Weekly Dose of Optimism #143

Pope Leo, Techno-Industrial Playbook, Stripe, Vulcan Robots, Natural Short Sleep, MenB Vaccine, Ezra

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 143rd Weekly Dose of Optimism. We have a new Pope! Robert Prevost was elected as Pope Leo XIV yesterday becoming the first ever head of the Catholic Church from North America. And not only is he from North America, he’s from Chicago and attended Villanova for undergrad. I grew up Catholic in Villanova, so this one hit home. This is the first time I’ve felt “proud” to be Catholic in a long time. But it’s literally the second time I’ve felt proud to be from Villanova just this week! How about those Villanova Knicks, baby. What a week for the Wildcats!

Let’s get to it.

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Today’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by … ElevenLabs

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(1) The Techno‑Industrial Policy Playbook

The Foundation for American Innovation, American Compass, Institute for Progress, and New American Industrial Alliance Foundation are proud to present the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, a collection of detailed policy proposals written by senior domain experts. Our playbook targets three central areas — industrial power, national security, and frontier innovation — the systemic vulnerabilities of which have been exposed by recent crises and geopolitical competition.

At this point, we’re all pretty well aware of America’s need to reindustrialize. We write about it almost every week. Seemingly the White House’s entire economic plan is shaped by this perspective. Reindustrialization has never been more relevant or urgent. How exactly we accomplish it is certainly up for debate.

The good folks from the FAI, American Compass, IFP, and NAIA published a three-part playbook to re-establish America as the leading technological, industrial and security power. Across these three key areas (industrial, national security, and technological policy), the playbook offers eight detailed proposals each. Things like how to structure tax incentives for industrial industries, reforming the SBA, reforming the shipbuilding industry, financing critical minerals, establishing special computer zones, and how to recruit the based technology talent.

If broad tariffs are a hammer, this playbooks offers a number of scalpels for how the U.S. can rebuild its most crucial industries and ready itself for an increasingly competitive world.

One more suggestion from our friends at Abundance Institute: Delete NEPA. Bonus points for the mention of our man Josh Shapiro rebuilding I-95 in 12 Days.

(2) Stripe accelerates the utility of AI and stablecoins with major launches

From Stripe

At its annual user event, Sessions, Stripe launched the world’s first AI foundation model for payments and unveiled a major expansion of its money management capabilities, including stablecoin-powered accounts.

The GDP of the internet isn’t going to increase itself. That’s where Stripe comes in — the company that somehow still consistently manages to make the unsexy business of payments sexy and artistic. At its annual event this week, Sessions, the company unveiled a couple of new products that reinforce its mission (increasing the GDP of the internet) in a very Stripe way (full of craft, thoughtful, somehow sexy.)

First, the company launched its Payments Foundation Model, which it claims is the world’s first AI foundation model for payments. The model is trained on tens of billions of transactions and increased Stripe’s detection rate for attacks on large businesses by 64%. Preventing fraud isn’t exactly sexy work, but the world’s first AI model for payments that actually works really well? Kind of sexy.

Second, Stripe made its first big move into stablecoins after acquiring Bridge three months ago. It launched Stablecoin Financial Accounts, which allows businesses to hold a balance in stablecoins, receive funds on both crypto and fiat rails (like ACH and SEPA), and send stablecoins almost anywhere in the world. Stripe has been able to facilitate B2B and global payments for years, but stablecoins make it cheaper and easier, which of course will of course help increase the GDP of the internet.

For fans of Not Boring, there’s a special Easter Egg, a Not Boring triple-header. Stripe, which Packy wrote about in August 2020, parlayed its acquisition of Not Boring Capital portfolio company, Bridge, to partner with The Official Business Card of Not Boring, Ramp, to launch stablecoin-backed cards. If you’ll recall from Ramp’s Double-Unicorn Rounds, Stripe invested in Ramp back in 2021. Packy wrote, “As Stripe builds new products and improves existing ones, Ramp’s customers benefit.” Now, we’re seeing that play out.

Stripe may not be as flashy these days as an AI research lab or high-growth AI app, but it’s doing the the important work to help rebuild global financial services. And money makes the world go round.

Mini-Bonus: Coinbase launches x402

Elsewhere in the world of payments, Coinbase launched x402, “a new open source payments protocol built on HTTP rails.” It’s the company’s attempt to remedy the original sin of the internet, that payments weren’t baked into the internet’s protocols. As CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted, “x402 let's you make any API call with payment embedded right in the API call itself. No sign up, API key, or credit card required.”

This comes a week after not boring capital portfolio company World launched in the greatest country in the world (America, for the avoidance of doubt) and announced a partnership with Visa to launch the World Visa Card.

It’s a good week to be digital money. Probably, as they say, nothing.

(3) Introducing Vulcan: Amazon's first robot with a sense of touch

From Amazon

"Vulcan represents a fundamental leap forward in robotics," Parness says. "It's not just seeing the world, it's feeling it, enabling capabilities that were impossible for Amazon robots until now."

Working in an fulfillment center is hard, monotonous, and often times (contrary to the name) unfulfilling work. If AI takes all of our white collar jobs, you would not want to find yourself working 8 hour shifts in an Amazon FC picking orders. Today, someone has to do that work (and we’re thankful for them), but in the not-so-distant future, this work will be done by robots.

