Data Centers, and I think they’re wrong, even if they don’t like AI.
Because I keep hearing, reading, and seeing that AI Data Centers are funding new technologies before they’ve come down the learning curve, which might be a providentially big boon to Reindustrialization and all of the hard, physical things we want to see in the world.
It’s pretty beautiful that gaming chips that evolved from Apollo-funded integrated circuits are creating a product with so much demand that their houses can pay for all sorts of novel technologies, like the Apollo Program did.
Let’s get to it.
Hiring globally doesn’t have to be complicated
Hiring globally can unlock growth, but local laws, payroll, and compliance often slow startups down.
Deel’s free guide breaks down what an Employer of Record (EOR) is, how startups use EORs to hire internationally without opening entities, and when it makes sense to use one so you can scale with confidence.
There exists a vast pool of technologies that are potentially superior to those we employ today, but which require scale and learning curves to reach their potential.
Advanced nuclear reactors are one such technology - they are more expensive than alternatives today, but manufactured at scale, and benefiting from the learning curves required to get there, may become cheaper than other generation technologies. The cost physics are on their side, and nuclear is reliable, safe, firm, and clean.
The challenge with these technologies, in normal times, is that there is little economic incentive for the buyers who would enable the scale to stick their necks out. Natural gas is cheap and abundant, and it’s not that bad for the environment, compared to coal and oil at least, and the environment is someone else’s problem, anyway. And so, in normal times, we remain stuck in local maxima without the demand to push towards global ones.
Historically, these stalemates have cracked in a couple of main ways: Alpha Products and extraeconomic Buyers of Capabilities. These are essentially the same mechanism at different scales and with different motivations.
In The Electric Slide, we discussed the role that Alpha Products played in providing the initial demand that eventually brought each layer of the Electric Stack down their respective cost-performance curves. For lithium-ion batteries, the alpha product was the Sony Handycam. For neodymium magnets and motors, it was the 3.5” hard‑disk drive. For power electronics (IGBTs / inverters), it was the variable‑frequency drive (VFD) for industrial motors. For microcontrollers (MCUs), it was the calculator. Etc.
For each of these, the new technology was advantageous enough in a specific way to the end product that it was worth paying higher costs or sacrificing on other capabilities to capture those benefits.
Alpha Products, however, typically support components that are not multi-hundred million or multi-billion dollar projects in their own right.
The role of the extraeconomic Buyer of Capabilities in the development of new technologies is even better-understood. This is the DoD or NASA, mainly, buying technologies to confer a specific advantage, almost irrespective of their cost. This category of customer cares less about price than about capability.
Theirs is an important role because it gives new technologies the opportunity to get to scale, come down the learning curve, and ultimately compete in the much larger commercial market.
For a while now, but particularly over the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard some version of the same story over and over again:
“We are still going after our long-term mission, but to fund it, we’re planning to sell to data centers.”
Today, Data Centers are increasingly serving as Buyers of Capabilities, acting as something between a government and a commercial buyer. The Data Center is the meta-Alpha Product. If you can sell them something they need, fast, they have an almost bottomless bid.
This is true for obvious things like GPUs, inference chips, and DRAM, but it’s also true for companies that you wouldn’t typically associate with AI data centers, like supersonic turbines, enhanced geothermal, modular construction, high-voltage direct current grids, solid-state transformers, silicon photonics, optical fiber, lasers, batteries, and nuclear.
Many of these technologies have the potential to be better and cheaper than the incumbent technologies they aim to replace, but they have been too expensive and unproven to compete. With backlogs in all of the traditional inputs to Data Centers, however, developers are willing to pay up for new technologies that can deliver fast, which gives them the opportunity to scale up and cost down.
For these technologies, Data Centers act as a third type of Buyer of Capabilities, a commercial analog operating on DoD-style procurement logic but commercial timescales.
Given the size of the budgets, the relative smallness of any one input’s cost relative to the overall project cost and revenue opportunity, and the speed with which Data Centers are making decisions and putting down deposits, Data Centers may meaningfully increase the odds of success of hard tech companies and Vertical Integrators more than the market realizes.
Far from being the villains they are painted as (often using misinformation and largely due to their association with deeply unpopular AI), Data Centers may be the greatest accelerant of American Reindustrialization and a built-world future that benefits all people that we’ve ever seen.
They offer dilution-free capital (real revenue on a negative working capital cycle) to fund the big vision, and more importantly, the opportunity to get to scale and down the learning curve years earlier than would otherwise have been possible. This both accelerates timelines of things that might have worked, but more slowly, and makes companies that might otherwise have died in the Valley of Death viable.
Whatever your feelings are on AI, the furor towards Data Centers is misplaced. Hell, whether or not you think we’re in an AI Bubble barely matters here. In five years, this could all fall apart, and the world will be much better off. Data Centers are funding the future where no one else will.
This isn’t the first time that people have gotten mad that something that seems frivolous is sucking up so many resources. The immediate stuff - like how much money is being spent or power is being consumed - is an easy target, while the long-term benefits are hard to see.
With the benefit of hindsight and distance, the Apollo mission has become one of America’s proudest accomplishments. At the time, though, not everyone loved JFK taking us to the Moon. There were too many problems on Earth to be solved to waste all that time, money, and smarts on a lunar boondoggle.
In May 1961, Gallup asked Americans, “It has been estimated that it would cost the United States 40 billion dollars-or an average of about $225 per person-to send a man to the moon. Would you like to see this amount spent for this purpose, or not?” 58% of respondents said that they would not, another 9% had no opinion, and only 33% supported the mission.
President John F. Kennedy gave his canonical “We choose to go to the Moon” speech not because it was popular, but because it was unpopular and he needed to rally support.
It didn’t work that well. In a 1964 Gallup poll that asked “Do you think the United States should go all out to beat the Russians in a manned-flight to the moon–or don’t you think this is too important?”, 66% of respondents said that they did not think it was too important, and another 8% said “Don’t know,” which amounts to the same thing. In the summer of 1965, “one-third of the nation favored cutting the space budget, while only 16% wanted to increase it.”
