2026-09-11 20:46:09
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome to our 210th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Today is the 25th anniversary of September 11th. I still remember exactly where I was, in my first week of high school on my way to the school chapel, when the news hit. It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed.
I’m sending at exactly 8:46am, 25 years to the minute when the first plane hit the North Tower.
I’m not going to outwrite Colston Whitehead on this one, so instead, I’m going to share the essay he wrote two months after the attacks: Lost and Found. I read it every year on September 11th, and it’s the best thing I’ve read on what it means to be a New Yorker. This short ESPN documentary on Welles Crowther, who sacrificed himself to save 12 lives, is a sober reminder of the real people who died in, and survived, the attack.
The world changed forever 25 years ago. In some ways, it’s gotten worse, and in many, the world in 2026 is better. We focus on those. But never forget.
Let’s get to it.
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OpenAI
Navier-Stokes is no Navier-Joke.
While some frontier lab employees were telling us that there’s a good chance they’ll kill us all, OpenAI announced that a group of roughly 10,000 AI agents had produced a proposed solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. The agents worked for about 88 hours using an unreleased model more capable than GPT-6 Astra. Formalizing and verifying the result in Lean, a math programming language and theorem prover, took another 17 hours.
The question is whether the equations describing a smooth, three-dimensional fluid can develop a singularity: a point where the math blows up. OpenAI’s construction starts with fluid at rest, applies a smooth external force, and produces unbounded velocity while keeping total energy finite. It addresses the forced version of the problem. You can read the 166-page proof and inspect the Lean code yourself, if you are incredibly bored this weekend.
Of course, there was controversy. Anthropic was working on its own Navier-Stokes solution with a mathematician, and they accused OpenAI of using the logs from their Codex conversations to come to their own solution. Sam Altman denied the charge but said that rumors that Anthropic was close did spur OpenAI to give it the ol’ college try themselves.
Whatever happened, this is a glimpse into the future: AIs doing all of our work for us while we spend time doing more human things, like arguing for credit.
Pushmeet Kohli and Žiga Avsec for Google DeepMind
It’s safe to say that Google DeepMind is getting its butt kicked on the frontier LLM side, but it’s still doing some of the coolest work in science AI.
On Tuesday, it released AlphaGenome Atlas, a one-petabyte database of predicted molecular effects across the human genome. It includes the 98% of our DNA that doesn’t directly encode proteins, where changes can still affect when, where, and how genes get used. Researchers can look up variants through a website and use a combined impact score to figure out where to look more closely.
Basically, the human genome contains about three billion letters. At each position, you could swap the existing letter for one of three others. That gives you roughly nine billion possible single-letter changes. GDM predicted what all of the changes might do.
Like at the Broad Institute, the Atlas helped researchers identify a DNA change predicted to disrupt RNA splicing, providing supporting evidence in an unresolved rare-disease case.
To be clear, it’s not a replacement for actual experiments, but those take a lot of time and money and Atlas gives researchers a better sense of where to spend their limited resources.
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” now extends to life’s … alphabet.
Speaking of cool stuff GDM has done, check out all of the things that people have been doing with its complete map of fruit fly neurons:
Hermeus
As we covered way back in our Deep Dive on Astro Mechanica, the challenge with ramjets is that they need to be moving very fast before they start working. Forward motion compresses the incoming air, which means you need some other way to get the engine up to speed in the first place.
Luckily, Hermeus has a really fast plane, the Quarterhorse.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled Ramjet-X, an expendable test vehicle designed to launch from its reusable Quarterhorse aircraft. Quarterhorse gets it to the necessary speed and altitude, releases it, and returns for another mission, then Ramjet-X keeps flying under its own power.
The company plans to sell access to this setup as Flight Test as a Service. Customers could test sensors, materials, autonomy software, communications equipment, and propulsion technology in sustained high-speed flight without having to build an entire test program themselves. Engine testing is underway in Florida, with integrated vehicle testing planned for 2027.
Hermeus is special because of its fast development of fast planes. Now, it’s using one of those planes to light up a ramjet platform that will let others develop faster, too.
Michael Levin
We don’t include every Michael Levin paper in the Dose. Man is far too prolific. But we include a bunch, and this might be the most important of them all.
On Wednesday, Levin published the revised, peer-reviewed version of Ingressing Minds. He proposes that minds are patterns in a structured, nonphysical space, and that bodies provide interfaces through which those patterns enter the physical world. He argues that many things beyond humans and animals can be interfaces, including computers, which is the most compelling argument I’ve heard that AI might be able to become “conscious” or “alive.”
Platonic space is a little tricky to understand, but it’s simpler if you start with triangles. If you know two angles of a triangle, you get a third “for free.” In the paper, Levin asks whether that idea extends to much richer patterns, including patterns with agency. In his framework, some of the things inhabiting this “Platonic space” are minds, and biological or engineered systems let them become embodied.
Levin himself came to the idea from the biology side: cells can assemble into unfamiliar living constructs with capabilities that weren’t explicitly designed into them, before any replication or evolution happens. He’s now systematically investigating where those capabilities come from and how to access more of them.
In his announcement, Levin describes the pushback Ingressing Minds has attracted, then adds: “if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait.”
I can’t. I can’t wait. I think Michael Levin will go down as the most important scientist of this era, and this may be his most important paper. Worth a read.
On Tuesday, I got invited to a preview of the new Neko Health location in Soho.
Neko is a preventative health company founded by Hjalmar Nilsonne and Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek. I’d seen a bunch of tweets about the experience in the UK and Stockholm, where it launched in 2023, and I’ve been wanting to try it. As soon as I stepped through the front door, it delivered.
I don’t want to spoil it, but it feels like walking into the future, from the stairs to the waiting area to the screening room that felt like what it would feel like if friendly aliens invited you onto their spaceship and offered to make you right. There’s a full-body scan, some bloodwork, cuffs, and a bunch of lasers and lights designed to understand your heart, blood pressure, body composition, a bunch of markers, and more. The people were friendly, calm, and professional, and the screens kept you posted on the progress. The whole thing flew by, and as soon as it finished, they took me into a room to share and explain the results.
Luckily, everything was clear - there’s some inflammation to fix and I could do to lose a few pounds / points of BMI, but it was a relief to know my heart and cholesterol are in good shape. I haven’t been to a traditional doctor in a very long time.
The reason this is Dose-worthy is that they do it for $499, with a goal of squeezing as much into that price as they can over time. It combines people, design, and technology to pull it off. And with a medical system that’s focused on fixing things once they’re broken, a delightful, accessible network of preventative health locations will help catch things before they break, when it’s easier and cheaper to fix. Plus, it’s nice peace of mind.
It’s great to see people who’ve had success in tech like Daniel and Shak put their resources towards fixing one of humanity’s biggest problem in a way that serves a lot of people instead of just a few who could afford something more successful.
Big thanks to Shak and Sarah for the invite. They’re not a sponsor and I’m not an investor, but you can move up in the line using my link here.
2026-09-10 20:45:19
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Thursday! We dropped a new notboring.com website this week, and this is our second essay of the week. Lock-in season.
This one is a continuation of the series arguing that strategy is important and moats matter. It’s still popular for startups to say that they don’t need them, that they’re just faster and better at product, that it’s too much to ask such young companies to have Network Effects or Scale Economies in place.
But startups don't get a pass on strategy because they're young. Luckily, there’s one moat that they can use to buy time. This is an ode to that one.
Let’s get to it.
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There are 7 Powers, but if you made me choose a favorite, I’d pick counter-positioning.
In his primer on Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, Mind the Moat, Lindy CEO Flo Crivello defines it as “the practice of developing your business model such that incumbents have conflicting incentives preventing them to compete effectively.”
The definition contains the reason I enjoy it so much: before they’re old enough to access the other 6 powers, it’s the moat with which startups are able to attack incumbents. Incumbents have bigger businesses and more resources, and it is those advantages startups use to attack them. Their business is too good to mess with.
When I wrote about Ramp for the first time back in December 2020, I compared counter-positioning to the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique from Kill Bill. When a startup hits them with counter-positioning, the incumbent might not realize they’re dead; take a step in the startup’s direction, though, and they topple over.
If incumbent corporate cards incentivized customers to spend more by giving them points, Ramp built its business on helping customers spend less. Incumbents couldn’t match that for a number of reasons, including the fact that they were nowhere as good at software, but mainly because if customers spent less, they made less, which their shareholders would not appreciate. Other startups like Divvy and Brex played the same game incumbents did, offering rewards and points for spend. They both had good outcomes: Bill.com bought Divvy for $2.5B and Capital One bought Brex for $5.15B. Today, Ramp is valued at $44 billion and launching a flotilla of products that help customers save time and money, including a model router.
If you come at the king, you best not [play their own game but with better technology].
I am thinking about counter-positioning today because of Base Power Company CEO Zach Dell’s conversation with David Senra on David Senra. At 16:18, discussing how he and Justin came to their business model, he gives a sermon on counter-positioning.
“If you’re going to take on an incumbent,” he says, “my view is the best way to do it is to have a counter-positioned business model.”
If I showed up and said, ‘I have... the best home battery on the market... and I’m going to sell it to you for 10% below the big guys,’ your margin is my opportunity, right? Like these big guys are going to compete on price. First they’re going to copy my product, then they’re going to drop their price and they’re going to run me out of business.
But if I show up and say, ‘I don’t sell batteries. I sell electricity,’ and we’re going to install this battery on your home, and because of our different business model, you pay 1/20th or even 1/40th of what you’d pay to own it outright, then I can win.
And if you want to compete with me and you’re one of the incumbents, you’ve got to completely change your business model, which as you know for a public company is very hard, right?
Base won’t be able to use counter-positioning forever. The moats it digs to protect its margins from competitors will come from the other powers: Scale Economies, Cornered Resources, Switching Costs, Brand, and perhaps even Network Effects and Process Power. But as Zach points out, there is no better way to start taking on an incumbent than by counter-positioning.
This is a theme that Ben and David bring up again and again on the Acquired podcast: “As Hamilton [Helmer] would put it, counter-positioning is usually a take-off phase power.” Helmer himself went on the pod and explained why: “It’s the only one that’s a partial source of power. If you want real durability… you want to have another source of power.”
Counter-positioning is here for a good time, not a long time. Which is part of what makes it so fun. It’s the trickster power. Counter-positioning buys you time against the incumbent — which is positioned in some way against which you can counter-position — but it doesn’t necessarily protect you against another startup. You need other moats for that.
Poetically, Helmer chooses Dell to make the point. Dell was counter-positioned against Compaq because Compaq’s dealer channel made direct sales painful. Eventually, though, everyone could adopt direct sales, and Dell’s counter-positioning power disappeared. By then, Dell had used the window to build Scale Economies around its direct, just-in-time model.
The Acquired canon is chock full of examples.
When Google launched Android, it could afford to give it away for free because the mothership made its money on search. It could afford to just subsidize the losses completely, but it also didn’t have to, because more mobile search on Google meant more revenue. Nokia, on the other hand, had to make money from the mobile stack itself; giving it away for free would have killed the business.
This is one good way to think about counter-positioning: can Challenger A do X because it makes its money somewhere completely different from Incumbent B?
It, to be clear, is easier to do if you have Google’s cash machine behind you, but it’s always worth thinking about how you can fuck with the way that your incumbent competitor makes its money.
Amazon, born on the internet, was built around direct-to-consumer fulfillment. Barnes & Noble was optimized around stores. For B&N to go all-in on Amazon’s model would have meant reallocating capital, executive attention, and distribution infrastructure, and tolerating lower near-term profitability from its existing stores. The Amazon model “would be less profitable for them… versus the hugely profitable stores,” Ben said. Amazon “counter-positioned against everyone whose cost structure was set up” for physical retail, David added.
This is another way to think about counter-positioning: the more an incumbent has invested in building out its infrastructure, the less able it is to adapt.
Startups with less money than Google can certainly use this form. My favorite example is Somos Internet. As I explained in Cable Caballero, Somos designed a new network architecture and built its own hardware to run it, and incumbent telcos can’t respond because doing so would require ripping up the billions of dollars of CapEx they’ve spent buying and upgrading third-party hardware in the old network configuration. You can see their stuckness. Plus, given their reliance on vendors, most don’t have the technical wherewithal or nimbleness with which to re-architect the whole thing anyway. Plus plus, they’ve used so much debt to finance the network buildouts that they can’t really lower prices to hurt Somos, let alone fund an uncertain new network buildout.
There’s the flip side of both of the above, too, which is familiar to anyone who’s watched a movie where a bad guy gets leverage on a good guy by kidnapping their family: having nothing to protect is freeing.
When Microsoft took on the company nobody got fired for buying, IBM, “Microsoft basically had no baggage,” Ben explained. IBM sold integrated computer systems - software, hardware, everything - through the greatest enterprise salesforce in the business. To launch its PC, urgently, Big Blue broke with its normal model, used off-the-shelf components, an Intel processor, and even an operating system supplied by Microsoft. But Microsoft didn’t license exclusively to IBM; it licensed DOS non-exclusively, and was incentivized to make PCs as cheap and abundant as possible in order to get its software onto as many desks as possible. Per Ben & David, they could say: “We don’t need to make any money on hardware. We don’t need to even make hardware.”
Microsoft didn’t win because it wrote better software than IBM. IBM wrote software that was just fine eventually. But IBM needed its software to sell high-margin machines, whereas Microsoft benefited when the hardware layer got commoditized. As hardware commoditized, the software layer became the one with which all of the hardware providers had to be compatible. Or as Ben put it, Microsoft was “free to become the whole point of integration for the entire ecosystem just by shipping bits.”
This is a vicious form of counter-positioning: an entrant can be counter-positioned not just because it is willing to cannibalize a profit pool, but because it actively benefits from the destruction of the incumbent’s profit pool.
Then there’s Facebook, which faced off against MySpace and its 1 million users when it launched in 2004. MySpace is a joke now, but was a rocketship then. It launched in 2003, got to 1 million users in February 2004, passed Friendster the next month, and quintupled to five million users by November.
Facebook counter-positioned by saying that mashing a lot of users in one network to start was bad, actually, and that it was better to start small, to seed a network with the gentlemen and ladies of Harvard and to grow in little circles.
If you’re MySpace, and growth is good, and these nerds are building a little thing for their nerd friends, what are you going to do? Stop growing?
But it turned out that it was better to start small, to seed a network with the gentlemen and ladies of Harvard and to grow in little circles. Not forever, of course, but in the beginning. Facebook used the counter-positioning period to build a ravenously passionate network of people talking to their new college friends and poking each other and made the product so appealing to those on the outside, younger and older, that when they opened the floodgates, it FLOODED, and they moved on to Network Effects.
People haven’t learned.
Earlier this week, a16z partner Josh Elman tweeted, “The new moats are the same as the old moats. Every few years, we fall in love with shiny new tech and forget the basic physics of consumer software.” I’d expand it to say that we forget the basic physics of business strategy, but we’re on Facebook, so let’s stick with consumer.
Assistants are the buzzy product du jour, and Instinct the buzziest of those. It’s a wonderful experience, a better product than the assistants that came before it.
But as Ben says, “Being better is not counter positioning.” The Strategy Don, Michael Porter, writes that “Operational effectiveness means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them. Competitive strategy is about being different.”
Better is a benefit; Power requires a barrier. Counter-positioning exists when the incumbent sees that you’re better but cannot copy what makes you better without damaging the business it already has.
(For the avoidance of doubt: you can’t just pick a model that’s so bad that anyone, including you, would be damaged by pursuing it.)
Who would be damaged by releasing helpful agents? The Labs have kind of done it in their desktop apps, Grok Bot has done it, other new startups are doing it (and it is definitionally impossible to counter-position against new startups), and still Instinct is better. Because it’s better, it raised a $350 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation in late August, and one of the theories was that they raised so much so they could continue to offer it for free and drown competitors on the way to new business models (i.e. transaction fees).
Better, though, is not a moat, and good luck drowning Meta’s cash machine.
Meta (née Facebook) released their Assistant this week, too. Its name is Muse.
Some early reviews say that it’s better than Instinct. I still need to try it; better is not the point.
The point is that not only is it not painful for Meta to copy Instinct’s model and product, it’s great! Meta knows more about you than anyone and can recommend things you didn’t know you needed, solving the cold-start problem. They can, as Ben Thompson wrote, give each user “a VM with 8GB of RAM and 8GB” which is “a real-deal computer, and Meta is offering that to everyone in the United States, and eventually the world. It’s pretty extraordinary!” They can integrate it directly into WhatsApp, their enormous but undermonitized messaging app, they can integrate it with FB Marketplace so you can get what you want for cheap, they can put it in Meta Ray Bans so you can just tell your own face what to do, and they can train it in their gigantic data centers. They can give it away for free until the heat death of the universe (or until Anthropic hits on its >10% chance of killing us all). They can bring Network Effects and Scale Economies and Brand and whatever moat is necessary to bear, because they counter-positioned early and then dug all of those.
Now, Zuck has tried to copy or create new products before and failed, or failed to kill his target. Threads hasn’t cured my Twitter addiction. But Twitter had Network Effects. It was moated.
There are, to Josh’s point, too many startups out there that think that the new technology is so incredible that they no longer need moats. They just need speed and taste or whatever and focus and nimbleness and the special je ne sais quoi that comes with being a startup.
And there are plenty of startups who will do just fine with that approach. The big moated companies are willing to pay a lot of money to bring some of that je ne sais quoi inside their castles and to keep it out of their competitors’.
I couldn’t point to Cursor’s moat, but it was an excellent product and it was worth $60 billion to SpaceX. Nvidia paid $12,930,300,000 for Hugging Face, which I actually used as an example of an AI company that used a Complexity Uncertainty Window to develop early Network Effects in When to Dig a Moat. I talked to a founder not long ago and asked about moats, and he said something like “We don’t care about moats we want to build a great product” and so I passed and the company is valued at like 50x what it was then, so what do I know.
It’s rumored that Meta (and others) even offered 10 figures for Instinct!
But when Instinct turned them down, Meta said, “Fine, we’ll build it ourselves,” because it cost them nothing but money and they have plenty of that. Of course, it’s probably easier than ever to copy unmoated products now that AI can write the code, but that’s besides the point, because without moats, any good company will get copied, even if the humans have to do it themselves.
We are in a period in which AI is so shiny and new that incumbents are willing to pay a lot of money for products that are better than anyone else’s, but acquisition hope is not a strategy and better is not a moat.
I hope that Instinct wins, as I hope that many startups take down their industries’ Goliaths. They are fighting. Just yesterday, they introduced a Trusted Person network, to let people’s assistants talk to those of their significant others, family, and friends.
It is an attempt to create Network Effects, and they’re going for it. Respect. The question will be whether they’ve given themselves enough time to build a real Network Effect before people start using Muse, and Muses inevitably work with each other, too.
Time is why counter-positioning is such a powerful weapon to the otherwise unshielded.
It makes it painful, suicidal, even, for someone to copy your better product. You need to use that time to sprint like hell until you can establish your long-term moats.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with another Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2026-09-08 20:53:13
Welcome to the 2,414 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 278,821 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Tuesday and welcome back from the long weekend!
It’s beautiful out in NYC and it’s time to get back to work. So here’s a short and fun one about why everyone is reading the same old book that I am.
Let’s get to it.
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There is a phenomenon called Baader-Meinhof where when you discover something, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s not that the thing is suddenly everywhere; it’s just that you notice it now.
So maybe it is because I’m reading Lonesome Dove that I’ve noticed that everyone is reading Lonesome Dove.
I mentioned the book in a Slack I have with eight friends. One wrote back that he’s reading it now:
Another shared that his mom is reading and loving it:
And three, including the one whose mom is reading it, said that they are going to read it, which makes five people in a group of nine.
This is heartening, because they say that no one is reading anymore. It turns out that people are, just they’re only reading Lonesome Dove.
Let me be clear: Lonesome Dove deserves to be read. It is a Pulitzer Prize winner. If you haven’t, you should go read it right now. But it is also weird that everyone is reading it! It was published in 1985 and won the Pulitzer in 1986.
So Why Is Everyone Reading ‘Lonesome Dove,’ an 858-page Western From 1985? That’s the question that Esquire asked and attempted to answer on March 20th, 2025.
The author, Michael Sebastian, had seen a post on a friend’s Instagram about the book and decided like a year later, driving past a bookstore, that he had to buy it. He tried to figure out why it seemed like everyone was now, like him, reading the book and traced it to a few things:
McMurtry died in September 2023, the same month that a biography about the author and a big story in The New Yorker about him came out. This confluence of factors was likely the spark. The kindling is that all things western are in the Zeitgeist: the Taylor Sheridan universe (Yellowstone, 1923, Landman), the new Netflix show American Primeval, Kevin Costner’s epic Horizon: An American Saga, Pharrell’s western-wear fashion show for Louis Vuitton in January 2024.
Then he asked why it resonated so much and concluded that it was something to do with the fact that it deals with something a lot of men are feeling, which is that we’re never going to be the man we want to be. And maybe! That hasn’t been my experience; I’ve enjoyed the characters and the simplicity of the prose and the unvarnished look at life on the frontier in the 19th century.
But there are a lot of books that might resonate. Why this one? The McMurtry profiles / death timing and Yellowstone / Landman popularity felt like they would have been enough to get a few people to read it, but while I loved both shows, I didn’t know that McMurtry had died (Esquire was wrong, btw; he died in 2021). I didn’t even know that there was a Larry McMurtry.
No, I found Lonesome Dove because I asked Claude to give me a book I wouldn’t be able to put down, and it recommended The Mountain in the Sea, which I’d already read, and Lonesome Dove.
I went back to the source this week to ask Claude to help me understand whether it was responsible for the Doveaissance, and it said kind of but not really, so I asked it to give me a timeline, which it did, but it felt incomplete, so I asked ChatGPT Astra 6, and it delivered a plinko ride through how things spread today.
Basically, the whole thing kicks off with The Ringer. Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald spent COVID Summer (2020) discussing LD on The Watch, culminating in a 2.5 hour megapod.
Then McMurtry, like so many of his characters, died. He left us on March 25, 2021. That summer, Stephen King went on Stephen Colbert’s “What Ya’ Readin?” and said that his favorite book was probably Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. When it later went viral on BookTok (the part of TikTok where people talk about books), a bunch of people said that King’s rec was the reason they picked it up.
I, mind you, didn’t know about any of this, and I suspect you didn’t either. Media is a fragmented thing.
We pick the trail back up in November 2023, when the From the Front Porch podcast picked it as its 2024 “Conquer a Classic” for another group read-along. One participant described reading it alongside “thousands of other readers,” which is more copies than most books sell total.
In June 2024, popular writer Jia Tolentino put Lonesome Dove in The New Yorker’s “What To Read This Summer” list, after having been recommended the book by a friend in 2023. She wrote:
I gasped and sobbed and clutched the book when it was over. I was so thankful for the reminder that reading can still be like this, that the realm of the unread always holds, somewhere, the exact thing I’m looking for, whatever it is.
The next month, in July, Defector’s Tom Ley wrote, It’s Time For You to Read Lonesome Dove, just gushing about the reading experience.
In February 2025, undoubtedly due to the book’s growing popularity and that of the aforementioned Taylor Sheridan Universe, Teton Ridge Entertainment – “THE LEADER IN WESTERN SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT” – acquired the adaptation rights.
On March 6, 2025, another Substacker, Bart Schaneman, wrote Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is the darling of BookTok. It deserves the hype., and wrote:
It seems like every guy with a BookTok or Instagram account about books has either read or is reading Lonesome Dove, and most of them are in agreement that it’s one of the best books that they’ve ever read. Writers I admire like Elisa Gabbert said it was one of her favorites of last year. Kevin Morby has cited it as an influence. Adam Gnade references it. A couple of weeks ago it was announced that someone had bought the rights to all of Larry McMurtry’s novels that include these characters, so expect a streaming series or movies or both.
Later that month, we got the Esquire piece, a cap, it would seem, on the breakout-again success.
I still had not heard about any of this, and none of it is that weird yet. Event-driven word-of-mouth mixed with some genre resurgence and influence from influencers.
In April, the BookTokkers kept coming. This guy, Booksaresick, got 41k likes on a “Books for dudes” video that featured Lonesome Dove.
Maybe this would have happened anyway given that you can’t change time, but in mid-to-late 2025, Simon & Schuster released a 40th-anniversary paperback edition with a Taylor Sheridan foreword, creating a direct bridge between Lonesome Dove and the modern Yellowstone audience. On September 23rd, it released an entirely new 35h 49m audiobook narrated by Will Patton.
In October, S&S said that the book had sold more copies in 2025 - 56,000 - than in any year since the TV miniseries, Return to Lonesome Dove, aired in 1993-94, the year that the Knicks were last in the Finals and OJ Simpson raced the police in his Ford Bronco. All while reading was reportedly getting scalped by the internet!
That brings us to 2026.
Early this year, Robert Duvall, the actor who played the protagonist Gus McCrae on the show, passed away at 95. He had said Gus had been his favorite role, and that Lonesome Dove was “The Godfather of Westerns,” and obituaries foregrounded it. RFD-TV re-aired the entire four-part miniseries in his honor. There was a big spike on Google Trends around this time.
In March, Sonny Bunch wrote Why Lonesome Dove Continues to Resonate on The Bulwark as part of the press tour for another McMurtry biography, Western Star: The Life of a Legend by David Streitfeld. When I tweeted about Lonesome Dove on Monday as I started writing this, my friend Cristin Culver replied recommending the book.
In May, The Art of Manliness kicked off another read-along, with weekly posts and discussion prompts on the book.
Finally, in August, Rachel Monroe and LD-stan Jia Tolentino wrote a whole New Yorker piece titled What To Read After “Lonesome Dove”.
In Texas, where I live, someone always seems to be reading “Lonesome Dove,” Larry McMurtry’s thrilling, ambivalent Western, first published in 1985. The rest of the country is catching on: the novel sold more copies in 2025 than it had in thirty years, and earlier this year it spiked on Google Trends. And I’m not surprised—“Lonesome Dove” is the kind of romantic, immersive story that gets BookTok going, but McMurtry shades his epic with just the right amount of regret. There’s never a bad time to hunker down with Gus, Call, and the other members of the Hat Creek outfit as they drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana, but summer is ideal. Nearly the whole novel takes place outdoors, through a series of vast landscapes that are at once brutal and beautiful. I guarantee you’ll cry at the end.
What is interesting to me is that, again, I didn’t see any of this! There was this whole Lonesome Dove movement happening right under my nose, on BookTok, in The New Yorker, on Instagram, on TV, across Substack, in read-along communities, and I missed it all.
But Claude didn’t.
The internet fragmented the media landscape into a billion pieces, like cable TV smashed it into hundreds before it. So much so that despite all of the time I spend on my computer and phone, despite how much I love to read, and despite the fact that I ripped through Yellowstone and Landman and Dutton Ranch and was hungry for more in the category, I didn’t catch a whiff of it.
Then I asked Claude for a book rec, and it told me to read Lonesome Dove. Which is maybe a coincidence! Maybe it just knows me well and thought I’d like it.
But I asked ChatGPT, too, on two separate occasions, and all three times, it recommended… Lonesome Dove. The second time was influenced by the first, but it re-recommended it when I asked for books to read in France. It was the only non-France-themed book on the list.
Two LLMs both recommended the same 850+ page book, a book that starts out pretty slow, when I asked for page-turners. I asked friends who read the book how they came to it, and many of them said Claude or ChatGPT recommended it to them, too. D.A. Wallach pointed out that LLMs keep recommending the book to his book club, which is a patient zero-to-superspreader scenario.
Claude loves Lonesome Dove so much that one guy, jj.books.and.beats, made an Instagram video in which Claude keeps pushing him to read it while he’s trying to work.
There’s a way to read this that’s something like “Ugh the flattening of culture!” Remakes are bad enough, now we’re so out of new ideas that the LLMs are just pushing us to the originals.
That’s not how I read it.
Two of the bigger challenges seem to me to be that 1) people are reading less and 2) things are so fragmented that we’re never all watching the same thing. There’s no TGIF or new Harry Potter book release at midnight.
If the internet fragmented discovery, LLMs might be the right tool to put the pieces back together. I don’t read Jia Tolentino or watch Colbert, but they do. They read and watch everything.
It’s been very fun to be reading something old and great at the same time as so many people on the internet seem to be, and finding those people and wondering how the hell they’re just coming to Lonesome Dove now, too.
The fact that it seems to be a bunch of traditional triggers that might have otherwise fizzled but have been given staying power and reach by LLMs - pretty much the one thing that we’re all using - is pretty cool. LLMs may be a new distribution channel for the back catalog of human culture.
Search is good at finding what you’re looking for when you know what you’re looking for. Social media is good at showing you what people are talking about right this second. LLMs are good at figuring out what you, specifically, might think is great, which is often what many other people think is great. Both search and social media have historically advantaged newness, and it’s interesting to think about what happens when LLMs advantage “best” or “best for me” or “lindyness.”
Our new distribution technology might turn out to be real good for old things.
I guess that’s life on the frontier.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with another Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2026-09-04 20:36:19
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday, Happy Labor Day Weekend to my fellow Americans, and welcome to our 209th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Right on cue, we have a week so full of celebration-worthy labor from the good guys that I don’t even know where to fit it all. We have a couple extra stories above the fold and a whole heaping for not boring world subscribers below.
If this is what acceleration feels like in the summer, hold onto your butts in the fall.
Let’s get to it.
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h/t Gina Gorlin
I’ve been saying for a while that the best thing the pro-progress people could build is a Counterfactual Machine. Run a simulation in which you remove certain technologies from humanity’s toolkit and let people experience that world in VR.
This isn’t quite that, but it’s pretty darn close. Someone built a site that lets you draw a life at random from any of the over 100 billion people who have ever lived. As they wrote, “most lives ever lived were Asian, poor, and brief,” and indeed, the life that I pulled was an Asian woman who lived in the 11th century and lost four of her six kids before age 5.
In a 2016 speech, President Barack Obama said, “If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you'd be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you'd be born into — you wouldn't choose 100 years ago. You wouldn't choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You'd choose right now.” He was drawing on John Rawls concept of the Veil of Ignorance (and if you haven’t, stop what you’re doing and read Scott Alexander’s Being John Rawls).
People love to talk about the challenges of modern life, and there certainly are some, but there’s also never been a better time to be alive in human history. The only better times, I suspect, all lie in the future, thanks to the types of stories we’ll cover today.
What a time to be alive.
World Model enjoyers stand up!
In March, General Intuition founder & CEO Pim DeWitte and I co-wrote an essay on World Models. “World models,” we wrote, “these systems that learn from watching the world and the actions taken in it — are a fundamentally new kind of foundation model. They can compute what was previously uncomputable.”
There are a bunch of different kinds of models that are called World Models, and in the essay we wrote that Runway’s were Video Models and World Labs’ were 3D Reconstruction and Generation Models, but both took a step closer to our definition with these releases (Runway a little more than World Labs), but whatever you call them… holy shit are these releases cool.
On Monday, Runway dropped Solaris, which it calls an “Interface World Model.” Instead of an LLM writing code that a browser renders into an app, Solaris generates the app itself, frame by frame, in real time, and when you click or drag something it generates the next frame. There is no code. “The image is the application.” This is a picture is worth 1,000 words situation, so just watch the video. Software is going to get so cool.
Not to be outdone, on Tuesday, Fei-Fei Li and the World Labs team showed off Atlas, an “omni world model” trained from scratch on text, images, video, camera poses, depth maps, and 3D all at once. It generates up to a minute of 1440p video with what they call pixel-perfect camera control, meaning you hand it real camera geometry instead of typing “pan left,” it will invent a coherent hallway between two unrelated photos if you tell it they’re in the same building, and it reconstructs real scenes into 3D from anywhere between one photo and a hundred. Ehhh.. you know what? Just watch this one, too:
And then, yesterday, Runway dropped another model - GWM World 2 - “a world model for real time environment simulation.” Instead of an interface or a scene, this one “generates full, interactive, real-time video simulations in one continuous 720p stream at 24 fps and audio at 48000 Hz, responding to your inputs as you explore.”
What a … world.
The launch video nails it. While I haven’t gotten to play with it yet, the demos from those who have seem unreal. Like this one, from Matt Shumer, who built a simulated world full of Astra-powered agents and watched them coordinate. (He also used Unreal to build a realistic Manhattan world.)
A lot of people are saying AGI is here, and I don’t know exactly what that means, but it does seem as if humans are going to be able to use these new models to do a lot of things for us that we shouldn’t be doing ourselves, and that it will let us be creative in entirely new ways. It’s the most excited I’ve felt to play with a new model.
Jennifer Hiller for WSJ
All of these models - World Models, Astras, whatever comes next - are going to need a lot of power.
On Tuesday, Fervo announced a 396 MW power purchase agreement with Google, the biggest enhanced geothermal PPA any company has ever signed, to power a potential Google data center in Utah with 24/7 carbon-free electricity from its Cape Station project in Beaver County starting in 2028. Google also gets an option to take roughly 600 MW more by June 2030, which would bring the total to a full GW, from just one customer.
We’ve covered Fervo a few times here, most recently in #190 & #193 related to its IPO, but if you’re new, enhanced geothermal uses shale drilling rigs to hit hot rock. You don’t need a hot spring or a geyser, just heat within reach of a drill bit, which is a lot more places.
This isn't the first Fervo-Google deal. Project Red in Nevada has been powering Google's data centers there since 2023, and the two signed a 115 MW deal with NV Energy in 2024 that invented the Clean Transition Tariff (Google pays extra for more expensive clean energy so neighbors don’t have to).
Fervo says this new deal “unlocks new, around-the-clock electricity capacity at no cost to existing ratepayers,” and under a Utah law called SB132, it may be able to sell straight to Google’s load.
(Speaking of which, this WSJ article, See the New Building Techniques Turbocharging the Data-Center Boom, is short, sweet, and mostly visual, and its subtitle makes the case for DCs: “Hyperscalers’ need for speed is spawning timesaving products and building techniques.”)
The future of transport is safer, more enjoyable & gives you more time back
Yesterday in Austin, Texas, Tesla launched the Cybercab, and starting at 5pm today, anyone in the Austin geofence can hail one from the Robotaxi app.
The interior was designed for self-driving: it has two seats, butterfly doors, no steering wheel, no pedals, and no controls of any kind. The future should look like the future. It has nine cameras, a 48 kWh battery pack good for roughly 290 miles, one 219 horsepower motor, weighs 3,113 pounds, comes with Starlink in the roof, and, per Elon, is “basically a super comfortable lounge on wheels with a great TV and epic sound.”
Back in Dose #204, when Zoox got the first US approval for a vehicle without a steering wheel, I wrote that cars would start being designed like moving rooms. That was seven weeks ago. Now we have another one, designed explicitly to be an entertainment room.
Cybercab is starting small of course. Waymo does 500,000 paid rides a week across 14 cities with 4,000+ retrofitted Jaguars and Ojais. There are only 45 Cybercabs in the Texas fleet next to 269 Model Ys (one way they want to scale is by letting people sign up to purchase fleets of them).
But this is the first vehicle designed from a blank sheet to be autonomous and cheap and mass produced, by a company that has mass-produced impossible things before, and real people are riding in them. The Zoox is a $250,000-ish minivan-shaped thing. Waymo pays Zeekr and Jaguar and then bolts on $100K of sensors. Elon says the Cybercab costs under $30,000 to build and about 20 cents a mile to operate at scale, with 10 cities by the end of the year and positive unit economics by mid-2027.
As friend of Not Boring Sam D’Amico tweeted, “Cars are robots now.”
There may be tens of millions of these robocars on the streets one day. I still can’t wait to read about the horrendous things people do in them, as they’re whisked very safely from Point A to Point B.
Danny Bernstein and Pascal Labrecque
As fund theses go, Reservoir VC’s might be the most specific: “Reservoir VC invests in rugged AI startups that solve one high-value task in ag and then compound to adjacent industries.” Their answer to “let me know how I can be helpful” is unique, too. GP Danny Bernstein has a 40 acre farm / agricultural robotics playground in Salinas where the robots can get real-world practice.
There, this week, a Canadian startup called Sami Robotics had a robot cut and pick a head of iceberg lettuce, which seems pretty cool but is apparently a bigger deal than it looks. Danny called it "an AgTech moon landing moment."
NZ robotics company Sentinel Robotics added: “I don't think people understand how monumental this kind of thing is. Harvest has always been the hardest part of agricultural automation and leafy greens are the hardest of the hard.” Every head is a different size, you have to cut in exactly the right spot without bruising it, and a good crew of humans with knives is really fast as it is.
If I ever see a Sami iceberg salad on the menu, I’ll say to my friends, “Lettuce try that.”
NASA (h/t Matt Gialich)
Last Sunday at 7:26am, a Falcon Heavy took off from Pad 39A with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on top, the start of its three month journey to Sun-Earth L2, almost a million miles away.
It’s going to hunt for exoplanets.
Roman’s mirror is the same 2.4 meters as Hubble’s (it’s actually a spy satellite mirror the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA in 2012), but its Wide Field Instrument sees a chunk of sky at least 100 times bigger than Hubble’s infrared view at the same sharpness. Over five years, it’ll survey more than two billion galaxies, measure how dark energy has stretched everything out over time, and do a microlensing census of planets toward the center of the Milky Way.
This is Dose-worthy on its own because we love a good space telescope here. We shared the first images from James Webb way back in Dose #3!
But it’s even more Dose-worthy, because as AstroForge founder Matt Gialich noted, it’s… “9 months ahead of schedule. That is unheard of for a billion-dollar-plus mission.”
Casey Handmer, who’s been hilariously critical of his former employer NASA (please read NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage), QT’d Gialich proposing that we “Promote the people responsible and give them another worthy project with performance-linked bonuses and lots of authority and responsibility!”
If Administrator Isaacson’s NASA keeps this up, we may get to Mars after all.
Matthew Pines
For most of human history, genius was the rarest thing on Earth.
The last time I heard from Matthew Pines, it was when he was the guest on a 4+ hour American Alchemy episode a year ago titled UFO Physics & Disclosure Under Trump. Now, he and his team at PSI (which stands for Physical Superintelligence, but is also a nod to psi abilities) have $58 million to bring our physics up to the 21st century.
Pines is doing it with Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, whose Eon Systems fruit fly brain we covered in Dose #184, and who graduated top of his class at MIT in 2003 as the last student to complete a triple major under the institution’s historical policy, and Alex Klokus, who created the Gravity Blanket and co-founded the UAP / psionic research group, Skywatcher.
Which is to say, we have a bunch of wide open minded geniuses with tens of millions of dollars to save physics from whatever path it went down decades ago. Hell yeah.
Yesterday, Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston announced a non-profit called The Fermi Explorer, which plans to launch “a minimum viable spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, leaving in 3 years and arriving in around 80,000 years. We hope it will be both the first spacecraft to leave Earth for another star, and the last to arrive.” AstroForge’s Matt Gialich, who you might remember from the story right above, is an advisor.
I bring this up because the mission was designed by… PSI.
We’d spent three months and one billion tokens on it [the mission],” Johnston said. “In a week, they [PSI] spent 10 billion tokens on it, and it came up with this ingenious perihelion-pump maneuver that we then validated with the NASA guys.
And speaking of AI models doing crazy physics, our friends at Arena Physica, who you might remember from Electromagnetism Secretly Runs the World, which I co-wrote with its founder Pratap Ranade, released its new model, Heaviside-1 this week. Heaviside-1 is its second generation foundation model for electromagnetism, and can run sims like this in milliseconds instead of today’s simulators’ hours.
You can play with it yourself in the Fields Simulator here. Look at me. Look at me. I’m the [physicist] now.
2026-08-28 20:14:36
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 208th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
While there was a ton of good news this week, the videos of the floods in Nepal and Tibet are some of the most heartbreaking I’ve ever seen. We’re going to cover the good stuff, but if you’d like to donate to the relief efforts, I’m giving to DirectRelief’s Nepal Flood Relief 2026, where 100% of donations support Nepal response activities.
Now, August rules: you should be outside as much as possible while you can, so we will just quickly tell you to check out “Matthew’s” Field Notes from China, and then…
Let’s get to it.
Dan and Sienna rolled out what looks like the most delicious creatine ever made, the Lemonade Collection. To celebrate, they agreed to give not boring readers 50% off through the weekend. Go get your Lemonade Creatine + Electrolytes and code notboring50 at checkout.
Xavier Martinez for WSJ
Pancreatic cancer has long been one of the deadliest and hardest to treat forms of the disease thanks to a mutation that sticks the RAS protein on and causes runaway cell growth.
In terrible news for cancer and great news for people, the FDA has approved a drug, Revolution Medicines’ Rasonque, that targets the mutation and helped subjects in a late-stage study live for more than 13 months instead of around 6.7 months for those who receive chemotherapy alone.
The drug does have side effects, and 13 months isn’t forever, both issues personified by “Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who went public in the spring with what he described as a significant reduction in his tumors while in a clinical trial of the drug, appeared on television with his face covered in red blotches.” Sasse lived longer than expected, but he still expects to pass away, as discussed in his incredible conversation with Leopold’s wedding officiant Ross Douthat, titled “How Ben Sasse is Living Now That He is Dying.”
Still, this is a massive win, one that drew a standing ovation at a cancer conference last spring when Revolution announced the results.
As one patient, former Disney exec Jay Williams, told WSJ, “What it does is buy you time, and that’s one thing you don’t always have with pancreatic cancer.”
And speaking of time, good on the FDA for approving this so quickly. Per the Agency, “The FDA granted Rasonque Breakthrough Therapy and Orphan Drug designations. Rasonque received Priority Review for this indication. The application was also reviewed under the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher pilot program, which is intended to help accelerate the review of therapies that address national public health priorities.” As a result, it was approved about 6.5 months faster than the standard PDUFA timeline, which means means it went through in roughly half the usual already-accelerated window for a priority oncology drug.
Patients, oncologists, all of us, and regulators are saying the same thing: get fucked, cancer.
Naman Pushp for Airbound
Last year, I invested in a company called Airbound founded by a young guy from India who taught himself physics and engineering on YouTube during COVID and used that knowledge to build better drones.
After we got introduced but before we met, I didn’t really think I’d invest - drones are a fairly crowded space and Zipline is awesome. Then I met Naman, and decided to invest immediately.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the chance to work with him on his Manifesto for Airbound, in which he did a great job laying out the future where all movement is in the air that got me so excited in our first conversation.
He published it this week, along with the news that he raised $37M from Greenoaks, Lachy Groom, and others.
Read it - and stay tuned for more.
U.S. Army Communication and Outreach Office
We love to see friends get contracts from the US Army to make a lot of nuclear reactors and hopefully save a lot of lives in the process, so we were very happy to see the Army choose Radiant Nuclear, who we wrote about in 2024, and Antares Nuclear, whose co-founder Julia DeWahl was my Age of Miracles co-host, sign deals as two of five companies selected for the $2.2B Janus program.
Radiant is getting $750M to make 15 Kaleidos microreactors, and while Antares didn’t reveal specifics on this contract, they tweeted that they “now have a contract value on the order of $1B that is growing rapidly.”
While the business side is awesome, the most important piece is what this might mean for warfighters. As Doug said in the deep dive, “Over 55% of US soldier casualties in the two Iraqi conflicts are from ambushed convoys. And convoys move ammo, water, and fuel. So if you could put a reactor in one of these locations, you completely remove all those fuel shipments, you save tens of thousands of lives.”
As a bonus, our portfolio company Standard Nuclear has signed a binding agreement to supply Antares with TRISO fuel through 2035 for microreactors built for defense and space missions, which means it’s now supplying both Janus-winning startups.
And speaking of nuclear fuel, Actinide became the first startup to enrich uranium and produce HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium), the fuel that many advanced reactors use (it goes inside the TRISO pellets).
They did it using their particle accelerator, Endurance, designed and built in Texas, which had been producing “enriched Yb-176, a precursor for cancer therapies worth roughly $30,000 per gram,” just last month.
HALEU will be one of many isotopes the company makes in its attempt to “address humanity's greatest unsolved problem: control of the atom.”
MHS enables AI agents to operate multiple lab and manufacturing instruments, such as microscopes, liquid handlers, and robotic arms, in parallel, and perform intricate tasks ranging from routine drug discovery experiments to laser calibration on a quantum computer.
Ruxandra Teslo has some good quick thoughts here, which you should read, but which are basically: this is aiming to automate boring stuff, like laser alignment, so humans can do science, which is core to the human spirit.
David Hansen has some, too, on what humans at US manufacturing companies can already do with Claude and Codex.
Read more here.
Two days ago, rumors swirled that Nvidia would be buying Hugging Face, the open source model repository, for $12.9 billion. Open source makes sense for Nvidia - commoditize your complements!
So when Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf tweeted on Thursday morning, he tweeted what was on everyone’s mind: “We have a huge news to share today!”
The news, though, was that Pollen Robotics, which the company acquired in 2025, was “unveiling the first truly accessible RL robot - welcome Microduck.”
The thing is cute, costs $399, and you can train it yourself with reinforcement learning. Before you do, it can do a bunch of stuff out of the box, like “walk, sit, crouch, roller-skate, pick up objects with its articulated beak, and recover on its own.”
Asked to comment on Hugging Face’s big week, Billy Madison said, “That’s quacktastic!”
2026-08-25 20:08:52
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Tuesday!
A few weeks ago, a longtime not boring reader and one of my smartest friends, someone I go to with questions on everything from energy to robotics, told me that he was going to China. Over the next few months, he planned to meet with energy, AI, and hardware companies and develop his China Fingerspitzengefühl.
Would I be interested in sharing what he learns in real-time with not boring’s readers? Incredibly easy yes.
If you are interested in the types of companies and technologies we write about in not boring, you probably need to understand China better. I need to understand China better. It currently dominates the Electric Stack, for one thing, and the next few decades will see Western companies compete with Chinese ones to bring the best products to the world market, to say nothing of geopolitics.
There are a number of great China-focused blogs for western audiences out there - I like Sinocism, China Talk, Tech Buzz China, and Hello China Tech, not to mention Dan Wang’s great book, Breakneck, but there are many more - but I think there’s something particularly interesting about riding along with someone sharp, curious, and motivated as they land in China with a bunch of imported questions, try to answer them, realize they were probably the wrong ones, ask new ones, and seek those answers. The process is often more illuminating than the output.
We decided to share his field notes as a series for paid not boring world subscribers for a few reasons:
This is exactly the kind of thing I want to publish for paid subs in not boring world: an operator sharing raw information with a little intelligent interpretation through his own earned lens.
So that he can be more open with his discoveries and analyses, and move freely.
For that same reason, he’s writing under a pseudonym: “Matthew.”
Over the past couple of weeks, as we’ve chatted from across the globe, I’ve been amazed by how fast “Matthew” went from American outsider to someone in the right WhatsApp chats to conversations with increasingly heavy hitters. You can see that evolution already in today’s piece - from wide-eyed tourist to factory tours. In just the few days since the ones we cover here, he’s gone deeper still.
Today, for our first installment, we’re including some of his initial impressions of Hong Kong and the mainland above the paywall as an introduction, but most of the good stuff today and going forward for the next couple of months will be for not boring world subscribers. Subscribers can also ask any questions on China you have — specifically around hardware, energy, AI, and manufacturing, but really, just throw anything at us. Send them over to me and he’ll dig, as he’s generally quite curious about China beyond his immediate interests.
Understanding China as more than a cartoonish adversary is critical for anyone who wishes to compete with its companies, and for those who simply want to better understand the world. I hope that Matthew’s adventure will give you a specific and increasingly nuanced view of how they do what they do, and why, and what they might do next, and what it all means for American technology companies, through the eyes of an American engineer.
Let’s get to it.
This piece will cover my first 11 days in China. The purpose of my extended trip is to learn about and meet with Chinese energy equipment companies and factories, but I’m also curious about China’s culture and financial ecosystem.
In the first section, I was an outsider getting a feel for China and getting invited to the right WeChat group chats. As I did, I began getting invited to factories and having discussions with more and more “mainlanders” who helped fill my knowledge gaps about the country. Throughout the piece, I’ll share a mix of my experiences and key takeaways.
Three Biggest Takeaways:
The China of 2036 will be vastly different than the China of 2026. Companies that used to manufacture luxury handbags are now becoming the brands themselves. Investors who used to copy American VCs are now running their own state-backed deeptech playbooks. Battery cell companies are becoming grid, datacenter, and asset-owning companies. If you aren’t heavily updating your mental model of China after this piece, then you will get blindsided.
China is heterogeneous. China has so many different dialects, dresses, jobs, climates, educational attainments, and personalities that I feel as though I could spend centuries in China learning new things. Beware of anyone who makes reductive stereotypes about the country, positive or negative.
China is big. Yes, this is “obvious,” but you don’t viscerally feel it until you casually see hundreds of skyscrapers in a row and single companies outproducing the industries of entire countries. Everything else just seems so…puny.
When I first arrived in China (or rather, Hong Kong, before heading into mainland Shenzhenbei the second day), I was incredibly shocked by the scale. The airport seems innocuous enough, although larger than most American international airports, but the moment you take a taxi into the city, everything becomes mind-bogglingly dense. In New York City, America’s densest city, there are around 900 buildings above 100 meters. In Hong Kong, there are 4000, filled to the brim with people in and around them. Frankly, it surprises me when people say that China is lying about the size of its population. You can feel the sheer size of everything here. Even the “suburbs” here can be millions of people large, with towering high-rises
stretching on and on and on.
Being guided by my friend in Hong Kong, I could find anything anywhere. Hong Kong is a financial and trading hub (import/export businesses have created many wealthy individuals), and in 10 minutes I saw three separate stores selling professional-grade cellos. But things really got nuts when I walked into the malls and high-rise buildings. You could have an IKEA on floor 5, an ice skating rink on floor 10, and then a wave pool on floor 11. I truly never quite knew what to expect every time we entered a new building. For example, Toys “R” Us was a staple of my American childhood, and it went bankrupt around a decade ago. However, the Chinese arm of Toys “R” Us was always financially healthy, so it still exists in China. Similarly, many famous US brands in China are owned by the Chinese version of the company, despite sharing superficial similarities. The 5090 GPU I found in an electronics market here, though, was very much the same Nvidia as the US one.
Hong Kong is also interesting because many mainlanders refer to it more as an “antique of the British Empire.” Hong Kong used to be China’s dominant financial hub, partly because of its advantageous tax structure and lax rules compared to the mainland (changes in both during COVID led foreigners to flee to Singapore). However, Shanghai, Beijing, and even Shenzhen have grown rapidly since the 90s, giving Hong Kong competitors.
That said, Hong Kong has an abundance of great universities, many of them highly technical and sending out thousands of students. This is one of the city’s more lasting draws for mainlanders, along with Hong Kong’s nature. Near one of these universities, while taking the subway (which arrived every 2 minutes, had perfect AC, and moved millions of people a day), I first saw Hong Kong’s low-rises and was surprised by the size of its beaches and archipelagos. I took a speedboat to tour and visit some of the beaches, and was even more shocked by the number of wakeboarders and superyachts corralling around. It felt more like Monaco than the urban metropolis I expected.
Heading back, although the locals will just drive up, you can hike up Hong Kong’s mountains to get a breathtaking view of the city. Hong Kong’s densest region is roughly 3x the size of Manhattan in terms of population, and from the tallest mountains you can even see Shenzhen. One of the buildings, around 500 meters tall, was covered in OLEDs gleaming pink, a cyberpunk obelisk staring at you from across the border.
The next day I headed into Shenzhen, the famous “tech-bro” city, and I should’ve allowed a lot more time for immigration. It was my first time getting a lot of particular paperwork and processes done, like giving them all of my fingerprints while being watched by quite literally over a hundred cameras. So, by the time I got on the high-speed rail into the city (which, likely because it was in an urban area, only went 160 km/h), I was in Shenzhenbei, a train stop about 10km north of where I wanted to go. I should’ve gone to the Futianbei train stop because a lot of the urban scene, my hotel, and seemingly everything fun is more on the south side of the city, but it was still useful. Shenzhen, I’ve been told, is much more friendly to foreigners in terms of its infrastructure than other mainland cities (some of which have just straight-up zero English anywhere), but it was still quite a difference. Uber no longer really worked; you needed to have WeChat Pay or DiDi. Most signs had little to no English; the rate of foreigners dropped dramatically, and cigarettes and cameras watching you took their place.
Most people who drive are in EVs; I saw very few gas-powered cars.
The McDonald’s that I scrambled to grab food at had a slightly different menu, but honestly wasn’t too different from an American one (besides some folks eating with plastic gloves, although most were just eating with their hands/utensils), before I headed into the core part of the city. I dropped my stuff off at my hotel, which, despite being super nice/multi-floor, was around $50 USD, where I met a friend who had moved to Shenzhen a year ago.
There, he introduced me to a ton of folks on WeChat (WeChat is where everyone does business; if some low-tier Alibaba factory responds to your email, then you know they’re going to be bad), and gave me a bunch of advice summarized in this italicized paragraph.
“Shenzhen is massive, it’s new (Deng Xiaoping’s SEZ 40 years ago), so nobody is “from there” the way they are from Beijing/Shanghai, culture is fairly welcoming, 100k people every day make something new so it changes all the time, even if you were here for a decade or two decades you would know so so so so so so little about the whole of it all, tier-1 manufacturing can be found in many parts of the world not just china but density of suppliers and supply chain make Shenzhen unmatched. APEC 2026, normally held in Beijing/Shanghai, is being held here for the first time because Xi likes the city and the government wants to show it off. It helps to be specific about who you want to meet because hardware specialists exist in every subfield you can imagine, and many universities offer 4-year/master’s degrees in manufacturing that are actually really good. No foreigner will ever get government subsidies (you may be well liked, and even a permanent resident in Hong Kong, but you will forever be a foreigner. Never forget that.) and that’s why you see so few here; they just get brutally outcompeted, but you can and should work with folks on suppliers/supply chain. Be careful about IP; people are super competitive here. If you want to cut costs and figure out expansions, don’t just think about input/output; you’ll get scammed. You need full process knowledge to figure out the limiting factors and how cheap things really are. He’s seen suppliers charge companies $200k for a machine that should have cost $20k. The food delivery guys can make a living here because the cost of living is so low, but they were often just scrolling e-girls on their phones while we were driving. However, if Meituan tried replacing them all with drone delivery, there would be so many riots in the streets.”
I then (after being guided by a friend who said “just come here, trust me”) entered an unexpectedly massive anime/cosplayer facility underground, with every possible character/combination you could imagine. There were blatant ripoffs of many characters (I know a Minion when I see one), but it was interesting to see the variety of genres. While I didn’t snap pictures of the cosplayers for fear of being rude, many elaborate anime cosplays in thick makeup, wigs, and costumes walked around Shenzhen.
Afterward, I walked upstairs and spent a few hours around Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen’s famed electronics market. To be honest, it moderately blew my mind, and I say moderately only because the initial Hong Kong skyscrapers had completely shattered my worldview the prior day.
If you are a hardware nerd, you would’ve loved this place. Massive billboards advertised MOSFETs and spare motorcycle parts. I walked into a McDonald’s looking for a bathroom and ended up in a random 5-story electronics market. I saw every type of phone (Huawei stores included), drone, robot form factor- you name it; here, there was technicality (and the smell of solder wafting around) in the air. Plenty of small kids came up to me yelling “nihao nihao”, which was cute, although the 7-11 shockingly not taking international payment was not cute, as were the waves and waves of blisteringly fast scooters that threaten to run you over if you don’t dodge and weave around them.
I went to the original Bambu Labs store in Shenzhen, where they proudly displayed that their 3D printers could make guns. That was probably one of the bigger culture shocks of the day, given the paranoia in the United States about ghost guns.
An interesting takeaway from the first few days is that we are not at the center of their universe.
America is certainly important and interesting to China, but China has the Greater Bay Area (which has more skyscrapers than all of North America and Europe combined, compared to our puny American Bay Area) and will come to dominate over the next 10, 20, 65 years. They’re going to spend over a trillion dollars on new infrastructure through the next decade, which goes so far here, and try to return to where they once were: the capital C greatest Civilization in the world.
By the fourth day in China, I had begun to internalize a very important lesson: foreigners won’t be helpful here. This might be an exaggeration, but I see it as directionally correct. Even if you speak the language and have been in the country for decades, there is naturally a wariness that exists if you are not a Han Chinese person who was born in mainland China. That’s a big reason there are essentially no foreigner-run ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) in Shenzhen.
Of course, even though China is a country pretty explicitly for Chinese people, it is not a homogeneous place. In a couple of hours, you can go from the center of a Tier-1 gleaming coastal city to see literal rice paddy farmers working in the fields. Some companies are almost entirely subsidized, while others take zero government money. There are people dressed in streetwear covered in tattoos, piercings, and dyed haircuts, while others are so straight-laced they would never even breathe incorrectly. Over 80% of people in China do not hold a college degree. Many buildings were in shoddy condition, yet they were surrounded by marvelous, glowing OLED obelisks.
Shenzhen’s scenery is a visceral example of China’s heterogeneity. Show of hands: how many of you knew that Shenzhen, world capital of the hardware nerds, had palm trees? I certainly didn’t, although I suppose that it makes sense that there would be palm trees in Shenzhen and beach archipelagos near Hong Kong. It’s right near the Tropic of Cancer line of latitude, similar to where Cabo is. Of course, Shenzhen is a lot more mercantile and only mildly less alcoholic (debatable) than Cabo is.
Similarly, how many people talk about Shenzhen’s creative district, which would not be out of place in a standard American or European coastal city? Just like in these countries, they also have nice little patios where you can order pastries and public art, which I will describe simply as “somewhat odd.”
On my fourth day, I visited a UPS and PCBA factory in Shenzhen.
