Weekly Dose of Optimism #172
Childhood nutrition, Dell Invests America, Amazon Leo, NASA finds life's building blocks, Levin on Lex Round 2 + The Thinking Game + Dose Fuel + Hearing Aids
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday! I hope you didn’t miss us too much last week. We’re back.
December is one of the best months of the year. Holiday parties. Santa. A few final sprint weeks and then a few days to relax and plan the year ahead. And, of course, humans squeezing as much good progress into the last bit of 2025 as they can.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Zipline Helps Reduce Severe Childhood Malnutrition 89% in Rwanda
Zipline co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn
Over the weekend, Zipline co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn tweeted that the company has seen all of its numbers going up and to the right except one… ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) for kids.
A couple of years ago, “Rwanda made eliminating childhood malnutrition a national priority, and with better logistics they succeeded almost immediately, reducing cases of severe malnutrition by up to 89%.” Zipline has to delivery fewer of the RUTFs used to fight malnutrition because it’s helped practically eliminate the issue in two years. In their place, Ryan said, Zipline is delivering more products like vaccines and supplements that help kids have a healthier childhood instead of simply surviving.
This is huge, that we’re at this point in civilization. For some reason, I clearly remember talking to somebody in line at Alpine Bagels in college about this idea: that all of these interventions that could help people in developing countries were actually cheap and simple, but that getting those cheap, simple solutions to people was the problem.
Now, we live in a world in which we can put those cheap, simple solutions in an autonomous drone that navigates itself to the remote areas in need. Just fly right over the challenge.
Half of childhood deaths are linked to malnutrition, per Our World in Data: “In 2021, 4.7 million children under the age of five died; 2.4 million of those were attributed to child and maternal malnutrition.” We can save millions of kids’ lives every year not with miracle drugs, but with logistics.
Zipline and Waymo might be two of the best longevity drugs we have.
More good news, then: last week, Zipline announced a $150M pay-for-performance deal with the US State Department to expand its medical drone delivery across Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire over the next three years. The goal is to triple network coverage from 5,000 to 15,000 health facilities and reach up to 100 million people who will now be able to receive lifesaving drugs and food from drones that fly themselves through the sky like little avian miracles. What a world.
(2) Dells Donate $6.25 billion to 25 million children
Michael Dell on X
Susan and I believe the smartest investment we can make is in children. That’s why we’re so excited to contribute $6.25 billion from our charitable funds to help 25 million children start building a strong financial foundation through Invest America.
This one is exactly what it sounds like: Michael and Susan Dell are contributing $250 to 25 million children, a total of $6.25 billion, through the new Invest America program.
Invest America accounts are tax-advantaged accounts for children under 18 that must go into low-cost, diversified index funds tracking the broad stock market, like the S&P 500. Championed by Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner, the idea is that the country is stronger when more people own a piece of its success. Instead of feeling left behind, kids might come into adulthood feeling like they’re benefiting from growth, too. The money is locked until the kids are 18, at which point it can be withdrawn for things like education, a down payment on a home, or to start a business.
There is some criticism of the plan, which I kind of get, because I sold the Savings Bonds my grandparents gave me almost as soon as I could, before they’d fully matured, to buy beer. So is Invest America going to turn every little kid into Warren Buffett? Maybe I was an outlier…
But there was also a surprising amount of criticism of the Dells’ gift, from Rationalists and Effective Altruists who want to optimize all the joy and expressiveness out of giving. Yes, $6.25 billion could save the shrimp until the heat death of the universe, but have you considered how cool it is to give 25 million kids1 $250 each and introducing them to the joys of compounding? of having a little cash sitting there waiting for you?
Now even with a roaring next two decades in the S&P 500, $250 won’t turn into enough to pay for college (which in 18 years will either not exist or cost $7 trillion per semester). What’s most exciting about the gift, though, is that it sets a precedent.
Through the plan, anyone (parents, grandparents, friends, employers, philanthropies) can contribute, up to a max of $5,000/year for each kid. The federal government is seeding kids born during Trump’s second presidency with $1,000 bucks, but I think seeing one private philanthropist fill the kids’ coffers will inspire others to do something similar.
Ted Cruz and newly-married Cory Booker recently sent a cross-aisle letter asking CEOs to consider contributing to the accounts. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick plans to prioritize legislation in the 2027 session to create a “New Little Texan Savings Fund” that would give Texan kids an extra $1,000 in the S&P 500. You gotta imagine that local businesspeople will do a little something in their home zip codes.