Amazon has for years been ahead of the curve on using robotics in warehouses. Picking orders with humans is expensive, slow, and hard to manage. Getting 300 laborers to show up to work on time the day after Thanksgiving when there are 20 other jobs offering them bonus pay is no easy task. Picking orders with robots, however, is cheaper, faster, and far easier to manage. Robots don’t come to work late, or get tired, or ask for a retention bonus. Anyway, Amazon knows this and has been building an increasingly sophisticated robotics workforce for the last 10-15 years. It bought Kiva for $775M back in 2012 and has been rolling out more automation and robotics ever since.

This week, Amazon started rolling out Vulcan, its new warehouse robot with a sense of touch. Vulcan uses cameras, suction, and pressure sensors to pick and stow items with way more finesse, like a human hand. That means it can handle crowded bins, avoid breaking stuff, and even know when to call in a human for help. Vulcan is gentle, most robots are not. It’s already cutting down on awkward, physical tasks for workers (like climbing ladders) and speeding up order processing. Amazon plans to roll it out across the U.S. and Europe to boost efficiency and safety at scale.

(4) The SIK3-N783Y mutation is associated with the human natural short sleep trait

Chen et al in PNAS

A mutation in salt-induced kinase 3 (hSIK3-N783Y) is identified in a human subject exhibiting the natural short sleep duration trait. These findings advance our understanding of the genetic underpinnings of sleep, highlight the broader implications of kinase activity in sleep regulation across species, and provide further support for potential therapeutic strategies to enhance sleep efficiency.

I am a good sleeper. I define good sleeper in two ways: 1) when I fall asleep, I don’t wake up again until morning and 2) I don’t really need much more than 6-6.5 hours to feel really good the next day. But I am only a good sleeper, not a great sleeper. We all know a great sleeper: the person who only needs a few hours of relatively deep sleep and, as a result, has more hours in the day to get stuff done. My mom is a great sleeper. I am convinced she doesn’t actually sleep*, but is still more energetic than anyone I know. *When she crashes, she crashes . No matter where she is: party, dinner, 6 o’clock on a Saturday. Does not matter.

Turns out that there’s a biological reason some people are great natural short sleepers. Researchers linked a rare genetic mutation in the SIK3 gene to the natural short sleep (NSS) trait in humans. The mutation makes the SIK3 protein work less effectively, which changes how certain brain proteins are turned on or off , especially ones that affect sleep. People with this mutation can thrive on just 3–6 hours of sleep per night without negative health effects.

Now that we have a better understanding of how this mutation works, scientists can develop therapeutics to address certain sleep disorders, but can also develop drugs or protocols that generally make people natural short sleepers. Imagine what that would do for global productivity. If instead of needing 8 hours per night, everyone was totally fine and fresh on just 4-5 hours. I imagine getting back ~25 billion waking hours each day would accelerate progress just a bit.

(5) A phase 1/2a clinical trial to assess safety and immunogenicity of an adenoviral-vectored capsular group B meningococcal vaccine

Dold et al in Science

Dold et al. developed an adenoviral-vectored MenB vaccine, ChAdOx1 MenB.1, and tested its safety and immunogenicity in a clinical trial enrolling healthy adults. The authors found that the vaccine was safe and elicited immunity against the homologous bacteria, proving the proof of concept with this approach.

Oxford scientists just tested a new vaccine, ChAdOx1 MenB.1, to fight a nasty type of meningitis-causing bacteria called MenB. MenB is a fast-acting, potentially deadly bacteria that causes meningitis and sepsis, especially in infants, teens, and young adults, and while pretty rare, it can strike suddenly and kill or disable you within hours. You don’t want MenB in your body The vaccine was safe and worked well against one specific strain, sparking a strong immune response in everyone who got two doses.

MenB vaccines already exists, but they’re expensive and require multiple doses, which of course limits how accessible the vaccine is especially in poorer countries. This new vaccine uses the same platform as the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID jab, which is cheap and easy to make at scale.

Hopefully that’s the shot of good news you needed to start your weekend off.

BONUS: Ezra is Joining Function Health

For the past few years, my dream has been to create a $500 Full Body MRI and make it widely available. Today, that dream becomes reality.

Packy here. A couple years ago, I wrote about a company called Ezra that uses early detection with MRIs to fight cancer. I wrote, “For its part, Ezra is continuing to launch AIs that push MRIs down the cost curve. It hopes to develop a 15 minute scan that would cost around $500 in the next couple of years, putting cancer screening on its own Moore’s Law-like curve.”

The next couple of years is here! Earlier this week, the company’s CEO, Emi Gal, announced that he’d sold his company to the $2 billion health startup, Function Health. As part of the deal, Function will begin offering the $500 scan in 100 locations (growing to 1,000+ in the coming months).

This is awesome news. One, because Emi is awesome and I’m pumped to see him get a win and the resources to grow ezra everywhere. Two, and probably more generally importantly, because early detection is our best tool in the fight against cancer. Lower prices in more locations means more people will be able to detect cancer early, and fight it when it’s easier to beat.

Say it with us: get fucked, cancer!

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Have a great weekend y’all.

Thanks to ElevenLabs for sponsoring. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan