Weekly Dose of Optimism #166

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and hello from sunny Berkeley, California, where Roots of Progress is hosting the 2025 Progress Conference this weekend. We are going to have a lot to talk about. This is one of the most jam-packed in the history of the Dose.

Last week, Dan predicted that with me at the keyboard, the Dose was about to get a lot longer. He was right; this is a rare TRIPLE BONUS week, and we still had to leave things out. Big thanks to Aman and Sehaj for scouring the internet to help put together the Dose.

In my defense, there were just a lot of great things happening this week. We have big news out of the world of AI: OpenAI is now allowing erotica in ChatGPT (jk) a new Google model generated a novel cancer hypothesis that humans have validated! We have big news out of the world of American Finance. We have a new Michael Levin theory on aging. We have Nuclear News. And we have plans for a new city in California. On top of all that, we have the best profile/podcast/book trio of the year.

So much happened this week that we didn’t even include Anduril’s unveiling of EagleEye (or Palmer’s Rogan appearance), Lockheed’s autonomous Black Hawk, SpaceX completing the V1 and V2 era of Starship, Daylight’s $75M to decentralize the grid, Brian in Ramp’s Office, or Joel Mokyr winning the Nobel in Economics “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth.” What a week for the optimists.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) JPMorganChase Launches $1.5 Trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative to Boost Critical Industries

“Our security is predicated on the strength and resiliency of America’s economy. America needs more speed and investment. It also needs to remove obstacles that stand in the way: excessive regulations, bureaucratic delay, partisan gridlock and an education system not aligned to the skills we need.”