Even a decade after NASA pulled off the near-impossible, in 1979, only 41% of Americans told an NBC/AP poll that the benefits of the space program outweighed the costs. By 1995, that had risen to 47%, by 1999 it hit 55%, and by the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing, in 2019, support had reached 64%.
One explanation is that, not having to pay the costs ourselves but getting to bask in the memory of victory, today’s Americans can of course look back and say it was worth it.
Another, though, is that over time, the real benefits, not at all obvious at the time, have become more clear.
Apollo’s critics were ultimately proven wrong, both because beating the Soviets to the Moon was awesome…
… and more directly because the absurdity of the task’s ambition coupled with the bottomlessness of its budget that they complained about were exactly the conditions needed to create terrestrially-useful innovations that would otherwise have taken much longer, or never been invented at all.
While the role that the Apollo Program played in inventing new technologies is probably overblown, it accelerated, scaled, and de-risked a lot of things that otherwise may not have gotten to sufficient scale or cost to impact our lives. Some of the technologies and products for which they served this role include:
Fireproof fabrics and flame-retardant materials (developed after the Apollo 1 fire), which made their way into firefighter suits and racing gear
Improved freeze-drying processes for food preservation
Mylar-based reflective insulation, which became the emergency space blanket
Advances in composite materials and ablative coatings
CAT and MRI imaging benefited from digital image processing techniques developed to enhance lunar photographs at JPL
Implantable cardiac pacemakers improved from bidirectional telemetry developed for astronaut biosensors
Cool suits (liquid-cooled garments) used for MS patients, burn victims, and racing drivers came directly from the spacesuit undergarment
Kidney dialysis machines used a chemical process developed to remove toxins from astronauts’ water
Black & Decker developed the technology to make cordless power tools for collecting lunar samples
NASA developed Memory foam (Temper Foam) for crash protection in seats
Water filtration using silver ions, based on the system that purified the Apollo crew’s water
Scratch-resistant lens coatings, derived from coatings developed for astronaut visors
Improved smoke detectors (the modern ionization-type was refined for Skylab, which leveraged Apollo hardware)
Even cleanroom protocols for handling lunar samples spread into pharmaceuticals and, relevant to today’s discussion, semiconductor manufacturing.
That’s just one program, albeit a very large one. If you zoom out to include the technologies that received early support from the DoD, the list includes pretty much everything that defines modern life.
The internet and TCP/IP directly, and Ethernet indirectly. Satellite communications, GPS, the inertial navigation systems that run in our phones and cars, and radio navigation. The mouse, windowing interfaces, and hypertext; the work that Doug Engelbart showed off in his “Mother of All Demos” was ARPA-funded. Public-key cryptography was invented for UK SigInt, Grace Hopper developed COBOL on the Navy’s dime, and DARPA funded the first AI labs at MIT, Stanford, CMU, and Stanford Research Institute for decades. The chips AI runs on, GPUs, and the CUDA software behind them, owe something to DARPA-funded parallel computing research. Siri’s lineage, for better or worse, through DARPA’s CALO speech recognition program at SRI. There are the more obviously military products, like the jet engine and the planes jet engines power, stealth coatings, night vision, radar and synthetic aperture radar, Lidar, ultrasound, drones, and infrared and thermal imaging. There are materials, like composites, including carbon fiber, titanium alloys, and advanced ceramics, all of which scaled through defense procurement. LEDs were funded through early signaling work, and digital photography found a buyer in early spy planes. In medicine, we have the DoD to thank for EpiPens, tourniquets, hemostatic agents like QuikClot, prosthetics, blood banking, and plasma storage. Penicillin was first mass-produced in a wartime crash program. And energy? Civilian nuclear power descended directly from Admiral Rickover’s Naval reactor program, lithium-ion battery research had defense funding, and solar photovoltaic cells were pulled forward by satellites’ unique power needs.
Military procurement is the closest thing that the United States has to a national industrial policy, and its worked. The military has funded the development of practically every general purpose technology of the past century, before the commercial market took those de-risked, cost-downed technologies and figured out how to bring them to the masses.
Of all of these, the cleanest case study and the one that maps most directly onto what’s happening in 2026, is the integrated circuit.
Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957 as a transistor company, and its first big customer was the military.
Specifically, facing a threat from larger Soviet boosters that could launch intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could fit vacuum tubes, the US military, with its smaller boosters, had to invest in miniaturization, which meant transistors. Between 1958 and 1960, Fairchild’s revenue grew from $500k to $21 million, largely on the back of the Minuteman I program, for which it produced custom designs. Challenge was, as the number of transistors grew, the electronics industry ran into the “tyranny of numbers”: now that they could, engineers wanted to design circuits with thousands of components, all of which had to be wired together by hand.
So in Dallas, Texas Instruments’ Jack Kilby came up with his “monolithic idea.” “He realized that,” Carl Leonard writes, “instead of connecting separate components, an entire electronic assembly could be made as one unit from one semiconducting material by overlaying it with various impurities to replicate individual electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors.” He had invented the integrated circuit (IC).
Three months later, in Mountain View, Fairchild co-founder Bob Noyce arrived at a similar idea from a different angle. Starting from the planar process, invented by Jean Hoerni in early 1959, Noyce realized that you could build transistors flat on a silicon wafer, with all the connections on the top surface, protected by a layer of silicon oxide. He wrote in his notebook, “In many applications now it would be desirable to make multiple devices on a single piece of silicon in order to be able to make interconnections between devices as part of the manufacturing process, and thus reduce size, weight, etc., as well as cost per active element,” and filed a patent that year.
While there are differences between the ICs they developed (Kilby’s used Geranium and Noyce’s silicon, for example), the two are credited as the co-inventor of the IC. What matters for our story is 1) the IC may not have been developed without demand from the Air Force, Army, and Navy, which were each spending real money on parallel attempts to solve it, and 2) Fairchild was now in the IC business.
In 1961, after starting at $1,000 per chip on tiny pilot runs the year before, Fairchild brought the integrated circuit to market at $120 per chip. The challenge was, no one really needed an integrated circuit, not enough to pay that price. Any electronics firm could wire together discrete transistors to do the same thing for a fraction of the price. As Britannica puts it, “a buyer had to have a serious space constraint to justify purchasing ICs.” Fortunately for Fairchild, NASA had a serious space constraint.
In early 1962, MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, which was responsible for the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), placed a test order for 100 ICs at $43.50 per unit. Meanwhile, getting ahead of volume and hoping to use scale to rev aerospace demand, Noyce cut the price of the IC from $120 to $15, an 87.5% drop, while still charging NASA and MIT premium prices to fund scale. “Noyce slashed prices, too, gambling that this would drastically expand the civilian market for chips, Chris Miller wrote in Chip War. “In the mid-1960s, Fairchild chips that previously sold for $20 were cut to $2. At times Fairchild even sold products below manufacturing cost, hoping to convince more customers to try them.”
Meanwhile, the government funded the gap. That November, MIT decided to go with Fairchild’s IC, or more specifically, its Micrologic computer made up of ICs. By 1963, MIT was consuming 60% of US IC production for the AGC; other military and aerospace buyers made up the rest. In a 1964 article for IEEE, Noyce wrote, “Military and space applications accounted for essentially the entire integrated circuits market last year, and will use over 95 per cent of the integrated circuits produced this year.”
In 1965, the year that Gordon Moore wrote the Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits paper that birthed Moore’s Law, ICs had reached cost parity with discrete components, at around $10, and were beginning to beat them. It was around this time that the Minuteman II program, which now used Texas Instruments ICs, became the technology’s largest buyer. That meant two things – 1) there were multiple large buyers of ICs and 2) there was competition – which combined caused Noyce to cut prices again, down to $2, and again, to $1. The cash coming in from Apollo allowed him to attack the commercial market with lower prices.
And it worked. By the end of the decade, America beat the Russians to the Moon, and Burroughs released the B2500 computer, the first to use ICs.
From that point forward, Moore’s Law has largely been driven by demand from the much larger and faster-moving commercial market. But the IC would not have come down the cost curve so quickly – and Moore’s Law, that self-fulfilling prophecy, may never have been coined or executed against – without the early space and military demand. It is to these Buyers of Capabilities that we owe the computer-powered world we inhabit today.
Something similar might be happening with Data Centers today.
There is a sentiment floating around that we can’t build hard things in America anymore, but by any measure, modern AI data centers are hard assets to build and operate, and we are building a lot of very big ones. Western hyperscalers, labs, and neoclouds will spend something like$750 billion this year and more than $1 trillion next year building them. Goldman estimates that AI CapEx will take $7.6 trillion of capital between 2026 and 2031 across Compute, “Data Centers,” and Power.
This is an enormous amount of CapEx, absolutely, historically, any-way-you-slice-itly. With US GDP around $32 trillion, this year’s spend represents 2.4% of GDP. Assuming GDP grows by an aggressive 3% next year, AI CapEx will account for 3.1% of GDP. For context, the Manhattan Project reached 0.4% of GDP, the late-90s telecom bubble reached 1.2%, and even the Apollo Program only hit 0.4%. To find a more GDP-dominating project, you’d need to look to one of the two World Wars, the New Deal, or the Railroad Boom.
For a little more context, the $15 billion per year that Anthropic will pay SpaceX for the use of two of its Colossus data centers is roughly 60% of NASA’s entire annual budget.
2026-05-22 20:51:22
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome to our 194th Weekly Dose of Optimism. I’m emailing you from beautiful Utah, where I attended the Abundance Institute Gala last night and got to talk nuclear with Oklo’s Jake DeWitte and General Matter’s Scott Nolan, and where I’ll be spending today at the state’s Operation Gigawatt Conference.
It’s hard not to feel the optimism in the mountain air. When we started writing the Dose a few years back, nuclear was a controversial dream. Today, we’re heading into the Memorial Day Weekend that kicks off the summer during which multiple new reactors will go critical for the first time.
Plus, you’re about to read one of the most action-packed Doses in Dose history.
Things are moving fast, and mostly for the better. Happy Memorial Day Weekend, y’all.
It turns out, my house has been making me worse at writing. Sorry about that. I have it under control now.
Lightwork came by my place recently and tested our air and water quality, light sources, likelihood of mold, electromagnetic exposure (turns out electromagnetism does run the world), and household products. It was an awesome experience. I learned a lot, including that my home’s air quality and lighting were undermining my energy levels, our shower water was full of VOCs whose vapor I was inhaling, and a whole lot more.
Lightwork’s assessments are concierge evaluations where they test every aspect of your home that could be impacting your health, produce a science-backed, in-depth report on all their findings, and then help you fix all the issues they uncover. I recommend them. Check them out!
Eli Lily
Yesterday morning, Eli Lilly reported topline results from TRIUMPH-1, the Phase 3 trial for retatrutide in adults with obesity and at least one weight-related comorbidity. Here’s a summary of the results from Superpower founder and peptide enthusiast Max Marchione:
28.3% bodyweight lost on 12mg over 80 weeks
70.3 pounds on avg. or 31.9 kg
45.3% of patients hit 30%+ weight loss (this is bariatric surgery territory)
30.3% weight loss (85 lbs) at 104 weeks in higher-BMI patients
65.3% of 12mg patients dropped below the obesity BMI threshold
19% loss on 4mg over 80 weeks (47.2 lbs) with fewer dropouts than placebo (4.1% vs 4.9%)
significant drops in blood pressure, triglycerides, non-HDL cholesterol, waist circumference, and hsCRP
no cardiac or liver signals
These are bariatric surgery results in a shot, with a bunch of freebies thrown in.
People have been excited about reta on social media for a while, but it’s still gray market, so this is a key step towards getting it to the general public, and just an astonishing set of results. People are losing 28.3% of their bodyweight, or 70 pounds, in less than two years!
For context, Zepbound (tirzepatide) tops out around 20-22% weight loss in its big trials, and the previous-generation Wegovy (semaglutide) at around 15%.
Retatrutide is the first triple hormone receptor agonist (GIP + GLP-1 + glucagon). We previewed this back in Dose #175, in our piece on grey-market peptides and Gen3 GLP-1/GIP/glucagon agonists. The author of the essay we covered, Not for Human Consumption, called these drugs “the holy grail of weight loss medications” before any of them had a Phase 3 readout. Now one of them does.
This is Lebron-level. Unbelievably hyped out of the gate, and then exceeds the hype.
As with all of these miracle drugs, there are positive side effects beyond weight loss. Retatrutide reduced osteoarthritis knee pain by an average of 75.8%, with more than 1 in 8 patients reporting they were completely free of knee pain at the end of the trial. LDL cholesterol dropped 20%. 72% of prediabetic participants returned to normal blood sugar levels. Seven more Phase 3 readouts are expected this year, including diabetes, sleep apnea, chronic back pain, and cardiorenal outcomes.
Get ready to get hot and healthy. It’s Reta Summer (in 2027).
“Before we named the stars, before we mapped the atom, we asked ourselves an impossible question: which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
On Monday, Ben Lamm's Colossal Biosciences announced that it has hatched 26 healthy chicks from a fully artificial egg, an oval printed shell coated in an oxygen-permeable membrane that lets an embryo develop from poured-in yolk to pipping bird, without a biological eggshell. Researchers crack a freshly laid fertilized egg, pour the contents into the artificial shell (Colossal adds ground-up calcium back in, because the embryo eats the shell as it grows), and watch through the top window as eyes form, vasculature spreads, and, 18 days later, a chick taps its way out.
Real scientists will tell you (and MIT Tech Review's Antonio Regalado dutifully did) that growing birds outside the shell isn't new. A Japanese group hatched quail in 1998. Katsuya Obara hatched chickens under transparent plastic film in 2024. Colossal's marketing is, per Regalado, "pure Hollywood." Which is kind of fair but too clucking cynical.
Colossal’s real engineering advance is the membrane, which lets the embryo pull enough oxygen from ambient air that the system doesn't need supplemental gas. Previous shell-less methods did, and chicks tended to die. I like the version in which the chicks live, Regalado.
While this experiment was on a chicken, we have plenty of those. Colossal likes to de-extinct. Its stated goal is the 12-foot, 500-pound South Island giant moa, which laid four-liter eggs no living bird is large enough to surrogate. Colossal staff are reportedly already calling the prototype scaled-up version the "salad spinner." More immediately, the artificial egg is a tool for genetic rescue of endangered birds and, as per our discussion in Dose #186 with not boring capital portfolio company Neion Bio, a substrate for transgenic chickens producing therapeutic proteins in egg whites at a fraction of mammalian cell culture costs.
This is the first member of what Colossal calls its "exogenous development" family. Up next: artificial wombs for marsupials.
With this chicken breakthrough, it feels like humans have crossed a road.
For the entirety of its existence, human civilization has lived on a single celestial body: Earth. The current paradigm, in which human civilization is confined to one planet, exposes humanity to existential threats that are unpredictable and uncontrollable on a planetary scale. By moving beyond the only home we have ever known, we ensure species-level redundancy and that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet subject to the inevitable hazards of a harsh and vast universe. We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.
On Wednesday, SpaeX dropped what may have been the most highly-anticipated S-1 in the history of the planet (until Anthropic files later this year). You can read it here.
Financial highlights include:
Revenue: $4.69B (run-rate ~$19B)
Operating loss: $(1.94B), but Adjusted EBITDA of +$1.13B
Connectivity (Starlink) prints cash: $3.26B revenue, $1.19B operating income in just the first quarter. Its revenue is growing ~50% per year, and profitability is growing faster.
AI is losing money for now…: $818M revenue, $(2.47B) operating loss in Q1. Capex on AI alone was $7.7B in Q1, more than Space ($1.05B) and Connectivity ($1.33B) combined, by far.
But has the monster TAM: AI infra, consumer subscriptions, digital advertising, and enterprise applications - the AI segment - has a company-estimated TAM of $26.5 trillion, which seems small when you consider the size of the universe and the potential to spread Enterprise Applications throughout it.
SpaceX also disclosed that it’s doing a second compute deal with Anthropic, in which Dario & Co. will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for Colossus 2, which is nearly as much as entire SpaceX makes now. For now, it’s selling compute on earth, but per the S-1, it plans to begin deploying orbital compute in 2028 and scale it to 100 GW of compute launched annually, which would make Colossus seem like a pale blue dot.
Starlink, which had been the bull case until AI, is at 9,600 satellites, 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries, and now accounts for ~75% of all active maneuverable satellites in orbit.
There is no one operating at a higher level than Elon and the SpaceX team, across everything from terrestrial data centers to rockets to satellites to, soon, Terafab. After more than 20 years, it’s awesome to see the company go public (and generate some much-needed DPI for the venture and seven-layer-SPV ecosystems). Is the price a little high? Maybe, yeah, sure. But what would you pay to own a Scarce Asset that catches Statue of Liberty-sized rockets with chopsticks…
We’ll find out in June.
In the meanting, after scrapping the launch of Starship v3 last night, SpaceX is giving it another go today. What a way to launch summer.
Take n dots on a piece of paper. How many pairs of dots can sit exactly one unit apart from each other?
Paul Erdős posed this in 1946, conjectured the answer grows just barely faster than n, and offered cash for a resolution. For 80 years, the best constructions anyone could find were boring square grids, and most of combinatorial geometry treated Erdős's upper bound as essentially right.
This week, an internal general-purpose OpenAI reasoning model produced a proof that disproves it. The model isn’t math-specific, it just thought for a long time and burned an estimated ~$1,000 max worth of tokens, which is pretty affordable for an 80 year old unsolved problem! It found that there's an infinite family of point arrangements that beat the grid, polynomially. Erdős was wrong, and his “favorite problem” is settled.
How’d it pull it off? Instead of more clever geometry, it pulled in algebraic number theory (specifically, infinite class field towers and Golod–Shafarevich theory, of course, why didn’t I think of that) to construct number systems with the right symmetries, then read the geometric configurations off of those. No human had tried this connection. Thomas Bloom thinks it will unlock other long-stuck problems in discrete geometry.
And, importantly, it’s verified. Last October, OpenAI claimed GPT-5 had solved ten Erdős problems; on inspection, it had just surfaced answers from the literature. This time, it got external review by Fields Medalist Tim Gowers and Will Sawin at Princeton, with a companion paper. Gowers's verdict: "if a human had written the paper and submitted it to the Annals of Mathematics, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation." It also got endorsements from Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, Arul Shankar. Shankar said the models “are capable of having original ingenious ideas, and then carrying them out to fruition.” The full proof is available as a public PDF.
Ten months ago, frontier models were at IMO-gold level. Really smart high schoolers, basically. Now, they’re doing Annals-worthy novel work.
I’ve been more skeptical about AI than I normally am about new technologies, and less excited than the average person in tech. Per the evidence that keeps coming out, I’ve been wrong. On the business side and the capabilities side, the pace has been truly remarkable, and I can’t wait to see what problems they’ll solve for us in the years ahead.
Jim Belosic (SendCutSend)
Jim Belosic started SendCutSend in 2018 because he couldn't get custom metal parts fast enough for the cars and motorcycles he was restoring. Eight years later, bootstrapped to this point on credit cards, savings, a PayPal loan, and bank-financed machines, the Reno laser-cutting and bending shop is doing roughly $200 million in revenue, growing 100% year over year, and turning into one of the most important on-demand manufacturers in America.
Austin Vernon's February essay Speed Can Reindustrialize America is the best piece on why the company is so impressive and potentially important. Vernon's argument is that the US is great at high-volume manufacturing and terrible at low-volume, short-lead-time custom work because soft costs (quoting, programming, billing, all the white-collar overhead) swamp the actual fabrication cost on small orders. SendCutSend's whole company is an attack on soft costs: instant quotes, one-click buying, software-routed production. It’s generating ~$275K revenue per employee, and the market would support a hell of a lot of employees.
Interestingly, Patrick Collison was the one person Vernon thanked for feedback, right above the “Funding Opportunities Apendix.”
And I guess Collison took it literally, because he reached out to Belosic about investing, and although SCS had never taken outside capital, he decided to take money from the Collisons, Sequoia (Andrew Reed), and Paradigm (Matt Huang) to go bigger, faster.
Jim and SCS are easy to root for and have become a cult classic over the past few years. Now, the cat’s out of the bag, the money is in the bank, and IT’S TIME TO BUILD.
In other great news for building stuff here, Amca raised $300M at $1B+ from Caffeinated and crew. Amca builds and modernize factories to design and produce critical aerospace and defense components that are supply-constrained and often sole-sourced.
Jai Malik’s eighteen-month-old El Segundo startup already runs factories in California, Iowa, and New York, supplies components for the F-35, and uses its RAPID software platform to deliver parts to BAE, Airbus, Textron, Honeywell, and GE Aerospace 67% faster than the legacy defense supply chain. Now, it can make more of the critical components on which the country runs.
2026-05-16 20:52:13
Trying something new for not boring world subscribers. A little case study as a follow up to an essay I wrote last year called The Great Differentiation.
I saw a great case study on the Great Differentiation this week, so put together some quick thoughts off the dome, as I continue to study how companies tell their stories in new and interesting ways. Let me know what you think.
Earlier this week, I saw a headline that a company called Cowboy Space Corporation had raised over $200 million to build rockets whose upper stages are just foldable data centers. My first thought was who would be dumb enough to compete with Elon in launch at this point and my second was that this had to be the peak.
Then, I saw that it was Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt’s company, Aetherflux, rebranded and expanded, and I got a little more interested, because at least they’d been planning to do energy in space since before data centers were cool, and because turning Robinhood money into sci-fi energy and compute moonshots is exactly how you should billionaire. This is Choose Good Quests.
I wrote about it in the Dose yesterday, because if nothing else, it’s bold.
But in that process, I watched the videos. There’s the one I included in the Dose, which was pretty cool because it had a tumbleweed, and some cowboy-adjacent music, and because the product itself - the upper stage that unfurls into a data center powered by a bunch of solar panels - is arresting, and because calling space “The High Frontier” is both cool and relevant for a company now called Cowboy Space Corporation.
If it were just for that video, though, I wouldn’t be writing this note. This is the one that made my fingers do the keyboard two-step:
It’s so fucking weird when you watch it, right? Baiju, who I’ve never met and I’m not sure watching this if he’s really like this or if this is a bit, is just talking into the camera while he slaps cowboy hats on his team’s head.
2026-05-15 20:42:13
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 193rd Weekly Dose of Optimism.
The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, Demis is going to solve all disease, Varda is making space drugs, pancreatic cancer keeps getting punched in the mouth, we’re turning whole rocket upper stages into space data centers, and the IPO window is OPEN. Y’all mind if the optimists have another good week?
Let’s get to it.
We celebrate ambitious companies every week in the Dose, but ambitious also means long odds, and not every ambitious company ends the same way. Some shut down. Some sell assets. Some get acquired. Some simply reach the point where winding down is the right move.
But however a company ends, there are still final steps to handle: state filings, investor communications, distributions, compliance requirements, asset decisions, and remaining obligations.
SimpleClosure helps founders bring structure to closure, so the process is handled clearly, responsibly, and without becoming another months-long burden.
Whether you’re actively winding down or trying to understand what comes next, SimpleClosure can help.1
I recently read Sebastian Mallaby’s book on Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, The Infinity Machine, after having already watched the documentary on DeepMind’s development of AlphaFold, The Thinking Game, and a big takeaway for me is that you don’t want to bet against Sir Demis.
In addition to DeepMind, now part of Google, Demis spun out a bio-focused company called Isomorphic Labs whose mission, right there on the homepage, is to “Solve All Disease.” As of today, they have $2.1 billion more in the anti-disease arsenal thanks to a Series B led by Thrive Capital with participation from Google vehicles Alphabet, GV, and CapitalG, and sovereign vehicles, MGX, Temasek, and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund. It is the second largest biotech round ever, after Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner’s AltosLabs came out with $3 billion in 2022.
Back in Dose #180, we covered IsoDDE, Isomorphic Labs’ unified AI drug design engine that crushed AlphaFold 3 on the hardest protein-ligand benchmarks and, in one of the more striking results, rediscovered cereblon’s second binding pocket from sequence alone, an achievement it took human researchers 15 years to confirm experimentally. Our take then was that the engine was real but the proof would come when AI-designed molecules actually entered humans. The money will go towards that, with the first of their wholly-owned drug candidates expected to enter human trials at the end of this year, and to expand the pipeline, continue to improve IsoDDE, and keep hiring the very best talent.
While there are a number of companies promising to solve drug discovery with AI, Isomorphic Labs seems to have the track record, talent, and war chest to do it.
Nobel Laureate Sir Demis Hassabis has a history of planning to do things that sounded crazy at the time and then doing them, and the craziest part is that if he does it again this time, the thing that sounds crazy that he will actually pull off is solving all disease. God Save the Queen, and all of us as well.
Sana Pashankar for Bloomberg
Isomorphic seems promising for Earth Drugs. But what about Space Drugs?
Way back in June 2023, almost three years ago, I wrote a Deep Dive on not boring capital portfolio company Varda in which we discussed its plans to manufacture drugs in space, where the lack of gravity lets you do things you can’t on earth, and send them back down to earth, where the people who need them are.
After three years of launches and re-entries with defense customers, the company is igniting stage 2 of the plan: start testing space drug manufacturing.
This week, it announced a partnership with $25B publicly-traded pharmaceutical company, United Therapuetics, to “explore the use of microgravity in creating drugs for chronic diseases in a deal that could prove out the value of in-space development for the pharmaceutical industry.”
United makes drugs to treat cancer and high blood pressure in the lungs, and it’s expected that this partnership will start by testing molecular samples of drugs intended to treat lung diseases specifically.
That’s one big step for Space Drugs, and one potentially giant leap for mankind.
for
Back on earth… it’s been a bad few weeks for pancreatic cancer, which means it’s been a great few weeks for humans. We led off Dose #190 with a pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine, Dose #191 with pancreatic cancer-detecting AI, and now, Ruxandra Teslo drops a banger on a different pancreatic cancer fighting drug, Revolution Medicines’ daraxonrasib.
Last month, Revolution shared daraxonrasib’s Phase 3 results. The oral, once-daily pill roughly doubled median survival for metastatic pancreatic cancer, pushing it to 13.2 months. More importantly, it represents a new class of drugs that use a “molecular glue” strategy to hit targets that don’t offer the usual drug-binding pocket. Daraxonrasib targets RAS, a cancer-driving protein found in roughly 25% of human cancers and more than 90% of pancreatic cancers, long considered “undruggable.” This isn’t a cure, but it is a crack, an early sign of the undruggable becoming druggable.
Go read Ruxandra’s excellent essay. Get fucked, cancer.
Bloomberg
Do you feel that breeze? That’s the IPO window, baby. It’s wide open.
Yesterday, fast inference chipmaker Cerebras had a very successful IPO, pricing well above initial range at $185, and then closing 68% above that. Bill Gurley has got to be conflicted… on the one hand, the man hates when a company leaves money on the table in an IPO. On the other, his old firm, Benchmark, is going to make an extraordinary ~$5 billion+ at the $311 opening day closing price.
Fervo, the geothermal company whose S-1 we covered recently, also IPO’d this week. Its shares popped 33% on Day 1 from its $27 price, and then jumped another 11% today.
Look, things are a little frothy. I’m not buying Cerebras at $311. But we love to see tech companies win, but I’m also just psyched to see some liquidity flow back to LPs to flow back into venture to fund the next batch of companies whose IPOs we’ll cover right here in the Dose in ~8-10 years.
Plus…
In older recent tech IPO news, Figma defied the SaaSpocalypse / Anthropic design plugin narrative by crushing its first quarter financial results. The stock popped 8%. Not dead.
Speaking of AI infra exuberance, Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt’s space-based energy company, Aetherflux, has rebranded to Cowboy Space Corp, a company that will, of course, be doing orbital data centers.
On the one hand, it’s a little 2026 Mad Libs. On the other, though, it kind of rocks.
Choose Good Quests ✅ - Baiju is Robinhooding himself, stealing his own gains from the fintech app and giving them to the space company. It’s what we want out of our billionaires.
Also, the idea is pretty interesting. Instead of an upper stage that holds and releases a data center payload, the upper stage is the data center payload. That means that Cowboy has to build its own rockets, in competition with SpaceX, but is focusing fully on orbital data centers by making them half of the rocket.
Maybe this is a sign that we’re nearing a peak. Maybe it’s exactly what we need to provide AI with all of the compute it will need. I don’t know.
I think we’re at the point in the cycle where we just sit back, enjoy, crack open a High Life, and root for these crazy Cowboys to wrangle their space GPUs for the benefit of all mankind. Giddy up baby. Yeehaw.
2026-05-13 20:53:38
Welcome to the 1,481 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 265,556 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Wednesday! Last week, I went out to LA to give a talk at my friend Grant Gittlin’s event, The Mountain. He asked me to do something different and weird, and I took the opportunity to pull a bunch of the ideas I’ve written in essays like Means and Meaning, The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff, The Return of Magic, Most Human Wins, and others into one cohesive ~philosophy. It was a good excuse to think about the meaning of life.
This is the talk. It was written to be spoken, so it may seem an oddly-written essay, but I hope it’s useful nonetheless, if for no other reason than that it makes you pause and wonder at the insane gift and responsibility we’ve all been given to experience and create in the world from our own unique points-of-view.
I was very nervous giving this talk to a room full of 80 people, but once I got through that, and a bunch of people told me that I should share it more broadly, I decided why not send it to 265,556 of my closest friends. I do think a lot of people are wondering what it is we’re here to do when machines can do more and more.
This is my best attempt yet, in what will be a lifetime full of attempts, to answer that question and then try to live the answer.
Let’s get to it.
Note: I’m sharing the first half with everyone and the whole thing with not boring world subscribers. Join us.
Transcript of a Talk Given at The Mountain on May 6, 2026
Thanks for inviting me, Grant, and to all of you for letting me fill your experience and attention for a little while.
What a week to get to talk to a room of technology people. Sierra just raised at $15 billion. Anthropic crossed a $44 billion run rate, and launched a new company with some huge funds that has $1.5 billion to deploy AI in big companies. OpenAI did the same thing but with $4 billion. Long Lake bought AmEx global travel for $6.3 billion.
All of which raises an important question: who gives a shit?
I mean that: why do we care?
Things are moving so fast that it’s worth thinking about what it is that we’re doing here.
Last night, a woman who reads my newsletter reached out over Substack DM. She said she had been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer (she’s in remission now!), so she had been confronted with a question we’d all be facing: what happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity (or in her case, the need to care about being productive at all)? To answer it, she analyzed more than 200 sci-fi books. Across all of those books, by far the most common thing left to solve for post-scarcity is meaning. 59% of books were about the search for meaning. Identity was next, at just 17%.
Assume that companies will keep getting bigger and bigger, and growing faster and faster, and who cares… the thing we’ll be left solving for is meaning.
Luckily, that’s what I’d been planning to talk to you about.
When Grant asked me to talk and I asked Grant what he wanted me to talk about, he said, basically, “Whatever you want, the weirder the better. The line I really love from your recent essays is ‘You have the right to the work only but never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.’”
The funny thing about that line, which comes from the Bhagavad Gita, is that when I wrote about it, Venkatesh Rao, who is smarter, better read, and more Indian than me, replied, “This interpretation of the Gita verse is a bit of a stretch.”
After going back and forth in the comments, I think Venkatesh and I actually agree, but I am warning you that I am going to do a little bit more Indian-text-stretching and leaping in this talk to build a framework that I think is potentially useful and give it some ancient gravitas.
There is this category of questions I’ve been wrestling with, which I think a lot of people have been wrestling with recently, which is something along the lines of:
If new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy?
If we have means our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of, why is there a meaning crisis?
What is technology for, anyway? What are we doing here?
In his 1978 essay collection, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.”
Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning about his experience finding meaning in the concentration camp, in the worst situation imaginable, writes three decades later about the lack of meaning in what could historically be described as the best situation imaginable.
This weird inverse relationship between material and spiritual wealth shows up over and over again.
“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.”
The greater our means, the harder it might be to find meaning. The more we accomplish, the sooner we ask, “Cool, now what?”
It seems that we are in the middle of creating more technological, financial, and material wealth than we have at any other point in human history, thanks in part to some of the people in this room.
In order to avoid being the proverbial car-catching dogs, we’d better get prepared for what lies on the other side of all of those means. The world’s spiritual traditions were formed in times of scarcity. How are we supposed to handle all of this abundance? Is abundance bad, actually?
I’m going to propose a framework, drawing loosely on a broad set of sources including, but not limited to, the world’s major religions and a guy who took a lot of acid.
Here’s what I propose:
OK, so for the first stretch.
In the Upanishads, there is this concept of “Neti, neti,” or “Not this, not this.” It is a process of understanding what we are not so we can better understand what we are.
When you sit in silence and make yourself observe yourself, you notice things like:
“I am not my thoughts, because I can observe them come and go.”
“I am not my emotions, because I can watch them rise and fall.”
“I am not my bodily sensations, because I can feel them changing.”
The idea is to strip all of that away so that you know, gnostically, in your bones, that “you” are a process, an undefinable part of an incomprehensible whole. Which doesn’t mean that you are nothing.
What’s left is awareness, and at any moment, awareness is aware of something, experiencing something. You are awareness itself, and if you’ll allow me to stretch one step further, you are what you experience.
This probably isn’t a coincidence. Experiencing things might be the whole reason we’re here.
A few years ago, I started going down this rabbit hole that sounds insane when you list it out, from Dan Simmons’ sci-fi series Hyperion Cantos to Jesuit scholar Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man to The Telepathy Tapes to The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley’s book arguing that mystics in every tradition – Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist – have peered deeply into the nature of reality and come back saying basically the same thing.
The same thing is: thou art that.
This is a phrase that comes from the Upanishads, too. The idea is that the innermost self in you (Atman) and the ultimate reality of the universe (Brahman) are not separate things but the same thing.
If I am not my thoughts, not my emotions, not my body, what am I? Thou art that.
You are god, the universe, whatever, looking at itself through a particular set of eyes, experiencing itself through a particular consciousness.
If this is true, and it’s at least weird that so many of the world’s religions came to the same conclusion!, it means that every unique experience a human has is the universe experiencing itself in a way it couldn’t have otherwise.
This idea is both woo-sounding and load-bearing for the rest of the talk, so I’m going to reinforce it a little bit through some good ol’ fashioned appeal to authority.
Alan Watts said that “‘You’ is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.”
The 13th Century Sufi Poet Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”
The Jesuit de Chardin said something similar. He held the heretical belief that evolution had a direction, towards more complexity, consciousness, and interiority. He asked, “What is the worth of human works if not to establish, in and by means of each one of us, an absolutely original center in which the universe reflects itself in a unique and inimitable way?”
I can see that you want to get weirder. Let’s get weirder.
Chris Bache, a Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Religion at Youngstown State University, conducted 73 high-dose LSD sessions on himself over the course of twenty years, going deeper and deeper, often painfully, to the point of tears and vomit, each time. From his later sessions, when he was getting really deep, he came back with the knowledge that “the essence of the individual is the essence of Totality, that Atman is Brahman.”
He portrays humans as incarnated aspects of a Creative Intelligence whose purpose is to awaken within physical existence, exercise controlled creativity, and thereby participate in the universe’s self-emergence.
Too weird? Let’s re-anchor on someone more traditionally credible.
Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician who wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, spent his 60s building a metaphysics from scratch. “With the becoming and perishing of each actual occasion,” he wrote of moments, “a perspective on the universe is achieved that has never existed before.” In Whitehead’s metaphysics, the universe is not made of things, but of, and I quote, “drops of experience.”
So far, we have religious mystics of all traditions, a philosophical entertainer, a psychonaut, and a mathematician staring deep into the universe and reporting back essentially the same thing.
Why, though? If we are slivers of the universe experiencing itself, to what end?
Because through our imperfect experience, an infinite and perfect universe can know itself and create itself.