And let’s just say that if someone at Pampers isn’t figuring out, this very minute, how to swaddle each and every newborn’s Invest America account in $100 bills, heads will roll at 1 Procter & Gamble Plaza.
Dude, you’re getting a $250.
(3) AWS Launches Trainium3 AI Chip
via Perplexity
Amazon is launching its next-gen Trainium chip, which it’s positioning as a cheaper alternative to NVIDIA. The more interesting story is that Amazon, following Google’s recent move in TPUs, is competing so directly with Jensen & Co.
I think Mohit Agarwal did the best job predicting that something like this would happen and explaining why over a year ago.
TL;DR Vertical Integration Rules Everything Around Me. VREAM get the money.
Even beyond chips, Amazon is getting feisty. Maybe it was seeing their founder with his new love interest.
Just last week, they announced three new satellite internet terminals under the rebranded Amazon Leo (fka Project Kuiper) in a bid to compete with Starlink. Ultra in particular looks pretty speedy: 1 gbps up, 400 gbps down.
It’s no Somos, but we just love to see the titans compete on the commercial gridiron.
(4) Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Samples
NASA
Scientists led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan found sugars essential for biology on Earth in the Bennu samples, detailing their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience. The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found. Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system.
This week, scientists published three new papers with findings from asteroid Bennu.
The one we want to talk about is the one from Yoshihiro Furukawa and team of Tohoku University in Japan published in Nature Geoscience: Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu.
As the name would suggest, the team found sugars essential to life - the five-carbon sugar ribose (used in RNA), which has been found on other space objects before, and the six-carbon glucose, which gives life energy and which had never previously been found in an extraterrestrial sample.
Ribose and glucose aren’t evidence of life, any more than a wood plank is evidence of a house. The sugars are building blocks, and along with the amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids already found on Bennu, suggest that building blocks of biological life are spread throughout the solar system.
Parmita Mishra captured my feeling cleanly:
what the actual fuck
how are people not talking about the fact that they found bio-essential sugars on an asteroidOf course this is not proving actual life but come on, guys. That’s obvious. What it is proving is an abundance of the chemicals needed for life to happen. similar findings in meteorites have been known but often ignored because people assume it is earth’s contamination driving such results.
This is the most pristine example. It is hard to argue this is a conflated result due to earth contaminants.
After some research, she followed up: “the NASA Asteroid Bennu Samples, if real, kinda make it hard for me to ignore the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.”
Right after Age of Disclosure dropped and Rogan went on American Alchemy… Probably nothing. 👽
(5) Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life
Lex Fridman & Michael Levin
But I mean, what is life, right?
Every couple of years, Michael Levin comes on Lex Fridman to give the most plain English overview of everything he and his lab have been thinking up and proving out over those couple of years (which is decades in normal lab years). Intelligence as cognitive lightcone. Minds beyond biology. Unexpected agency in trivial algorithms.
I don’t want to spoil it. This dude is just operating on a different level. Enjoy.
Bonus: The Thinking Game
I haven’t watched this yet, but I’ve heard great things and plan to this weekend. Even with Claude Opus 4.5 coming off the top rope to bodyslam Gemini, the Weekly Dose remains a Google DeepMind / Demis Hassabis fan account. This is their story.
As one friend with a much higher IQ than mine (but still lower than Demis’) texted: “main takeaway is that IQ matters a lot.” Shit.
Fuel for future Doses:
Radical AI comes out of stealth with Jason Carman materials video
Retro Biosciences is raising at a $5B valuation to add 10 years to healthspan
Unlimited Industries raises $12M for automated infrastructure construction
Bastion2 announces $14.6M in funding and fresh Sony Bank stables partnership
Double Bonus: Fortell Comes Out of Stealth with New Hearing Aid
Steven Levy for WIRED
I got to try this hearing aid a few months ago, and it’s remarkable. To oversimplify, current hearing aids amplify all the sound around you (I could hear water running in pipes and footsteps on the floor above), but Fortell’s picks out the sound you want to hear, like the voice of the person you’re talking to, so it sounds like a normal conversation. Ya gotta hear it to believe it, but it sounds like getting old just got a little bit better.
Have a great weekend y’all.
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We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
Kids under 11 living in Zip Codes with average income under $150k.
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