Happy Friday and welcome back to our 142nd Weekly Dose of Optimism. We’ve been pumping out content lately: Chaos is a Ladder(a long strategy banger from Packy, episodes of Hyperlegible (most recently with Mike Solana), andof course your Weekly Dose of Optimism. And if the world keeps being a complex place that needs explaining, writers keep publishing great essays that deserve discussion, and people keep doing things that push us forward, then we’ll keep pumping out the content.
Let’s get to it.
This week’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by… ElevenLabs
At this point, you’ve probably heard of ElevenLabs — the company that makes AI voices that don’t sound like AI voices.
My friends at ElevenLabs were nice enough to cook up a Packy voice for me,whichI’ve been using to make the audio version of every Not Boring essay and Weekly Dose. The voice was so good that my mom just thought it was me.
For developers building conversational experiences, voice quality makes all the difference. Their massive library includes over 5,000 options across 31 languages, giving you unprecedented creative flexibility.
ElevenLabs is powering human-like voice agents for customer support, scheduling, education and gaming. With server & client side tools, knowledge bases, dynamic agent instantiation and overrides, plus built-in monitoring, it’s the complete developer toolkit.
The video you just watched was narrated, edited, and posted with only the use of thoughts. That’s possible because Brad Smith, the first nonverbal ALS patient to receive Neuralink’s brain implant, now controls his MacBook using only brain signals.
Brad edited and narrated an entire video using Neuralink’s BCI and an AI-cloned version of his actual voice (maybe with ElevenLabs?), importantly bypassing previous limitations of eye-gaze tech which allows him to interact with the world even when in a sunny outdoor environment. His Neuralink implant sits in the motor cortex and uses 1,024 electrodes to record neural activity every 15 milliseconds. AI then decodes these signals to translate movement intentions, like tongue flicks or jaw clenches, into cursor movement and clicks, enabling real-time computer control. Put this way, BCI or Brain Computer Interface, you understand why it’s called a brain-computer-interface.
Not going to lie, Brad’s video hit me deep. How he appreciates his caring wife, how Neuralink has untrapped thoughts he’s had in his mind for years, and how his involvement in Neuralink will help other people with similar conditions. It was a reminder how technology can truly be a force for real good in real peoples’ lives.
And the crazy thing about Neuralink, or BCIs in general, is that this is the worst the tech is ever going to be. It’s only going to get smarter, less invasive, and more accessible over time. It already works (look at Brad’s video!) and these are essentially just highly advanced prototypes. I am very much looking forward to a world in which more people like Brad get access to tech that untraps their brains.
Update: As ifjust on cue, yesterday afternoon Neuralink received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for individuals with severe speech impairment. This designation gives Neuralink priority access to FDA reviews, rolling reviews, and more flexible trials. Essentially, this means the FDA sees high potential for Neuralink to serve serious medical needs than anything else on the market. If all goes to plan more people, like Brad, will get access to Neuralink soon!
Joby Aviation has completed several piloted test flights with its eVTOL aircraft prototype, covering full transition from vertical to cruise flight and back again.
I cannot wait to hail an air taxi and Joby is making important strides in making that possible. The eVTOL company completed its first batch of piloted vertical and horizontal flights earlier this month, a key milestone for getting these little air taxis ready for the big leagues of commercial, live flights.
Previous transition flights were either remotely piloted or in hover/low-speed mode. This is the first time human pilots flew the aircraft through full vertical-to-horizontal transitions and back. The flights showed the aircraft behaves predictably and safely under direct human control, which is generally important but also specifically important for Joby as it’s a perquisite for the FAA final certification stage.
eVTOLs are basically if a helicopter and an airplane had a baby. They can take off, hover, and land like a helicopter but can fly like an airplane at higher speeds and efficiencies. And, don’t forget that “e,” these babies are powered by electricity rather than fuel burning engines.
I wouldn’t expect Jobys to be whizzing around Manhattan anytime soon. The company is planning to deliver some aircraft for commercial use in Dubai soon, but stricter regulations and general air traffic congestion will mean a longer wait time in the U.S.
Which, frankly, is as embarrassing as Chinese nuclear on the Moon. Mr. President, if you’re reading this, give us our big beautiful flying cars.
Researchers have trained a new kind of large language model (LLM) using GPUs dotted across the world and fed private as well as public data—a move that suggests that the dominant way of building artificial intelligence could be disrupted. Flower AI and Vana, two startups pursuing unconventional approaches to building AI, worked together to create the new model, called Collective-1.
Shoutout Not Boring Capital portfolio company Vana!
Vana, along with Flower AI, created a new AI model called Collective-1 which was trained using decentralized GPUs across the internet with both public and user-contributed private data. In the partnership Flower AI is enabling the distributed training while Vana is supplying the public and user-contributed private data. Collective-1 is currently a 7B parameter model, but Flower is scaling up with plans for 30B and 100B parameter models, and open-sourced a new tool, Photon, that enhances efficiency for distributed training.
The current approach to building AI relies on centralized data centers packed with high-end GPUs, ultra-fast fiber connections, and massive datasets. Then training is done on tightly coupled hardware where data and compute are pooled in one place for speed and efficiency. And as the scale of AI continues to grow rapidly, this approach will really only be feasible for a number of tech giants.
A distributed approach like Collective-1 flips this: training happens across many independent machines and is connected via slower public internet. Training and running models doesn’t require pooling data or compute in one place. Instead, data stays decentralized, often on user devices or across organizations, and compute is spread out, with coordination handled by open-sourced tools like Photon. This means smaller AI players can tap in, without needing to build massive infrastructure.
Beating highly centralized large models at their own game is not necessarily the goal. Rather, offering a more decentralized, accessible option could open opportunities for a whole set up builders and users that aren’t considered in the current approach.
But the hope is that with data that no one else can access, Vana and Flower AI can build models that no one else can.
A world-first human trial of a drug designed to treat the underlying cause of type 1 diabetes has begun in Australia. University of Queensland researcher Ranjeny Thomas has spent more than a quarter of a century developing the drug, designed to rebalance the body's immune response in people with type 1 diabetes, which affects more than 130,000 Australians.
Croikey! The Aussies are developing a first-of-its-kind type 1 diabetes drug. Good on ‘em!
The experimental drug, ASITI-201, was developed over 25 years by Professor Ranjeny Thomas, and retrains the immune system to stop attacking insulin-producing beta cells. It works by injecting a combo of beta cell protein fragments and vitamin D, which teaches immune cells to recognize those proteins as safe instead of threats This approach addresses the disease, not just its symptoms.
The trial, just now currently dosing its first participants, aims to preserve pancreatic function and reduce insulin dependence. If proven safe and effective, it could pave the way for early type 1 diabetes intervention, or even prevention, in at-risk individuals and reduce the need for insulin injections. If this approach is ultimately successful, it signals a major shift in how we can treat autoimmune diseases, moving beyond reactive care to immune system reprogramming.
If you read Not Boring and you’re on X, chances are your feed is jam-packed with Hill and Valley Forum content right now. The annual conference is a bipartisan gathering of U.S. lawmakers and tech leaders focused on national security and technological competition, hosted by Jacob Helberg, Christian Garrett, and Delian Asparouhov. It has a pretty start-studded lineup of folks like Jensen Huang, Alex Karp, Doug Burgum, Josh Kusher, Ritchie Torres, Mike Johnson, Ruth Porat, and Mike Johnson. Big names across both government and tech. Government and tech have never, at least in my lifetime, seemed so intertwined: tariffs, the AI race, anti-trust, reindustrialization, etc, etc.
The 2,851 mile journey between Silicon Valley and DC has never been so short. With the Hill and Valley Forum, the internet got an inside peek as to how these two worlds are working together. And we got an even sneakier peek thanks to the fine gentlemen over at TBPN who reported live from the entire event.
BONUS: Hyperlegible 008: Mike Solana, Golden Age
Speaking of what’s possible when SF and DC come together… Pirate Wires’ Mike Solana joined Packy on Hyperlegible to talk about building Disney-inspired Golden Cities where houses are cheap, rare earth metals are refined, and it’s legal to manufacture things. A day in, it’s the most popular Hyperlegible to date.
The people have spoken. Build the Golden Cities.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to ElevenLabs for sponsoring. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
The guest selection process for Hyperlegible is three parts art, half part science, and four parts serendipity.
It boils down to: if someone writes an essay I love, I want to talk to them about it.
Sometimes, I’ve never heard of someone, then they write something amazing and I want to meet them and learn about them. Others, I read everything a person has written, so I have to wait for something that resonates extra, and that encapsulates how I think of them perfectly.
Mike Solana, the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Pirate Wires, is in the latter camp. I read Pirate Wires every morning when I wake up; its Three Morning Takes is the best-written way to load three things that have happened in the world into my brain. Pirate Wires’ staff is envy-inducingly talented, each with their own voice that all fit the Pirate Wires voice.
Every so often, though, the EIC comes down from his EIC chair, whips out a keyboard, and writes essays of his own. I get an extra little dopamine hit when I see those.
Last week, Solana wrote a piece called Golden Agethat sits in the bullseye of the Venn Diagram between things I’m interested in — building new cities, cutting red tape, and painting an optimistic vision for America — and what I love about Solana’s writing — “I took a few days off from the internet last week to spend some time with my family at Disney World, and I found the place, as I have found it since my early childhood trips to Fort Wilderness, almost overwhelmingly inspiring” — that I had to talk to him about it.
America’s building paralysis vs. China’s ability to build Disney’s vision in Shenzen
Why Disney is the guy for Solana, the one he wants his career to look like
Rare earths, chips, and regulatory free zones
Scaling Pirate Wires like Disney scaled Disney
Why past charter city efforts have failed
What life in Golden City could look like
Special development zones vs. regulation gridlock
Culture change through media and narrative
Who could be the next Walt Disney?
Solana on “Moral Inversion” and cultural decay
Final takeaway: “Where there is no vision, the people perish”
I hope you enjoy my conversation with . Links to a transcript, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts are right down below so you can listen early and often.
Thank you to our partners for supporting Not Boring:
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While you’re there, give us a like, comment, and subscribe so we can bring great essays to more people.
You can also find links to all of the essays and conversations at readwise.io/hyperlegible. Thanks to our friends and sponsors at Readwise, you can head there for a free trial and get all Hyperlegible articles automatically added to your account.
If you want more to read, here are two of Solana’s reading recommendations, one of his and one by QNTM. Save them to Readwise and come back to them:
There’s that famous Warren Buffett quote, “Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.” I’m working on being fearful when others are greedy, but I thrive on being greedy when others are fearful.
The economy is chaotic right now. Tariffs, trade wars, and uncertainty rule the day.
For the companies that we talk about here at Not Boring, for the very best startups, this is the opportunity of a generation. This is when orders change, when new Techno-Economic Paradigms are born. This is when plucky startups start to become industry leaders.
I turned to ancient myths, underappreciated academic frameworks, case studies, and Game of Thrones to explain why chaos is a ladder. It’s as much fun as I’ve had writing a piece in a while, seeing so many weird and disparate ideas click into place.
If you want to read the whole thing online, you can do that here. And if you learn something useful, if you come out of this more excited about the future, please share it and help spread the word.
The word is this: you can’t control chaos, but you can play with it.
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The gods of industry have spent decades attempting to insulate themselves from risk, constructing globe-spanning architectures to maximize efficiency. But life is risk, and what you don’t pay for today, you will pay for tomorrow.
Now, chaos is at our door. It will be painful for everyone. But it will be more painful for those whose grooves are most deeply entrenched. Which means they’re an opportunity for those who would seek to topple them.
There is no Creative Destruction without destruction.
Shall we do a little Norse mythology?
In Norse mythology, Loki is the trickster god. He is of the enemy Jötunn race of giants by birth, but becomes blood brothers with Odin and is accepted among the Æsir, the principal gods. As the trickster, he plays a role familiar in mythology everywhere: he brings both chaos and innovation.
So one day, Baldr, “the Pure One of the Norse pantheon”, “so fair of face and bright that a splendour radiates from him,”1 begins to have nightmares indicating that harm will come to him. He shares his dreams with his mother, Frigg, who sets off across heaven and earth to extract oaths from everyone and everything – “from men and beasts, from fire and water, from metals and stones—not to harm Baldr.” Oaths sworn, Baldr protected, the Æsir amuse themselves by throwing things at him, only to watch them drop “before they touch his shining body.”
“All this annoys Loki, who disguises himself as a woman and quizzes Frigg as to the details of her oath-taking. In this way, he discovers that she has, in fact, omitted one item. ‘West of Valhalla,’ she says, ‘grows a little bush called a mistletoe. I did not exact an oath from it; I thought it too young.’”
If you have read any mythology whatsoever, you can guess what happens next. Loki fashions a dart from mistletoe wood and approaches one of the gods, Hod, who stands off to the side, not throwing anything at Baldr. “Why are you not honoring Baldr as the others are,” Loki asks the blind god. He gives Hod the mistletoe dart and guides his hand. “The dart goes straight through Baldr and he falls dead to the ground.”
Loki Tricks Hod into Killing Baldr with Mistletoe
The distraught gods try to bring Baldr back from the underworld and fail. They capture Loki and bind him “beneath the earth with cords made from the guts of one of his own children.” They hang a snake above Loki to drip venom on him for all eternity, and allow his wife to hold a dish to catch the poison, but she has to leave to empty the dish from time to time, at which points the venom drips on Loki’s face and cause him anguish. He writhes in pain. “The periodic writhings of Loki beneath the earth is what we now call earthquakes.”
While none of the Norse literature, according to Lewis Hyde, “says that what happens next in the sequence happens because Loki has been bound, the sequence of events is always the same and so the cause and effect is implied. The gods’ binding of Loki is always followed by the prophecy of Ragnarök, the doom of the gods.”
It begins with Fimbulwinter, three successive winters without summer. “Brothers will kill one another for greed; one wolf will swallow the sun, another the moon. The stars will vanish. All fetters and bonds will be snapped, including the cords that hold Loki to his stone.”
Unbound, Loki will lead an assault on the gods from a ship made from the unclipped fingernails of the dead. Fenrir the Wolf, Loki’s son, escapes his chains and devours Odin. Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, another of Loki's children, rises from the ocean and battles Thor; Thor kills Jörmungandr, but dies from his venom. The fire giant Surtr leads the forces of Muspelheim against the gods; Sutr kills Freyr. For his part, Loki battles the watchman Heimdall, and both die. “Fire will consume the heavens and the earth, and mortals and immortals alike will perish.”
"Ragnarök", Johannes Gehrts (1908)
“The prophecy, however, does not end there,” Hyde writes. “For the world is born again, refreshed, from this apocalypse.”
I want to share with you some of Hyde’s interpretation, from his excellent Trickster Makes This World, because the Norse anticipated Joseph Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction by more than a millennium and a half, and provide it with ancient, unshakeable underpinnings.
“To my mind,” (Hyde’s), “the whole sequence that moves from Baldr’s baleful nightmares to the Norse apocalypse hinges on the moment when Frigg decides to make the world safe for her son.”
“How much control can we have before the good life we’re guarding ceases to be good in any conventional sense?”
“Can we reduce contingency to zero, or must we always have some exposure to things we cannot control?”
“Is the life that has no risk a human life?”
The classicist Martha Nussbaum argues that, according to the Greeks, the good life must periodically occupy “the razor’s edge of luck.”
According to Hyde, the makers of the Norse myth agree. “In this story, we do not get the green world, growing even as it perishes, fruitful even in decay, without the paired forces of order and disorder. There must be right relationship between the two. The Norse gods are reginn, ‘organizing powers,’ and by themselves cannot bring that world to life; they need the touch of disorder and vulnerability that Loki brings, a point we see in its reverse: when Loki is suppressed, the world collapses; when he—and disorder—returns, the world is reborn.”
Líf and Lífþrasir, Louis Moe
Hyde ends this particular chapter with an analysis so germane that I will include it in full:
For [Georges] Duzémil, Baldr embodies the will whose energy is spent, the sovereign whose death is near. He’s the irremediable mediocrity of the present age, and must be killed if there is to be any change for the better.
Frigg’s attempt to guard her son stands in the way of this necessary end, which is therefore more destructive than it needed to be. Just as violent upheavals increase when no political process allows for change, so here the sneakiness and shock of Loki’s deed is proportional to Frigg’s exaggerated attempt at control. Moreover, the witless gods learn nothing from that violence, for they immediately increase the stakes, binding Loki and, as the inexorable logic plays itself out, bringing their whole world to its apocalyptic end. There is no way to suppress change, the story says, not even in heaven; there is only a choice between a way of living that allows constant, if gradual, alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals.
Those who panic and bind the trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop styles (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes contingency will always engender.
The irremediable mediocrity of the present age must be killed if there is to be any change for the better.
The Norse submit that chaos is inevitable.
Littlefinger adds color: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.”
A ladder represents potential for those who stand at the bottom. A ladder represents danger for those who stand at the top.
It is a rough time to be raising a venture fund.
Pitchbook recently released Q1 fundraising data, which showed that VC firms are on pace to raise less money than they have in any year this decade, and that the money that is raised is going to fewer funds.
There are many good reasons for LPs (limited partners, the people and institutions who invest in funds) to be avoiding venture right now. Most of them boil down to one thing: liquidity.
LPs need returns to fund their university’s research if the government won’t. They can easily sell stocks and bonds at their market value; they can’t sell VC stakes as easily. And VCs have not been returning much capital to their LPs. According to Carta, more than 60% of 2019 VC funds have returned zero cash to LPs. Which means that LPs have less money when they need more money, generally, and have less money to invest in VC, where their money sits tied up, specifically.
Venture funding is a leading indicator. Right now, les bon temps are rouling. AI companies are raising mouth-watering sums at eye-watering valuations. But the data suggests, like much of the economic data suggests, that bad times are ahead. If the trend holds, there will be less money available to invest in startups just when their opportunity is greatest. Just when the old gods fall.
Acknowledging that as an emerging manager myself who would like to raise money I am self-interested here, it is hard to imagine a better setup for venture capital. Specifically, and again with the same caveat, for venture capitalists investing in Vertical Integrators.
This is what this essay is about. Don’t let the trickster talk fool you. It’s about why now, in the chaos, is when startups win.
Startups play with the trickster. Startups are the trickster.
Elsewhere in his analysis of the trickster, Hyde observes that the trickster, specifically Coyote, “seems to have no way, no nature, no knowledge.”
“What conceivable advantage,” he asks, “might lie in a way of being that has no way?”
He answers:
“A first answer might be that whoever has no way but is a successful imitator will have, in the end, a repertoire of ways.”
“Perhaps having no way also means that a creature can adapt itself to a changing world. Species well situated in a natural habitat are always at risk if that habitat changes. One reason native observers may have chosen the coyote the animal to be Coyote the Trickster is that the former in fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is, therefore, a consummate survivor in a shifting world.”
“So we have a second reason why it might be useful to have no way, no nature, no fixed instinctual responses. Having no way, trickster can have many ways. Having no way, he is dependent on others whose manner he exploits, but he is not confined to their manner and therefore in another sense he is more independent. Having no way, he is free of the trap of instinct, both ‘stupider than the animals’ and more versatile than any.”
Do you see where I’m going with this?
April Fool’s Day came a day late this year. We called it Liberation Day.
A month later, we’re still figuring out what’s actually happening. Tariffs on most countries were paused within days. Tariffs on China went up as high as 145% before President Trump admitted that they’d be a lot lower, that he wouldn’t play hardball. There are reportedly trade deals in the works with allies like Japan and Vietnam, although thus far, they remain as mythical as Loki and Coyote.
The point is not the specifics. They will emerge over time. The point is chaos.
The Economist
And chaos is a ladder.
A ladder represents potential for those who stand at the bottom. A ladder represents danger for those who stand at the top.
Here, 1,900 words and two myths in, is my thesis:
The chaos in global supply chains will accelerate, and increase the odds of, startups replacing incumbents atop large industries. Startups are the trickster, wayless and flexible enough to thrive in chaos. As the economic architecture of the world shifts, they are better positioned to adapt and capitalize than sclerotic incumbents. “When Loki is suppressed, the world collapses; when he—and disorder—returns, the world is reborn.” Loki has returned. The world will be reborn.
I suspect you will want me to back that up with more than myth.
It may be due to chance and contingency that you haven’t heard of Architectural Innovation. It may be good marketing.
Good marketing can be the difference between a big company and a once-promising product. The same is true for ideas.
Most people reading this will be familiar with late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s two types of innovation: Sustaining Innovation and Disruptive Innovation. Popularized in his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation have become core to how people in tech think about what new technologies will do to the established order.
Disruptive Innovations start out looking like toys and improve their way to the mainstream; by the time incumbents adapt, it’s too late. Sustaining Innovations, on the other hand, benefit incumbents, who incorporate them into existing offerings before startups have a chance to gain a foothold.
Maybe because it was just a paper and not a book, a third type of innovation has remained relatively under the radar, but it may be even more important to understanding the world to come.
According to Henderson and Clark, Architectural Innovation is the reconfiguration of existing product components into new relationships (the architecture) while leaving the core components largely unchanged, creating a particularly challenging type of change for established firms. It undermines their organizational knowledge structures while appearing less threatening than radical innovations.
The toy example they use is the fan. If the established technology were large electric ceiling fans, improvements in blade design would be incremental innovation, easy for incumbents to plug in, while central air conditioning would represent radical innovation, requiring entirely new components and relationships. A portable fan would represent an architectural innovation for fan manufacturers: the core components remain similar, but the architecture changes significantly.
Xerox losing market share to smaller, more reliable copiers in the mid-1970s? That’s disruptive innovation – Xerox made money leasing big, expensive copiers and servicing them when they inevitably broke down - but it’s also architectural innovation - competitors used the same optics, drums, and toner to make small copiers, but they packaged them differently.
RCA was as dominant in radios in the 1950s as Xerox was in copiers in the early 1970s. Like Xerox, but less famously than Xerox PARC, RCA had an R&D arm that developed new products. In fact, it was RCA engineers who developed a prototype of a portable, transistorized radio receiver. “But RCA,” Henderson and Clark write, “saw little reason to pursue such an apparently inferior technology.” A small, relatively new Japanese company did, though. Sony, using technology licensed from RCA, “used the small transistorized radio to gain entry in the U.S. market” then “introduced successive models with improved sound quality and FM capability.” That is classic disruptive innovation, but it’s also architectural innovation. RCA tried to follow Sony’s lead, “yet RCA had great difficulty matching Sony’s product in the marketplace.”
The core difference between disruptive and architectural innovation is that disruptive innovation focuses on the business model and leaves room for the possibility that incumbents could bring their resources to bear on the seemingly smaller, toy-like opportunity if they were willing to risk the business, while architectural innovation focuses on how products are actually made, and argues that all those resources an incumbent might bring to bear are actually weights that prevent it from pivoting quickly enough to avoid destruction.
It’s the difference between won’t and can’t.
“Species well situated in a natural habitat are always at risk if that habitat changes.”
Writing not about Coyote but about modern manufacturing companies, specifically photolithographic alignment equipment companies, Henderson and Clark explain “why established firms often have a surprising degree of difficulty in adapting to architectural innovation.”
“Much of what the firm knows is useful and needs to be applied in the new product, but some of what it knows is not only not useful but may actually handicap the firm.”
See, in the early days of a new technology, there is a lot of confusion and a lot of experimentation. Trickster paradise. But once companies figure out the new product they can build with the new technology, they switch to optimizing (and ossifying) the process by which they make that product.
co-authored a paper titled A Dynamic Model of Process and Product Innovation. By looking at a study of 120 firms, they found that product innovation is initially dominant but gradually gives way to process innovation as the product design becomes standardized and firms shift their focus to improving production efficiency. As everything that can be squeezed out of a particular process has been, the rates of both product and process innovation trend towards zero.
Abernathy & Utterback, 1975
In the Vertical Integrator Series, we talked about Abernathy and Utterback in terms of the cycle from early vertical integration to later modularization. Henderson and Clark take a different tack.
In the early days of a new technology:
Organizations competing to design successful products experiment with many different technologies. Since success in the market turns on the synthesis of unfamiliar technologies in creative new designs, organizations must actively develop both knowledge about alternate components and knowledge of how these components can be integrated. With the emergence of a dominant design, which signals the general acceptance of a single architecture, firms cease to invest in learning about alternative configurations of the established set of components. New component knowledge becomes more valuable to a firm than new architectural knowledge because competition between designs revolves around refinements in particular components. Successful organizations therefore switch their limited attention from learning a little about many different possible designs to learning a great deal about the dominant design.
“The fox knows many things,” wrote the Greek poet Archilocus, “but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Since in an industry characterized by a dominant design, architectural knowledge is stable, it tends to become embedded in the practices and procedures of the organization.
Architectural knowledge becomes embedded in everything from communications channels to reporting structures to information filters to problem-solving strategies to supply chains, and as a result, it becomes automatic, unthinking, set in its way.
When I was at Breather, one of our ML engineers, Sam, told me about ant colony optimization algorithms. For some reason, the idea has stuck with me.
Ants do this clever thing. When an ant discovers a food source, it leaves a trail of pheromones on the ground as it returns to the nest. These pheromone trails serve as a communication system for other ants in the colony; they light up the path to food, olfactorily speaking. As more ants follow the trail and successfully find food, they reinforce the trail by depositing their own pheromones, creating a positive feedback loop. The more ants find food on a given path, the stronger the scent, the easier it is for the next ants to find food. Brilliant.
Wikipedia
But as you know, there ant no such thing as a free lunch. Several failure modes can occur. Ants can get trapped following each other in circles, reinforcing a loop to nowhere. Wind or rain can throw off the scent, leading ants to reinforce paths that don’t lead to food. Ants can become locked into a certain path, even if a new one emerges and the established one becomes suboptimal.
And of course, predictability itself is like a pheromone to the trickster. The trickster exists to throw people off their established paths.
When there is an architectural innovation, then, it creates problems for incumbents that they might not even realize they have until it’s too late. Henderson and Clark say that these problems have two sources.
First, it takes incumbents a long time to even identify a particular innovation as architectural. They’re on the lookout for component innovations, but their information filters might explicitly filter out information on architectural innovations.
“Since the core concepts of the design remain untouched,” they write, “the organization may mistakenly believe that it understands the new technology.” The mistake may only become apparent when they test the new components in the old design and fail.
Boeing 707 makes its first flight (1954)
Ironically, given that Boeing is my poster child for sclerotic incumbents ripe for replacement, Henderson and Clark point out that it was such an incumbent failure to recognize architectural innovation that allowed Boeing to rise to aircraft industry leadership.
With the emergence of the jet engine, an obviously important new component, “Established firms in the industry understood that they would need to develop jet engine expertise but failed to understand the ways in which its introduction would change the interactions between the engine and the rest of the plane in complex and subtle ways (Miller and Sawyers, 1968; Gardiner, 1986).” Boeing, as a newer entrant, was able to design a new aircraft with the jet engine in mind. The company soared.
Second, once they recognize that an innovation is architectural, organizations “need to build and apply new architectural knowledge effectively.” This is harder than it sounds. It needs to switch to a new mode of learning, “from one of refinement within a stable architecture to one of active search for new solutions within a constantly changing context.” It needs to invest time and resources. It needs to shift the premium from SOPs to experimentation and design. Then they need to actually learn, and implement, while continuing to operate the existing business.
“Established firms are faced with an awkward problem,” Henderson and Clark write. “Because their architectural knowledge is embedded in channels, filters, and strategies, the discovery process and the process of creating new information (and rooting out the old) usually takes time. The organization may be tempted to modify the channels, filters, and strategies that already exist rather than to incur the significant fixed costs and considerable organizational friction required to build new sets from scratch (Arrow, 1974).”
Here’s the kicker, their words, not mine:
Architectural innovation may thus have very significant competitive implications.
Established organizations may invest heavily in the new innovation, interpreting it as an incremental extension of the existing technology or underestimating its impact on their embedded architectural knowledge.
But new entrants to the industry may exploit its potential much more effectively, since they are not handicapped by a legacy of embedded and partially irrelevant architectural knowledge.
“Perhaps having no way also means that a creature can adapt itself to a changing world.”
If you think the existing system simply needs to be improved, you might want to build or invest in the types of companies that can improve it.
But if you believe that we’re in a moment in which systems need to be rebuilt, then you will want to build or invest in a smaller number of Vertical Integrators that can handle as much complexity as is needed to pull their industry into a new and better way of operating.
I believe that we are in such a moment, that we’re at the beginning of a new Techno-Economic Paradigm. Instead of building things that look like toys, Vertical Integrators are building new architectures around newly-available components - from AI to batteries to electric motors and more - to build products that are better, faster, and cheaper than incumbents. This is Architectural Innovation: “a Vertical Integrator designs a system for optimal performance, taking a risk on the combination of proven technologies.”
In fact, I hadn’t read Henderson and Clark when I wrote that series. I fed Claude all four of the essays and asked what else I should be reading, and Architectural Innovation was the first paper it suggested. Good rec.
But why all this talk of chaos and tricksters?
A brief note on memory and my writing process. I don’t have a great memory. I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to understand whether recessions and crises benefit startups more than incumbents, whether they’re a precursor to new Techno-Economic Paradigms. I read a good 1994 paper by Ricardo Caballero and Mohamad Hammour, The Cleansing Effect of Recessions, in which they cite two other economists, Blanchard and Diamond (1990): “Blanchard and Diamond point out that an explanation along creative destruction lines of the greater cyclicality of job destruction implies that recessions are times of ‘cleaning up,’ when outdated or relatively unprofitable techniques and products are pruned out of the productive system—an idea that was popular among pre-Keynesian ‘liquidationist’ theorists like Hayek or Schumpeter (see De Long 1990).” Then yesterday, I decided to re-read Vertical Integrators: Part II, because I knew that I had written something about what the end of a Techno-Economic Paradigm and the beginning of a new one looks like.
And there it was. Right there.
In that essay, to make sure that I wasn’t just picking facts that fit my thesis, I asked Claude, “According to Schumpeter and Perez, what happens to incumbents at the end of a Techno-Economic Paradigm? What signs would there be that we're at the end of one?”
I copied the whole response in, just to keep myself honest.
The only one missing: “Crisis or Recession: A major economic crisis or recession may signal the end of one paradigm and the potential beginning of another.”
Crisis or recession was the last unchecked sign that the old Techno-Economic Paradigm is dying so that a new one can be reborn.
So are we in a recession? Are we heading towards one?
Apollo (the half a trillion dollar asset manager, not the Greek god) put out a report last week – How are US consumers and firms responding to tariffs? – showing chart after chart turning sharply south. If we’re not in a recession yet, Apollo’s Chief Economist predicts, just give it time.
For his part, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told a crowd last week that “he believes the best case outcome from the trade war would be a mild recession for the U.S. economy.”
I don’t know if we’ll enter a recession. It certainly feels like something bad’s coming. We’ve been talking about things like the dollar losing its reserve status, small businesses going out of business, supply chains in turmoil. On Saturday, this was the top story on wsj.com:
WSJ.com, April 25, 2025
It is the uncertainty that is so disturbing to the incumbents.
“The level of uncertainty is too high,” [Goldman Sachs CEO David] Solomon said. “It’s not healthy and it’s affecting investment, spending and planning, and that will have an effect on growth and the economy.”
“Do the rates stay in place as they’ve been published? How long do they stay in place for? Are we able to further mitigate it in other ways? Do they get rescinded and have other effects?” asked Neil Mitchill, RTX’s chief financial officer. “I don’t know.”
Like Frigg, their plan is to fight uncertainty with control. From the WSJ yesterday:
“Control the controllables and try to help mitigate some of the things we can’t control,” Norfolk Southern CEO Mark George told investors and analysts as he cited plans to wring savings out of fuel and labor costs, among other areas.
International Business Machines CEO Arvind Krishna said the technology company was “focused on areas we can control,” including productivity initiatives throughout the company.
PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta said the company is “controlling what we can” by, in part, making its supply chain more efficient.
These CEOs have read too many balance sheets, too little myth.
There may be a recession. Who knows? Macro is hard. But chaos? There will certainly be chaos.
Chaos, to corporate Friggs, is the mistletoe dart.
Chaos, to startups, is a ladder.
Having studied Henderson and Clark, having studied the trickster, we can see the mechanism.
We have discussed at length, in this essay and others, the idea that as incumbents grow, they ossify.
They switch from product innovation to process innovation. They financialize and outsource. They plan for predictability. They attempt to control contingencies. They lay down pheromones on the path that has led to food so reliably for so long, and like Toucan Sam, follow their nose.
They architect communications channels, reporting structures, information filters, problem-solving strategies, and supply chains as if the trickster were just a myth.
I saw this tweet from Saagar Enjeti a couple weeks ago that encapsulates it all so well:
They forget to read Heinlein, who would have warned them that TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. You eventually pay for what you don’t pay for.
Free State of Luna Flag, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein, Wikimedia
I am going to make a small leap, one that I hope you’ll grant me at this point, now that we’ve traveled so far.
Henderson and Clark write about the devastating effect minor architectural innovations can have on incumbents. I spared you the summary of nine pages on the impact that seemingly small changes to photolithographic alignment technology architecture made and broke companies’ fortunes.
These are architectural changes so seemingly small that the companies themselves, and the people within those companies, who spent every hour of every day thinking about photolithographic alignment technology, didn’t realize they were a big deal.
Look at the changes we’re talking about, like the one from the contact aligner to the proximity aligner:
Henderson & Clark
Can you even spot the difference? (Look at the gap between the Mask and Wafer.)
Now look at what this architectural innovation, and others like it, did to these companies’ market share over time:
Henderson & Clark
Cobilt went from market dominance with the contact aligner to irrelevance. Nikon came out of nowhere to capture 70% of the second-generation step and repeat aligner market.
Here’s the leap: if this is what happens because of small architectural changes, what do you think happens when the architecture of the global supply chain changes? When it’s not even clear how it’s going to change? When it’s thrown into chaos?
To be clear, it is a leap. TANSTAAFL. In Henderson and Clark’s view, one of the pernicious things about architectural innovation is that changes seem so small that companies might not even notice them until it’s too late. No one is missing the impact of tariffs.
But Henderson and Clark also say that even when incumbents notice, they’re slow to move, because moving is hard to do when you’ve built up an entire organization around the way things are and atrophied your “preparing for the way things might be” muscle. And Henderson and Clark are just two voices in a long line of voices – from Norse and Native American myth-makers to Joseph Schumpeter to Carlota Perez to Littlefinger - all saying basically the same thing.
Chaos is a ladder.
A ladder represents potential for those who stand at the bottom. A ladder represents danger for those who stand at the top.
It’s too early to tell which incumbents will tumble when and how as a result of the tariffs.
Boeing seems vulnerable, of course. Scott Christenson recently wrote How Much of a Boeing 737 is Foreign-Made?, in which he breaks down which components come from where. He found that, “40% — 50% of the parts of a Boeing 737 are obtained from foreign suppliers.” Some, like the vertical tail-fin, are sole-sourced or primarily-sourced in China. Christenson believes that switching to a “Made in America” 737 Max would halt production for 3-5 years while Boeing reshores, during which time Airbus would be able to pick off Boeing’s airline customers.
What else?
Something I’ve written about before is that you can see changes that will impact everyone in media first, because media is easier and faster to change than physical products. The internet, for example, came for media first before coming for everything else. The same, I think, is true for crypto. It moves so much faster than other industries that you can see early warning signs in the chart.
Anyway, here is a chart of BTC versus USD since Liberation Day:
Yahoo! Finance, as of April 25, 2025
It is now glib to say that strong companies are started during hard times. Airbnb and Uber came out of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), you know. But people repeat these things for a reason.
The last time we had real stagflation, on the back of the 1973-1975 Oil Crisis-driven recession, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975 and Steves Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple in 1976. Those are the two most valuable companies in the world today, valued at a combined $6 trillion. With a T.
Not for nothing, Apollo expects this trade war to precipitate fresh stagflation.
Of course, the changing of the guard doesn’t happen overnight.
Bitcoin was started at least in part as a response to the GFC, too, and it’s taken more than a decade and a half for it to start fulfilling its role as a dollar hedge (if this current trend sticks).
First Bitcoin transaction: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
Crises sow the seeds. And the nature of the crisis determines which types of companies will wither and bloom. It is unsurprising that a financial crisis tied to mortgage-backed loans precipitated Bitcoin and Airbnb, a bank alternative and a way to make extra money to pay your mortgage, respectively. Since the GFC, Bitcoin and Airbnb have ridden the initial chaos to the top of their industries.
Hotels still exist, but by market cap, Airbnb is larger than any of them.
Banks still exist, but by market cap, Bitcoin is larger than the four largest American banks combined.
If the current crisis/recession/chaos is the Global Supply Chain Crisis or something – the Voluntary Trade Reset Recession, in Apollo’s words – which is what it looks like it will be, one that forces firms that make physical things to reshape their very architecture, even subtly, my contention is that we will see the same thing play out across practically every industry that makes physical things, which is most industries, over the next 15 years.
While it’s too early to tell which incumbents will tumble when and how as a result of the tariffs, and to tell which startups will replace them by which route, there is recent precedent for a Vertical Integrator handling supply chain disruptions better than modularized incumbents: Tesla.
COVID was a freak preview of a world in which global trade slows to a halt. While you were locked inside, automakers scrambled to access the chips that drive the performance of modern automobiles. Most of those chips, ~73% according to ChatGPT via the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), were made in East Asia: Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China.
ChatGPT pulling from SIA, at least directionally correct
This was predictably catastrophic for incumbent automakers, who’d architected their entire production processes and supply chains around the smooth global flow of goods. When that flow was disrupted, so was their production.
Headlines from AP and Reuters (2020 and 2021)
The headlines worked their way through to the financial and production numbers. By February 2021, CNBC reported that Ford predicted a $1-$2.5 billion 2021 earnings hit, while GM expected to pull in $1.5-$2 billion less. By May 2021, an AutoForecast Solutions study estimated that Ford had taken 326,616 vehicles out of production, GM had removed 277,966, and Stellantis had reduced production by 277,966 vehicles. Yikes.
You remember this. Remember when the cost of used cars skyrocketed? What you might not remember (I didn’t) is that not all automakers were impacted equally. One, in fact, increased production in 2021. You guessed it: Tesla.
Source: Tesla Filings
That is remarkable.
Of course, Tesla was starting from a lower base. And it’s not that Tesla didn’t face the same challenges as everyone else. On the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call, Elon Musk said that the company had “insane difficulties” with the supply chain that quarter. "We've had some of the most difficult supply-chain challenges that we've ever experienced in the life of Tesla," he said. Tesla even briefly halted production of the Model 3 at its Fremont facility for two days.
But while Tesla, too, sourced components from around the world, it hadn’t welded the architecture of its product to its supply chain.
“Where trickster is the author of market exchange, he creates a form of commerce that allows strangers to come together without becoming kin;” Hyde explains. “People come into contact in his marketplace but they are not as a result connected.”
When Ford, GM, and Stellantis couldn’t access enough of the specific chips they needed, they had to halt production to match the shortage.
When Tesla couldn’t access the chips it had been using, it rewrote its firmware and rearchitected its cars to use different types of chips and even to use less of them.
“Yes, turns out we had more chips than we needed,” Elon said on the Q2 earnings call.
Because Tesla is vertically integrated, because the system is the product, it was able to use the chaos as an opportunity to not just survive, but to improve its product.
“One reason native observers may have chosen the coyote the animal to be Coyote the Trickster is that the former in fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is, therefore, a consummate survivor in a shifting world.”
Lewis Hyde could have been an investor. While all automakers (and most companies) ended up doing well in 2021 as chip shortages worked themselves out and consumer demand went bonkers, Tesla’s stock increased 6.6x more than the next best performer, Ford.
Tesla v. Ford v. GM v. Stellantis, 2020-2021; Yahoo! Finance
As importantly, Tesla’s US market share grew from 1.1% pre-pandemic in 2019 to 3.8% post-pandemic in 2022, while Ford and Stellantis’ market share fell by a combined 3%.
Tesla was not the most valuable automaker coming into the pandemic. That was Toyota. By June 2020, it took the lead. It has not looked back.
Today, Tesla is more valuable than the next 11 biggest automakers combined.
Chaos is … well, look at the chart.
Chaos is chaos for everyone.
I know of plenty of startups considering raising prices or even delaying product launches because of tariff uncertainty. My argument is not that this will not be hard. Loki is held beneath the earth, tied up with his children’s guts, poisonous venom dripping on his face before he leads an armageddon that clears the path for the earth to be reborn, refreshed. Startups and incumbents alike will perish in this economic armageddon.
But the world will be reborn. The world is always being reborn.
When it is, new gods will occupy the corporate heavens.
We’ve been waiting for this.
This is the Fourth Turning, “a decisive era of secular upheaval — the old order is toppled and a new one put in its place.” Hopefully, it is a bloodless and primarily economic one.
This is the death of Baldr, “the irremediable mediocrity of the present age” who “must be killed if there is to be any change for the better.”
This is the end of one Techno-Economic Paradigm, to make room for the next.
This is Creative Destruction, accelerated.
We never know what the crisis will look like when it comes, only that it must come.
“There is no way to suppress change, the story says, not even in heaven; there is only a choice between a way of living that allows constant, if gradual, alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals.” The feeling of chaos, despite millennia of warnings, comes from the unpredictability of the mechanism.
For our own little corner of the world, and of history, I’ve tried to tease out that mechanism.
Incumbents, architected for a certain way of doing things, spend years laying down pheromones on the tried and true trail. That makes them efficient in times of certainty. That leaves them vulnerable to architectural innovations. That leaves them stranded on the wrong path when the winds shift, as they do, naturally, as technology progresses, and violently, in times of crisis.
You can see it in the quotes from CEOs, bemoaning uncertainty and preaching control. You can see it more concretely in Tesla’s COVID ascent.
Chaos is hard for everyone, but better for some. And that makes all the difference.
Startups, having no way, can more easily adapt themselves to the changing world. The ancients understood this; Henderson and Clark explained it.
With the benefit of hindsight, we will look back at this time and realize how useful it was for a number of startups that played it right.
It seems like it will be good for certain AI startups: as companies cut costs, an almost-good-enough AI that can replace an expensive human seems more attractive.
It seems like it will be good for certain robotics startups, for the same reason, but more directly tied to reshoring.
It seems like it will be good for certain crypto startups: crypto thrives on chaos. As I’ve tweeted, “Crypto is the purest way to bet that the future will be crazier than the present.”
Generally, Taleb writes that while a single startup is often fragile (it can die), the portfolio of many startups plus the option-like upside of any one success makes the ecosystem antifragile.
But I believe the companies that will benefit the most from this particular flavor of chaos are Vertical Integrators.
For one obvious thing, Vertical Integrators are building physical products (or systems) to compete with the incumbents who, as we’ve discussed, are most vulnerable to a crisis that rearchitects physical supply chains.
For another, the advantages Vertical Integrators have over incumbents in normal times become more advantageous in times of chaos. In Vertical Integrators: Part IV, I wrote that competing directly with powerful incumbents (versus using technology to build net-new capabilities) seems insane, but that there are “Advantages to Vertical Integration.” I will list the most relevant here:
Vertical integration allows for tighter feedback loops. While, per Henderson and Clark, incumbents take the architecture for granted, Vertical Integrators are constantly iterating on both components and architecture. “Hadrian,” I wrote, “Has software engineers working next to machinists in order to build better software and automate what can be automated.” They are constantly thinking about architecture.
Vertical integration allows for trade-offs at the system level as opposed to the product level. See: Tesla during COVID.
Vertical Integrators can control their own supply chains and bring their own core technologies down those curves. I have one portfolio company that was using a component from a large incumbent that kept failing. So they decided to build their own. It’s cheaper, higher performance, and shorter lead-time. They are using it themselves, and selling it to other companies frustrated by the incumbent.
Vertically integrating means better margins, if it works, at scale. Margins, in turbulent times, are room for error.
Finally, vertically integrating means competing for the biggest prizes. It means, as Schumpeter wrote, “striking not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.”
Look at Anduril versus the Primes, as one example:
ChatGPT
Anduril works with dozens of Tier-1 suppliers. Lockheed Martin has “13,181 suppliers – more than 12,000 across the US and 932 around the globe. RTX executives said they have 2,000 suppliers in China alone. Of course, Anduril makes fewer, less complex products, but that is the point. So did Tesla. Anduril’s smaller, less global supplier base, vertical integration, software chops, use of COTS parts, and its flexibility of youth will help it weather the storm relatively better than incumbents.
You can play a similar game in every industry dominated by a sclerotic incumbent challenged by a Vertical Integrator. The startup will emerge in a better relative position than it would have without chaos. It will climb the ladder. From the bottom, it will strike at the incumbents’ foundations and their very lives.
At their foundations and their very lives.
Loki struck Baldr with the one weapon that could kill him. The Osettes in the Caucasus mountains of southern Russia tell a tale of Sydron, who rolls a saw-toothed wheel right at a secret weak spot in the nearly-invulnerable Soslan’s knees and cuts him down.
“From this brief story,” Hyde writes, “I would like to entertain the following generalization: the eternals are vulnerable at their joints. To kill a god or an ideal, go for their joints.”
Henderson and Clark might add, “The incumbents are vulnerable in their architectures. To kill an incumbent, go for their architectures.”
I wrote that list in September 2024, before the chaos. I was mainly focused on Vertical Integrators’ ability to benefit from technological (and, I would learn, architectural) change.
Everything I wrote then is a more significant advantage now, when the architecture of the economy is changing in real-time. When the incumbents’ joints are exposed.
Towards the end of Trickster Makes This World, Hyde makes a big reveal: the hymnist who sings of the trickster is the trickster himself; the audience is the cautious, controlling gods.
“If [Greek trickster] Hermes is the hymnist, then where shall we find Apollo? Apollo is the audience listening to the Hymn, and the hymnist’s performance is a sort of Hermes raid on their Apollonian side…
…as it works its magic it draws whoever will listen away from the Apollonian limits and into a dilating world of Hermetic possibility.”
That is my invitation to you. Chaos is inevitable. Learn to play with it. Embrace the uncertainty – instead of attempting to impose control on the world that was, join a Vertical Integrator and bring about the world that will be. Play the trickster.
The Vertical Integrators that play the chaos correctly will create and capture the lion’s share of value and set the stage for the half-century to come.
As uncertain as things seem right now, the uncertainty accelerates that future. Turbulence in the markets - in public markets and venture markets - is short-term noise on a long-term trend.
The hard part might just be embracing chance and contingency, as it always has been for those who feel they’re in control. I hope I have convinced you that that is the only move.
We will look back on 2025 like people look back on the GFC: a moment in time at which obviously Bitcoin, Airbnb, and Uber would have been born. We will wish we had seen it.
These moments are hard to see in the present, standing on the “razor’s edge of luck.”
But it is possible to see them. This is a very old story, one that plays out again and again across eras and cultures. And it’s one backed by both theory and observations.
Might this be an optimistic reading of the myths and the literature? Certainly, there’s a less hopeful way to read this: America is the controlling god, China the trickster. That in the destruction of the old world and the rebirth of the new, China will emerge on top.
But China is top down. China attempts to control. China is Frigg. America, for all of its volatility, can play the trickster. It is good, here, for old companies to die and for new ones to thrive. It’s how the system works, and why it’s antifragile.
What America does better than any country in the world is that we produce the tricksters who strike at the gods’ joints. If we are to win this trade war, emerge stronger, and continue The American Millennium, it will be because of our startups.
Those startup tricksters will become corporate gods one day, too. Vertical integration will give way to optimization. Architectures will ossify. The world will be restored to order.
And then there will be new chaos, new disorder, and new startups. This is the cycle.
Startups play with the trickster. Startups are the trickster. And trickster makes this world.
That’s all for today! We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with a special episode of Hyperlegible, and Friday with a Weekly Dose.
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Hi friends 👋,
Happy Sunday!
If you’ve been reading Not Boring for a while, you’ll know the name . When I write about building hard things in the physical world, I often lean on his work to understand the history and details.
When I originally wrote about Base Power Company, I cited him three times, and used his excellent four-part series on The Grid to understand the workings of that “single enormous machine that spanned from coast to coast (exclusive of Texas).”
When I wrote about Cuby, I used multiple of his essays, including Another Day in Katerradise, about his experience at and lessons from working at the Softbank-backed home manufacturing startup, as well as his more technical Logistics, Production Volume, and Industrialized Buildingand others. I leaned on him so heavily for that one that I even thanked him at the end.
I’ve mentioned his series on how solar power got so cheap numerous times, and we’ve probably included various essays from his newsletter, Construction Physics, in half a dozen Weekly Doses of Optimism.
Recently, crunched for time after a work retreat, Brian put together 50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics that is exactly what it sounds like: a distillation of 600,000 words over five years into one information-dense list.
It was the perfect excuse to talk to Brian about so many of his great essays at once, so I asked him to come on Hyperlegible and he was nice enough to accept. We covered a lot:
Brian’s writing and research process (preview: read everything available on a subject; make that feasible by picking a sufficiently narrow subject)
What are some things that seem like recent developments but have key predecessors going back centuries or decades?
An example of something that seemed like an inevitability, but was really a highly contingent product of chance and circumstance?
What’s the intuitive explanation with the widest gap from the real story?
What’s a problem a lot of people think is simple that is actually really complex?
Why is prefab construction not cheaper than conventional, on-site construction, but manufactured and mobile homes are?
Why does Chicago build skyscrapers twice as fast as New York City?
How is it possible that the US actually builds high-profile skyscrapers as fast as China?
Why did the US start adopting gas turbines after the 1965 Northeast blackouts?
If the Jones Act isn’t to blame for US shipbuilding woes, what is?
What did Cambridge and Bell Labs get right?
Why have jet engine and commercial airliners always been so expensive to develop?
Is just fundamentally resistant to learning curves?
And much, much more.
The reason I do Hyperlegible is because really smart people spend weeks compressing a ton of information into the best single essay they can write on the topic. We can piggyback off all of that work (and give them a little shine for doing it).
This conversation felt like cheating: the compression of so many compressions.
Brian’s takeaway from writing Construction Physics thus far is that things are almost always more complicated than they seem. Thankfully, we have people like Brian helping us make sense of all of the complexity. I had so much fun learning from him live after learning from him through writing for so long, and I hope you do too.
If you’re more the reading type, I used Claude to turn the messy YouTube transcript into something well-formatted and clean. It kind of blew my mind watching it.
As always, you can find the full conversation wherever you like by subscribing to Not Boring Radio:
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Apple Podcasts:
You can also find links to all of the essays and conversations at readwise.io/hyperlegible. Thanks to our friends and sponsors at Readwise, you can head there for a free trial and get all Hyperlegible articles automatically added to your account.
If you want more, here are some of the essays of Brian’s and others that we discussed in the conversation. Save them to Readwise and come back to them:
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 141st Weekly Dose of Optimism. This week was all about how to build the future: inspirations for future-building, how to power a future on the moon, building robots to do our future housework, and an Argentinian economic roadmap that I imagine many countries will follow in the future. Put some shades on while you read this one because the future is bright.
Let’s get to it.
Today’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by … HoneyBook
Running your own client-based business can be awesome. Your schedule. Your terms. No boss.
But it also means no support. You have to manage contracts, send invoices, collect payments, and schedule meetings all by yourself. That’s not what you’re best at, and not why you went independent. So for the past 12 years, HoneyBook has given independent entrepreneurs the tools they need to make all of the less fun parts easier.
Now, HoneyBook is starting to just handle all of that for you. By sprinkling AI onto a product that already understands your workflows, HoneyBook can automate more and more of the stuff that you don’t want to do so you can focus on the things that make you great.
This is literally the promise of AI. Freeing humans from drudgery to focus on creative pursuits.
Noah Smith and Mike Solana were singing similar tunes in their own key this week. Noah argues that civilizational greatness is not inherited but built through ambition, risk-taking, and actual effort. Solana gives us a vision for that effort.
Noah is as good as any writer in the world at making clear how good we have it today. He’s really, really good at telling us how shitty life used to be, how comparatively good life is today, and backing it all up with economic data. This specific essay was in response to an X post by former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong in which Wong basically says China will always continue to be great because it’s conscious of its 5000 years of history. Noah disagrees, critiquing the romanticization of ancestral greatness, and especially the idea that modern success is simply a return to ancient civilizational glory. Our ancestors’ legacy , Chinese or otherwise, is not one of riches, and greatness, and wisdom but rather toil, hardship, and relentlessness. We do not honor our ancestors by mythologizing a past that never actually existed, but by building a better future.
Solana just wants more Disney Worlds. Or rather, he wants a regulatory framework and cultural spirit that Walt Disney created and inspired in Florida’s orange groves. He wants Golden City. Solana argues that in order to progress, we need to build an inspiring future rather than protect the crumbling past.
Move forward. Build up. It’s what our ancestors would have wanted.
The inclusion of the nuclear power unit in a Chinese space official’s presentation at a conference for officials from the 17 countries and international organisations that make up the ILRS suggests Beijing supports the idea, although it has never formally announced it.
The power of writing, man. The very same day Noah told the US and China “The proper way to honor that legacy is to emulate it — to build more, to keep struggling upward in the present day,” one of the two listened.
At a presentation in Shanghai on Wednesday on the Chinese and Russian plan to develop the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), the Chief Engineer for its 2028 Chang’e-8 mission, Pei Zhaoyu, said that China is considering building a nuclear plant on the moon to power the base. This echoes a similar claim made by Russia last year.
"An important question for the ILRS is power supply, and in this Russia has a natural advantage, when it comes to nuclear power plants, especially sending them into space, it leads the world, it is ahead of the United States," Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program, told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference.
That sounds like a challenge to me. America should lead the world when it comes to “nuclear power plants, especially sending them to space.” Moon should be a state. And honestly, a nuclear reactor on the Moon is lunarpunk as hell. We can’t let them get that W.
Mr. President, cut it with the shenanigans. Call Elon into your office. Call up Radiant. Call up Antares. Keep the NRC the hell away from Luna. And for the love of God and country, send our Megawatts to Moon.
We have been developing robotic foundation models that can generalize to such messy environments, building on our vision-language-action (VLA) model π0. While both π0 and other recent VLAs are evaluated in environments that closely match training, we've developed a new model that we call π0.5 that exhibits meaningful generalization to entirely new environments. We believe that this represents a significant step forward toward truly generalizable physical intelligence.
If robots are going to take over the world (and by this I mean in a friendly, helpful way…), they’re going to need a generalizable physical intelligence.
The aptly named robotics startup Physical Intelligence made a big leap towards general-purpose home robots with the release of π0.5, a new foundation model that allows robots to generalize to entirely new environments, like cleaning kitchens or bedrooms they’ve never seen before. Simply put, these robots can do housework like a human.
Unlike past robots that only excel under very controlled settings, π0.5 learns from a mix of robot demonstrations, web data, and language instructions, enabling it to understand both how to do tasks and what those tasks mean. This “vision-language-action” model uses a unified system to plan high-level actions and execute low-level motor commands, mimicking human-style reasoning and flexibility. One of us. One of us. One of us.
Housecleaning AI Robots are certainly going to take some jobs in the coming decade. That’s a very, very good thing. If I have to never clean my house again, that is a very good thing. Our human spirit is much better spent elsewhere.
But getting there won’t be easy. Brian Potter wrote in Construction Physics that Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard.
Argentina’s economy is not only under control, but thriving under Milei’s stewardship. Many of these numbers are a couple of weeks old at this point, but thanks to a share on ACT and a repost by Alec Stapp on X, the stories are starting to make the rounds again.
In Argentina, under Milei, inflation is down, poverty is down, and economic activity is up. Monthly inflation that peaked around 25% has hit a five year low and has been between 2% and 3% since October. Poverty is now lower than when Milei took office, following an initial spike in poverty rates over the initial course of the administrations “shock therapy” plan for the economy. And economic activity continues to grow: in February Argentina’s economy grew 5.7% YoY and it has been growing year-over-year for nearly 6 months.
Whatever Milei is doing down there, putting aside the memecoin shit he pulled (which was pretty discouraging for a Milei fan), seems to be working. I’ll take Milei’s Hail Mary economic plan over whatever the fuck it is we’re doing in the U.S. any day of the week.
Put more optimistically, Argentina is an existence proof that, executed well, trimming bloat and letting markets do their thing can actually work.
Lak et al in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition
This study was the first to directly assess hair follicle health following creatine supplementation, providing strong evidence against the claim that creatine contributes to hair loss.
Good news for any of the fellas that take creatine: it does not cause hair loss. That’s according to a new study that found 5g/day of creatine did not increase DHT nor directly cause hair loss.
The idea that creatine causes hair loss is quite pervasive and has likely deterred millions of people from creatine supplementation over the last 15 years. This idea dates back to a single, small-scale 2009 study of 16 rugby players that found creatine supplementation increased levels of DHT, a hormone linked to hair loss. That study had some design errors, was never replicated, and was woefully misinterpreted, but was effective in instilling fear in millions of potential creatine users.
This new study is not perfect (still relatively small and short compared to what you’d like to see in a study) but is much better designed (double-blind RCT) and more comprehensive (measures DHT, free T, DHT: Ratio and used high-res imaging to evaluate hair characteristics.) The results were pretty conclusive: No creatine-specific changes in DHT, total T, free T, or DHT:T ratios. Importantly, high-resolution trichogram imaging showed zero effect on hair count, density, growth phase ratios, or cumulative thickness.
Now should I definitively say up top that creatine does not cause hair loss? No, that’s not these types of studies work. It’s impossible to completely rule that out. But we can now say that there are two studies on creatine supplementation and hair loss. One study was smaller, shorter, and more poorly designed and showed a loose linkage to hair loss. The other study was larger, longer, and had better design and could not replicate that loose linkage and could not identify any changes in hair characteristics. More research is certainly needed here, but given what we now know from this research and the millions of creatine users that haven’t loss their hair when taking creatine, I feel pretty confident saying that creatine does not cause hair loss. If you’re already genetically pre-disposed to hair loss, perhaps creatine and hard exercise in general expedites the hair loss, but if that’s the case I would recommend taking proactive steps towards treating your hair situation vs. cutting out an otherwise very beneficial supplement or working out less hard.
Yes, I am a biased creatine gummy slinger but a I believe a world with more men taking creatine is a better world indeed.
Packy again. If you want to do the kind of work that shows up in the Weekly Dose, I got something for you. My friend, the airship enthusiast Eli Dourado, recently joined Astera as Head of Strategic Investments. Yesterday, he sent me their residency and asked if I knew anyone great who wants to work on things like Mars terraforming, AIs that can interface with brains, and geoengineering… he’s come to the right place.
Punchline: $125-250k to do something so wild no one else will fund it.
I’ll share a paragraph of the description here…
Astera is opening a call for the Fall 2025 cohort of our major science residency program, a one-year, fully funded program centered on the creation of public goods. We plan to welcome 8-10 new residents, who will join the 6 from our Spring 2025 cohort in Emeryville, California, where we are building a hub for open science, data, and technology. We will provide residents a salary of $125,000-$250,000, commensurate with experience, to explore an important problem of their choosing, along with an additional budget for a team and other operational expenses, as necessary; a chance to pitch us and others in our network for longer-term, larger-scale support; medical benefits; and access to substantial compute and programmatic resources (see details below).
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 140th Weekly Dose of Optimism. And an early Happy Easter to our Christian readers. We don’t cover any tech this week that can bring the dead back to life…but honestly, some of this stuff isn’t all that far off.
The evaluation presented here demonstrates that exoplanetary geochemistry now approaches a level of sophistication comparable to that achieved within our own solar system.
Amid all the daily chaos—tariffs wrecking markets, planes falling from the sky—I try to zoom out and remember how tiny we really are. We’re a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, as Carl Sagan once said. But not just any mote: we’re the living one. The special one. Or…so we thought.
Astronomers studying a distant planet, K2-18b, just found something remarkable: dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere. On Earth, this molecule is only produced by living organisms, mostly marine plankton. That makes it a possible biosignature: a chemical hint that life might exist elsewhere.
K2-18b orbits a red dwarf star 120 light-years away and belongs to a weird class of planets called "sub-Neptunes,” bigger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, with no equivalent in our solar system. Some scientists think certain sub-Neptunes could be “Hycean worlds”: planets with warm oceans and hydrogen-rich atmospheres.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists analyzed the starlight filtering through K2-18b’s atmosphere as it passed in front of its star. The light spectrum revealed a strong, repeated signal of dimethyl sulfide, far stronger than anything found on Earth. They also found methane and carbon dioxide, which fit the Hycean theory.
Of course, this doesn’t mean aliens are splashing around just yet. The planet could still be a rocky hellscape with a thick, toxic atmosphere. More data is needed, and lab tests must confirm whether dimethyl sulfide can be formed by other, non-living processes out there. Still, it’s the clearest whiff of life we've ever picked up outside our solar system. A potential sign that we’re not the only living dust in the beam.
Today, we’re releasing OpenAI o3 and o4-mini, the latest in our o-series of models trained to think for longer before responding. These are the smartest models we’ve released to date, representing a step change in ChatGPT's capabilities for everyone from curious users to advanced researchers.
OpenAI introduced seemingly incremental but actually impressive new AI models earlier this week. These models, o3 and o4-mini, are smarter, faster, and better at using tools like web search, Python, and image analysis together, agentically, and with judgment. Crucially, these models think before they act, solve problems step-by-step, use tools strategically, and format outputs intelligently.
To be fair, none of that seems groundbreaking and the improvements may not be super detectable by the untrained eye. But in practice, and after a couple of days of using the new models, the advancements are significant in how I use ChatGPT. These models can handle complex problems, use a variety of tools to help solve those problems, and the outputs are (from what I can tell) very accurate. Simply put, the models just seem to be working harder and more thoughtfully to give me answers.
The hype around these launches were somewhat overshadowed by the news that OpenAI is in talks to acquire AI coding tool Windsurf for $3B. The move makes sense to me. OpenAI gets a red hot developer tool at a decent valuation and Windsurf gets $3B and doesn’t get crushed by a potential major rollout of an OpenAI AI coding tool.
Packy note:I have been fairly skeptical of a lot of the AI hype. I am hyped on o3. It’s only been a couple of days, but it really does feel like it will dramatically improve how I work. I’ve had it do analyses on complex businesses for the fund and asked it to do research for essays I’m working on, and in both cases, it feels qualitatively much stronger than before. I gotta admit, I kind of feel the AGI.
Two hotly anticipated clinical trials using stem cells to treat people with Parkinson’s disease have published encouraging results. The early-stage trials demonstrate that injecting stem-cell-derived neurons into the brain is safe1,2. They also show hints of benefit: the transplanted cells can replace the dopamine-producing cells that die off in people with the disease, and survive long enough to produce the crucial hormone. Some participants experienced visible reductions in tremors.
In a major step forward for Parkinson’s research, two new studies tested whether injecting lab-grown dopamine-producing neurons into the brain can safely replace those lost to the disease. Trials in the U.S., Canada, and Japan used stem cells to generate dopamine neuron precursors, which were transplanted into the putamen, a key motor-control area in the brain. In both trials, many patients showed mild-to-moderate improvements in motor function, especially those receiving higher doses, and brain scans confirmed increased dopamine activity in key regions. Importantly, the treatment was found to be safe, with no serious side effects or tumor growth.
Over 10 million people worldwide have Parkinson’s, and unfortunately that number is expected to double by 2040. The disease is hard to cure because it involves the gradual, irreversible loss of dopamine-producing neurons deep in the brain and these are cells the body can’t naturally replace. It also progresses differently in each person and affects both motor and non-motor functions, making treatment even more complex.
Current treatments help manage symptoms but don’t stop or reverse the disease but cell therapies like the one above, are one of the first real attempts to change that.
A daily pill may be as effective in lowering blood sugar and aiding weight loss in people with Type 2 diabetes as the popular injectable drugs Mounjaro and Ozempic, according to results of a clinical trial announced by Eli Lilly on Thursday morning.
GLP-1s are a good thing. Whether you like a society that requires the proliferation of GLP1-s is another question. But GLP-1s are good. They help with weight-loss, blood sugar regulation, cardiovascular health, and potentially a whole swath of other health areas. The fact that we have GLP1-s today, in any form, is a miracle. They’re the result of serendipitous research, trial and error, and repurposing.
But today, the most popular and effective GLP-1s are injectable and expensive. That limits how many people can benefit from the drugs. However, a more convenient and cost effective solution may be on the way in the form of GLP-1 pills.
Eli Lilly announced promising results from a clinical trial of orforglipron, an oral GLP-1 drug, showing it is as effective as its injectable brethren in lowering blood sugar and aiding weight loss. In the trial, participants saw similar reductions in blood sugar and weight loss, with up to 16 pounds lost over 40 weeks. Unlike injectable GLP-1s, the pill can be taken without refrigeration, making it more accessible and potentially less expensive.
Precision Neuroscience has obtained an FDA clearance for a crucial piece of its plans for a full brain-computer interface system, starting with its minimally invasive cortical electrode array. The company described it as the first regulatory green light for a developer of wireless mind-reading tech.
“The first regulatory green-light for a developer of wireless mind-reading tech” is a cool thing to read and a cool thing for humanity. Here’s what it means: Precision Neuroscience was awarded FDA clearance for its Layer 7 cortical interface, a paper‑thin, 1,024‑electrode film that slides through a microscopic slit, rests on the brain’s surface for 30 days, and both reads and stimulates neurons. The clearance allows the company to deploy the device immediately for ultra‑high‑resolution brain mapping during open surgeries. And, importantly, more deployment means more data collection, which will ultimately make the AI systems that underpin the system much smarter. The plant is only deployed on 37 patients, but getting learnings from thousands of patients in need will make the AI much smarter.
Precision is trying to crack this flywheel: more implants → more neural data → smarter algorithms and BCIs go from surgical tool helping in-need patients to massive platform powering paralysis recovery, mood disorders, and hands-free computing.
I’ve been blessed to be in this position, to be a free agent, to have the opportunity to make this decision. And I feel like I’ve made the right decision. I’m going to take my optimism to the internet and join the Abundance Institute. -Packy McCormick (via LeBron)
Packy here. Earlier this week, the Abundance Institute announced that I’m going to be joining them as a Senior Advisor. If you’ve been reading the Weekly Dose, that shouldn’t come as a surprise: we’ve included their work a bunch of times, including bangers like Nanotechnology: A Primer for Policymakers by Where is My Flying Car? author J. Storrs Hall, an Abundance Institute Fellow.
For those who are unfamiliar, the Abundance Institute is a mission-driven nonprofit focused on creating space for emerging technologies to grow, thrive and have a chance to reach their full potential. It does this by supporting and assembling talent, community building, and shaping public policies before emerging technologies go mainstream. If you’re wondering why I teamed up with them, spend a couple of minutes on their website and I think you’ll understand.
Simply put, there’s no organization out there that’s fighting as hard or as smart for the types of technologies and companies that I think can help us get to an Age of Miracles than the Abundance Institute. As one example, they are driving a lawsuit brought by states like Utah and Texas and companies like Last Energy, Valor Atomics, and Deep Fission against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to require the NRC to follow federal law and allow state authorities to regulate small modular reactors (SMRs). As another, when I went down to Texas to watch (Abundance Institute Fellow) Jason Carman’s excellent Too Cheap to Meter Frontier Film, Abundance was the one supporting the film.
Over the past year or so, I kept running into Abundance Institute CEO Chris Koopman at future-related events. During the 47g conference in Utah, we spent more than an hour walking around Salt Lake City talking about Abundance’s work while he spliced in SLC history lessons. We’ve kept the conversation going, and with each new thing that he told me they’re working on, I got more and more excited.
So a few weeks ago, when he asked me if I’d be interested in getting involved, it was an easy yes. The pitch was something like: “You talk to a lot of companies doing the type of work we’re interested in. If they tell you about blockers we might be able to help with, let us know, and we’ll figure out how to help.” No brainer.
One of the big lessons I took from our season of Age of Miracles on nuclear was that technology is like half the battle. Whether a technology, and the people behind it, is able to live up to its potential to make the experience of being human more awesome often comes down to a host of cultural, political, and regulatory factors that are outside of their control. Abundance Institute exists to help with those factors.
I’m psyched to have the opportunity to help them fight the good fight and unblock the future for the types of companies we write about and invest in at Not Boring and right here in the Weekly Dose.
Abundance is on the lookout for more optimists to bring onboard, and this seems like the perfect place to find them. If you’re interested, reach out to Chris on X. And if you just like a good day of conversation and a fancy party, I’ll be on a panel at Abundance’s 1-year Gala on May 19th: apply to join us at the Policy Summit and/or Gala.