A couple of years ago, a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes rocketed to #1 on the podcast charts. The host, Ky Dickens, had heard stories of non-verbal autistic kids who were able to communicate telepathically, and on the podcast, she interviewed a lot of them and their parents and ran experiments to test their abilities.
The thing that got me was a conversation with one of the kids, named Asher, who said, through a verbal woman named Jess, that he visits a place called the Realms to access information on any topic, which sounds crazy except for the fact that the kids know things about people they’ve never met that they couldn’t possibly know, and understand languages they were never taught and which their parents don’t speak.
Explaining the Realms, Asher said:
It’s all parts of our soul exploring consciousness in different ways, and we’re basically building up huge amounts of information.
Every new thought we have, every new idea we have is new information. And that way, we’re expanding the cosmos because each new piece of information that we come up with then goes into this library of his and becomes available for everybody else. But we have to get this knowledge through direct experience in 3D life.
This is something that comes up again and again, too: that God or the universe, omniscient and omnipotent as it is, needs imperfect beings to experience things to sample the full range. There are no stakes if you know how things will play out, no sacrifice if you can just fix it.
There’s this great book by William Egginton called The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, in which the author examines the ultimate nature of reality from the perspective of the author, the quantum physicists, and the philosopher. All three came to the same conclusion:
To observe anything, you need distinctions — between here and there, before and after, this and that. Without those gaps, there’s nothing to observe. A timeless, spaceless, perfect unity would be unobservable. Perfection can’t know itself. Only finite, imperfect conditions make experience possible.
Our job, then, cosmically, is to be limited, imperfect things having experiences on behalf of something too perfect and limitless to be able to.
Which was kind of the point of Jesus, right? Christianity’s deepest claim - that God became man, the infinite became finite - is the same claim the other traditions are making, from a different angle.
Jesus even had his own version of thou art that: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
In the Gospel of Thomas, discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you have nothing within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.” Interpretations range from the gnostic - if you recognize and bring forth the divine light within, you will return to source - to the psychological.
This quote is famous today because Jung’s followers use it to explain the concepts of Shadow and Individuation. “If you bring forth what is within you…” refers to Individuation, or the process of taking the hidden parts of your personality, your talents, your repressed emotions, your Shadow, and bringing them into the light of consciousness. By becoming fully and uniquely you, you are saved from living a fake life.
“The privilege of a lifetime,” Joseph Campbell said, “is being who you are.” You’ve probably heard that one before. It comes from In the Field, the opening of Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, something that I highly recommend everyone read. What I forgot until I looked it up while writing this talk was what he said later in that essay.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else’s path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.
Eternity
is a dimension
of here and now.
The divine lives within you.
And later still:
The goal of the hero trip
down to the jewel point
is to find those levels in the psyche
that open, open, open,
and finally open to the mystery
of your Self
being Buddha consciousness
or the Christ.
That’s the journey.
It’s all about finding
that still point in your mind
where commitment drops away.
The separateness
apparent in the world
is secondary.
Beyond that world of opposites
is an unseen (but experienced)
unity and identity in us all.
And then:
You must return
with the bliss
and integrate it.
The return is seeing
the radiance everywhere.
The goal is to live
with godlike composure
on the full rush of energy,
like Dionysus riding the leopard,
without being torn to pieces.
Which is one of the coolest lines I’ve ever read, and if you take just one thing from that talk, I hope it is that: to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.
This is a man who spent his entire life studying the stories and myths that humans across space and time have told ourselves to understand ourselves, and he came back reporting the same thing.
Thou art that. Thou must be the specific version of that you were put here to be.
Every one of these people is saying the same thing: you are a piece of the universe experiencing itself. And every one of them is saying, in different words, that this imposes an obligation on you: to be the fullest, strangest, most irreducible version of yourself. All of this so that each of us might create and experience the world differently than anyone else could.
In other words, differentiation is a moral obligation.
It is also a mathematical one, and here I will bring this room full of technologists back to familiar ground.
In his 1948 “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory and the originator of the word ‘bit,’ proved mathematically that information is surprise.
The more predictable a message is, the less information it contains. A universe full of identical people producing identical experiences would contain no information at all.
An omniscient god cannot be surprised.
It’s only through the surprising, the differentiated, the irreducibly specific, that any new information enters the system. Shannon was in no way intentionally writing about the meaning of life, but if you take his math seriously, and mix it in with the mystics and philosophers’ message, the universe learns something through you only to the extent that you are the unexpected thing only you could be.
Forty years later, John Wheeler, the physicist, re-enchanted Shannon’s concept of the bit when he proposed the now-famous “It from Bit” at a conference in Tokyo. In Wheeler’s Participatory Universe, the universe doesn’t exist until it’s observed by a conscious mind. Matter (It) emerges from information (bit).
Wheeler wasn’t a kook. He was a giant. Richard Feynman, his most famous student, said “Some people think Wheeler’s gone crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.” Feynman credited Wheeler’s insights as the foundation of the Quantum Electrodynamics that won him the Nobel Prize.
CalTech’s Kip Thorne, another Nobel Laureate Wheeler protege and the physics consultant on Interstellar, said that “Wheeler was the greatest master of metaphors and names I have ever known.” He came up with Black Hole and Wormhole and Quantum Foam. Thorne called him “the last of the giants.”
And Wheeler argued that humans are co-creators of the universe, through the surprising actions we take and the things we experience.
OK, so having stretched and mixed a bit, where are we?
You are not your job, your outfit, your emotions, your body. You are awareness. You are a little slice of the universe experiencing itself.
Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, psychonauts, non-verbal autistic children, and myths from around the world that the meaning of life is to expand the range and depth of experience in the universe in order to expand and co-create it.
You are here to experience and create in a way that only you can, and for many of you in this room, that means experiencing and creating in a way that expands humanity’s capacity for experience and creation. Differentiation is a moral obligation.
If some of this sounds familiar, it might be because it sounds very similar to how we train AI models. Humans take actions and create information, from which the model learns and grows. Labs are willing to pay a ton of money for new information; feeding it the same old stuff actually degrades performance.
So where does that leave us, the humans in the room?
