Weekly Dose of Optimism #159

The Kelces, Starship, Pediatric CRISPR Cures, Nano Banana, Base, Electric Slide

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 159th Weekly Dose of Optimism. This is always the saddest weekend of the year for me. Last real weekend of summer. Time to pack away the sunshine and drag yourself back to real life come Tuesday at 9am sharp. But if you need a little lift, you’re in the right place. We’ve got five (plus a couple bonus) stories of good news to carry you through.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married

From Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce on Instagram

We love love here at Not Boring. So if you thought we were going to ignore the biggest event in love history just because it’s not technically technological, think again.

As new Swifties (after her appearance on New Heights - way cooler than expected!), we expect that with their nuptials and inevitable pregnancy (Polymarket has 2025 pregnancy odds at 12%; someone needs to bid it up to 13% asap for the brand), Traylor Swelce will save the nuclear family in America and ignite a Baby Boom that will create a future generation of NeoBoomers that dwarfs the Boomer generation in sheer mass. As Eagles fans, we’re just excited that Travis Kelce is going to spend the season incredibly distracted.

And if you’re mad at us for using one of our Blank Spaces to talk about Traylor Swelce in the Dose… Shake It Off. You Need to Calm Down. No Bad Blood. Don’t Blame Me. Shake It Off.

It’s a Love Story, baby just say yes.

(2) SpaceX pulls off Starship rocket launch in much-needed comeback

Georgina Rannard for The BBC

SpaceX has pulled off a successful test flight of its newest generation rocket Starship, reversing a trend of disappointing failures.

Tenth time’s a charm.

SpaceX completed a fully successful Starship test flight, achieving every major milestone it set for the mission. The previous nine attempts were each remarkable feats of engineering (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) and pushed the program forward, but none managed to check every box. Flight 10 changed that.

The launch demonstrated the ability to restart engines in orbit, deploy a payload of eight Starlink satellites, survive the heat and stress of reentry, and move a step closer to full reusability. Both the booster and the ship splashed down successfully, making it the first time the entire system completed its planned profile.

The next step is Flight 11, projected for later this year. That flight is expected to take Starship to a true orbital trajectory and attempt a(nother) dramatic “chopstick” catch. And who doesn’t love a good chopstick catch? Nothing more American than a chopstick catch.

If successful, it will bring SpaceX closer to its vision of a fully reusable launch system and get Elon closer to his vision of colonizing Mars and making civilization multi-planetary. And if not, SpaceX will learn, iterate, and get ‘em on Flight 12.

(3) Children with rare genetic diseases get CRISPR Cures center

From Nature

A new center in San Francisco will offer tailor-made CRISPR therapies to cure children with rare diseases. The Center for Pediatric CRISPR Cures, announced in June, brings together pediatrician Priscilla Chan, co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley. The new center builds on the successful treatment whereby baby KJ was cured of a rare and life-threatening metabolic disorder caused by carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency using a personalized CRISPR therapy.

The next time you are mindlessly scrolling IG Reels and feel that deep pit of worthlessness and despair, take solace in the fact that in doing so, you are funding the development of bespoke CRISPR therapies for babies with rare diseases.

Priscilla Chan, wife of Mark Zuckerberg and co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, donated $20M to launch The Center for Pediatric CRISPR Cures in San Francisco. The goal is to make custom CRISPR therapies for rare genetic diseases quick, affordable, and widely available.

The Center builds on the landmark Baby KJ case, in which researchers delivered a bespoke gene edit that cured a deadly metabolic disorder, proving that one-off genetic cures are possible. That breakthrough now serves as a blueprint for developing and standardizing personalized CRISPR-based treatments. By establishing a repeatable process, the Center aims to dramatically lower costs, shorten development timelines, and extend lifesaving therapies to children with thousands of rare mutations that currently have no treatment options.

And all you gotta do to make this possible is keep scrolling.

(4) Introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, our state-of-the-art image model

From Google

Today, we’re excited to introduce Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (aka nano-banana), our state-of-the-art image generation and editing model. This update enables you to blend multiple images into a single image, maintain character consistency for rich storytelling, make targeted transformations using natural language, and use Gemini's world knowledge to generate and edit images.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: do not sleep on Google DeepMind.

This week Google rolled out Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, codenamed “Nano Banana,” a model built for advanced image generation and multi-step editing. It lets users add, remove, or merge elements while keeping faces and objects consistent, a challenge that has tripped up most AI systems. It’s like a natural language–driven Photoshop that anyone can use with just their words.

Nano Banana is built directly into the Gemini app and available to both free and paid users, a sign of how aggressively Google is pushing to make AI tools mainstream. Developers also get access through the Gemini API and Vertex AI, so we expect to see the banana showing up in all sorts of apps in the coming months.

The move puts pressure on competitors like OpenAI and Midjourney, showing that Google can ship cutting-edge models and distribute them at massive scale essentially overnight. That’s a good thing for consumers and a challenge for every other AI lab.

(5) Base Power x Abundance Institute

From The Abundance Institute

By making power more affordable and more reliable, you make peoples’ lives better.

We’re beginning to think people are making content explicitly to show up in the Dose, because Abundance Institute x Base Power Company… come on! Tailor-made Dosenip.

Base is one of our favorite companies over here at Not Boring. Packy’s written two Deep Dives on them: here and here. By installing residential batteries, Base can store energy when it’s cheap and abundant, and discharge it when it’s expensive and in high-demand. By doing that, it can help people avoid outages, lower their bills, and help balance the grid. It also helps the grid do more with the transmission it has, which is important, because it’s become incredibly slow and expensive to add more transmission.

This video, a conversation between our friends Chris Koopman and Zach Dell shot at Base HQ in Austin, TX, is a great overview about what Base does, and gives a good feel for the electric vibes in the Base office.

Base is going to be one of the most important companies of this generation. You heard it here first.

Bonus: Electric Slide

Packy here. On Tuesday, I shared my longest and most deeply-researched essay ever: The Electric Slide.

I wasn’t sure how people would feel about a 40,000 word essay, but as I started writing it, I kept realizing that I didn’t quite understand certain things about the history or physics of the Electric Stack, and so I wrote down what I learned and hoped that some other people would want to work their way all the way up from the basics, too.

Turns out, The Electric Slide is on its way to becoming the most popular essay in Not Boring history. It’s already the most liked and most shared of anything I’ve written, and the feedback has been way better than I expected. Some people have even read the whole thing. It’s been very cool to see.

I think that the electrification of everything is going to be at least as important as AI, and that without the Electric Stack, AI will be stuck in our computers, unable to fulfill its boosters’ most optimistic visions. I also believe that America (and our friends) needs to reconsider its priorities: we need to get more serious about building the Electric Stack and the products built on top of it, because they will be better, faster, and cheaper than what’s come before. The fact that the components of the Stack are 99% cheaper than they were in 1990 and still dropping makes that inevitable.

If you have some time this weekend, grab a coffee and a comfy chair and give it a read.

DOUBLE BONUS: Cyan Banister - A Fool’s Dérive - Dialectic

Packy again. Honestly we owe you an extra for that Traylor Swelce stuff.

Luckily, Jackson Dahl has been on fire with Dialectic. He’s on one of those runs where you’re like “ok there’s no way he’s going to top that conversation” and then he goes out and tops it. Over and over again. If you’re not listening to Dialectic yet, add it to your podcast feeds pronto.

Out of 27 excellent conversations, his recent one with Cyan Banister might be the best yet. I’ve started trying to incorporate some of the things she does into my life after listening to it. I won’t spoil it - just go listen and make your weekend a little more magical.

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Have a great Labor Day weekend y’all.

Thanks to Bland for sponsoring. Go get your company a voice to welcome Bland to the Dose!

We’ll be back in your inbox next Tuesday (hopefully).

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan