Brainwaves

The Saturday Morning Newsletter #89

Drew Jackson — Sat, 09 May 2026 15:35:57 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 13 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

Your weekly pulse check: The most important events in venture capital, energy, space, economics, intellectual property, philosophy, and more. I distill the most important developments across sectors I track, saving you hours of research while keeping you ahead of the curve.

New to these updates? They pair with our bi-weekly Brainwave analyses for comprehensive sector coverage. Wednesday’s deep dive explored proponents of venture capital - catch up here.

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#1: True Anomaly

Description: True Anomaly is a developer of space technology.

Why Is This Company Interesting? True Anomaly recently raised $650M in venture capital funding. True Anomaly is developing software that enables operators to orient, decide, and act in orbit. Additionally, they’re developing a tactical fighter-interceptor to operate within contested space environments. Their goal is to curate a suite of space-based solutions for the modern government and/or commercial use cases.

#2: CMBlu Energy

Description: CMBlu Energy is a developer of long-duration batteries.

Why Is This Company Interesting? CMBlu Energy recently raised $50M in venture capital funding. CMBlu Energy is developing a water-based battery that provides long-duration power without needing lithium. These batteries are modular and can be deployed when needed. They’ve recently repositioned their business model to serve AI and data centers. These batteries are reliable, with an extensive engineering team helping scale long-duration energy storage solutions easily.

#3: Fermeate

Description: Fermeate is a precision fermentation startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Fermeate recently raised $2M in venture capital funding. Fermentation is a complex art that requires sophisticated equipment and know-how. Fermeate is developing a new hardware module that delivers timed pulses of light to switch your production organisms genetically. This further optimizes existing infrastructure, increases yields, and provides greater stability in genetic variation.

#4: Panthalassa

Description: Panthalassa is a generator of energy from waves.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Panthalassa recently raised $140M in venture capital funding. Global energy demand is rapidly accelerating, outpacing current supply growth. Panthalassa is developing autonomous ocean-based systems that generate wave power, capturing a natural source of movement as energy. Their devices are easy to create and deploy and can be scaled efficiently as the world demands more flexible energy sources.

#5: Moment Energy

Description: Moment Energy is an EV battery repurposing company.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Moment Energy recently raised $40M in venture capital funding. Moment Energy is recycling existing EV batteries to create commercial-scale energy storage plants. They create public good by recycling old batteries while purchasing their supplies at a lower cost than new batteries. Interesting model as they’ll be working with technology that is always 5+ years behind current market innovations, so that lag may hurt them.

The New York Times: America Will Pay Dearly for Its Energy Arrogance

Under Trump, America has embraced fossil fuels, moving further away from other sources and increasing concentrations and potential harms. In the short term, this may be fine, but in the long run, it will create significant uncertainty and instability, potentially leading to long-term consequences on a geopolitical scale.

The New York Times: A Strong El Niño May Be Coming

Forecasters say a powerful El Niño weather pattern could form later this year. This could be one of the strongest in three decades. There’s roughly a 60% chance, with scientists saying next year could be the warmest year on record yet.

Spaceflight Now: ULA Launches 29 Amazon Leo Satellites

This week, ULA launched 29 more Amazon Leo satellites into orbit. This is ULA’s sixth flight, delivering the internet satellites into orbit. This brings the total number of Amazon satellites in orbit to 270 as Amazon seeks to compete with SpaceX for next-gen space-based internet capabilities.

The Wall Street Journal: How Fast the Universe is Expanding

Scientists are beginning to know how fast our universe is expanding. Experts found that objects in our universe recede faster as they become more distant. This rate is the most precise ever calculated. This is contrary to what the theory of everything predicts, causing ripples in the scientific community.

Pitchbook: VC’s Future is Anyone’s Guess

Venture capital’s 2030 forecast is very broad - it all depends on whether AI firms can exit their investments. The base case estimates very modest growth, whereas the upside could result in a 50%+ increase in global AUM. AI now accounts for around 65% of total VC deal value, with the money highly concentrated among a small group of top-tier companies.

The New York Times: Why Gasoline Prices Vary So Much

The price of gasoline varies dramatically by city and state. Around 50% of gasoline prices are driven by oil prices. Since the United States attacked Iran, the price of oil has risen by more than 50%. The variance between states and cities stems from the location of oil refineries, logistics, state taxes, and competition.

Psyche: Why It’s So Hard to Agree on What Counts as True

Everyone pretty much agrees on the facts. However, recent studies have shown that people view “truth” differently. Truth can be understood in different ways. From a social angle, truth is tied to authenticity, so calling someone’s statement true means we think they were honest and transparent. Maybe it’s time to be more conscious about how and when we use the word “truth.”

The Conversation: How to Fix Democracy?

Plato argued that governing a state is a skilled trade, no different from piloting a ship or practicing medicine. In his view, leadership is not a birthright or a popularity contest, but a craft requiring a specific, rigorous expertise.

The first hurdle is defining the “skill” of ruling. Plato defines it as a rule that possesses knowledge of “that which is truly good.” Unlike flying a plane, where a safe landing measures success, the “true good” is subjective and difficult to quantify.

This isn’t to say that only a small subset of the population has a monopoly on these skills - leadership isn’t confined to just government; anyone can have these skills in any facet of life.

Additionally, there is a strong case for the wisdom of the crowd. Collective decision-making often proves better than those of a single expert.

No system can perfectly guarantee a skilled leader. Democracy doesn’t always produce the best leader, but neither does any other system. It’s a complicated process that no one has yet figured out perfectly.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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Drew Jackson

Founder & Writer

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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #88

Drew Jackson — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:35:17 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 11 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

New to these updates? They pair with our bi-weekly Brainwave analyses for comprehensive sector coverage. Wednesday’s deep dive explored the proponents of venture capital - catch up here.

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#1: Fasal Bio

Description: Fasal Bio is a plant-based plastics producer.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Fasal Bio recently raised $7M in venture capital. Fasal Bio is developing a proprietary renewable materials formula that uses wood-based materials to replace conventional plastics in manufactured goods. Their product is engineered to work with standard plastic processing methods, including injection molding and extrusion. This enables it to be integrated into existing manufacturing production lines with minimal impact.

#2: NanoTech Materials

Description: NanoTech Materials is a developer of advanced materials.

Why Is This Company Interesting? NanoTech Materials recently raised $29M in venture capital funding. NanoTech Materials has a proprietary, patented coating technology that reduces heat transfer while maintaining structural durability. This helps control energy costs and extend asset lifetimes, saving businesses money in aggregate. Wildfire exposure is also driving this effort, as their product is engineered to protect structures against temperatures of thousands of degrees.

#3: Plume

Description: Plume is a developer of geospatial AI.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Plume recently raised $3.3M in venture capital funding. Plume is a software platform for energy infrastructure intelligence. It enables development teams to identify the best-suited land for renewable energy projects, track risks, and build a strong pipeline of top-tier opportunities. Getting through the permitting and development phases is one of the longest parts of this process, so finding efficiencies like Plume provides developers a leg up on the competition.

#4: Starfish Space

Description: Starfish Space is a developer of robotic spacecraft to service satellites.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Starfish Space recently raised $110M in venture capital funding. Starfish Space is developing an autonomous satellite servicing vehicle (called Otter). It’s smaller and cheaper than alternatives, using solar electricity to dock with satellites to enable life extension and proper disposal. Their technology is actively in space, helping service existing infrastructure.

#5: Xoople

Description: Xoople is building a satellite data platform.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Xoople recently raised $130M in venture capital funding. Xoople is a developer of AI Earth data monitoring. Their infrastructure layer will feed into many other tools, enabling businesses and governments to be more productive in their decision-making regarding Earth-based variables. Their ultimate goal is to build a system of record for Earth data that can be used by many AI agents.

World Nuclear News: TerraPower Begins First U.S. Utility-Scale Advanced Nuclear Plant

TerraPower is developing what will hopefully be the first advanced nuclear plant built at scale in the United States. The company began non-nuclear construction in 2024 and just received its NRC-approved construction permit. It is the first commercial reactor approved for construction in a decade. The project is expected to be completed and operational by 2030.

The New York Times: Amsterdam Outlaws Ads for Fossil Fuel or Meat

Recently, after being characterized as a very open city, Amsterdam outlawed advertising that promotes lifestyles linked to high carbon emissions. This primarily relates to ads surrounding fossil fuels (airlines, cruises, and faraway destinations) and meat (beef, chicken, pork, fish). This is a world first, but it could signal a trend as regions become more aggressive in addressing climate change.

The New York Times: Global Deforestation Slows

In 2025, the total area of trees destroyed was around 63 million acres, around 14% decline from 2024. This was the lowest of any year in the last decade, largely driven by progress in protecting tropical forests. This was especially impactful in tropical rainforests, where declines were 36% compared to 2024.

The New York Times: We Will Be Paying for the Iran War

America’s war with Iran will cause decades of repercussions. The government has entered into many long-term contracts in the face of this war to fund retrofitting equipment, developing new weapons, and creating stockpiles. This war, which many Americans believe should not have happened in the first place, has enduring repercussions that only compound the issue.

U.S. Senate: China Stealing U.S. Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is a vital component of the United States economy, driving extensive innovation and product development and generating many positive externalities. However, it isn’t a perfect system. Foreign actors, China specifically, have been stealing designs to their benefit—leapfrogging current capabilities unethically and illegally. We must protect our intellectual property, but how to do it perfectly isn’t clear yet.

EcoNews: The Loneliest People

The headline is perfect: “Psychology suggests that the loneliest people in life are not usually the outcasts, but rather those kind, competent, and always-available individuals whom everyone values, but whom almost no one calls to ask how they are doing because they seem too strong to need care.”

Loneliness isn’t just a bad mood; it’s been found to be linked with higher risks of disease (29% higher risk of heart disease) and even early death.

This is a quick reminder to check on people in your life—even the ones that seem like they’re all good and have their lives together.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

Found this analysis valuable? The best way to support Brainwaves is to share it with someone who’d benefit from these insights.

Drew Jackson

Founder & Writer

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Proponents: Is Venture Capital the Best Asset Class?

Drew Jackson — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:35:53 GMT

Credit National Park Service

Venture capital represents less than 1% of U.S. GDP, yet it is the primary engine behind the most transformative companies in the modern economy. From the smartphone in your pocket to the rockets landing themselves on ocean platforms, VC-backed businesses account for a staggering 77% of U.S. public market capitalization and 92% of all private R&D spend. While critics focus on the failures, the data suggests that without this ‘tiny’ asset class, the 21st century would look fundamentally different.

This Week’s Focus: Venture Capital

What You’ll Understand: Favorable Viewpoints on the Venture Capital Industry

Reading Time: 14 minutes for full analysis + key takeaways highlighted throughout

Key Question: Is venture capital the best asset class?

My Take: Many investors claim that venture capital is the best asset class. In many ways, it is better than other asset classes. It produces high returns for a select few investments, driving innovation and positive externalities for society. However, there are some aspects that are hard to dismiss (covered in part 3). In aggregate, venture capital is a very good asset class, but it might not be the best.

Quick Context: This deep dive connects to my work historically on venture capital (here). New to Brainwaves? We explore the forces reshaping our world across venture capital, energy, space, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy. Subscribe here for bi-weekly deep dives plus weekly current events.

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Let’s dive in.

Venture capital has rapidly evolved and expanded throughout the last couple of decades into a full-fledged industry. Throughout its development, many of the industry’s core characteristics and the players’ fundamental properties have changed drastically to adapt to emerging trends and ultimately increase success rates.

As such, our knowledge of modern industry principles and practices may miss key developments or be fundamentally skewed by historical thinking.

The purpose of this essay today is to continue acknowledging and addressing aspects of the modern venture capital industry and any misconceptions we may have, revolving around one of the biggest overarching questions: Is venture capital the best asset class?

View part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series.

Is venture capital truly the best asset class?

Most of the people I know who write about venture capital, in one way or another, are pretty adamantly on one side of the aisle or the other (i.e., they really love VC or really despise it).

One of those people I read frequently is Packy McCormick at Not Boring. If you can’t tell from any of his articles (here, here, here, or here), he writes about VC often and is a strong proponent of it. Why?

The Proponents

The proponents of venture capital being the best asset class list a wide variety of reasons, the main of which are:

Venture capital fund returns (as an average across the asset class) are higher than those of other asset classes
Venture capital funds a large portion of innovation in the U.S.
Venture capital is the best situated to embrace variance in returns
Venture capital is able to fund the wildest ideas in the world
The venture capital industry builds upon itself over time
The failure of one company’s returns doesn’t necessarily spell failure for the fund’s returns
Venture capital investors have an active involvement in value creation
Venture capital can help social and economic impact

Proponents’ Rationale #1: Venture Capital Fund Returns Are Higher Than Those of Other Asset Classes

In one of Packy’s recent articles, he uses the following graph from a 2015 study comparing private and public company investments by researchers at the University of Virginia. The results speak for themselves:

Credit Not Boring

As you can see, given its risk level, venture capital aggressively outperforms its peers. Packy explains that the data isn’t perfect, but is directionally correct. Depending on the time horizon you use and whether or not you’re using risk-adjusted returns, venture capital may or may not be the best-performing asset class.

If you’re like me, you don’t always trust one source, so here are other sources that prove a similar point (here, here, here, and here).

There’s virtually no other asset class capable of providing returns of 50%+ annualized IRR over a 10-year fund cycle. To be clear, not every venture capital fund can hit this level of returns; it’s a select few (a good IRR is around 20%, per the graph above).

Why does venture capital return this high? It’s a combination of factors, mainly the risk and return profile, diversification, and the types of companies invested in. Don’t worry, we’ll discuss each of these points further.

Proponents’ Rationale #2: Venture Capital Funds a Large Portion of Innovation in the U.S.

What isn’t in doubt is that venture capital funds a large portion of the innovation in our society. As we’ll touch on later, whether the company is a winner or a loser, there are benefits to innovation in every scenario.

As writers from Adams Street Capital explain, venture capital is a relatively tiny asset class in terms of total dollars, representing less than 1% of the U.S. GDP, yet it is the primary engine behind the most transformative companies in the U.S. economy. They elaborate:

Venture capital firms have a multi-decade history of facilitating innovation. Four of the five largest public companies by market capitalization at the end of 2022 trace their roots to VC funding. According to the National Venture Capital Association, half of all US public companies benefited from venture investment, while VC-backed businesses make up about 77% of US public market capitalization, 81% of total patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office, and 92% of research and development (R&D) spend. Since 2001, 53% of all initial public offerings (IPO), and 70% of tech companies going public had VC backing, according to Professor Jay Ritter at the University of Florida.

Traditional corporations often focus on incremental innovation—making an existing product 1-10% better—to protect their quarterly earnings. Venture capital firms fund disruptive innovation—companies that make existing products and solutions obsolete.

Venture capitalists often take on technical risks that public markets won’t touch, often because of their speculative nature. For example, in 2026, venture capital is the dominant funder of commercial nuclear fusion, quantum computing, and synthetic biology.

Venture capital doesn’t just fund products; it creates entire industries that didn’t exist a decade ago.

The Internet Economy: Google, Amazon, Meta
The Space Economy: SpaceX, Relativity Space, Stoke Space
The Modern Energy Grid: Tesla, Form Energy, Valar Atomics

Without venture capital, these would likely still be academic research papers or slow-moving government projects.

Proponents’ Rationale #3: Venture Capital is the Best Situated to Embrace Variance in Returns

Venture capital is the career choice for the ultimate variance seekers. In standard finance, returns often follow a normal distribution, with most outcomes clustering around the average. In venture capital, returns often follow a power law.

Because the upside of venture capital investments is theoretically infinite, but the “downside” is capped at 1x (the money invested). Venture capital firms don’t fear a 90% failure rate; they fear missing the one outlier.

This unique structure makes venture capital the best asset class for embracing variance.

For pension funds, a 50% swing in a company’s value is a disaster. For a venture capital firm, high variance is a signal of disruption. If a market is stable and predictable, there is no room for a startup to capture massive value. Venture capitalists look for tectonic shifts that create high-variance environments where new giants can be born.

As you can see in the visualization below, the range in venture capital fund returns is much larger than for any other asset class, followed by other private speculative asset classes like private equity, private capital, and real estate.

Credit Not Boring

Consider the current AI bubble. Venture capitalists are investing billions of dollars in companies offering models, wrappers, and outrageous promises of world-changing solutions. Billions of this will undoubtedly be worth nothing very soon—not all companies are born to succeed. Why is this the current situation? Venture capitalists can’t perfectly predict which investments will succeed, so they need to cast a broad net and embrace greater return variance.

Packy provides his perspective, “Would returns look better if VCs simply funded the good companies and didn’t fund the bad ones? Maybe in the short-term, maybe not in the long-term, but it’s a moot point, because no one knows what the great ones are going to be ahead of time. Venture is beautiful for embracing that.”

Proponents’ Rationale #4: Venture Capital is Able to Fund the Wildest Ideas in the World

Venture capital is often described as the fuel for the future because it operates on a logic that most traditional financial institutions, like banks, simply can’t touch.

Most businesses are built to be stable and profitable. Venture-backed startups, however, are built for extreme outcomes. They only need one Uber or SpaceX to make their entire fund a success; they are incentivized to take massive risks on unproven technology in pursuit of large gains. Packy explains further:

Venture capitalists are willing to fund companies creating new technologies even if those companies don’t seem to have a viable business model in sight. The best venture capitalists try to fund companies that marry new technology with viable business models, but some technologies are just too early to make any economic sense. That’s OK! There are venture capitalists willing to fund those, too.

For startups, there is a period known as the valley of death, signifying the gap between an invention and a finished product. It often requires millions of dollars in research and development before a single cent of revenue is generated. From Packy, “Who’s going to fund that experimentation period? A bank? The public markets? Nope. Venture capitalists.”

Venture capitalists can fund the wildest ideas in the world, some of which will work, most of which won’t. Packy ends his thought well:

I’d argue that even if venture capital underperformed other asset classes, generated 0% returns or something, it would be a net benefit to society to have a pool of capital that funds crazy experimentation. But this is capitalism, and returns are what keeps the machine humming. So the fact that VC has generated such strong returns over a long time horizon is key.

Proponents’ Rationale #5: The Venture Capital Industry Builds Upon Itself Over Time

The venture capital industry isn’t just a series of bets; it’s a compounding infrastructure of innovation.

When people think of venture capital, they often focus on the unicorn investments—the big wins. However, the real engine of the industry is the collective learning curve generated by the vast majority of companies that didn’t make it.

Most cutting-edge technologies are too early when they first launch and go through several “winters.” Early venture capitalists fund the pioneers who often go bust because the timing is off, the hardware is too expensive, or the market isn’t ready.

However, in the grand scheme of history, those failures aren’t everything. They leave behind trained engineering and founding talent who know exactly what doesn’t work, codebases and research that become the baseline for the next venture, and the beginnings of consumer education to promote future adoption.

To be clear, venture capital firms aren’t being altruistic. They’re greedy for the “big win”, trying to get an early investment stake in the next big thing at a low price. Their risk appetite serves as an R&D subsidy for the rest of the world.

Packy, in a recent article, stated, “There seems to be collective intelligence at play on longer timescales. The opportunity to generate returns today might not exist if someone hadn’t been willing to lose money decades ago. No venture capitalist does this altruistically – they’re driven by the small, against-all-odds chance that this too-early technology might be the next big thing – but in their mistakes they create opportunity for others.”

Proponents’ Rationale #6: The Failure of One Company’s Returns Doesn’t Necessarily Spell Failure for the Fund’s Returns

More often than not, venture capital investments don’t pan out. Within a typical venture capital fund of 20-40 companies, the outcome distribution tends to look like the following:

60-70%+ Fail: These companies either go bankrupt or return less than the original investment. These bets didn’t pan out—but as we’ve discussed, they’ve laid the foundation for future companies.
20-30% Average Returns: These companies survive and might return 1-3x the investment. They are successes on paper, but don’t move the needle much for a venture capital fund.
5-10% Power Law Winners: The goal is for one or two companies in the portfolio to be “home runs” that return 10x, 50x, or even 100x the initial investment.

When developing their portfolios, venture capitalists often don’t diversify to lower risk; they diversify to increase the probability of hitting a power law winner. If you invest only in 3 companies, your chances of missing the “next big thing” are very high. The more companies you invest in, the more you increase your chances of luck.

In this way, the failure of a single company is often a planned casualty in the pursuit of the outlier.

This effect is magnified for limited partners (people and funds that invest in venture capital funds). They diversify their investments across venture capital, private equity, real estate, and other asset classes. Packy elaborates:

From the LPs’ perspective, venture capital is a small but growing high-risk / high-reward piece of a much larger portfolio. If any individual investment that one (or multiple) of their venture managers make fails, no matter how spectacularly, it’s unlikely to have a big impact on the overall portfolio. What’s more important to LPs is that venture as an ecosystem continues to take the kinds of risks that have a shot at driving higher returns.

Proponents’ Rationale #7: Venture Capital Investors Have an Active Involvement in Value Creation

There’s a common viewpoint that venture capitalists (and private equity, for that matter) are simply “money men.” However, this is a common misconception. As venture capital continues to grow in terms of the number of funds, fund sizes, and competition, venture capital firms must find ways to differentiate themselves.

To win the best deals, venture capitalists must prove they add value to a business. In most cases, this includes active support that helps the startup scale faster or more efficiently than it could on its own.

For example, most lead investors take a seat on the company’s Board of Directors. This isn’t just about oversight; it’s about providing a perspective that founders, who are deep in the daily grind, might miss, given their extensive industry experience and investing in similar companies.

Venture capitalists have seen hundreds of companies succeed and fail. They can spot patterns months before it becomes a crisis. Additionally, they can help prepare the company for an IPO or an acquisition years in advance, ensuring the financial reporting and corporate structure are ready.

To compare the two types of investors, passive investors (e.g., those invested in public stocks) and active venture capital investors, passive investors often rely on public filings or quarterly disclosures, whereas active venture capital investors have information rights and real-time data.

Similarly, passive investors generally have no say in daily operations, often voting by proxy or through regularly scheduled cadence. In contrast, venture capital investors often collaborate on hiring, pivots, pricing, and much more.

Proponents’ Rationale #8: Venture Capital can Help Social and Economic Impact

Venture capital is often benchmarked using internal rate of return and unicorns, but its impact on society and the economy is far more structural.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that between 2018 and 2022, venture capital-funded firms accounted for just 0.2% of all U.S. firms but employed 12.5% of the workforce.

Unlike traditional small businesses that grow linearly, venture capital-backed companies are designed to scale exponentially. This requires hiring hundreds (if not thousands) of high-skilled workers in a matter of months, with a significant economic impact. For every direct job created at a startup, research estimates 1.5-2.0 indirect jobs are supported in the surrounding ecosystem, from lawyers to accountants to doctors to janitors.

Venture capital companies don’t just contribute to the economy by filling jobs; they also constitute around 50% of all U.S. public companies and 77% of the total market capitalization. During economic downturns, such as the 2008 economic crisis, venture capital companies maintained positive, high-growth employment rates.

Venture capital offers a unique solution for many companies, especially compared to traditional small-business bank loans. The risk profiles differ: banks require collateral and steady cash flow, whereas venture capital firms accept total-loss risk for high-growth potential.

Bank loans help stabilize the local economies, while venture capital firms disrupt and expand the national economy. More commonly, bank loans and other small business financing primarily have a social impact on individual livelihoods and small communities. Compared with other funding sources, venture capital can fund ideas that affect nations and the world (mRNA vaccines, EVs, etc.).

Venture capitalists are often the only entities willing to fund businesses with large social impacts. Furthermore, the venture capital industry is increasingly deploying capital to break down historical barriers to entry, with notable increases in funding for female-founded and minority-led startups.

This has led to the development of a special class of venture capital investors dubbed “impact investors,” whose primary goal is to fund projects with a large impact on the world around them.

___

Packy arguably says it best, “All I’m saying is that as an asset class, venture capital is way better than it gets credit for. There’s no other asset class that’s been as positive-sum or cooked more free lunches over the past half century.”

Is Venture Capital the “Best” Asset Class?

I’ve often found it difficult to objectively determine whether something is truly the “best” among its class.

In many ways, venture capital is better than other asset classes. In others, it’s simply on par. In some categories, it underperforms. In aggregate, I would argue that venture capital is a very good asset class.

Unfortunately, there are some aspects that are hard to get past, namely, the necessity on other classes to function and return money to limited partners, the tendency to adopt a winner-take-all model where the best funds continue raising larger and larger funds and the rest of the industry struggles and dies, and the lack of liquidity and transparency for limited partners narrowing the types and profiles of potential investors and future opportunities they are interested in pursuing in the industry.

By no means is this a comprehensive analysis of every pro and con of the venture capital industry—please let me know what I’m missing, and there may be a sequel with an updated perspective given new information.

That’s a wrap on this deep dive.

Found this analysis valuable? The best way to support Brainwaves is to share it with someone who’d benefit from these insights.

Drew Jackson

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Next Deep Dive: Public vs. Private Space - May 13th, 2026
This Saturday: Weekly roundup of breaking developments across energy, space, venture capital, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy
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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #87

Drew Jackson — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:35:49 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 12 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

New to these updates? They pair with our bi-weekly Brainwave analyses for comprehensive sector coverage. Wednesday’s deep dive explored opponents of venture capital - catch up here.

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#1: Blue Energy

Description: Blue Energy is a developer of prefabricated nuclear power plants.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Blue Energy recently raised $380M in venture capital funding. The nuclear reactor itself only accounts for <10% of the total cost of a nuclear power plant. The other portions are construction costs, labor, and materials, with a significant portion being loan interest. Blue Energy is focused on this portion, designing prefabricated nuclear reactors that can be dropped into place, eliminating a large portion of development costs.

#2: Humble

Description: Humble is a developer of autonomous freight trucks.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Humble recently raised $24M in venture capital funding. Humble saw the huge problems in shipping and the supply chain and designed a modern solution: autonomous trucking. Their trucks use sensors (think Waymo) to drive from A to B, hauling large loads along the way. The commercial trucking industry is large, especially in large countries like the United States. Humble’s technology can semi-easily upend an entire industry.

#3: Atmos Space Cargo

Description: Atmos Space Cargo is a developer of orbital transport and re-entry vehicles.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Atmos Space Cargo recently raised $25.7M in venture capital funding. Atmos Space Cargo is developing a reusable spacecraft that uses a mechanism resembling an inverted parachute. This proprietary device controls reentry and maximizes the spacecraft’s reusability. This ensures a lower-cost infrastructure to make space more accessible.

#4: TheStorage

Description: TheStorage is a thermal energy storage developer.

Why Is This Company Interesting? TheStorage recently raised $3.6M in venture capital funding. TheStorage is developing a new way to store heat by acting as the conduit between renewables and industries. Clean energy is converted into heat and stored in sand at high temperatures; when needed, the heat is released from the sand. This enables a steady supply of energy for critical technologies, all powered by renewable energy sources.

#5: NOC Energy

Description: NOC Energy is a developer of electric heating systems.

Why Is This Company Interesting? NOC Energy recently raised $2.7M in venture capital. NOC Energy converts energy into high-temperature heat. This heat powers crucial industrial processes without relying on burning fossil fuels. Their technology can be used for drying, curing, chemical reactors, transforming raw materials, or replacing combustion systems. In an era when many industrial facilities seek renewable resources to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, NOC Energy provides a valuable solution for a necessary byproduct of fossil fuels: heat.

National Interest: Two Military Bases Receiving Micronuclear Reactors

The Department of the Air Force and the Defense Innovation Unit confirmed which two military bases will receive nuclear microreactors under the Pentagon’s recent program. The goal of this program is to demonstrate the feasibility and operational benefits of on-premises localized energy.

The New York Times: You Paid to Have Old Clothes Recycled. Here’s What That Really Means

Some companies have built business models around collecting and recycling clothing. Unfortunately, most of these companies don’t provide tracking for the journey. This leads to a lack of transparency for customers, so often there’s not a clear picture of where things are really ending up. Usually, recycling isn’t truly recycling. Old clothing doesn’t usually become new; it's usually downcycled into insulation or mattress filling.

The New York Times: Sightings of Meteors Surge

Depending on how fatalistic you are, this could have different meanings to you. In the first three months of 2026, the number of meteor fireballs in Earth’s atmosphere was around double what it usually is. And scientists don’t know why. Could it be aliens? Could it be our tech has blind spots? Could it be satellite debris? There are quite a few theories out there—stay tuned as we learn more.

Pitchbook: Upcoming Mega-IPO Wave

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all expected to go public in the next year. These exits will likely add to the chaos in the secondary market, which has been growing rapidly over the last few years. These companies are expected to raise $100B+, almost the size of the entire secondaries market in 2025.

The New York Times: You Can’t Defend a Nation When Soldiers Don’t Have Child Care

I think the premise of this article is incredibly unique, and one that I love learning more about. See, the military can’t function when children aren’t being cared for. During the 1980s, the military developed a robust child care service that helped soldiers across the nation feel safe to serve their country. This kept soldiers on the job and reduced absences. Now, in 2026, the current administration is looking to gut these programs to pay for wars, and the economists are predicting poor results.

IP Watchdog: AI is Raising the Stakes on Intellectual Capital and IP Rights

In the grand scheme of things, the shift to IP-heavy businesses has been relatively recent. Now, most organizational knowledge and value lies in the know-how, the intellectual property of the business and employees. AI is upending this strategy by codifying complex human-based tasks, eliminating much of the need for human interaction. Therefore, proprietary, protected processes protected by IP become increasingly valuable and create larger moats.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen and heard the phrase “live life to the fullest” out and about. However, current societal norms actively prevent this from happening. Society highly values predictability and stability, which are generally the opposite of a life lived to the fullest.

Our world has been built around the 40-hour work week and the pursuit of productivity. It’s difficult to chase your passions when your survival and ability to thrive are based on your schedule and income. We are encouraged to dream, yet penalized if those dreams impact our work product.

Society was built for conformers. Those who reject tradition are met with skepticism, often pushed aside, and even shamed. Society actively pushes people to conventional paths and ideals, ensuring the collective moves in the correct direction. It actively suppresses living life to the fullest.

It seems like the idea of living life fully is just a faraway ideal, rather than something that can actually be achieved—think strong parallels to the American Dream in 2026. Living to the fullest requires a level of risk-taking that our society isn’t set up to handle, leaving most of us to sadly gain only glimpses of it, without experiencing its true depth.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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Drew Jackson

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Next Deep Dive: Proponents: Is Venture Capital the Best Asset Class? - April 29th, 2026
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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #86

Drew Jackson — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:35:41 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 15 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 6 minutes of curated insights

New to these updates? They pair with our bi-weekly Brainwave analyses for comprehensive sector coverage. Wednesday’s deep dive explored the opponents of venture capital - catch up here.

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#1: Turion Space

Description: Turion Space is a developer of spacecraft.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Turion Space recently raised $75M in venture capital funding. Turion Space is building a platform and ecosystem optimized to perform in the next century of space. Their technology anticipates that space will become increasingly congested, requiring next-generation solutions that proactively position and equip hardware to adapt to changing conditions. Their platform is built with this in mind, packaging the software and hardware together for this end scenario.

#2: Agriodor

Description: Agriodor is a developer of natural crop protection products.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Agriodor recently raised $15M in venture capital funding. Agriodor is seeking to further stabilize agricultural outcomes from the effects of pests and insects. Their goal is to develop a biology-based, natural pesticide that repels unwanted invaders while protecting the helpful critters. They’ve created a proprietary blend to do this and are now deploying it to the market.

#3: Citra Space Corporation

Description: Citra Space Corporation is a developer of space object identification capabilities.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Citra Space Corporation recently raised $15M in venture capital funding. Citra Space is developing a software solution for space-based objects. Their platform enables the discovery, identification, and tracking of space-based objects, ensuring full transparency in orbit. Technology like this is especially attractive to government entities that wish to ensure dominance in space and prevent bad actors.

#4: Scentian Bio

Description: Scentian Bio is a developer of insect-based sensors.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Scentian Bio recently raised $7M in venture capital funding. Scentian Bio uses insect-based techniques to revolutionize odor detection. They use highly sensitive biosensors that measure the concentrations of thousands of compounds to determine what the “smell” is and should be. They’ve been able to produce this technology at scale, bringing it into the food and beverage, logistics, health, and pest control markets.

#5: Fieldwork Robotics

Description: Fieldwork Robotics is a developer of berry-picking robots.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Fieldwork Robotics recently raised $3M in venture capital funding. Fieldwork Robotics is creating robot pickers for the raspberry market. They’ve created an autonomous robot that reduces the cost per berry and provides a predictable cost structure. These robots use 3D cameras, sensors, and machine learning to pick fruits at the same speed and quality as human pickers, while operating for extended periods.

Visual Capitalist: The Countries Building the Most Nuclear Power

Based on existing and projected project capacity, China is set to become the leader in nuclear power. This article ranks countries by current and prospective nuclear capacity, showcasing how the world plans to reach 180 GW+. Countries expanding nuclear capacity can reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, while strengthening energy security and grid safety.

AgWeb: Solar Panel Plague or Progress?

Solar panels have become a large source of income for farmers, but those around them aren’t happy with the change. Farmers are being offered $1,500/acre+. Many critics argue that it reduces local wildlife, destroys the scenery, and reflects poorly on the regions where it’s placed. It’s a complicated affair because, on the one hand, we want to ensure the renewable energy transition, but on the other hand, solar takes up a lot of land, affecting local inhabitants.

The New York Times: Northeast States Set Big Climate Goals

Several years ago, Northeast states adopted some of the most ambitious policies to shift away from fossil fuels towards clean alternatives. Today, after rising electricity bills and the current Administration’s goals, these states are beginning to rethink their goals. Is it possible to achieve clean energy targets? For many, actual events are beginning to point to a miss; there still may be initiatives to help bolster results.

The New York Times: Why Investing in Wind and Solar to Avoid Gas Shocks Hasn’t Added Up For Some

Fuel prices are soaring after prominent geopolitical conflicts. Even as countries are installing record levels of wind and solar power to insulate themselves against energy shocks, the results haven’t been fully proven. This is particularly impactful in Europe, as the way it sets electricity prices can be dramatically affected by fluctuations in fossil fuel prices.

The New York Times: Artemis II Gives NASA Momentum in Renewed Moon Race

For the time being, the United States is ahead of China in the race to the Moon. The recent Artemis II mission demonstrated that their spacecraft can handle transporting human beings to the Moon. The next significant milestone is putting humans back on the Moon in 2028. China aims to put its astronauts on the Moon by 2030, so the U.S. timeline continues to show dominance for now.

The Wall Street Journal: Landing On The Moon Will Be A Lot Harder

Some current and former NASA officials are skeptical that a 2028 landing will be possible, given the technical and operational needs over the next two years. The Artemis II recent mission may end up being the easy part of this initiative. Major progress will be made in 2027 with the Artemis III mission, which will dock the spacecraft with lunar landers in orbit.

The New York Times: Where Did All The Affordable Cars Go?

For better or worse, American society is built on cars. For most Americans, buying a car has become a significant financial burden. The solution is to stop subsidizing American-made cars and open the market broadly to foreign-made cars. This is a complicated solution, as it further promotes offshoring and the use of foreign assets in critical U.S. infrastructure. Yet people at the bottom of the income scale need a solution for the broader society to function.

Clarivate: Impact of AI on Modern IP Decision Making

AI remains ingrained in modern intellectual property workflows. A majority of intellectual property participants use AI in their workflows, with trust developing through exposure to the product. People have slowly moved from skepticism to support once these platforms have proven they can reliably handle every request. The future is expected to only continue this transition.

Albion College: Asking and Answering Weird Questions

Asking weird questions is a fundamental part of philosophy. Similarly, an equally important part of philosophy is the answers it provides. Every good philosopher should practice asking all of the weird questions and be prepared to vehemently defend the answers they give. This is the field’s goal: advancing ideas and answers through rational analysis.

20 Sentences to Maximize Your Social Intelligence (I guide I found on the internet)

To solve an issue quickly, be soft on the person and hard on the problem
Pretend everyone was sent to teach you something
Pause in speaking + eye contact = confidence
Make people feel important with the SHR Method: Seen, Heard, Remembered
A person’s favorite sound is their name, so remember it
“Praise publicly. Criticize privately.” - Warren Buffett
To give feedback, first make the other person feel you care about them
“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.” - Neil Strauss
The best networking strategy is a helping others first strategy
Loneliness is a silent pandemic; assume people want to meet you
Practice going first, e.g., “Hi, I’m Ben.”
Build the habit of responding with “Yes, and” because it advances their idea
Avoid complaining or gossiping (nobody likes to hear it)
Storytelling is a superpower; use a structure like setup, tension, and resolution
Every dog has its day because dogs are friendly (lesson in there)
“The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.” - E. Perel
To discover blind spots, build an inner circle that will give you honest feedback
Normalize “I don’t know anything about that yet” as a successful answer
Record and study your speaking like an athlete watching game film
“Great leaders create more leaders, not followers.” - Roy T. Bennett

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

Found this analysis valuable? The best way to support Brainwaves is to share it with someone who’d benefit from these insights.

Drew Jackson

Founder & Writer

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Next Deep Dive: Proponents: Is Venture Capital the Best Asset Class?
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Opponents: Is Venture Capital the Best Asset Class?

Drew Jackson — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:35:50 GMT

Credit Stanford Graduate School of Business

Roughly 90% of all startups fail. In any other industry, those odds would signal a catastrophe; in venture capital, they are simply the cost of doing business. While proponents call it the ultimate engine of innovation, a growing chorus of opponents argues that the ‘best asset class’ is actually a high-stakes gamble where most players leave the table empty-handed.

This Week’s Focus: Venture Capital

What You’ll Understand: Opposing Viewpoints on the Venture Capital Industry

Reading Time: 18 minutes for full analysis + key takeaways highlighted throughout

Key Question: Is venture capital the best asset class?

My Take: Many investors, both within and outside the industry, claim that venture capital is the best asset class. However, their opponents cite high risk, large-scale failures, reliance on external factors, and many other factors for why this simply can’t be the case. Honestly, their case has quite a bit of merit, but it may not outweigh the positives (coming in part 4).

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As such, our knowledge of modern industry principles and practices may miss key developments or be fundamentally skewed by historical thinking.

View part 1 and part 2 of this series.

Is venture capital truly the best asset class?

There are thousands of proponents and opponents of the venture capital industry. On one hand, there are thousands of companies and founders that use venture capital funding to change the world and get rich in the process. On the other hand, this comes at the expense of LPs, company failures, and reliance on other factors.

Today, our goal is to understand the main arguments of these naysayers, those who habitually oppose and are skeptical of the industry’s true value. Part 4, the final piece of this series, will present the champions’ viewpoint.

The Opponents

The opponents of venture capital being the best asset class list a wide variety of reasons, the main of which are:

Venture capital is incredibly risky and has a high failure rate
Venture capital funds are very illiquid
Venture capital returns are highly variable with a high dependence on “home runs”
Venture capital firms charge high fees (2 & 20)
There are substandard and unqualified investors in venture capital
Venture capital firms make money when other people do all the hard work
Many venture capital funds are struggling
Because venture capital firms invest in private companies, there can be a lack of transparency for limited partners
Venture capital requires larger, more mature asset classes for its exits—venture capital can’t exist in a vacuum

Opponents’ Rationale #1: Venture Capital is Incredibly Risky and Has a High Failure Rate

Just because you received a venture capital investment does not mean you’re going to be the next unicorn (although it doesn’t hurt your chances). In fact, in venture capital, risk isn’t just a possibility—it’s at the core of the business model.

Roughly 90% of all startups fail. Venture capital’s goal is to find and invest in the 10% that don’t fail (or have less likelihood of failure). In practice, this often means investing in companies with high potential but high failure rates.

Packy at Not Boring summarizes the problem well: “No asset class’ constituents fail at a higher rate than venture capital’s, yet venture capital’s returns match or exceed all the others’... Even the best venture funds are wrong much more often than they’re right.”

Venture capital sits at a unique point on the risk-return spectrum, taking many risky bets with the hope that a small few will return well enough to cover the others and then some. If the failure rate is so high, why do institutional investors (e.g., pension funds and insurance companies) continue to invest in venture capital?

Like other private markets, venture capital often moves differently than the stock market, providing an uncorrelated return profile that enables further portfolio diversification.

Additionally, these investors want access to the home run upside. In venture capital, you can only lose 1x your money on a failure (which is often the case), but it provides an opportunity to make 100x or even 1000x on a success.

On the whole, these factors create dynamics where the best funds, those hitting home runs consistently, rise to the top percentiles, while the majority of funds, those consistently striking out, struggle and eventually disappear.

Opponents’ Rationale #2: Venture Capital Funds are Very Illiquid

Packy states the issue perfectly, “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.”

Traditionally, venture capital funds were designed to be ~10-year vehicles, with the first 5 years for investing the money and the other 5 for building and selling companies. Thus, as an investor, your money is tied up for 8-10 years before you begin to see money back and any capital gains.

In 2026, this timeline can often be longer, as funds are hesitant to deploy capital on the frontend and companies are staying private longer, resulting in 10-15-year fund timelines that further increase the illiquidity of these funds.

This means many funds are reaching their legal expiration date while still holding most of their assets. As a result, fund extensions have become increasingly popular to ensure capital can be recovered.

The “J-Curve” represents a fund’s return profile and its illiquidity. In the first few years, a fund’s value drops because of management fees and early investment failures. It only curves upward in the final years of the fund’s lifecycle as the winners grow and eventually exit.

For many funds, limited partners don’t give the venture capital firm all of the money at once. Instead, they are “called” over several years, meaning the investor must keep that cash ready but relatively unproductive until the venture capital firm asks for it, further compounding the lack of immediate returns for investors.

Therefore, an investor might not see a single dollar of distributions (profit) until year 7 or 8 of the investment. Because this illiquid wait time has become so long, the industry has developed new ways to artificially create liquidity before a company actually goes public or is acquired.

In 2025, the global secondaries market reached $240M. This market enables limited partners to sell their stakes in a fund to another investor, or for founders to sell a portion of their shares to specialized firms.

Additionally, if a venture capital firm has a great company but its fund is expiring, they might “sell” that company into a new fund they also manage. This gives old investors a choice: take their cash now or roll into the new fund to keep waiting for a bigger exit.

It’s a very difficult environment for venture capital investors right now. Limited partners need returns to fund their insurance programs, pension funds, university research, and other activities. They can easily sell stocks and bonds at their market value; they can’t sell their venture capital stakes as easily. So it’s not surprising some limited partners are becoming hesitant to provide capital for venture capital firms.

Opponents’ Rationale #3: Venture Capital Returns are Highly Variable, With a High Dependence on “Home Runs”

Peter Thiel, in his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, states:

The error lies in expecting that venture returns will be normally distributed: that is, bad companies will fail, mediocre ones will stay flat, and good ones will return 2x or even 4x. Assuming this bland pattern, investors assemble a diversified portfolio and hope that winners counterbalance losers. But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you miss those rare companies in the first place.

One of the best parts of venture capital is that not all investments need to pan out, enabling them to take risky bets that other asset classes cannot.

Due to these factors, venture capital firms are often reliant on a few core investments (usually unknown from the start but identified throughout the investment lifecycle) to return the majority of their capital and profit.

However, if you don’t manage to capture any of those home-run performers, your fund struggles—as many do today. This can lead to competent, powerful investors failing solely because of the field’s uncertainty, potentially decreasing capital available to companies in the future. Thiel continues:

Of course, no one can know with certainty ex ante which companies will succeed, so even the best VC firms have a “portfolio.” However, every single company in a good venture portfolio must have the potential to succeed at a vast scale.

Opponents’ Rationale #4: Venture Capital Firms Charge High Fees (2 & 20)

The traditional compensation structure for venture capital and private equity funds is known as the “2 and 20” structure. On the surface, it sounds simple, yet it creates a powerful set of incentives that dictate how money is invested and managed.

The “2” refers to the annual management fee (usually 2%), calculated based on the total capital committed to the fund, not the amount currently invested. The purpose is to keep the fund afloat by paying salaries, covering office space, travel, technology, legal expenses, and more.

For some quick math, if you raised a $1B fund, you would receive 2% in annual management fees, or $20M. Over a typical 10-year fund life, that’s $200M in guaranteed revenue, regardless of whether the fund makes a single dollar in profit.

Granted, most modern funds include a “step-down” provision where, after the initial investment period (3-5 years), the fee might drop to 1.5% or 1% as the workload shifts from finding new deals to simply managing existing ones.

The “20” refers to the performance fee, and it’s where venture capital firms make their real wealth. Once the fund has returned all the original capital to the limited partners, the general partners retain 20% of any additional profits. This is designed to ensure the venture capital fund only gets rich if the investors get rich.

If our $1B fund returns $4B (once all investments are exited), the limited partners receive $1B back first, and the remaining $3B is divvied up: 80% to the investors and 20% to the venture capital firm.

Over the last few years, a clear divide has emerged in the industry. As a new class of funds emerges, dubbed “megafunds”, with over $10B in assets under management. For these firms, the management fees ($200M+/year) are so massive that the partners are wealthy even if the fund’s performance is mediocre. Smaller, scrappier funds, usually $500M and under, must hit home runs to survive, as their management fees barely cover basic operations.

Thus, some firms are more heavily incentivized to carefully select and pursue home-run investments, even if the economics (2 & 20) remain the same.

Overall, investors generally accept high fees so long as the fund provides alpha (returns higher than what the investor could earn elsewhere, usually the stock market). When performance dips, these fees are among the first things limited partners seek to renegotiate.

Opponents’ Rationale #5: There Are Substandard and Unqualified Investors in Venture Capital

Despite its elite reputation, venture capital is a highly fragmented industry. In 2026, the gap between top-tier firms and “unqualified” investors has never been wider.

When observers or critics speak of “substandard” or “unqualified” investors, they are usually referring to three types of venture capital players that can actually damage a startup’s health:

The Hype Chaser: These are investors, often retail groups, family offices, or non-tech corporations, who enter venture capital only during the boom times. Unfortunately, they often lack the stomach for the 7-10 year startup winter. When a company faces volatility or uncertainty, these investors are often the first to panic and push for a premature sale, at the company’s long-term detriment.
The Dumb Money: These are capital providers that provide zero strategic support. While an elite venture capital firm provides hiring assistance and customer introductions, an unqualified investor might overcomplicate the cap table, demanding toxic terms that make it impossible for the founder to raise more money later, or require excessive hand-holding, wasting management’s time instead of finding ways to add value.
The Ghost Investor: Ghost investors are groups that have stopped writing checks but still want to appear active, a significant red flag in today’s climate. If an existing investor doesn’t follow on in your next round, it sends a signal to the rest of the market that something could be wrong with your company. Many “unqualified” investors often run out of dry powder but don’t tell the founder until it’s too late.

Based on the above explanation, you may have come to the natural conclusion that “substandard” or “unqualified” investor types are detracting from the industry, and should be eliminated—that was my first thought, too. Packy provides some clear commentary on this point:

They stand in the way of acquisitions that would be life-changing for founders but meaningless for returns. Often, the most helpful thing some VCs can do is write a check and get out of the way. I’ve worked with bad ones from the other side of the table and I know how harmful they can be. The good news is, over time, the market typically punishes the bad ones.

He continues with a counterintuitive point:

If you zoom in on the behavior of any one participant at any given time, you might think that they’re behaving stupidly. In many cases, they are. The ecosystem works not in spite of, but because of, the stupidity of some of its participants.

There are undoubtedly investors who show up to work and do a substandard job, as you would find in any career. Unfortunately, in this case, all suffer. In what ways can this be prevented?

Arguably, the biggest reason behind this trend is the lack of formalized training and oversight of venture capitalists—there’s technically a very low barrier to entry.

Additionally, the industry is moving toward structural and technological safeguards to weed out low-quality investors. The goal is to shift from a traditional handshake culture to a data-driven culture where poor performance and toxic behavior have immediate consequences.

For instance, founders have begun to vet venture capital firms as rigorously as venture capital firms are vetting them. This includes asking for references from successful and unsuccessful portfolio investments to discover how the investor behaves when things go right and wrong.

Review sites are gaining traction, allowing founders to leave reviews for venture capitalists and flag sub-performers, helping future founders understand the scope of their potential partnership.

Lastly, the National Venture Capital Association and similar entities have launched initiatives to increase transparency across the venture capital process. A main initiative is creating open-source, fair-market-term sheets that enable founders to recognize unfair terms as red flags for unqualified investors.

Opponents’ Rationale #6: Venture Capital Firms Make Money When Other People Do All the Hard Work

The argument that venture capitalists make money while others do the work is a common critique of the industry and has some merit. Underlying the argument is the fundamental tension between capital (in this case, the venture capital firm’s capital) and labor (the founders’ and employees’ “sweat equity”).

At the very beginning, a company’s value is essentially zero. Founders and early employees provide 100% of the labor, but they often lack the resources to significantly scale. In many cases, the solution is to bring in a venture capital firm to provide some of the capital necessary to grow and achieve future projections.

In return, a founder trades a portion of their ownership (often 20-40%+) for the capital needed to hire a team and build the product. Fast forward to exit, if the company sells for $1B, a venture capital firm that owns 20% makes $200M. Critics will argue that the venture capital firm didn’t write the code, sell the product, or pull late-nighters to ensure viability—yet they took a massive share of the value created by those who did.

The counterargument used by the venture capital industry is based on the nature of the risk each party assumes. For the founder, if the startup fails, they lose years of their life and potential salary, but they often don’t lose millions of their own dollars. In contrast, if the startup fails, the venture capital firm loses its entire investment. As such, there is an asymmetry in the risk taken (in the venture capital firm’s opinion), which justifies the compensation received on successful investments.

Recently, this paradigm has been shifting in favor of the founder. Founder-friendly terms are appearing more often in term sheets, including “super-voting shares” that allow founders to keep control of the company’s direction even if they own a minority of the stock.

Additionally, to help prevent founders from burning out while venture capitalists wait for a massive exit, many term sheets include provisions that allow founders to sell a small portion of their shares in a secondary transaction early in the venture. This allows the founders to get paid for their hard work before the investor gets their final payday.

Separately, some venture capital firms are moving away from passive investing towards the creation of venture studios, where the venture capital firm actually provides the first engineers, designers, and recruiters. In these cases, the work and value-creation process is more evenly shared between the firm and founders, justifying the return profiles.

Opponents’ Rationale #7: Many Venture Capital Funds are Struggling

In March 2026, the Chairman of the 45th Annual Small Business Forum summarized this issue well: “This panel will also examine trends of increased concentration in the venture capital industry. For example, in the first seven months of 2025, roughly 40% of all venture capital dollars flowed to just 10 companies, while the share of deals below $5 million fell to a decade-low of 49%. On the fundraising side, thirty firms accounted for approximately seventy-five percent of the total venture dollars raised in 2024.”

Now, to be clear, concentration doesn’t exactly mean many venture capital funds are struggling, just that some are outperforming the rest.

Carta, a software to manage equity management, estimates that from 2021 to 2024, the number of new venture capital funds raised fell by 68%. In the same period, the annual count of investors who made at least one new investment in a U.S.-based startup declined by 26%.

Often, one of the biggest signs of a successful venture capital firm is the ability to raise subsequent funds, usually at larger fund sizes.

Through these metrics—concentrated funds raising the majority of venture dollars and a decrease in firms raising new funds—it’s a pretty sure bet that many venture capital funds are struggling.

In recent years, limited partners have struggled to earn significant returns on their venture capital fund investments. This is measured by a metric known as distributed-to-paid-in capital (DPI), which compares the cash returned to investors with the capital they contributed.

Among the most recent venture capital fund vintages, DPI has been hard to achieve. Carta estimates that just 21% of funds from the 2020 vintage have generated any DPI for investors thus far, compared to 37% over the same period for 2017 vintage funds. They include the following graph, which illustrates this point well:

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was a surge of new venture capital funds as investors sought to capitalize on a growing market. Thus, many speculate that the current trends of the shrinking VC landscape represent a normalization back to long-term trends.

Aside from these factors, the recent market consolidation is painful for many funds, resulting in fewer fundraising opportunities for both less-experienced founders and newer investors.

Opponents’ Rationale #8: Because Venture Capital Firms Invest in Private Companies, There Can Be a Lack of Transparency for Limited Partners

In most cases, the relationship between the general partner of a venture capital fund (the person managing the investments and portfolio day-to-day) and the limited partner (the institution or individual(s) providing the money for the fund) is often a black box.

Because venture capital invests in private companies, they aren’t subject to the same public disclosure rules as a company listed on a public stock exchange. This creates a significant information asymmetry.

In the public markets, a stock price is updated every second. In venture capital, the value of a company is often a “best guess” based on the last time someone wrote an investment check. For instance, a company might have raised money at a $1B valuation in 2021. If the market crashes in 2022, the venture capital firm might still carry that company at $1B on its books until it raises additional capital in a down round or exits.

Even though limited partners are the primary financiers, they rarely have a seat on the startup’s board. Limited partners usually receive quarterly portfolio summaries. They might see “Company X is doing well,” but they won’t see the internal Slack messages, customer data, board minutes, or the granular monthly burn rate.

This is especially the case if the limited partner also invests in competitors of the company, in which case, general partners must strictly limit what information they pass up the chain to prevent trade secrets from leaking.

However, limited partners have begun to push back, wanting increased transparency. For example, in 2026, the Institutional Limited Partners Association introduced new reporting templates that force venture capital firms to provide more granular data on fees, expenses, and performance metrics. In another instance, California recently passed a diversity law requiring venture capital firms to report the demographic data of the founders they fund—moving transparency from financials to include social and operational metrics.

Opponents’ Rationale #9: Venture Capital Requires Larger, More Mature Asset Classes For Its Exits—Venture Capital Can’t Exist in a Vacuum

Venture capital doesn’t exist in isolation within the financial landscape. It is often the on-ramp for companies to a much larger global financial highway. While venture capitalists specialize in high-risk, early-stage growth, they cannot survive unless they can eventually hand their companies off to larger, more mature asset classes to provide liquidity.

As we’ve discussed, venture capital creates value, though it’s largely paper value until an exit. For venture capital to return cash to its investors, it needs a buyer with significantly deeper pockets, typically from three mature asset classes.

Firstly, the public markets are the ultimate destination for startups. When a company lists on an exchange, it gains access to a pool of capital valued at trillions of dollars from retail and institutional investors. JP Morgan estimates that this accounts for around 10-15% of all venture capital exits.

Secondly, large strategic incumbents (e.g., Google, Microsoft, and Costco) regularly use their cash reserves to acquire companies. For example, in 2026, the race to build AI infrastructure has led many strategics to record-breaking M&A deal values and volume, with these giants serving as exit opportunities for smaller innovators. Sales to larger strategic players represent around 50-55% of all venture-capital backed exits, the largest channel.

Lastly, large financial institutions (e.g., private equity firms, family offices) deploy significant capital to continue growing these companies for years to come. These investors often bring significant operational, technological, and sector-specific expertise through prior investments. Financial investors account for the remaining 25-40% of venture capital investment exits.

Venture capital relies on these larger asset classes to achieve liquidity and to ensure the next stage in the company’s growth lifecycle (traditionally, a more mature, moderate-growth stage).

However, this has become harder recently. In 2026, Stanford Professor Ilya Strebulaev found that the average time to exit was between 6 and 10 years, with this timeframe increasing steadily over the last 3-5 years. Only 35% of companies exited within 1-5 years, 40% within 6-10 years, and 25% within 11-15 years.

Because companies are staying private longer, the secondary market has become vital. This capital allows early investors and employees to sell some or all of their shares to other private investors before the company actually fully exits.

This provides a pressure-release valve for the venture capital ecosystem, ensuring capital keeps flowing even when the IPO or M&A windows aren’t favorable.

Part 4 to come next.

That’s a wrap on this deep dive.

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This Saturday: Weekly roundup of breaking developments across energy, space, venture capital, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy
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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #85

Drew Jackson — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:36:07 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 11 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

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#1: Patlytics

Description: Patlytics is an AI platform for patent law.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Patlytics recently raised $40M in venture capital funding. Patlytics is a company I’ve been following for a couple of years. Their software helps lawyers draft patent applications, pursue legal actions, and file claims more easily. In an era of intellectual property appreciation, this model is increasingly valuable and is likely to grow rapidly.

#2: Portal Space Systems

Description: Portal Space Systems is a developer of solar thermal propulsion systems.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Portal Space Systems recently raised $50M in venture capital funding. How do we move things in space? Initially, we relied on the traditional method of burning fossil fuels, which only works as long as you have enough on board. Portal Space is proposing a new technology powered by solar thermal energy, creating a renewable energy source capable of easily moving objects in orbit.

#3: TerraSpark

Description: TerraSpark is a producer of space-based energy systems.

Why Is This Company Interesting? TerraSpark recently raised $5M in venture capital funding. I would estimate this is the fourth or fifth space-based solar power beamed to Earth startup I’ve written about in as many weeks. Given the vast energy needs on Earth, many are looking for solutions on and above Earth. Space-based solar offers many efficiencies; the only downside is the distance from Earth, but significant advances have helped reduce inefficiencies in this gap.

#4: Starcloud

Description: Starcloud aims to build solar-powered data centers in space.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Starcloud recently raised $170M in venture capital funding. As data center demand continues to increase, the cost to build decreases, and energy costs increase, the economics for space-based data centers make more and more sense. Starcloud is creating the initial infrastructure for these projects, striving to be first to market to prove out the technology.

#5: Standing Ovation

Description: Standing Ovation is a precision fermentation startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Standing Ovation recently raised $25M in venture capital funding. Standing Ovation is a developer of alternative proteins using a proprietary fermentation process. They create non-meat proteins, including dairy- and vegan-based options, for use in other food products to bolster their protein content.

Gizmodo: Should We Be Hyped Or Freaked Out About Nuclear Microreactors?

Nuclear microreactors are a newer, widespread innovation in the nuclear sphere, as commercial and government entities wish to provide flexible, movable energy to areas. Each reactor can power towns and cities, just as larger reactors do. These reactors pose a greater risk because they aren’t always fixed in place, which can encourage nuclear proliferation.

The New York Times: Enthusiasts Turn to Plastic Instead of Ice

For places with outdoor ice rinks, a newly proposed solution is to install new rinks made of high-density polyethylene, rather than resorting to expensive ice maintenance and upkeep. This material is more durable, easy to assemble, cheap to maintain, and performs almost exactly like ice. It’s an interesting concept for curbing climate change that I hadn’t considered.

The New York Times: Artemis Astronauts Splash Down

On Friday, the four astronauts aboard the Artemis II rocket splashed down off the coast of California. This ended their 10-day mission to circle the Moon and back, proving the technology’s capabilities for a future Moon landing. This is arguably one of the biggest space milestones in over 50 years, a monumental feat.

The Wall Street Journal: Artemis Astronauts Go Farther Than Any Human

Mid-flight, the four Artemis astronauts traveled to a new record distance from Earth: 248,655 miles. That surpassed the milestone set by Apollo 13. “‘We, most importantly, choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,’ said Jeremy Hansen, the Artemis astronaut representing the Canadian Space Agency, after the crew set the new distance milestone.”

Fortune: Risk Killing America’s Golden Goose By Taxing University Research

Many lobbyists are promoting the idea of taxing the income universities earn from licensing their intellectual property. However, opponents argue that this is contrary to universities’ goals: creating and fostering intelligence and intellectual curiosity. It’s unclear at this point if any laws will be enacted, but this is a highly contentious issue in the intellectual property sector.

ZME Science: Japan Just Switched on Asia’s First Osmotic Power Plant

If you’re a cool new technology nerd like I am, you’ll enjoy this one quite a lot. Japan has recently gone live with its new power plant powered by osmosis.

This plant generates electricity in a unique way, by mixing fresh water with salt water. This is only the second plant of its kind in the world, capable of powering a nearby desalination plant and supplying power to around 200 homes.

It works by putting fresh water on one side of the membrane. On the other side is seawater. The difference in saltiness pulls the fresh water across the membrane, increasing the pressure on the saltwater side. This pressure is used to turn a turbine, generating electricity.

Isn’t that an interesting use of a technology you learned about in biology class?

I love it when humans find unique solutions to problems that affect the entire population in an interesting yet simple way.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #84

Drew Jackson — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:35:05 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 15 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 6 minutes of curated insights

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#1: Mantis Space

Description: Mantis Space is a space and advanced energy startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Mantis Space recently raised $10M in venture capital funding. Mantis Space strives to build space-based energy infrastructure. Their goal is to create a satellite network that can beam power to other satellites in Earth’s shadow, ensuring they receive sufficient power. These types of innovations will be critical for the development of further space infrastructure, as everything relies on energy.

#2: Factorial

Description: Factorial is a solid-state battery developer.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Factorial recently raised venture capital funding. Factorial is set on pushing the limits of battery technology. Current lithium-ion technology is reaching its limits, with only diminishing marginal returns from new innovations. Solid-state batteries, like those produced by Factorial, are the future, offering high returns and greater potential.

#3: Vast

Description: Vast is a producer of commercial space stations.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Vast recently raised $300M in venture capital funding. Vast is developing the next generation of space stations for in-space habitation and scientific development. Their initial tests have proven successful on rocket deployments, with further tests planned. With recent news that the U.S. may pause a new space station deployment, this model may be in flux, but it’s too early to tell.

#4: Hawkeye 360

Description: Hawkeye 360 is a supplier of space-based radio frequency data.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Hawkeye 360 recently raised $23M in venture capital funding. Hawkeye 360 is developing technologies to scan the entire broadband for signals, helping governments identify bad actors and illegal activity. Additionally, this technology is crucial for early threat detection, ensuring that communication with all end parties is correctly validated.

#5: Pave Space

Description: Pave Space is a developer of orbital transfer vehicles.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Pave Space recently raised $40M in venture capital funding. Orbital mobility will be a critical component of space infrastructure. Satellites will need to be moved between orbits, and other spacecraft will need to be adjusted, especially if they lose propulsion. Pave Space is developing the initial prototype that enables this movement while in orbit.

NPR: Trump Takes Aim at Windmills Despite Increasing Energy Costs

President Trump is actively pushing companies to keep coal-powered plants online. Simultaneously, Trump is battling any and all attempts to expand wind energy. Not one windmill has been approved since Trump has been in office. The Administration’s goal is to keep this trend going.

The New York Times: Forest Service Will Close Research Stations Studying Wildfires

The U.S. Forest Service is closing 57 of its 77 research facilities under a reorganization plan this week. This will threaten the science of studying wildfires, droughts, pests, and global warming. This comes at a time when the Western United States is suffering from record temperatures and prolonged drought, which will dramatically increase the risk of wildfires this summer.

The New York Times: Avalanche Dogs

Nothing is better than a wholesome story about cute dogs. Avalanche dogs are trained for years, playing elaborate games of hide-and-seek. The goal is to be able to find people buried under snow very quickly, before they suffocate, freeze, or starve. Using their noses, these dogs can track people and ensure they’re identified in the proper order.

The New York Times: Artemis II Astronauts Fly Away From Earth Toward the Moon

Hopefully, you, like millions around the globe, watched the live launch of the Artemis II rocket. It could turn out to be a pinnacle moment in the history of space. Currently, these astronauts are flying towards and around the Moon, testing systems to enable a moon landing in 2027 or 2028. This is crazy futuristic stuff, happening right now!

Reuters: NASA Plans to Build $20B Moon Base

NASA announced that it is canceling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead plan to build a $20B base on the Moon’s surface and send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars. These are unprecedented changes to the Artemis program, all based on returning to the Moon before China sends its astronauts in 2030.

Pitchbook: OpenAI Buys TBPN

This week, OpenAI acquired TBPN, the daily livestreamed talk show and podcast. This is their first acquisition of a media player, following a trend of companies bypassing traditional press outlets to reach consumers directly. OpenAI isn’t a normal, regular company. As such, this move makes a lot of sense—they can help control the narrative and showcase their company as they see fit in the open market.

TechCrunch: Building Diverse Teams

Building diverse founding teams in a company starts on day one. Starting with diversity makes it easier to continue, rather than having to adopt it later. Now, when it comes to startups, often a major influence is their capital provider(s). These individuals and groups, if they aren’t diverse, can have a major effect due to their outright or implicit biases (not to say that diverse groups don’t have that as well; it’s usually just less). Having diverse venture capital groups helps drive diversity and ultimately returns in startups.

The New York Times: Every President Tries It. It Never Works

Every president tries to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S. They’ve all found it’s extremely hard, and not necessarily in favor of the country’s long-term interests. When presidents try to reverse this trend, they mostly only succeed in shifting jobs from one industry to another rather than expanding the pie overall. There are many economic costs we have to bear when manufacturing is returned—is that worth the benefits? Opponents argue there are smarter economic strategies out there.

Lexology: Key IP Trends in 2025

This author summarizes key intellectual property trends that shaped the industry in 2025:

Redefining ownership using AI
Patent filing gets smarter and faster
Digital content protection and copyright reform
Fighting deepfakes and counterfeits
Surge in multi-jurisdictional IP litigation and online hearings
Harmonizing global IP laws
Surge in trade secrets litigation

The Wall Street Journal: The Secret to America’s Success in Exploring the World

I loved some of the nuggets from this recent article, leading up to the fantastic Artemis II launch.

This author explores how and why Americans have been leading the world in the exploration of our world and beyond. Classic qualities like grit, determination, and perseverance help, but there’s more.

Firstly, the free market system, combined with strong intellectual property laws, rewards innovation and risk-taking. This encourages explorers to go out and dare.

Second, explorers have always been able to tap into large pools of capital to finance their ventures, whether from the private or public markets. These fund initiatives that otherwise may not have happened.

I think it’s super interesting to dwell on this combination of factors that has driven the U.S. to now be launching humans back around the Moon. We’re built to explore—and we’re built so everyone has a shot to do that if they so desire.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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Assassinations, Threats, Cover-ups, Greed - A History of Intellectual Property

Drew Jackson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:35:47 GMT

Credit Axiom

Assassination, greed, cover-ups, rewriting history, and threats have driven much of intellectual property law today, and most don’t know it.

This Week’s Focus: Intellectual Property

What You’ll Understand: The history behind today’s intellectual property rules can be interesting and exciting for everyone.

Reading Time: 12 minutes for full analysis + key takeaways highlighted throughout

Key Question: What is a not lame, captivating way to tell the history of intellectual property?

My Take: There are millions of interesting intellectual property stories to highlight in a comprehensive history. The stories depicted below represent some of the biggest moments and most captivating, with highlights including assassinations, greed, cover-ups, threats, and more.

Quick Context: This deep dive connects to our core work on intellectual property, including the future of the field. New to Brainwaves? We explore the forces reshaping our world across venture capital, energy, space, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy. Subscribe here for bi-weekly deep dives plus weekly current events.

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Let’s dive in.

Honestly, it’s often hard to get excited about intellectual property. I’m impressed you made it this far. I’ve been meaning to write a background and history of intellectual property, but I knew it would normally read like a textbook—and we don’t want that.

I’ve made it my mission to find the best, most interesting stories on intellectual property to help tell the story of how the field has changed over time. It’ll be worth your time whether or not you know anything about intellectual property, or whether you know a lot.

To frame our discussion today, we’ll give a quick overview of some of the major intellectual property milestones from ancient times to modern day, highlighting how assassination, threats, the oath to swear to tell the truth and only the truth, an anti-monopolist producing the most popular game promoting monopolies, corporations and the “victors” rewriting history, unabashed corporate greed, cover-ups, and political lobbying shaped the intellectual property policies of today.

The Venetian Glassblowers: Arguably the First “Trade Secrets”

You’ve probably never heard of the stories behind the Venetian practice of glass blowing, but it reads like an action-packed Ancient Greek tale.

The Venetian city-state grew during the decline of the Roman Empire in the 400s (A.D.) as people fled invasions for the safety of the islands. Small communities began to form, among which Venice became the most popular.

The city became highly successful, becoming one of Europe’s trade capitals. Traders sold a wide range of goods in Venice, including spices, precious metals, gemstones, ivory, silks, and, most importantly to our story, glass. All of this trading led to an influx of capital in the region, promoting the development of an upper middle class and a wealthy merchant class. With this wealth came a greater appreciation for the finer things in life, such as art and architecture.

Researchers estimate that the practice of glass blowing began in Venice as early as 450 A.D. The earliest evidence is from the 700s-800s. Fast forward to the 1200s, and glassblowing has become a major portion of the Venetian economy. As such, the local governments strove to find any way to protect their models and prevent anyone from copying them.

And voilà, we have arguably one of the first forms of trade secrets! In 1291, most of Venice’s glassmaking industry was forcibly confined to the island of Murano—it’s a cluster of islands linked by short bridges, located around a mile north of the Venetian mainland in the Venetian lagoon.

The primary official reason cited was to prevent the threat of a disastrous fire from consuming all of Venice, as the furnaces used to make and blow glass are extremely hot and pose a significant fire hazard in a primarily wooden city.

However, this move also served to keep the technology of glassmaking, and, critically, the glassmakers themselves, confined to Murano. This drastically prevented the spread of Venetian glassblowing expertise from any competitors.

The rules were so drastic that glassmakers were not allowed to leave the island without government permission. If a glassmaker left the city without permission, they would be ordered to return. If they did not return, an assassin would be sent to kill them!

Did this actually happen?

It’s unclear exactly, but in 1667, the French Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, successfully bribed and kidnapped several Murano glassworkers to come to Paris to teach the French how to make high-end mirrors. At this point, the French were spending millions of francs on the mirrors (they were more expensive than gold).

The Venetian Republic did not take this lightly. After several warnings were ignored, two of the top Venetian glassmakers in Paris died suddenly and agonizingly of stomach pains within weeks of each other. Historical records and diplomatic correspondence from the time strongly suggest they were poisoned by Venetian agents.

In this era and for many years to come, intellectual property (particularly trade secrets at this point) was protected by physical walls and threats, rather than by legal rights. In the humorous words of one Redditor, “Man, noncompetes used to be so much harsher back then.”

The Sewing Machine War of the 1850s

In the 2010s, amid intense competition, smartphone companies began suing each other for patent infringement, with Samsung, Apple, Google, and Rockstar filing lawsuitsback and forth.

However, this wasn’t the first patent war—the first was around 200 years prior: the sewing machine war of the 1850s. Although the sewing machine is now a complete invention that revolutionized industries and countries, it didn’t start that way.

It wasn’t just one person who invented it by themselves; it was the result of many contributions by different inventors, all of whom received patents on their inventions. The outcome was that each sewing machine produced, sold, and used infringed on multiple patents, which spurred massive litigation by patent owners against all guilty parties.

Elias Howe Jr. was the first person to obtain a U.S. patent for his novel “lockstitch” sewing machine in 1846. The machine was the first to feature a thread feed that remains a crucial component of modern-day sewing machines. Without a ready market in the U.S. for his new invention, Howe and his brother went to England to seek financing. They failed to gain traction and returned to the U.S. in 1849.

At this point, Howe had a patent for a sewing machine; there wasn’t a market for it, and other mechanics were starting to tinker with the concept, producing their own designs. For instance, Isaac Singer patented a bulky sewing machine design in 1851, followed by numerous copycats.

By the mid-1850s, several manufacturers were producing and selling sewing machines under their own patents. At this point, while unsuccessful in his commercialization pursuits, Howe did have the oldest and best patent. So beginning in 1849, he started suing the other companies for patent infringement.

In this way, Howe started the sewing machine war, even though he didn’t make sewing machines. At the time, Howe’s business model was solely licensing his patent to the lockstitch sewing machine manufacturers. As commentators from Slate write:

One historian referred to Howe’s “main occupation” in the early 1850s as “suing the infringers of his patent for royalties.” In short, if Howe were alive today, people would call him a “patent troll,” although it’s more accurate to say that his business model was patent licensing. In fact, Howe’s licensing and litigation practices were only possible because he had the financial backing of a business investor.

During this period, one of Howe’s competitors tried to convince the “original” developer (Walter Hunt) of the sewing machine design (pre-Howe) to come forward and sue Howe for infringement, invalidating his claim as the “first.” Howe ended up winning on a technicality because Hunt, as a “free thinker,” wouldn’t take the required court religious oath (to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help him God”), so the case was thrown out.

After 5 years, Howe won his cases, gaining the right to order the other manufacturers to cease and desist. However, he still couldn’t make a good sewing machine. So, what could he do?

In 1856, Orlando Potter, the President of the Grover and Baker Company, brought together the main sewing machine manufacturers with a proposal. He wanted to create the first “patent pool”, where all of them would congregate their various patents. All of the companies in the pool would be able to manufacture sewing machines, paying licensing fees to everyone else.

These pools are still used today when technological inventions are covered by many overlapping patents as a way to streamline monetization and prevent lengthy petty court battles.

Monopoly Was A Stolen Idea

One night in 1932, Charles Todd, a Philadelphia businessman, and his wife introduced their friends, Charles and Esther Darrow, to a real estate board game they had recently learned. The Darrows liked the game so much that Charles Todd made them a copy and began teaching them more advanced rules.

The game didn’t have an official name, and it wasn’t sold publicly; it was simply passed between friends. Everyone called it “the monopoly game.”

At this point, Darrow was unemployed and desperate for money to support his family. So, he asked Charles Todd to write up a copy of the roles. Following, Darrow went on to distribute the game himself, calling it Monopoly. Within 3 years of his success, Darrow sold the game’s copyrights to the Parker Brothers, eventually making him millions.

Journalists continued to ask him where he got the inspiration to create the game. Darrow told the Germantown Bulletin, “It’s a freak, entirely unexpected and illogical.”

Now, most people think Charles Darrow invented Monopoly during the Great Depression and became a millionaire—and that’s the version Hasbro wants you to believe.

In actuality, the game was invented in 1903 by American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie, who originally called it “The Landlord’s Game.” As The Guardian writes:

To Elizabeth Magie, known to her friends as Lizzie, the problems of the new century were so vast, the income inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman working as a stenographer stood a chance at easing society’s ills with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.
Night after night, after her work at her office was done, Lizzie sat in her home, drawing and redrawing, thinking and rethinking. It was the early 1900s, and she wanted her board game to reflect her progressive political views – that was the whole point of it.

At the time, board games were becoming increasingly common, so Lizzie began developing her design. She devised the game as a way to explain the single-tax theory of the economist Henry George, with the intention of using it as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies.

She patented the first version of the game in 1904. Lizzie created two sets of rules to showcase different scenarios: an anti-monopolist set in which all players were rewarded for creating wealth, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.

After further refining her design, Lizzie patented the game again in 1923. Two years later, she published a version of the game through the Economic Game Company. The game became popular with left-wing intellectuals and college students, eventually finding its way to the home of Charles Todd.

When Parker Brothers bought the copyrights from Darrow, they learned that Darrow was not the sole owner of the game, and there were existing patents in place. As she later recounts, Lizzie wasn’t fully aware of the opportunity she was signing away when she received $500 in exchange for her patent, with no royalties.

A new patent was issued to Charles Darrow in 1935 for the iconic board design, pieces, and coloration. In 1991, Hasbro acquired Parker Bros, creating and licensing many other versions of Monopoly.

Even today, Hasbro downplays Lizzie’s impact on the game’s development, crediting the official Monopoly game to Charles Darrow, and the official history on their website begins in 1935.

The Monopoly story raises the question of who should get credit for an invention and how, as many unnamed and unnoticed inventors like Lizzie go under the radar every day.

The Great Happy Birthday Heist

Did you know that, growing up, when you sang happy birthday (by my quick calculations, that may have been upwards of 250 times), you were likely in violation of intellectual property law? I bet you didn’t know that—and the price can be pretty hefty.

Even in the age of the internet and more vigorous reporting and fact-checking, intellectual property qualms continue.

Originally published in 1893 by Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill (though this fact is disputed in true IP ownership fashion), the Happy Birthday song became internationally recognized over the subsequent century. In 1998, the organizers of the Guinness Book of World Records went as far as to claim it was the most recognized song in the English language.

So, how did this song become extremely controversial in the 21st century (it seems like it’s been a long time since the original inventorship)? Let’s dive deeper into the song’s controversial history.

The combination of the melody and lyrics to “Happy Birthday” was first printed in 1912; it didn’t include any credits or copyright notices. This trend continued for the following decades as the song steadily grew in popularity.

In 1935, the Summy Company registered a copyright for the song, citing the authors as Preston Orem and Mrs. R. R. Forman, and maintained ownership of the intellectual property until the company was purchased in 1988 by Warner/Chappell Music for $25M (the value of the Happy Birthday IP was $5M at the time). With its newfound ownership, Warner stated that unauthorized public performances of the song were prohibited unless the user paid a $700 licensing fee.

In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, extending the rights of copyrights from the life of the author plus 50 years (or 75 years from publication or 100 years after creation) to be the life of the author plus 70 years (95 years from publication or 120 years after creation). As such, Warner claimed that the U.S. copyright would not expire until 2030.

However, some were skeptical about Warner’s ownership rights. Chief among them was American law professor Robert Brauneis. He extensively researched the song’s history and, in 2010, concluded that there was a high likelihood it was no longer under copyright.

In 2013, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Nelson wanted to use the song in a film about its history, but was told she needed to pay royalty fees (around $1,500) to do so. Nelson didn’t want to comply; instead working with Brauneis to develop a lawsuit against Warner, challenging the validity of the copyright claim.

After a two-year legal battle, a federal judge declared the copyright claim was invalid. In 2016, Warner settled for $14M, and the court declared that “Happy Birthday to You” was in the public domain. As the New York Lawyers Association writes:

The court’s decision was a significant win for culture and open access to music. With the recognition of the song’s public domain status, anyone could now use it freely—even in commercial contexts—without paying fees or seeking permissions. The case became a milestone in copyright history, underscoring the importance of balanced protection: ensuring creators are fairly compensated, but not enabling unjust monopolies over widely shared cultural works.
Moreover, the case served as a cautionary tale for other questionable copyright claims, encouraging greater transparency in the management of protected works and discouraging companies from profiting off creations that should belong to the public.

A Not Lame, Captivating History of Intellectual Property

The true, comprehensive history of intellectual property would fill libraries upon libraries of books. It’s incredibly convoluted and nuanced, complete with intricate technical terminology and historical precedents.

The 4 stories above showcase some of the most significant milestones in the history and development of intellectual property rights worldwide.

These tales showcase how assassinations, threats, lawsuits, monopolies, cover-ups, and unabashed greed have shaped the laws, policies, and principles we face today. It’s a classic case of a rule being made for a unique, niche scenario (i.e., this is why there’s a rule against eating crayons in class).

Even if you’re not fully interested in the field, hopefully, you’ve seen that there are parts that can be digestible and interesting for outsiders. If this sparked your interest to learn more, that’s great too!

There are hundreds of these stories out there—this is just the start. It’s my mission to continue sharing the captivating, not-lame narrative of this growing industry, one that is cementing itself as a key player in the 21st-century environment.

That’s a wrap on this deep dive.

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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #83

Drew Jackson — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:35:45 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 14 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 6 minutes of curated insights

New to these updates? They pair with our bi-weekly Brainwave analyses for comprehensive sector coverage. Wednesday’s deep dive explored why we should stop preventing all wildfires - catch up here.

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#1: Aetherflux

Description: Aetherflux is an orbital datacenter startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Aetherflux is currently trying to raise $250M in venture capital funding. Aetherflux is building power stations based in space. As AI data centers grow rapidly, they’re looking for solutions to provide additional bandwidth to meet increased demand. Where better to put new energy sources and datacenters than in orbit? Satellites can transmit power and data back to Earth using infrared lasers, enabling efficient transfer and small Earth-based infrastructure.

#2: Xona

Description: Xona is a satellite navigation network creator.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Xona recently raised $170M in venture capital funding. For decades, the world has relied on GPS. Now, the next generation of technologies demands a new level of precision for tracking. Xona’s technology, based on satellite-driven precise location data, is perfectly positioned to meet this demand. They’ve proven their infrastructure works and are using this funding to scale their model dramatically.

#3: Arc

Description: Arc is a producer of electric boats and propulsion systems.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Arc recently raised $50M in venture capital funding. Arc has primarily focused on electric boats for recreational personal use, but it recently raised funding to expand into commercial boats. These include tugboats, ferries, and defense vehicles. Their technology is revolutionizing this industry, providing greater reliability in a clean package.

#4: Foreverland

Description: Foreverland is a developer of cocoa-free chocolate.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Foreverland recently raised $6M in venture capital funding. Foreverland produces cocoa-free chocolate products. Given recent increases and fluctuations in cocoa prices, developing similar, consumer-loved alternatives to cocoa will enable brands to keep prices low while maintaining high supply.

#5: Epoch Biodesign

Description: Epoch Biodesign is designing enzymatic recycling technologies.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Epoch Biodesign recently raised $12M in venture capital funding. Epoch is currently aiming to address the unrecyclability of Nylon 6.6. This material is found in apparel, carpets, airbags, and more, and is currently lacking a cyclical option. Epoch uses enzymes to break down the material, recycle it, and reform it in the future.

Nuclear Newswire: On Moving Fast and Breaking Things

Recent nuclear regulatory changes have followed the technology approach: move fast and break things. Moving fast isn’t the problem; it’s the things that break along the way. When it’s a tech startup, the ramifications are limited. When it’s a nuclear power plant, that could spell disaster for thousands or millions. Whether we like it or not, this dynamic is likely to persist for the near future.

NPR: Oil and Gas Prices Soar, Solar Is a Solution for Some

As the war with Iran continues, oil and gas prices have increased. Some countries have been heavily affected because they primarily use fossil fuels for energy. Many countries are better off than they have been historically due to partial transitions to solar energy, battery systems, and even electric vehicles.

The New York Times: Vertical Farms Tried to Compete With Open Field Farming

Over the last decade, the vertical farming industry has grown exponentially, attracting significant venture capital. However, these startups have mostly withered since. It aimed to be a climate-friendly solution to modern farming. Thin margins, steep competition, and rising energy costs spelled the downfall of vertical farming as we know it.

The New York Times: NASA Wants You to ‘Start Believing Again’

Some of us didn’t stop (it might have been a slight, decades-long pause). NASA has recently become more serious about putting a base on the Moon. This week, they released a roadmap for the upcoming decade, aiming to inspire people in the same way the Space Race did. If you’re like me, you’re hesitant to believe at this point, given how much the agency has flip-flopped over the last few decades, but there might be hope.

PitchBook: Ultra Mega-Funds

Jeff Bezos is seeking to raise a $100B fund. How does that vehicle deploy capital while maintaining returns? So far, the only proof point is SoftBank, which has not posted much profit. There are unique dynamics with megafunds, including a limited investor base, potential for infighting, a need for world-class exits, and a tendency to overpay.

European Union Intellectual Property Office: The Importance of IP Rights to SMEs

Small- and medium-sized businesses represent 99.8% of all businesses in the EU. For many, IP is central to their success and competitiveness in the market. Studies have found that companies with IP rights generate 24% more revenue per employee (up to 41% when adjusted). As such, when a startup has intellectual property, it needs to be protected to increase revenue opportunities and solidify a moat.

Redman Spokesman: The Case Against IP

This author argues that, based on what we see in nature, intellectual property is abnormal. Survival doesn’t depend on who did what first. In the creation of IP, we curate artificial scarcities when knowledge should be available to all. Intellectual property often hinders more than it helps.

Aeon: A Duty to Oneself

Some African traditions idealize harmony and vitality and provide insight into how to treat ourselves. In many non-Western philosophies, harmony is considered a central value. In their opinion, when we violate a duty to ourselves, we are failing to treat ourselves in these friendly ways. Additionally, this article provides a long list of duties you should consider.

Reddit: I’ve Spent 30 Years Confusing Busyness With Purpose, And The Realization Is Humiliating

I honestly couldn’t say it better than this writer:

I’m 47. I’ve had the same job for 19 years. I own a home. I have a retirement account. By every conventional metric, I’ve “made it.”
But last month I had a panic attack in a grocery store because I couldn’t decide between two types of pasta sauce. Not because I cared about the sauce—because my brain was so fried from a decade of performative productivity that a simple decision felt like defusing a bomb.
I’ve been operating under the assumption that constant motion equals value. That if I’m not optimizing something, learning something, side-hustling something, I’m falling behind. I’ve turned my entire existence into a performance review where the metrics keep changing and the evaluator is a faceless void that never says “enough.”
The truth that’s been hardest to sit with: I’ve been running from stillness because stillness would force me to ask whether any of this actually matters to me. Whether I even like my life, or if I’ve just gotten very good at tolerating it.
I started tracking how I spent my time for two weeks—not to optimize it, but to see how much of my day was genuine versus performative. The results were devastating. Roughly 60% of my waking hours were spent on things I don’t care about, justified by narratives I absorbed from people who profit from my anxiety.
The grocery store incident was my body finally saying “no more.” I’ve started the painful work of untangling real priorities from internalized capitalism. It’s humiliating to realize at 47 that I’ve been living someone else’s life, but maybe humiliation is just what clarity feels like when you’ve been numb for decades.
I’m not sharing this because I’ve figured it out. I’m sharing it because I suspect I’m not the only one who confused exhaustion with virtue.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #82

Drew Jackson — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:35:39 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 14 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

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#1: SyberJet

Description: SyberJet is a jet startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Syberjet is seeking to raise $1B at a $4B valuation. SyberJet is creating the best light jets capable of flying the farthest distances at the fastest speeds. Their jets can outperform the competition while maintaining the luxury standards owners strive for. Designed and built in America, the first jet model is already FAA approved, with the second on the way.

#2: V-Glass

Description: V-Glass is a vacuum-insulated glass startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? V-Glass recently raised $3M in venture capital funding. V-Glass is designing thermal-insulated windows that enable large-scale energy savings. Traditional homes lose around 30% of their heat through windows. V-Glass has a solution that addresses this issue, creating a climate-friendly, cost-effective window.

#3: GridBeyond

Description: GridBeyond is a software and hardware company coordinating energy usage.

Why Is This Company Interesting? GridBeyond recently raised $13.8M in venture capital funding. What good is having energy if you can’t put it to efficient use? GridBeyond has developed a software platform that manages your assets and requirements, ensuring efficient energy use, conserving power, and avoiding unnecessary costs.

#4: Frore Systems

Description: Frore Systems is a data center cooling startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Frore Systems recently raised $143M in venture capital funding. Frore has found itself at the perfect time in history. The demand for data centers is skyrocketing as artificial intelligence and other technologies proliferate. Each of these data centers needs to be cooled. That’s where Frore comes in—they provide proprietary technology that enables faster and more efficient cooling.

#5: GA Drilling

Description: GA Drilling is a developer of geothermal drilling technology.

Why Is This Company Interesting? GA Drilling recently raised $10M in venture capital funding. GA recently completed a successful field deployment of its NexTitan technology in Norway, confirming that it can drive a drill bit deeper and through formations that have historically rendered deep drilling uneconomical. This new raise enables them to broaden the scope of their offerings and start commercializing their designs.

The New York Times: The Weather is Getting Wilder

Scientists are beginning to wonder whether climate change is accelerating. New research found that the rate of global warming has doubled over the last decade. Not all researchers agree, though many are surprised by how intense it is. Consequences are arriving faster and more powerfully than many had expected.

The New York Times: In Ski Towns, A Bad Snow Year Is Worsening Wildfire Fears

Across much of the U.S., mountain towns have received very little snow this season. Everyone is very concerned about the wildfire risk if it continues to be this dry. Climate change has already doubled the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires worldwide, and this year might be even worse.

The Wall Street Journal: Open Space Book Review

Satellites are becoming increasingly crucial to our lives. Space offers a vast opportunity for exploration, resources, and potentially new life. Currently, private corporations dominate much of the satellite fleet in space, providing tons of power (for instance, to warring forces targeting enemies). We are still in the early days, but there are some dynamics of space commercialization and exploration that we haven’t fully thought out that could be to our detriment.

Pitchbook: AI Market Map, 500 Leading Companies

Pitchbook has been closely tracking the AI funding crazy, with investments passing $240B in 2025. A handful of outsized rounds led the charge and are expected to continue this trend. This map is helpful for current startup leaders, prospective venture capital investors, and even interested sideline viewers.

The New York Times: I Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse.

We’ve already returned to a period of risk following the recovery from the 2008 crisis. This time, the risks are more broadly distributed, not just in mortgage-backed securities. Today’s system is much more tightly coupled and complex, which means a specific source of stress can trigger a cascading effect and probably the next crisis.

NDTV Profit: IP Drives Over 90% of Global Wealth

One intellectual property rights lawyer estimates that around 90% of the world’s wealth now resides in intangible assets such as intellectual property, brands, technology, data, processes, and more. Historically, wealth has been driven by knowledge, and in today’s world, knowledge means intellectual property and proprietary know-how.

Futurist Speaker: The Dream That Was Always Yours

Most people have a core initiative or goal they’ve been pursuing or always wanted to pursue. Why haven’t you done it? This writer argues that with the increases in technology and automation in the 21st century, you’ll have less routine work and more time to focus on these types of things—those that truly interest you.

Psychology Today: Why You Care If I Think You Matter

We have the capacity to reflect on our own self-mattering and long to justify it. We try to prove to ourselves that we matter to other people. To matter means to be deserving of attention. This author discusses our longing to be deserving of our own attention. However, it’s just arbitrary like our personal identity—yet we rarely realize this.

Global English Editing Article

“Behavioral scientists found that people who prefer solitude over socializing aren’t lonely – they’ve discovered that the quality of their own company is higher than what most social interactions provide.”

You could see this as an accurate and helpful finding; it signals that people who prefer solitude are comfortable with themselves (at least more than with others), and that they prefer solitude.

Or you could see it as concerning, as these people will only continue isolating themselves, dramatically limiting their contact with the outside world.

This author argues for the first point, saying that these people aren’t as broken as we might think. Chosen solitude is different than loneliness.

I think the key point here is the choice. When they chose to be alone, they exhibited positive signs. Conversely, when it was forced or outside their control, they experienced negative effects.

What does this mean for you? Choose to be in solitude as much as you need—know the power of your choices. Notice when you’re put into loneliness and how often that’s outside your control. Control what you can.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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We Should Stop Preventing All Wildfires

Drew Jackson — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:35:13 GMT

Credit Britannica

By preventing all wildfires, we paradoxically cause more harm in the long run. By getting treatment at the doctor, you’re more than likely worse off. Why?

This Week’s Focus: Futures Thinking

What You’ll Understand: The present is full of fragility. To ensure a successful future, we must establish methodologies to address them.

Reading Time: 32 minutes for full analysis + key takeaways highlighted throughout

Key Question: In what ways is the world around us fragile, and what can we do to solve these issues?

My Take: Humans are responsible for most of the fragility in our lives. We’re incredibly blind to this fact, although it shapes every aspect of life around us. From companies failing to people dying to wildfires running rampant to supply chain disruptions to extreme weather events to the downfall of the world’s most powerful nations, the elements of fragility are everywhere. Once we recognize this, we can use resilience (Tenet #8) and antifragility (Tenet #9) to address these issues both reactively and proactively.

Quick Context: This deep dive connects to our Futures Thinking series (intro here). New to Brainwaves? We explore the forces reshaping our world across venture capital, energy, space, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy. Subscribe here for bi-weekly deep dives plus weekly current events.

Let’s dive in.

Many years ago, there lived a boy who did a brave deed. His name was Peter, and he lived in Holland, a country by the sea.

In Holland, the sea presses in on the land so much that the people built big walls of earth and stone to hold back the waters. Every little child in Holland was taught that these big walls, called dikes, must be watched at every moment. No water must be allowed to come through the dikes. Even a hole no larger than your little finger was a very dangerous thing.

One afternoon in the early fall, when Peter was seven years old, his mother called to him. “Come, Peter,” she said. “I want you to go across the dike and take these cakes to your friend, the blind man. If you go quickly, you will be home again before dark.”

Peter was happy to go, because his friend, the blind man, lived alone and was always glad to have a visitor. When he got to the blind man’s home, Peter stayed awhile to tell him of his walk along the dike. He told about the bright sun and the flowers and the ships far out at sea. Then Peter remembered that his mother wanted him to return home before dark. So he said goodbye and set out for home.

As he walked along, he noticed how the water beat against the side of the dike. There had been much rain, and the water was higher than before. Peter remembered how his father always spoke of the “angry waters.”

“I suppose Father thinks they are angry,” thought Peter, “because we have been keeping them out for so long. Well, I am glad these dikes are so strong. If they gave way, what would become of us? All these fields would be covered with water. Then what would happen to the flowers, and the animals, and the people?”

Suddenly, Peter noticed that the sun was setting. Darkness was settling on the land. “Mother will be watching for me,” he said. “I must hurry.” But just then he heard a noise. It was the sound of trickling water! He stopped, looked down, and saw a small hole in the dike, through which a tiny stream was flowing.

A leak in the dike! Peter understood the danger at once. If water ran through a little hole, it would soon make a larger one; then the waters could break through, and the land would be flooded!

Peter saw what he must do. He climbed down the side of the dike and thrust his finger in the tiny hole. The water stopped!

“The angry waters will stay back now,” said Peter. “I can keep them back with my finger. Holland will not be drowned while I am here.”

But then he thought, “How long can I stay here?” Already it was dark and cold. Peter called out, “Help! Is anyone there? Help!” But no one heard him. No one came to help.

It grew darker and colder still. Peter’s arm began to grow stiff and numb. “Will no one come?” he thought. Then he shouted again for help. And when no one came, he cried out, “Mother! Mother!”

Many times since sunset, his mother had looked out at the dike and expected to see her little boy. She was worried, but then she thought that perhaps Peter was spending the night with his blind friend, as he had done before. “Well,” she thought, “when he gets home in the morning, I will have to scold him for staying away from home without permission.”

Poor Peter! He would rather have been home than anywhere else in the world, but he could not move from the dike. He tried to whistle to keep himself company, but he couldn’t because his teeth chattered with cold. He thought of his brother and sister in their warm beds, and of his father and mother. “I must not let them be drowned,” he thought. “I must stay here until someone comes.”

The moon and stars looked down on the shivering child. His head was bent and his eyes were closed, but he was not asleep. Now and then he rubbed the hand that was holding back the angry waters.

Morning came. A man walking along the dike heard a sound, something like a groan. He bent down and saw the child below. He called out, “What’s the matter, boy? Are you hurt? Why are you sitting there?”

In a voice faint and weak, the boy said, “I am keeping the water from coming in. Please, tell them to come quickly!”

The man ran to get help. People came with shovels to fix the dike, and they carried Peter, the little hero, home to his parents.

’Tis many a year since then; but still,

When the sea roars like a flood,

The children are taught what a child can do

Who is brave and true and good. For all the mothers and fathers

Take their children by the hand

And tell them of brave little Peter

Whose courage saved the land.

- The Tale of the Dutch Boy and the Dike, Core Knowledge

The future actively shapes our lives. Historically, the way humans have thought about and approached the future has been flawed. Futures Thinking is a modern approach to the future, rethinking how humans think about and approach the future.

Rather than trying to predict specific future events, Futures Thinking encourages a shift in how we conceptualize the future itself—drawing on diverse cultural perspectives, foundational world characteristics, deep modern literature reviews, and recognizing that our present actions and narratives significantly influence future outcomes. Since most major life decisions are essentially bets on the future, adopting this framework could transform how we approach education, careers, relationships, and other essential aspects of life.

Today, our discussion focuses on how our world is set up and how these underlying characteristics shape everything that goes on, specifically on Futures Thinking Tenet #7: Fragile systems amplify their own vulnerabilities, increasing the risk of failure and worsening our cognitive limitations.

Credit Food Logistics

A SINGLE SHIP HALTS WORLD TRADE - IT’S OKAY TO DROP YOUR PHONE MORE - DON’T DRIVE YOUR CAR INTO WALLS

In March of 2021, the Ever Given, a container ship owned by the Japanese firm Shoei Kisen Kaisha and leased to the Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen Marine, ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking the canal for 6 days.

The 1,300 ft long, 224,000 ton ship was buffeted by strong winds and ended up wedged across the waterway with its bow and stern stuck on opposite canal banks, blocking all traffic until it was moved.

It’s estimated that around 12-15% of the world’s maritime trade passes through the Suez Canal, so the ramifications of this disaster affected nations across the globe. It’s estimated that this blockage tied up goods totalling over $70B. By the last day, over 350 ships were queued up to pass through the canal.

A single ship getting stuck in a narrow canal easily showcased the vulnerabilities of global trade. This is a perfect example of a structural fragility—where a massive system depends on a tiny, unredundant “chokepoint.”

As defined by Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile, fragility is a property of systems, objects, people, countries, policies, thoughts, and more. Fragility is formally defined as anything that has more downside than upside from random events. In Taleb’s words, fragility “could be expressed as what does not like volatility,” or that which has vulnerability to volatility.

Drawing on principles discussed in previous Tenets, fragility could be expressed as what does not like volatility, randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, stressors, chaos, harm, “unforeseen” consequences, variability, chance, entropy, the unknown, turmoil, dispersion of outcomes, and critically, time.

For fragile things, volatility and shocks cause greater harm as their intensity increases. For instance, dropping your phone once from 12 feet is more damaging than dropping it 1 foot 12 times (e.g., 1x a 12 ft drop > 12x a 1 ft drop). As Taleb writes, “Your car is fragile. If you drive it into the wall at 50 miles per hour, it would cause more damage than if you drove it into the same wall ten times at 5 mph. The harm at 50 mph is more than ten times the harm at 5 mph.”

In other words, the effects of volatility and resilience to volatility are nonlinear. Fragile things are unaffected by the cumulative effect of minor deviations but are greatly affected by a single significant shock equivalent to the cumulative impact of the small shocks.

Another key aspect of fragility, which Taleb leverages in his core works, is its measurability. See, in the scenarios above, the risks present can be identified, but it’s almost always difficult to quantify their resulting impacts. Fragility, on the other hand, can be detected and, in many cases, measured.

In Taleb’s words, “You cannot say with any reliability that a certain remote event or shock is more likely than another (unless you enjoy deceiving yourself), but you can state with a lot more confidence that an object or a structure is more fragile than another should a certain event happen. You can easily tell that your grandmother is more fragile to abrupt changes in temperature than you are; that some military dictatorship is more fragile than Switzerland, should political change happen… And—centrally—you can even make the prediction of which one will last longer.”

Relating to Tenet #5, we can’t predict events, but we can identify fragilities, which gives us an edge in preparing for and addressing the future (as we’ll discuss in Tenets #8 and #9). In essence, instead of trying to predict (poorly) and calculate (inaccurately) future probabilities, we should focus on fragility (and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, antifragility).

Fragilities tell us what the results of events will be, not the events themselves. Actions and events have payoffs, and these are incredibly important to study. Take, for instance, the decision between two gambles. In the first, you have a 50% chance to walk away with $4 and a 50% chance to walk away with $0. In the second, you have a 1% chance to walk away with $100 and a 99% chance to walk away with $0. Expected values and probabilities indicate that the first option has a greater chance of paying out; however, most people presented with this decision will choose the second option.

Why? When deciding, humans base their decisions on payoffs, not probabilities. This is especially acute when payoffs are nonlinear (asymmetric).

Understanding the characteristics of fragility provides insights into the mechanics of every aspect of this world, from physical products (e.g., product failures, breakages, strain capacity, strengths) to politics (e.g., why some nations survive and others don’t) to nature (e.g., why some wildfires are detrimental and others are harmless) to our health (e.g., interfering to solve health concerns often hurts us more than helps) and more.

Credit Britannica

A COSTUME IS BIGGER THAN APPLE JUICE - WE SHOULD LIGHT MORE WILDFIRES - GOLDILOCKS SHOULD HAVE OPTIMIZED BETTER

I remember growing up when I was around 8-12 years old, sometime during the winter months, there was a group of older kids that went around our neighborhood one night playing the game “bigger or better.”

If you’re not familiar, you start with a small, insignificant item (like a penny), and you knock on a door and ask if they have something bigger (literally larger in size) or better (subjective to what they believe is “better”) than what you have, and then you trade them your item for that item.

When they came to our house, they brought us a 1-gallon bottle of apple juice, and we decided to go bigger and gave them my used die (think single dice) Halloween costume.

What, in reality, looks like a fun, youthful game on the surface contains many uncomfortable parallels to our modern society and the mindset that we’re never satisfied and that there’s always something bigger or better out there to achieve. This is just one of many fragilities present throughout the world.

You’ve likely not noticed, but humans are arguably the most responsible for the world’s various fragilities—especially in our modern world. We constantly intervene when nothing is necessary, we pursue broad homogeneity which strips the world of variation, we prefer rigidity when flexibility is needed, we build in unnecessary layers which gunk up processes, we prioritize symptoms over underlying causes, we suboptimize, there’s almost always a lack of “skin in the game”, and we concentrate sources of randomness.

Fragility Cause #1: Interventions When They’re Not Necessary

The very first article I opened on this subject, a research piece by National Geographic on The Ecological Benefits of Fire, begins by framing the problem perfectly:

Wildfires are destructive forces that can result from natural causes (like lightning), human-caused accidents (like improperly discarding cigarettes and leaving campfires unattended), or deliberate acts of arson.

Off the bat, two of the three major causes of wildfires are human. But there are more problems we’re causing besides simply lighting the fires. For thousands of years, small forest fires have periodically been used to clear out dead organic material (the most flammable material), so it doesn’t have the opportunity to accumulate and cause larger damage.

In more recent history, settlers from across the globe (American, European, Australian, Asian, etc.) have suppressed these fires, seeing all fires as a source of harm—investing significantly in fire-fighting resources, including helicopter and plane-based retardant drops, parachuting smoke jumpers, heavy equipment, hand tools, etc.

However, in our great haste to stop all fires in the pursuit of safety, we’ve actually caused the opposite: the big fires now are much, much worse. For instance, the following graph from NASA depicts the trend over just the last 20 years:

Credit NASA

The root cause of the problem is humans. First, we start these fires, then we intervene when it’s unnecessary to put them out prematurely, causing much more harm in the long run. The concept of intervention is a careful balance. Let’s take the healthcare system as an example.

The healthcare system is oddly situated in many ways, especially in the United States. To put it plainly, we have the whole idea of care backwards. When providing medicine, we tend to over-intervene in areas where the benefits are minimal (think the common cold) and under-intervene in areas where intervention is necessary, like emergencies.

Using a fragility-based treatment approach, we should not be taking risks with near-healthy people, but we should take a lot more risks with those deemed at risk. If you hadn’t noticed the parallels to Tenet #1, there is a nonlinear relationship here. Phillip Tetlock explains the problem as follows:

The standard histories are usually mute on these scores, but when we use modern science to judge the efficacy of historical treatments, it becomes depressingly clear that most of the interventions were useless or worse. Until quite recently in historical terms, it was not unusual for a sick person to be better off if there was no physician available because letting an illness take its natural course was less dangerous than what a physician would inflict.

We haven’t gotten better since then! This has become so bad that the word iatrogenic (referring to harm done by healers through their interventions) has steadily increased in usage since the 1920s, correlating highly with the continued development of modern medicine practices. Here’s a high-level version of a table Nassim Taleb includes in his book:

You still may not be convinced of the potency of this argument.

Perhaps the belief of 300+ million Buddhists would sway your thinking. The Four Noble Truths are the foundation of Buddhism, outlining life’s problem (suffering), its cause, its solution, and the path to that solution.

Point number two is exactly this point, simply reframed. As Noah Rasheta, author of Secular Buddhism: Eastern Thought for Western Minds, writes, “This is the cause of suffering: suffering emerged when we want life to be other than it is… we want life to conform to our expectations, and we experience suffering when it doesn’t.”

In other words, the cause of our suffering in life (which Buddhists believe is life’s main problem) is that we want life to be other than it is—we want to intervene to change life to be other than it currently is. Our tendency to intervene, whether we like it or not, has been ingrained in us as human beings for thousands of years.

One of the key problems with interventions is that the outcomes they produce don’t last. As Donella Meadows outlines in her book Thinking in Systems, “The trap is formed if the intervention, whether by active destruction or simple neglect, undermines the original capacity of the system to maintain itself. If that capability atrophies, then more of the intervention is needed to achieve the desired effect. That weakens the capability of the original system still more. The intervenor picks up the slack. And so forth.”

Intervention often creates a negative feedback loop, spiraling into increasingly fragile states. Quoting Meadows again, “If the intervention designed to correct the problem causes the self-maintaining capacity of the original system to atrophy or erode, then a destructive reinforcing feedback loop is set in motion. The system deteriorates; more and more of the solution is then required. The system will become more and more dependent on the intervention and less and less able to maintain its own desired state.”

As we’ll discuss in Tenet #9, intervention should occur only if it is certain that the outcome strengthens the system’s underlying ability to shoulder its own burdens.

Fragility Cause #2: Pursuit of Homogeneity, Introducing a Lack of Variation & Disorder

A common illusion many humans operate under is the thought that randomness is risky and bad, and therefore should be eliminated. This could not be further from the case.

As we outlined in Tenet #1, change is a constant principle of life. To ignore or resist this change increases our vulnerability and constrains our opportunity to pursue emerging possibilities, limiting our options.

Similarly, simplifying the system to increase efficiency reduces the number of possible responses to shocks, volatility, and disturbances, thereby increasing its vulnerability.

Mainly through human intervention, the world’s natural randomness and volatility (discussed in Tenet #2) have been suppressed, thereby increasing fragility. Taleb states this plainly, “We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness.”

For instance, in many remodels and “upgraded” designs, humans have removed some or all emergency response mechanisms. The rationale posed is that they aren’t often used and are very costly. In the short term, this often doesn’t have any ramifications, and people feel justified in their actions. However, in the long run, they’ve drastically narrowed the range of conditions over which the system can survive, introducing further fragility.

By systematically removing uncertainty and randomness, humans are trying to make life much more predictable (as covered in Tenet #5). Taleb explains this perfectly:

When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible—for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and conversely, predictive systems cause fragility. When you want deviations, and you don’t care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful, you are antifragile.

To be clear, removing and artificially suppressing volatility makes the system more fragile. At the same time, the system exhibits no visible risks. On the surface, these systems look calm and collected, while underneath, they’re accumulating a large mass of silent, deadly risks. These systems, as Taleb details, are more prone to Black Swan events (and others described in Tenet #3).

Fragility Cause #3: Rigidity When Flexibility Is Needed

Adam Grant, in his book Think Again, expertly summarizes this problem:

Research reveals that when their firms perform poorly, CEOs who indulge flattery and conformity become overconfident. They stick to their existing strategic plans instead of changing course—which sets them on a collision course with failure.

We’ve all met people like this, who are stubborn to their own detriment. In many cases, this only increases the fragilities, leading to further pain, heartache, and failure.

Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling stated, “Placing a system in a straitjacket of constancy can cause fragility to evolve.” Donella Meadows employs this quote as one of the core tenets of her systems thinking methodology.

As she describes, “Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.”

Rigidity prevents systems from undergoing the natural process of self-evolution, which, as discussed in Fragility Cause #2, reduces the variation within the society, further increasing its fragility.

Similarly, Brian Walker and David Salt, in their book Resilience Thinking, describe the four phases of a system’s adaptive cycle, including the rapid growth phase (depicted by rapid growth), the conservation phase (materials accumulate and fewer opportunities are available), the release phase (brought about when a disturbance exceeds the system’s resilience and breaks it apart), and the reorganization phase (the pieces of the system are renewed and reorganized).

The conservation phase is the critical one in which many fragilities are established, leading to the release phase when thresholds are breached. Specifically, during the conservation phase, growth has slowed, and the system’s connectedness has increased.

As this happens, the system becomes increasingly rigid, and its resilience decreases. Increased efficiency comes at the cost of reduced flexibility. The system increasingly depends on existing core structures, thereby increasing its vulnerability to disturbances and volatility. The system is increasingly stable but only for a decreasing range of conditions.

Fragility Cause #4: Increased Complexity and Sophistication Creating Unnecessary, Detrimental Layers

Over the last decade, the movement to eliminate unnecessary middle management in businesses has grown significantly. The argument is pretty simple: there are usually too many levels of management, which slow progress, create unnecessary bureaucracy, and reduce profitability.

In response, many new startups are embracing a “flat hierarchy,” with as few levels as possible (sometimes going so far as to have no hierarchy at all).

Over the last few centuries, humans have built our global system to include many unnecessary layers.

For instance, when dealing with complex systems, the traditional approach is to reduce or constrain them. Typically, this involves compartmentalization, where the system is divided into separate parts that work independently to accomplish their own missions (in support of the broader organization’s goal).

However, this approach creates unnecessary layers that increase the isolation of each division. When issues arise that bridge division, they can result in failure or a major setback. This thought is echoed by Donella Meadows:

Large organizations of all kinds, from corporations to governments, lose their resilience simply because the feedback mechanisms by which they sense and respond to their environment have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion.

When societies, systems, companies, and organizations gain in complexity—usually by adding more specialization and/or more sophistication through modern technologies and practices—they become increasingly vulnerable to collapse from Black Swan events due to their increased fragility.

Nassim Taleb said it best, “A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better.”

Fragility Cause #5: We Prioritize Solving Systems Instead of Addressing the Underlying Causes of Problems

Until the true development of AGI, the joke will always be that code will only do exactly what you want it to do. Consider the Boston Dynamics robot dog. It will only ever jump if it and when it is programmed to do so. If you don’t program it to jump, it won’t.

Our systems are designed in a manner similar to this principle. Donella Meadows again provides insight, explaining how we set up our systems to pursue a purpose or goal. This goal influences and directs the system, which dynamically acts in general pursuit of this aim.

As you might imagine, when the goal is positively defined, a large amount of benefit can be derived. For instance, a major pursuit in the last century was the Space Race, in which two prominent nations competed to put a man on the moon as quickly as possible. This resulted in widespread national pride, accelerated technological development, and numerous positive externalities. However, the opposite is just as true. As Meadows writes:

If the goal is defined badly, if it doesn’t measure what it’s supposed to measure, if it doesn’t reflect the real welfare of the system, then the system can’t possibly produce a desirable result. Systems, like the three wishes in the traditional fairy tale, have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce. Be careful what you ask them to produce.

This goal or purpose represents the underlying direction the system is pursuing. Unfortunately, when things go wrong, we rarely address the underlying conditions of the system, often preferring to deal only with surface-level symptoms. It’s a classic human trap: we tend to reach for the Band-Aid solution because it stops the bleeding immediately, even if the wound was caused by a systemic infection.

For example, when addressing environmental issues (including current climate change issues), we often focus on the visible mess rather than the underlying causes. We focus on the increased floods, wildfires, and other impacts rather than on the increased CO2 causing warming.

As we saw during the 2008 financial crisis, the government bailed out corporations rather than people. Only one person went to jail. By creating this pattern, this transfers fragility from the unfit to the collective. The solution, whether we like it or not, is to build a system in which no one’s fall can drag others down.

If we only ever focus on the symptoms, the underlying characteristics causing them will never be treated, leaving fragilities in the system. It’s difficult to mobilize people to address underlying issues, as it usually takes longer, they often aren’t responsible for the root cause, and it’s more expensive in the moment (even though it’s cheaper in the long-term).

Fragility Cause #6: We Overoptimize Subsegments of the System, Leading to Overall Suboptimization

The UK British Council summarizes the famous story well:

Once upon a time there was a little girl. Her name was Goldilocks. She had golden hair.
One day Goldilocks was walking in the forest. She saw a house and knocked on the door. She went inside. Nobody was there.
Goldilocks saw three bowls on the table. She was hungry.
‘This porridge is too hot! This porridge is too cold! This porridge is just right!’ Goldilocks ate all the porridge.
Goldilocks was tired now. ‘This chair is too big! This chair is too big, too! This chair is just right!’ But the chair broke!
Goldilocks was very tired. She went upstairs. ‘This bed is too hard! This bed is too soft! This bed is just right!’
Soon, the bears came home.
‘Someone’s been eating my porridge!’ said Daddy Bear.
‘Someone’s been eating my porridge!’ said Mummy Bear.
‘Someone’s been eating my porridge - and it’s all gone!’ said Baby Bear.
‘Someone’s been sitting on my chair!’ said Daddy Bear.
‘Someone’s been sitting on my chair!’ said Mummy Bear.
‘Someone’s been sitting on my chair - and it’s broken!’ said Baby Bear.
‘Someone’s been sleeping in my bed!’ said Daddy Bear.
‘Someone’s been sleeping in my bed!’ said Mummy Bear.
‘Someone’s been sleeping in my bed - and she’s still there!’ said Baby Bear.
Goldilocks woke up and saw the three bears. ‘Help!’ She ran downstairs and into the forest. She never came back again.

Humans have struggled for years to find the “just right” level of optimization in our systems. We’ve become incredibly skilled at overoptimizing the parts while suboptimizing the whole. It’s the “racing car problem”: if you’re a builder of race cars and you spend all of your money building the world’s most powerful engine (overoptimization) but forget to upgrade the brakes and tires (suboptimization), the car is actually less functional than a standard vehicle.

One of the main aspects of economics is prioritizing efficiency. As we discussed above, the pursuit of this goal has led to detrimental results: the elimination of redundancies (Tenet #8), which leads to drastic losses in resilience. This drive for the efficient optimal state has made the whole system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances.

We do this through a methodology known as “command and control.” It involves controlling or commanding aspects of a system to result in an optimized solution or end state. The view is predicated on the idea that it’s possible to create a “sustainable optimal state” that the system can stay in for long periods of time. Walker and Salt provide more insights:

This is not, however, how the world actually works. Yes, we can regulate portions of a system – and increase that portion’s return over the short run – but we can’t do this in isolation from the rest of the system. When some part is held constant, the system adapts around our changes, and frequently loses resilience in the process. While we can hold parts of the system in a certain condition, the broader system is beyond our command. Indeed, no one is in control; this is a key aspect of complex adaptive systems.

The last century of command-and-control management has created many hardships. For example, recently, humans have sought to command and control the Everglades, aiming to develop it into agricultural, urban, and conservation areas. Unfortunately, this has significantly reduced the area of natural habitat, resulted in a dramatic decline in water quality, and overall made the region vulnerable to shocks from extreme weather events.

As economist Charles Goodhart coined in what became Goodhart’s Law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” To rephrase, when a metric is used to reward performance or define success, people will manipulate it, making it lose its value as an indicator of true quality.

Formally, this is called rule beating, and it’s a phenomenon that becomes a problem only when it leads a system into large distortions or unnatural behavior that would not exist had the rules not been present to influence behavior.

As you can see, we often optimize for a single metric without realizing it’s making the broader system worse. As Meadows puts it, “When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization.”

Fragility Cause #7: Actors Have an Absence of Skin in the Game

Nassim Taleb is a man who makes many strong statements. Here’s another of his, “[This is the] largest fragilizer of society, and the greatest generator of crises, absence of ‘skin in the game.’”

As we’ll discuss in much greater depth in Tenet #9, skin in the game refers to coupling those who perform actions with the consequences of those actions. In our modern systems, the person acting or deciding often isn’t the person who feels the effects (e.g., think of upper management creating a policy that only affects entry-level employees).

In his eyes, this is the largest factor in our world’s fragility. “At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.”

Fragility Cause #8: Modern Systems Experience Concentrated Sources of Randomness

As discussed in Tenet #5, a major initiative humans have recently undertaken is to make the world more predictable. The result is that risk and randomness have become more concentrated, leading to trading frequent, small disturbances for rare, cataclysmic shocks.

We saw this in our example of the global financial crisis, where traditionally, a bank failure in one country or a virus in a remote village stayed local. Today, in our tightly coupled system, instead of these instances being isolated failures, they cause cascading collapse across neighboring systems, triggering many feedback loops.

We saw this in our example of forest fire prevention above. When we try to prevent small amounts of randomness, we store up energy for a massive explosion later. In this case, avoiding small mistakes (small sources of randomness) makes the larger ones more severe.

As Taleb states, “It is exactly like saying that nuclear bombs are safer because they explode less often. The world is subjected to fewer and fewer acts of violence, while wars have the potential to be more criminal.”

Credit Borderlandia

WHY NATIONS FAIL - SEEMINGLY ENDLESS FEEDBACK LOOPS CONTINUING CYCLES - EXTRACTION PROMOTES FRAGILITIES

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their contribution to comparative studies of prosperity between nations, highlighted in their culminating work, Why Nations Fail.

The authors begin by citing the innate differences between the two cities of Nogales (Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, pictured above). Despite sharing the same environment, ancestry, and name, the two sides of the city exist in completely different worlds. Why? The difference, as we’ll come to know, is the border and the associated institutions on either side.

The book, at a high level, describes how nations develop differently, with some succeeding in accumulating power, prosperity, and widespread diversity, and others failing. Ultimately, they describe how some nations, by various aspects described previously, curate aspects of fragility, making them more likely to fail when volatility and stressors arise.

Their key idea is the impact of inclusive and extractive institutions. Institutions shape actors’ behavior, incentives, and the rules underlying how the economy works, thereby influencing the success or failure of nations.

Inclusive institutions, as depicted in the United Kingdom, South Korea, the United States, and Botswana, are described as “those that allow and encourage participation by the great mass of people in economic activities that make best use of their talents and skills and that enable individuals to make the choices they wish. To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it must also permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. “

Through these characteristics and others, inclusive institutions foster heightened economic activity, sustainable and productive growth, and widespread prosperity. Inclusive economic institutions create inclusive markets that provide people with the opportunity to go where their productivity is highest, enabling firms to be replaced by more efficient ones.

Inclusive institutions are contrasted with extractive institutions, which are designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.

Specifically, extractive institutions are political and economic systems designed to extract income, wealth, and resources from the many to benefit a small, elite few. For example, in countries such as Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala, the Spanish conquistadors established the encomienda—a system designed to force indigenous people to work in mines or on land for the benefit of the Spanish crown and local elites.

There is a strong synergy between economic institutions and political institutions. To use Acemoglu’s definition, “Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it… When there is conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics—who can get more support, obtain additional resources, and form more effective alliances. In short, who wins depends on the distribution of political power in society. The political institutions of a society are a key determinant of the outcome of this game. They are the rules that govern incentives in politics. They determine how the government is chosen and which part of the government has the right to do what. Political institutions determine who has power in society and to what ends that power can be used.”

Extractive political institutions, as you may imagine, are focused on concentrating political power in the hands of a narrow, elite group. This group almost always structures economic institutions to extract resources from the rest of society, further propping up their regime. Extractive economic institutions depend on extractive political institutions.

Within this model, there is a strong feedback loop: political institutions enable elites who control political power to choose economic institutions that offer the greatest benefit to them. They also enable these elites to structure the future of the political and economic institutions. Extractive economic institutions enrich these elites, and their further economic wealth and power help perpetuate and consolidate their political dominance. Moreover, when the set of existing elites is overthrown by a set of newcomers, those newcomers have strong incentives to maintain these political institutions and create a similar set of economic institutions, thereby preserving the society’s status quo. As written in the novel:

The implication of course is that extractive political and economic institutions support each other and tend to persist.

In contrast, inclusive political institutions tend to break down extractive economic institutions, paving the way for inclusive economic institutions. Inclusive political institutions accomplish this by distributing power broadly throughout society, preventing others from easily usurping it and undermining the foundations of inclusivity. Acemoglu and Robinson summarize the ultimate premise well:

Political and economic institutions, which are ultimately the choice of society, can be inclusive and encourage economic growth. Or they can be extractive and become impediments to economic growth. Nations fail when they have extractive economic institutions, supported by extractive political institutions that impede and even block economic growth. But this means that the choice of institutions—that is the politics of institutions—is central to our quest for understanding the reasons for the success and failure of nations. We have to understand why the politics of some societies lead to inclusive institutions that foster economic growth, while the politics of the vast majority of societies throughout history has led, and still leads today, to extractive institutions that hamper economic growth.

Interestingly, Acemoglu and Robinson arrived at a similar conclusion to Taleb: centralized, top-down systems are inherently unstable, while decentralized, pluralistic systems are built to endure. Extractive institutions demonstrate and promote fragilities in two main ways:

Firstly, because power is concentrated in extractive systems in the hands of a small elite group, the entire society depends on the stability of that group. If the leader dies or the circle experiences a significant disruption (Tenet #2), the whole system collapses into chaos (Tenet #3).

Secondly, extractive elites suppress the natural cycle of creative destruction because it threatens their entrenched status. This process artificially suppresses the basic volatility present in society, the natural “shocks” of a healthy economy. This connects to the ideas about the wildfires above—eventually, the dead wood accumulates so much that the next spark triggers a massive, uncontrollable blaze (e.g., a Black Swan event).

In contrast, and as a brief preview to the content in Tenet #9, inclusive economies thrive on creative destruction. This allows thousands of businesses to fail every year. These “deaths” are stressors that provide information to the system, enabling the economy to evolve and strengthen. Because power is spread across many different groups, no single shock can take down the entire country. This decentralization makes the nation robust to individual errors.

Credit Yankee

EROSION DEFEATS ALL OVER TIME - THE IRISH POTATO MONOPOLY CRUMBLES - THE BEST RELATIONSHIP ADVICE

If you’re not from New Hampshire, you probably aren’t familiar with the tale of the Old Man of the Mountain (pictured above). The Old Man of the Mountain is a series of granite cliffs on Cannon Mountain.

The mountain has been a symbol for the Abenaki and Mohawk peoples for millennia and has slowly become a landmark and cultural icon for the state of New Hampshire, even featured as the state’s emblem.

A long-standing attribute of the Old Man was a long crack on the man’s “forehead.” In the 1950s, the legislature passed an appropriation to add cement, covering, and steel rods. This held for decades; however, in 2003, the formation collapsed.

For an estimated 12,000 years, this iconic face looked out over New Hampshire, surviving brutal winters, extreme winds, and much more. The structure was statically stable, but environmentally fragile. Over centuries, tiny amounts of water seeped into microscopic fissures, and during the winter, it froze and expanded slightly. This expansion shifted the center of gravity slightly, causing the entire structure to collapse in a single night.

The way the “fragile” breaks (as discussed in Tenet #3) is rarely a single, dramatic moment. Instead, it’s usually a slow dance between internal tension and external pressure. The fragile inevitably breaks with time.

Simonides of Ceos, a Greek lyric poet, had two excellent quotes on this subject: “Time has sharp teeth that destroy everything” and “There is no better test of a man’s work than time.”

One of the least fragile things in life is Mother Nature. The Earth’s current state has evolved and refined over billions of years. That’s a lot of time for fragile things to break. Taleb describes it expertly:

If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: innocent until proven guilty as opposed to guilty until proven innocent, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise…
If you want to talk about the “statistically significant,” nothing on the planet can be as close to “statistically significant” as nature. This is in deference to her track record and the sheer statistical significance of her massively large experience—the way she has managed to survive Black Swan events. So overriding her requires some very convincing justification of our part, rather than the reverse, as is commonly done, and it is very hard to beat her on statistical grounds.

As we’ll get into further in Tenet #9, the natural and organic is contrasted with the mechanical, noncomplex, and manmade. The natural can be both antifragile and fragile, whereas the manmade is typically fragile.

As we’ve seen, fragility comes in many domains. For instance, potatoes, which are originally native to South America, were brought into Ireland by the late 1500s. By the early 1800s, millions of poor Irish relied on potatoes as both their only source of income and a significant food source. For nearly a century, the “Lumper” potato was the mechanical engine of the Irish economy. It was incredibly efficient, producing massive yields from tiny plots of land.

Then, in the 1840s, infestations of Phytophthora infestans devastated the country. Because every potato was a near genetic clone, the system was incredibly fragile and couldn’t “self-heal” because there was no diversity to resist it. What looked like a robust agricultural machine was actually a fragile system that undercompensated when the shock hit.

Time is similar to volatility: the longer it is, the more events and opportunities for disorder. The Roman poet Ovid invoked the Latin phrase Tempus edax rerum, translating to “time, devourer of all things.”

In materials science, things don’t usually break because of one big hit; they break because of micro-stressors. Every time a “fragile” object experiences a change in temperature, a vibration, or a minor weight, tiny cracks form at the molecular level.

When we apply this concept to people and relationships, the “fragile” breaks through neglect or static tension. In relationships, fragility often breaks via “micro-cracks”, small resentments that aren’t addressed. Over time, these cracks snowball. Paradoxically, things often become fragile because they aren’t tested. Just as bones become brittle without the stress of gravity and movement, the human psyche can become fragile if it is overly shielded from minor hardships.

The fragile breaks because it cannot learn from time; it can only be weathered by it. To survive time, a thing must be able to incorporate the damage it receives and rebuild.

In every case, there are three possible states of exposure and response all things are subject to, detailed at a high level below and throughout Tenets #7, #8, and #9.

Luckily, whether you believe it or not, there are two rather unique solutions to life’s fragilities: resilience and antifragility. We’ll start by diving deeper into ways to maintain the status quo through resilience and robustness, beginning with Tenet #8:

Robust and resilient systems absorb shocks through redundancy and durability, though they don’t necessarily improve from them.

That’s a wrap on this deep dive.

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Drew Jackson

Founder & Writer

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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #81

Drew Jackson — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:35:42 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 13 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

New to these updates? They pair with our bi-weekly Brainwave analyses for comprehensive sector coverage. Wednesday’s deep dive explored the circular economy - catch up here.

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Let’s dive in.

#1: AIRMO

Description: AIRMO is a greenhouse gas monitoring company.

Why Is This Company Interesting? AIRMO recently raised $5M in venture capital funding. AIRMO is a tool for companies to ensure compliance with the latest EU methane regulations. Their technology utilizes satellite vision to inspect for leaks, analyze repairs, and maintain compliance. They trigger ground-based closer inspections, enabling early warning of potential issues and rapid response.

#2: Another Earth

Description: Another Earth is a developer of Earth observation software.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Another Earth recently raised $3.5M in venture capital funding. Another Earth uses AI to simulate various scenarios affecting Earth’s environment, enabling businesses to plan for any eventuality. Companies can confidently predict risk, ensuring that backup redundancies are properly in place and proactively maintained.

#3: Imperium Technologies

Description: Imperium Technologies is a steam systems intelligence provider.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Imperium Technologies recently raised $2M in venture capital funding. Imperium is aiming to solve an underreported problem: steam system failures. Steam systems help power many large, complex industrial machines. Steam traps are constantly failing, resulting in steam loss, reduced efficiency, and increased downtime. To increase effectiveness and revenue, proactive policies like Imperium must be implemented.

#4: AmpliSi

Description: AmpliSi is a battery material developer.

Why Is This Company Interesting? AmpliSi recently raised $2M in venture capital funding. AmpliSi is developing a new way to produce silicone anodes for batteries. Traditional graphite anodes limit performance and aren’t a perfect solution. AmpliSi’s proprietary process for creating silicone anodes provides a superior solution, ushering in the next innovation in battery technology.

#5: Lux Aeterna

Description: Lux Aeterna is a space satellite producer.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Lux Aeterna recently raised $10M in venture capital funding. Lux Aeterna is developing reusable satellites, a concept I wasn’t familiar with. These satellites are launched into space with additional payloads for space-based experiments and data collection. Upon completing their missions and serving as satellites, these structures return to Earth for another trip.

Yale: Why Offshore Wind Could Help the Grid

Many industries are increasing their energy demand as legacy energy sources begin to go offline. This creates a large gap in the market, one which offshore wind can help fill. A single offshore wind turbine can power thousands of homes. However, recent political pushback against the industry has stifled growth, while proponents say the fundamentals remain solid.

The New York Times: Trump Administration Sues California Over Car Rules

The Trump administration filed a lawsuit against California this week against its strict limits on pollution-producing vehicles, arguing the restrictions would force an unlawful switch to electric vehicles. Currently, 17 states have followed California’s lead on clean car standards, so if this were to reverse, it could have repercussions nationwide.

The New York Times: U.S. Solar Installations Fell in 2025

To be clear, the U.S. installed net-positive solar at a rate 14% lower than in 2024. This decrease is primarily due to the Trump Administration’s policies and attitudes towards solar energy, which see traditional fossil fuels as superior solutions. There is some good news, however, as 2025 was a record year for battery installations.

The New York Times: NASA Says Artemis II Moon Launch Set for April 1st

NASA is planning to launch 4 astronauts around the Moon in April. The program has been delayed a few weeks due to mechanical issues, but leadership seems fairly confident. The mission is estimated to take around 10 days, bringing the astronauts into an orbit around the far side of the Moon and then back to Earth.

The New York Times: Why the Kids Won’t Farm

In the next 20 years, the owners of roughly 300M acres of U.S. farmland are expected to retire or die. No one is sure where ownership of these lands will end up, as kids aren’t interested in farming and the industry is rapidly consolidating. This consolidation harms prices, the environment, and food security, but there isn’t a surefire path to diversification.

UC San Diego: What Happens If Truth is Lost?

Questions about truths in the world have captivated audiences for millennia. One philosopher argues that truth is a crucial value that defines our humanity. Truth is uniquely human, acting as a social contract, and contributes directly to our survival. To make progress, we need a genuine investigation of the truth rather than a simple narrative.

Big Think: The Philosophy of Indoctrination and How to Fix It

Indoctrination functions as a psychological cage that fences your beliefs from reasonable critiques. Now this doesn’t mean people who have been indoctrinated aren’t intelligent, but they commonly treat doubt as danger and counter-evidence as attacks. The solution? Epistemic compassion—creating safe spaces where changing your mind is treated as courage rather than betrayal or weakness.

Slate: Perspective Changes in Books

The “BookTok” community is up in arms about the increasing presence of 3rd-person written stories. They majorly prefer first person, why?

First person is easier to understand, to start. For readers looking for an easy read that lets them get immersed in the story, first-person is by far easier—they feel like they’re part of the community.

Surprisingly, the sales of romance books have doubled since 2020 as many continue their COVID-era habits. Norms have changed, as have reader preferences, the main one being the desire for first-person perspectives.

Why is this the interesting thought of the week? It seems a bit out of left field?

I was reading some additional pieces of commentary on the topic, and one of the points, unproven but feasible, caught my eye. This writer argued that a potential explanation supporting this viewpoint is that, with declining literacy rates, the first person is much easier to read than the third person, which may be why it’s more accessible and popular to most.

Either way, I think it’s something we don’t always consider—what perspective are we viewing things from? Maybe it’s time for mixing it up.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #80

Drew Jackson — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:35:35 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 12 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

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Let’s dive in.

#1: PLD Space

Description: PLD Space is a space transportation startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? PLD Space recently raised $180M in venture capital funding. PLD Space is a producer of reusable rockets for small and medium-sized payloads. Their goal is to become the go-to provider of cargo and human transport to and from the Moon and Mars. Reusable rockets shorten the time from development to deployment, enabling a lower-cost, more efficient solution.

#2: Rift

Description: Rift is a developer of iron fuel.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Rift recently raised $83M in venture capital funding. Industrial heat is one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions, with demand currently met mainly through fossil fuels. In many instances, electrification and hydrogen alternatives aren’t feasible, which leaves room for an alternative solution. Rift is developing a clean, circular solution, powered by iron fuel. Iron fuel is generated when fine iron powder is burned—without any carbon emissions.

#3: Photoncycle

Description: Photoncycle builds home energy systems.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Photoncycle recently raised $15M in venture capital funding. Photoncycle aims to solve one of the largest issues with solar power—the intense seasonality. Solar panels generate too much energy at times and too little at others. By using solid-state hydrogen energy storage, you can balance your residential grid to store more when production is high, and sell and use any excess when needed.

#4: Sierra Space

Description: Sierra Space is a defense-tech space company.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Sierra Space recently raised $550M in venture capital funding. Sierra Space is a spinout of Sierra Nevada. Their goal is to focus on national security space efforts, using their expertise gained from over 500 missions to build the next generation of space infrastructure and ground-based support. They continue to produce many satellites, partner with every space-focused government agency, and generally dominate much of the space landscape.

#5: Amatera

Description: Amatera is a developer of resilient perennial crops.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Amatera recently raised $6M in venture capital funding. Amatera is developing climate-resilient crops using advanced plant biology, robotics, and AI to identify and predict high-performing, resilient varieties. Their technology process is 2x faster and 10x more cost-effective than current industry standards. Currently, they’re developing new varieties of wine grapes and coffee beans.

Reuters: US Takes Step to Solidify Rules on Nuclear Fusion Energy

This week, the NRC said that fusion reactors can produce tritium, neutrons, and neutron activation products if properly contained, signalling a big win for the development of fusion energy. The NRC has long stood in the way of nuclear fission, so proponents of fusion are wary of overregulation in the fusion field.

AP News: US Military Airlifts Small Nuclear Reactor

The Pentagon and DOE airlifted a small nuclear reactor from California to Utah, demonstrating the capability to quickly move and deploy flexible, powerful capital. The 5 MW microreactor was transported without fuel; however, in the future, they will be transported live, enabling an immediate impact.

Michigan News: Solar Power Deployment Issues

A new study published found that simply having access to solar technology does not mean people will adopt it. Not all residential solar is the same—larger systems often provide more benefits and encourage further adoption locally. There are many unseen benefits of residential solar worldwide; we just need to capitalize on them.

The New York Times: Nuclear Reactor Gets Federal Approval to Start Building

Terra Power received a key federal permit this week, making it the first new U.S. commercial reactor in nearly a decade to receive clearance to begin construction. This permit allows them to begin constructing components of their new plant in Wyoming. The plant is expected to come online in 2031.

The New York Times: Asteroid-Smashing NASA Mission

In 2022, NASA crashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid. The mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), worked and shortened the asteroid’s orbit around a larger asteroid by 32 minutes. A new study followed up, finding that this crash shifted the path of both asteroids around the sun. It could provide valuable information to help prevent future asteroid impacts.

AS: Epicurus’s Insights

Epicurus said, “He who needs tomorrow least is the one who most gladly moves towards it.” One of the Stoic founders, Epicurus advocated that living in the moment and enjoying life would bring us closer to the perfect state of well-being known as happiness. The ability to pause, breathe, and simply exist in the present is becoming increasingly difficult, and we should cherish any time we get.

The Conversation: Meekness Isn’t Weakness

I don’t know if I could give a perfectly accurate definition of the word meek and its associated qualities.

Most people believe it’s a weakness or an undesirable quality when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Meekness, historically mean not becoming weak but subjugating one’s power to reason, not letting anger take control.

It’s all about cultivating self-control, a large strength that most could work on further.

As language has changed and evolved, the meaning of words—like meekness—has also changed, losing much of the power they once had.

The moral of the story is, don’t be afraid to be meek.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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Drew Jackson

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The Strategic Case for a Circular Economy

Drew Jackson — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:35:28 GMT

Credit Gregg Vanourek

We’re paying the price for aggressive consumption. Can a circular architecture save our economic and ecological future?

This Week’s Focus: Energy & Environment

What You’ll Understand: The benefits and drawbacks of the circular economy transition

Reading Time: 12 minutes for full analysis + key takeaways highlighted throughout

Key Question: Should we incentivize and encourage a shift to a circular economy?

My Take: The circular economy entails high costs—redesigning every process to promote sustainability, reduce waste, and promote mindful resource use. It won’t be easy, but it’s necessary to address climate change, reduce waste, and build a better future for generations to come. Our current mindsets of aggressive production and consumption aren’t healthy, and we’re beginning to pay the price.

Quick Context: This deep dive connects to my past work on recycling and recent news in The Saturday Morning Newsletter #75. New to Brainwaves? We explore the forces reshaping our world across venture capital, energy, space, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy. Subscribe here for bi-weekly deep dives plus weekly current events.

Let’s dive in.

Growing up, I didn’t have many conscious experiences with the circular economy.

Unbeknownst to me, it was surrounding me and affecting many aspects of my life.

For instance, I learned about the three-step approach of reduce, reuse, and recycle in school. But our community didn’t have a large-scale recycling program, so my first experiences with recycling were occasional in college, and now it’s a constant since I’ve moved to Seattle.

During a semester in college, I interned with the Department of Entrepreneurship at Penn State as a research assistant. One of the primary initiatives was to investigate the next generation of nuclear reactors, including micro nuclear reactors, Gen IV and V reactors, and medical byproduct uses.

This research generated my significant interest in the nuclear, energy, and environmental sectors. Now, I may not have grown up with the circular economy, but I’m trying to be a better participant in it. My next step is to learn more about the circular economy and teach you as much as I can.

The Circular Economy

Since the beginning of time, and especially since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have operated primarily on a traditional, linear economy.

The traditional model (visualized below) treats resources as infinite and assumes humans can dispose of waste cheaply.

This approach results in significant resource depletion, environmental damage, and massive waste.

I’ve seen direct examples of this in my life: products aren’t used to their full potential. They are sent directly to waste when they’re no longer in use, even if they still have useful life left or contain recyclable materials.

The Industrial Revolution brought exponential change worldwide and laid the groundwork for the new, linear economy. As industries expanded and technologies advanced, many countries’ economies grew, and goods were mass-produced on a scale unprecedented before (e.g., the Henry Ford production line). At the time, people treated resources as relatively infinite and therefore abused and degraded the Earth in pursuit of economic gain.

Over time, subsequent generations have learned to do this more effectively, creating even larger quantities of more advanced products. But the underlying model hasn’t changed—we still take, make, and dispose.

The adverse effects of this approach, while always present, are beginning to manifest: environmental damage, shortages of key materials, rapid accumulation of waste, and other consequences.

The introduction of the circular economy shifts this paradigm, focusing on designing products and systems for longevity, reuse, repair, and eventually, regeneration. It seeks to maximize the utility and value of products, components, and materials by keeping them in circulation for as long as possible. In an ideal world, the circular economy will prevent waste from being produced in the first place.

The following is an in-depth analysis of the circular economy, including:

The Butterfly Diagram
Aspects, Principles, & Strategies of the Circular Economy
The ‘How’ and ‘Why’ Behind the Transition to the Circular Economy
The Next Era of Circular Economies

The Butterfly Diagram

Often, new topics are best learned through visualization—especially those as complex as the circular economy. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation created what they call the “butterfly diagram,” which showcases the circular economy to help people better understand its mission and goals:

There are two sides to the cycle, the biological portion (left) and the technical portion (right). As writers at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation explain:

On the left-hand side of the butterfly diagram is the biological cycle, which is for materials that can biodegrade and safely return to the earth. This cycle mainly concerns products that are consumed, such as food. However some other biodegradable materials, such as cotton or wood, may eventually make their way from the technical cycle into the biological cycle once they have degraded to a point where they can no longer be used to make new products.

One of the key concepts in this section is regeneration. In contrast to the linear economy, which is primarily built on the continuous exploitation of natural resources without refilling the top of the funnel, regeneration prioritizes end products that can also serve as starting materials. If we design with the end (and subsequent recycling and a new beginning) in mind from the outset, we can sustain our consumption habits almost indefinitely.

The goal is to create a feedback loop with cascading effects. This loop would use existing products and materials in a continuous cycle. When products are eventually degraded beyond the point of return, they are returned to the soil and ultimately decompose into raw materials.

The technical cycle describes the actions taken in the biological cycle. There are many layers that sustain the use and implementation of products throughout this cycle to optimize resource value and availability before true degradation.

For instance, the innermost ring of sharing can significantly increase the utilization of many products. As writers at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation cite, “You may have heard the stat: the average power drill is used for just 13 minutes in its entire life. That is shocking underutilisation – and yet still many of us own one. Why not share?” Sharing does not apply only to drills—it can apply to many underutilized products worldwide.

At the other end of the spectrum is recycling. It’s the last resort in the circular economy (and also in the reduce, reuse, recycle trilogy). It entails forfeiting the product’s accumulated value by reducing it to its raw ingredients. While it isn’t the primary goal, products should be designed for recycling—especially any items that aren’t applicable in the prior steps of the technical cycle.

Credit Allianz

Aspects, Principles, & Strategies of the Circular Economy

You should be familiar with the famous triad, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Often, we focus only on the last one; however, someone recently pointed out that it’s actually the last action we should pursue, as reducing and reusing are far more effective.

In fact, this triad is only a small part of a broader framework developed by proponents of the circular economy, known as the R-Strategies (R-Ladder). The framework provides the most effective strategies for transitioning society from a linear to a circular economy.

It’s a complex diagram, but it ultimately reduces to 3 main activities that promote a linear economy.

The design phase is characterized by more efficient use of products and manufacturing processes. We need to refuse, thereby preventing the use of products, services, or raw materials to create unnecessary or inefficient end products. We can rethink the ownership, use, and maintenance of each product before discarding it. Finally, we should reduce the use of raw materials to prevent waste or underutilization.

The goal of the consumption phase is to extend the possibilities and lifespan of products already in use. We can reuse products (usually from another owner), repair broken products to working condition, refurbish and restore them to their original working status, remanufacture the same products using discarded portions or spare parts, and repurpose them to make new products from discarded products or parts.

Finally, if we have not yet reduced waste through the aforementioned steps, the end-of-life phase still offers a solution. We can recycle products by processing waste into new materials (e.g., plastics and glass) that can be used to produce new products. Or we can recover energy from waste processing to help offset the cycle’s costs.

If none of these are accomplished—or, more likely, if humans don’t know they are an option or don’t have habits to choose them, or simply are lazy, these products end up in a landfill or are incinerated. No value can be repurposed; the linear economy persists.

There are 9 steps that can capture some value from materials or products before everything is lost, with the level of capture increasing as you go higher up the ladder. In the linear economy, new raw materials are continuously needed, and waste increases accordingly. In a circular economy, using the R Ladder, we ensure that products and materials retain their value and waste is critically limited.

This ladder provides a structured approach to using resources more efficiently and making the resource economy circular. Companies, consumers, government, and all other entities play a crucial role in this transition.

Credit Phys.org

The ‘How’ and ‘Why’ Behind the Transition to the Circular Economy

Transitioning to a more circular world requires fundamental system change. As the World Economic Forum explains, “Consumers, businesses and politicians all need to make changes to how goods are designed, produced, sold, manufactured and reused.”

For instance, the circular economy will require designing products more intelligently, so they can be easily reused, repurposed, and recycled. Companies are seeking technology solutions that enable the production of materials with reduced reliance on raw materials, lower input costs, and lower energy consumption.

Recent advances in the sharing economy, through services such as Uber and Turo and new product-as-a-service business models, integrate sustainability, reusability, and resource allocation optimization.

Good intentions from consumers and businesses are a start, but fundamental policy shifts are necessary to further incentivize and mandate change over the long term. Over the last decade, countries have enacted laws banning gas-powered vehicles, single-use plastics, and other environmentally harmful products, in an effort to shift consumer demand and corporate resources toward circular solutions.

Is this all for nothing? Why are entities around the globe pushing so hard for this initiative?

As the Ellen MacArthur Foundation writes, “The circular economy tackles climate change and other global challenges, like biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution, by decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources.”

Transitioning to a truly circular economy offers numerous environmental benefits, primarily through the conservation and responsible use of natural resources. Resource extraction and raw material processing are highly energy-intensive, generating substantial CO2 emissions. By giving products a second use or recycling them, we dramatically reduce our energy demand.

To add data, the World Resources Institute estimates that transitioning to a circular economy could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 39%. This switch could significantly impact climate change mitigation efforts, driving change worldwide.

The circular economy creates a resilient system that delivers immediate economic efficiency and resource security for current generations while preserving the natural capital and environmental health necessary for future generations’ prosperity.

Opponents of the circular economy have raised concerns that the transition to it will reduce productivity. As you might imagine, reduced productivity can signal serious trouble. They argue that to reduce the massive waste our society produces, we must drastically slow emissions-heavy productive activity.

Proponents like the Forest Stewardship Council disagree, citing the financial benefits of the circular economy. Businesses can reduce costs by minimizing waste, particularly waste disposal fees, thereby improving profit margins. Circular estimates indicate businesses could save up to 70% on waste-disposal costs by adopting circular practices.

The United Nations Assistant Secretary-General estimates that a transition to the circular economy could deliver $4.5T in global economic benefits by 2030. Since 2019, an estimated $350B in financing and investment has been deployed to transition to the circular economy by entities seeking to capture a share of that $4.5T.

There is an extensive list of pros and cons associated with the transition to a circular economy. Advantages cited include resource efficiency, economic growth and job creation, environmental protection, increased sustainability, and higher societal resilience. Disadvantages cited include initial costs, technological dependency, regulatory challenges, short-term market disruptions, and a substantial shift in consumer behavior.

Credit The World Economic Forum

The Next Era of Circular Economies

The circular economy constitutes a comprehensive, systemic shift as we transition from a “take-make-dispose” model to a restorative system that eliminates waste, circulates products, and regenerates nature.

Our system isn’t a single system; it’s an interconnected whole comprising many smaller systems. Similarly, the transition to the circular economy doesn’t occur within a single isolated system; it’s a combination of efforts across many subsystems.

The transition to the circular economy requires us to redesign everything, creating everything with the intention of use, reusability, and recyclability. Design is the process by which we create products, services, and systems, and it underlies each component of the circular economy—it’s the mechanism by which we shape the material environment around us to meet our needs and desires.

Cities play a central role in the global economy—and an even bigger one in the circular economy. Cities account for 85% of global GDP, 75% of natural resource consumption, and 50% of global waste, while producing 60-80% of greenhouse gas emissions.

The way we design cities can bring tremendous economic, social, and environmental benefits. Implementing the circular economy could create thriving cities in which productivity increases through reduced congestion, waste elimination, and lower costs. These cities will become more livable with improved air quality, reduced pollution, and enhanced social interactions.

Another major subsector ripe for disruption through the circular economy is the fashion industry. Concerningly, over the last decade, clothing use has declined by 40% as the “fast fashion” trend has rapidly expanded. Every moment, one truckload of clothing is sent to the landfill or burned. The current system for producing, distributing, and using clothing operates in a completely linear manner.

A circular economy for the fashion industry would involve designing the creation, distribution, and use of clothing in a restorative and regenerative fashion. Clothes would retain their highest value during use and re-enter the economy after use, never becoming waste. Thrifting and used-clothing outlets have become a major channel for clothing distribution and value recovery, surpassing new clothing retailers.

In the food economy, the linear system is susceptible to disruption. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “For every dollar spent on food, society pays two dollars in health, environmental, and economic costs.” Today’s model has met short-term demand increases at the expense of long-term viability.

Currently, most food waste isn’t put to any use, entering landfills or other unintended pathways. In a circular food economy, any food by-products can be safely returned to the soil as organic fertilizer. Food should be grown regeneratively and locally. Businesses can design and market healthier food products so consumers can make the most of them.

The transition to a circular economy represents far more than an environmental initiative; it is a fundamental shift toward a more intelligent and resilient economic architecture. By decoupling economic growth from resource consumption, businesses can insulate themselves against the volatility of global supply chains and rising material costs. This model ensures the energy and labor embedded in products remain productive within the economy as long as possible, rather than being discarded as waste.

Ultimately, the circular economy serves as a bridge between current prosperity and future security. For the present generation, it catalyzes innovation and creates new market categories centered on regenerative design. For future generations, it preserves the natural capital and ecological integrity of our current society.

Transitioning away from a linear “take-make-waste” mindset is not just a moral choice, but a strategic necessity for building a world that remains both viable and competitive in the decades to come.

That’s a wrap on this deep dive.

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Drew Jackson

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Next Deep Dive: Futures Thinking Tenet #7 - March 18th, 2026
This Saturday: Weekly roundup of breaking developments across energy, space, venture capital, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy
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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #79

Drew Jackson — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:35:22 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 13 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

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Let’s dive in.

#1: Climatex

Description: Climatex is a developer of recyclable textiles.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Climatex recently raised $4.1M in venture capital funding. Climatex is a truly unique product, designed to be partially durable. Their clothes are made with the end in mind: to be recycled. As such, their fibers are water-soluble, making them easily absorbable and recyclable. How does that work when you’re wearing it in many conditions? I’m not entirely sure yet, but I’m looking forward to learning more.

#2: Shine Technologies

Description: Shine Technologies is a nuclear fusion startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Shine Technologies recently raised $240M in venture capital funding. Shine is yet another massive company trying to develop and commercialize fusion energy. They’re doing it in a unique way by finding commercial uses along the way as they complete milestones, which provide some revenue to offset development costs and create an ecosystem around them, so when they succeed, they succeed at a larger scale.

#3: Chariot Defense

Description: Chariot Defense is a battlefield power company.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Chariot Defense recently raised $34M in venture capital funding. I don’t tend to write about defense firms much because they can sometimes be a bit polarizing. Chariot isn’t quite different; however, they do have a unique angle that’s perfect for our discussion today. See, most of war technology is still reliant on diesel generators and fossil fuels, even though technology has advanced rapidly and now requires more power than we can currently provide. That’s where Chariot comes in—its goal is to provide energy to remote regions of the world to solve this pain point.

#4: ISPTech

Description: ISPTech is a space propulsion startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? ISPTech recently raised $6.5M in venture capital funding. ISPTech aims to address one of the most critical aspects of space rockets in the 21st century—efficient fuel usage. The engineers want less fuel on board to keep the craft lighter; the climate change activists want less fuel to reduce CO2 emissions; and the companies want to use less fuel because it costs less. ISPTech is the next-generation space fuel, providing a superior alternative to existing options.

#5: Sophia Space

Description: Sophia Space is a space-based computing company.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Sophia Space recently raised $10M in venture capital funding. Sophia Space is building a space-based datacenter that utilizes solar panels and is cooled by space. Earth-based data centers are constrained by power limitations and expensive land costs. By looking to space, we can solve these issues efficiently. Space isn’t without its issues, but it does provide an alternative option for the future.

Yahoo Finance: Space-Based Solar Economically Viable by 2040

I love a good speculative Yahoo Finance article. This one argues that given our rate of innovation on solar panels and space, the 2040 timeline is viable. They claim the renewable energy transition is running out of land, so space must be the next frontier for clean energy generation.

The New York Times: Judge Approves $345M Verdict Against Greenpeace

The almost decade-long court battle continues this week, with a judge affirming the previous ruling that Greenpeace owes $345M to Energy Transfer for promoting business disruption and protest. Greenpeace maintains its right to free speech and continues to expect to appeal the decision throughout the court system.

The New York Times: Plastic is Everywhere

Peak plastic is nowhere in sight. In a new book, the author reveals that major corporations are doing everything in their power to get the world to use as much plastic as possible. She exposes disinformation campaigns and efforts to shift responsibility onto individual consumers through political lobbying and more.

The New York Times: NASA Shakes Up Artemis Schedule

NASA is aiming to launch more often in the future, mirroring historical patterns. Artemis III was moved up from 2028 to mid-2027 and will not travel to the Moon; it will instead be a test flight. This would set up two landing attempts in 2028, meeting the President’s goal of sending NASA astronauts to the Moon before the end of his term.

The New York Times: Is This the Most Important Supreme Court Case of the Century?

This week, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariff plan. This stopped a monumental presidential power grab that relied on vague, broad language. The justices argued that this isn’t precise enough to sweep away language in the Constitution granting Congress taxing authority.

WIPO: World Intellectual Property Report 2026

Creating innovative solutions does not translate into economic growth or societal benefits. The process by which new technology is assimilated worldwide is called technology diffusion. This report discusses how the process happens and describes how policymakers can best inform their IP policy, systems, and strategies.

Columbia Undergraduate Law Review: Who Owns Ideas?

AI has rapidly expanded across the media industry over the last few years. How does intellectual property law create boundaries that protect human-created art? IP law must be able to distinguish between AI-assisted creations and human-only creations to protect human creativity and ingenuity without fully blocking the use of all technology.

11 rules mentally tough people live by (not an original, to be clear):

Don’t expect things to feel fair - Life doesn’t distribute challenges evenly. Accept reality as it is.
Separate facts from feelings - What happened is different from how you feel about it.
Focus on what you can control - Your energy is finite. Spend it on what you can change.
Take full responsibility for your actions and outcomes - Own what you did and what resulted. That’s where control lives.
Let go of the need for everyone’s approval - Not everyone will understand your choices. That’s not your problem.
Learn from the past but don’t dwell on it - Take the lesson, then move on. Replaying it won’t change it.
Engage in physical and mental wellness - Your mind and body are connected. Neglect one, and the other suffers.
Embrace change and calculated risks - Growth lives outside your comfort zone. Assess the risk, then take it.
Stop waiting to feel ready - Readiness rarely arrives. Confidence builds through action.
Set boundaries without guilt - Your time and energy matter. Protect them without apology.
Rest without justifying it - Recovery is part of performance, not a reward for it.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

Found this analysis valuable? The best way to support Brainwaves is to share it with someone who’d benefit from these insights.

Drew Jackson

Founder & Writer

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Next Deep Dive: The Strategic Case for the Circular Economy - March 4th, 2026
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What It Actually Takes to Run Brainwaves (Q1’Y3 Review)

Drew Jackson — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:35:16 GMT

Hello!

I built Brainwaves on a promise of radical transparency, and Q1 really put that to the test. It wasn’t all wins and milestones—we hit some significant speed bumps that forced us to rethink how we grow. In this update, I’m pulling back the curtain on the hard lessons we’ve learned, the numbers we’ve hit (and missed), and the roadmap guiding us through the rest of Year 3.

A Key Insight into Producing Content: PINK!

It was a nice, sunny morning on January 17th. I got the opportunity to sleep in a bit, but finally decided to get out of bed. One of my coworkers had told me about a local donut shop I needed to visit, so I put on my shoes and walked over. Insert Voodoo Doughnuts.

Besides making fantastic donuts (I can confirm I ate way too many), one of their main features is that everything is pink. It’s a bit aggressive in all honesty, but it definitely made an impression on yours truly.

I was pretty set on the rebrand in Y1’Q4 and the color addition (yellow), but I had never thought about pink as a new color. I think it complements the blues and yellow very well. And so… pink Brainwaves was born. Don’t worry, I won’t go all crazy pink on you, but you’ll start to see it as an accent here and there.

The moral of this story is that as a content creator, the most random of things can spark inspiration, from trying new bakeries to conversations with friends to ads you see on TV, and so much more.

There’s not a prescriptive formula for success in this business; it’s all about being scrappy and enjoying the journey. If you’re looking for inspiration, you’re much more likely to find it.

Thanks for listening to my short monologue, and with that, let’s get into the quarterly update.

Brainwaves: What Happened This Quarter?

This quarter focused heavily on optimizing content delivery, making it easier for people to get their hands on Brainwaves with a high-quality experience. I hope these efforts have established a good baseline that will propel us to new heights.

I’m very excited about the articles released this quarter, and I’m looking forward to what’s coming. There were many exciting Brainwaves updates and new releases this quarter. We also met many new people this quarter across a range of exciting subsectors and experiences.

Articles You May Have Missed From This Quarter:

Dream Big Dreams - Brainwaves year two in review, learn about the progress we’ve made, and see what’s to come!
Hi Me in 1 Year - A letter from my past self
Introducing the Brainwaves Referral Program 🚀 - We started a referral program! Get rewards for sharing with your friends
Special Edition: Interview with Max Lopez - An interview with the owner of Apartment D, discussing the animation industry
What Superforecasters Know That You Don’t - A long-form deep dive into Futures Thinking series tenet #6
Special Edition: Interview with Kelleigh Stewart - An interview with the owner of Big Island Coffee Roasters, discussing the specialty coffee industry
Special Edition: Interview with Nita Akoh - An interview with the owner of MyAltas Health, discussing the mental health prevention industry
Revisiting Value Creation & Capture - Revisiting a new perspective on an old subject, how we can create and capture value in businesses
Reincarnation in the Age of Reason - A cautious dive into a complicated subject to learn more, showcase conflicts, and provide new perspectives

The Saturday Morning Newsletter: What Happened This Quarter?

This has been a quarter full of late nights and tired eyes, but I’ve made sure to be consistent in producing the content you faithfully read every week. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed it, and it helps you stay up to date on the happenings in these subsectors.

Articles You May Have Missed:

The Saturday Morning Newsletter #66 - Big Bets on The Future of Running, Bill Gates’ Views on Climate, $1B to Restart Three Mile Island
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #67 - $17M for Pea-Based Milk, Electric Boating Fads, Lessons to Make You Stronger
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #68 - A New Development In Bird Strikes, 8 Classroom Teaching Practices, and 500,000 Satellites by 2040
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #69 - Next-Gen Nozzle Technology, Energy Givers and Takers, and $400M+ for Micro Nuclear Companies
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #70 - Bullish on 2026, Miracle Black Fungus, and Decoupling From China
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #71 - New Year’s Eve Shows Time Matters, 2026 Is The Year of Space, and The Return of Supersonic Jets
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #72 - How to Think, The Supreme Court Favors the Rich, and 10cm Earth Photo Resolution
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #73 - Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, The Gamification of Life, and Hidden Solar Issues
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #74 - No Buy January, Nuclear on the Moon, and Whether Life is All a Game
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #75 - Doomsday Clock Ticks Closer, Amazing Ocean Cleanup Project Results, and A Moon Landing Soon
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #76 - Make Bees Great Again, What’s Tomorrow, The Biggest Industry Might Be Full of Grifters
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #77 - Genetics Determine Life Expectancy, El Niño Coming Back, and EPA Rejecting Climate Change
The Saturday Morning Newsletter #78 - Unicorns and Soonicorns, Optimizing Waste Cleanup, and $70M+ for Sustainable Aviation Fuel

Brainwaves: By The Numbers

This quarter continued the progress of Q4’Y2; in the grand scheme of things, it signals a slowdown in growth to more long-term levels. I have some thoughts on initiatives to improve performance going forward, but at this point, everything is a series of trial and error, so hopefully something pays off. Nevertheless, having more subscribers increases the likelihood that someone benefits from my content each week, which is my ultimate goal.

After a breakout performance with a couple of articles this quarter, I’m looking forward to what’s to come this year. A large portion of this volume is due to increased website views as we continue to sort out the indexing and SEO practice. There are enough consistent readers that are pushing the numbers up each week, which is crazy to even think about. It’s always fun to see what content you like the most.

The Saturday Morning Newsletter is incredibly consistent with its performance. There were a couple of standout articles, all (besides the last one) with over 100 views each, which is a great milestone for continued growth. I only hope this trend continues.

We’ve been working on revamping the website for optimum performance this quarter and last, with success seen in the numbers. My favorite metric is scroll depth, which is best-in-class for newsletters (it will likely decrease over time).

Last Quarter Goal Execution

1) Dive into my unique brainwaves each day, write about them, and publish my in-progress views each week, hopefully making a positive impact on someone’s life each week

Success.

As I’ve already touched on, this quarter has been a very exciting time for learning, discovery, and growth. I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned in the upcoming quarters.

2) Curate an experience that readers enjoy, one that makes them want to return for more

Success.

I think readers have enjoyed the experience this quarter, with the introduction of the referral program and more of the content you know and love. Obviously, there is always room for improvement, but hopefully I’m doing a good job overall.

3) Subscriber Goal In 3 Months: 280

Fail.

As you probably saw, we’re up to 255 subscribers, falling short of our goal. It’s been a tough quarter to find time to launch new initiatives and drive growth, but I hope to have more time to devote to it.

4) Continue building on our social media success

Success (ish).

Social media is doing better now that we’ve brought Jasmine onto the team. It’s beginning to drive some subscribers, and I only hope to increase the conversion rate this quarter.

5) Drive subscribers through the referral program

Fail.

So, we launched the referral program (here) with the expectation that it would help drive growth, but so far it hasn’t (officially) driven one subscription, which isn’t great. I’m doing some research (and, frankly, some soul-searching) on what more I can do here, so I’ll keep you updated.

6) Read more books associated with subjects I’m interested in

Success (ish).

I’ve read a bit this quarter, but with work starting back up, it’s been hard to find free time to chip away at the books I’m trying to get through. I’m hoping to continue spending time here, but it’s going to be a more muted success here in the future.

7) Get 3 more interviews completed and published

Success.

I’m finally able to say I’ve accomplished this goal, and I’ve met awesome people along the way. I hope you’ve loved the interview content. I know I have, and I hope to continue providing more to you in future quarters.

Goals For This Quarter

1) Dive into my unique brainwaves each day, write about them, and publish my in-progress views each week, hopefully making a positive impact on someone’s life each week

This is the first and most important goal of this platform, and the reason I started this journey. I view this platform as a great excuse to share my unique perspectives on some of my favorite topics, trying to understand and continually refine my viewpoint on each subject.

I subscribe to the mantra that you learn more about a subject when you have to teach someone else. Through the Brainwaves platform, I’ve created an artificial obligation to produce content each week, which means I’m carving out time in my schedule to learn about new topics I might not have prioritized before.

This platform also allows me to publish my in-progress views on each subject I learn about each week. This is a great opportunity to get feedback from readers who may know more about these subjects than I do or have a unique viewpoint I haven’t considered.

Surrounding this entire process is the pursuit of making a positive impact on someone’s life each week.

2) Curate an experience that readers enjoy, one that makes them want to return for more

The goal of this platform is to create an experience readers enjoy so much that they keep coming back each week for more and more content. Now, that’s an incredibly lofty goal, but one I continue to strive towards each week.

I hope you enjoy the content each and every week!

3) Subscriber Goal In 3 Months: 285

I hate asking people for help, so I normally keep my “ask” to share/subscribe to this publication very short, and usually, most people just brush right past it.

Today, I’m putting it front and center.

If you enjoy and/or get any value from the Brainwaves platform, help me get to 285 subscribers by the end of February by doing any of the following:
Forward this email to friends and tell them to subscribe,
Share on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook with a short note,
Share within your existing community or your company Slack channel.

Getting to 285 people shouldn’t be hard. To put it into perspective, with 255 of you currently subscribed, we just need a referral rate of 0.12 (~1 in 8 people sharing) to reach 285. I’d really appreciate it if you could spend a couple of minutes helping me broaden this platform’s reach and impact.

To reiterate, the goal of this platform is not to become famous or generate an income stream; it is purely to educate people like you about critical factors in our future. So, the goal to increase subscribers is not to grow larger (although that is a nice economies-of-scale byproduct); it is simply to reach a broader audience consistently, and an audience that I will hopefully have a positive impact on every single week.

In addition, more subscribers mean more views and a greater likelihood that one of my readers knows more about a subject than I do, creating more opportunities for me to learn and grow through this process.

4) Continue building on our social media success

We’ve had a ton of success on social media this quarter. My goal is to continue pushing content and creating a measurable impact on our subscriber base via the social media efforts this quarter. That’s a lofty challenge that requires tons of views, interactions, and engagement, along with a decent conversion rate.

I think it’s an ambitious goal, but well within reach.

5) Drive subscribers through the referral program

If you missed it, we launched a referral program this quarter! There are some exciting rewards (in my opinion), so feel free to send this to a friend or two and get them to sign up. Read more here.

I hope this drives a large portion of subscriber growth (and helps me get rid of some of this swag) this quarter and quarters to come. Go make it happen!

6) Read more books associated with subjects I’m interested in

I’ve started reading books on subjects that interest me, and they’ve definitely helped round out my thinking, offer new perspectives, and deepen my knowledge of the niche subsegments within each sector.

I’ve already got some exciting books lined up for some segments I’m interested in. Hopefully, you’ll get to see a couple of insights here and there.

Thank You + Bonus Content

Thank you for sticking around. For anyone new here: thank you too! I hope you’ve enjoyed your time and will continue to return for more content each week.

I’m excited to see what happens this next quarter. This passion project continues to grow and develop, astounding me every single day. Like always, this is purely for fun and learning, and so far it’s been great.

As a little thank you, here’s a little hint at what’s coming down the pipeline:

Circles Are the Key to Our Future?

A Futures Thinking Tenet?

A Not Lame But Boring Article?

….and more

With that, thank you again for your support! As is customary, here’s a Kardashian + friends quote to brighten your week:

“Baker-Miller Pink is the only color scientifically proven to calm you AND suppress your appetite. I was like, ‘I NEED this color in my house!’”

- Kendall Jenner

Thank you again for another great quarter!

Drew Jackson

Twitter: @brainwavesdotme

Email: brainwaves.me@gmail.com

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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #78

Drew Jackson — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:35:42 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 14 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights

New to these updates? They pair with our bi-weekly Brainwave analyses for comprehensive sector coverage. Wednesday’s deep dive explored reincarnation - catch up here.

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#1: Alva Energy

Description: Alva Energy is a nuclear energy company.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Alva Energy recently raised $33M in venture capital funding. Alva is developing an attractive nuclear energy product. Their reactors cost $1B for 200-300 MWe capacity and can be deployed in less than two years (an astonishing feat in the world of nuclear). This isn’t anything super revolutionary on its own; it’s the combination of all these factors that sets Alva apart.

#2: LanzaJet

Description: LanzaJet is a sustainable aviation fuel maker.

Why Is This Company Interesting? LanzaJet recently raised $47M in venture capital funding. LanzaJet uses low-carbon ethanol to produce a more sustainable jet fuel. Their solution is compatible with existing aircraft and infrastructure, facilitating an easy transition.

#3: Metafuels

Description: Metafuels is a sustainable aviation fuel startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Metafuels recently raised $24M in venture capital funding. Seems like this is the week for sustainable aviation fuel capital raises as Metafuel inks another major deal. They’ve developed a proprietary areobrew using a proprietary technology to convert green methanol into sustainable aviation fuel.

#4: PolyGone Systems

Description: PolyGone Systems is a microplastic monitoring and removal startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? PolyGone recently raised $4M in venture capital funding. PolyGone is developing a system to remove sub-1mm microplastics from the ocean. Microplastics often contain harmful chemicals, so their removal is paramount. Some experts argue that they could be the greatest health hazard facing the next generation. This goes beyond traditional filtration, capturing particles as small as microns.

#5: Hauler Hero

Description: Hauler Hero is a platform to optimize waste and recycling hauling.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Hauler Hero recently raised $16M in venture capital funding. Hauler Hero is developing a software platform purpose-built for the waste and recycling industries. These industries consistently face logistical challenges as more routes and demand are forecast. The platform automates many back-office tasks, enabling people to spend more time on the job of collecting.

Global Energy Monitor: 2025 Wind and Solar - The G7 Gap

Despite holding around half of the world’s wealth, the G7 countries accounted for only 11% of global wind and solar capacity additions in 2025. The majority of growth is in emerging and developing economies as they leapfrog to next-gen electricity generation technology. Global wind and solar capacity grew 11% in 2025.

The New York Times: New AI Datacenters Could Elevate Your Power Bill

As AI data centers continue to pop up left and right, legislators are beginning to push bills requiring them to build their fair share of the energy grid without relying on or burdening existing infrastructure. I think these companies have known this would be the outcome for a while since they’ve invested heavily in energy providers.

The New York Times: EPA Lawsuit

Following the EPA reversal of its “endangerment finding,” a foundation for climate change action in the U.S., environmental groups have sued. These groups argue that the rollback is illegal under a previous Supreme Court decision. Experts estimate this will end up at the Supreme Court again, which is much more conservative than when it originally ruled on this topic.

The New York Times: NASA Completes Artemis II Launchpad Test

This week, NASA successfully completed a rehearsal of the Artemis II launch. The goal of this mission is to send astronauts around the Moon’s orbit for the first time in more than 50 years. They’re now targeting March 6 as the earliest launch attempt.

The Wall Street Journal: Bezos vs. Musk, The Battle for the Moon

The two space-focused billionaires are now fully set on their race to the moon. This is shaping up to be the 21st-century space race, a spectacle that could capture the eyes of the entire globe. Many are speculating that Musk’s recent change in priorities is due to the anticipated IPO later this year.

The New York Times: The Era of Soonicorns

Over the last decade, private unicorns (valued at $1B+) have started popping up all over the place, with over 1,000 now. Recently, new categories of decacorns ($10B+) and hectocorns ($100B+) have expanded. Now, there’s a new category of “soonicorns”, companies worth $500M-$999M that are going to be unicorns very soon. There’s never been more soonicorns in history (2,000+). 2026 is estimated to be a good year for many of these companies to achieve unicorn status and more.

Pitchbook: Series A Funding Difficulty Increases

Series A funding dynamics have dramatically changed over the last decade. Surprisingly, the stake acquired by investors in a Series A round (median ~25%) hasn’t changed much. However, the average size of rounds has rapidly increased from $10M to now $30M. As such, funds have been increasingly raising more and more money to pursue these larger rounds, a losing game over time.

The New York Times: The Price of Nature

3 new books showcase various economists’ views on nature:

It’s on You by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein
Blood and Treasure by Duncan Weldon
On Natural Capital by Partha Dasgupta

Econews: Exceptional Solar Panel Performance

Just in case you needed a bit of positive news this week, solar panels apparently last longer than previously expected.

When selling solar panels, manufacturers usually promise performance for 25-30 years. A new study found that most panels older than this produced more than 80% of their original power after 30 years.

Why does this matter?

Firstly, there’s less waste from solar panels as they last longer.

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, it spreads the investment cost over a longer period, making it more economical for more people to make the transition.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

Found this analysis valuable? The best way to support Brainwaves is to share it with someone who’d benefit from these insights.

Drew Jackson

Founder & Writer

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Next Deep Dive: The Strategic Case for a Circular Economy - March 4th, 2026
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Reincarnation in the Age of Reason

Drew Jackson — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:35:21 GMT

Credit HowStuffWorks

33% of Americans believe in reincarnation. In an era of data and logic, why is this ancient idea trending?

This Week’s Focus: Philosophy

What You’ll Understand: A concise, unbiased, modern perspective on reincarnation

Reading Time: 11 minutes for full analysis + key takeaways highlighted throughout

Key Question: How do modern people across the world think about, resonate with, and debate the topic of reincarnation?

My Take: The concept of reincarnation means radically different things to many people, with different emotional connotations (positive and negative) associated with each perspective. I’m not here to argue one side or the other—I haven’t even made up my mind on the topic. Reincarnation is a fascinating concept that majorly influences how some people live their lives. Maybe we’re missing something critical here?

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Let’s dive in.

I don’t personally believe in reincarnation, yet. I don’t not believe in it either.

If I had to guess, based on my interactions with people in my circles, I would ballpark the percentage of people in the US who believe in reincarnation at <5%. Broadening that to the entire world, and I’d estimate around 20%.

What does the research say? A 2021 Pew Research Center study asked participants a variety of religious questions. One of those was whether they believed “people will be reborn again and again in this world.” Across all U.S. adults, the researchers found that 33% believe in reincarnation. That sure surprises me.

Broken out by specific demographics, 30% of Christians believe in reincarnation, 12% of atheists, 27% of men, 38% of women, 40% of young people (ages 18-29), 23% of older people (ages 65+), 28% of white people, 45% of black people, and 42% of hispanic people.

The demographic breakdown varies vastly depending on background, religious affiliation, age, race, and other characteristics.

What’s interesting to me, as a young person, is that we’re less likely to believe in heaven and hell, but apparently more likely to believe in reincarnation. Is there a subtle cultural shift here?

Broadening the data, a 2025 Pew Research Study found that across 35 countries surveyed, the median percentage of adults believing in reincarnation was 33%. Adults in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Asia-Pacific region, and Latin America were especially likely to believe in reincarnation, with Kenya achieving a whopping 66%. Most European countries were toward the bottom of the scale, while North American countries were solidly in the middle.

When this was broken down by religious affiliation, Buddhists and Hindus were most likely to believe in reincarnation, followed by Christians, Jews, the Religiously Unaffiliated, and then Muslims.

There were 10 countries with statistically significant differences between the youngest and oldest age groups, each showing a difference of 10+ percentage points between the oldest (who were less likely to believe in reincarnation) and the youngest (who were most likely to believe in reincarnation).

It seems like the phenomenon currently present in the US is actually part of a global trend. Why? What are people understanding that the rest of us don’t?

What sparked this discussion today was a brief comment buried in a long Reddit thread about what people realized as they got older. The first commenter answered, “That death is not the worst thing that can happen to me.” The next reply, and the crux of our conversation today, was “Reincarnation is.”

Someone, somewhere, thinks that reincarnation is worse than death. Why? The next comment in the chain provides a hint at the rationale: “This is really what starts frightening me more and more the older I get. I don’t understand how people can actually long for that. I am not ungrateful for my life, and I have been very lucky anyway. But the idea of having to do this over and over and over again—that’s a scary thought.”

Honestly, I can see where they’re coming from.

The younger you are, the longer life looks ahead of you. For instance, if you’re 5 years old, the next year of your life is equivalent to 20% of what you’ve lived thus far. If you’re 20, that’s just 5%, but if you’re 60, that’s only 1.6%. This is sometimes called the ratio effect, in which the change in proportion as you age can make life seem to pass more quickly.

Anecdotally, this tracks with our narrative thus far. Older people, who have lived longer and struggled through each and every day for the past 65+ years, are less likely to believe in reincarnation. Why?

There are a couple of reasons I can point to. Older generations in the U.S. and Europe grew up when traditional, institutional Christian faiths were more culturally dominant. Because religion played a more prominent role in earlier generations’ upbringing, these individuals have carried those beliefs and teachings into old age. Newer generations are less connected to institutional religion and more drawn to what is broadly termed “spirituality.” This category of belief is more inclusive of concepts like reincarnation, astrology, and spiritual energy.

Explanations of different religious upbringings and a broader cultural trend away from traditional religious adherence toward more personalized spiritual beliefs help account for why older people, especially in the U.S., are less likely to believe in reincarnation.

However, this doesn’t explain everything. Perhaps the most influential reason is that they’ve lived so long and, like our commenter above, they don’t want to keep doing that over and over.

The research specifically called out Buddhism and Hinduism for being much more likely to influence a belief in reincarnation, yet other religions still commanded significant percentages.

As we’ve seen, reincarnation is a central tenet of many Indian religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism.

For Buddhists, the Buddha believed in an afterlife in another world and in reincarnation. The often misunderstood principle of karma influences rebirth and, most importantly, these cycles of repeated birth and death are endless. Every being reincarnates, creating the source of duhkha (which can be translated as suffering or pain), but this cycle can be stopped through achieving nirvana. Your past karma influences what you reincarnate as. As you would imagine, specifics differ between sects, but this description is a broad generalization of what most believe.

Hindus believe that the body dies, but not the soul, which is eternal. As in Buddhism, current karma affects the future in this life as well as future forms and lives. There is no permanent heaven or hell in most sects. In the afterlife, the soul is reborn as another being in either heaven, hell, or as a living being on Earth (human, animal, etc.). Once your karma runs out (in whichever place you are in), you’ll die and reincarnate. This cycle continues until you embark on a spiritual pursuit, gain self-knowledge, and attain moksa, which finally releases you from the cycle of reincarnation.

For the most part, mainstream Christianity doesn’t preach the tenets of reincarnation, so why do so many Christians believe in it? First, unlike some other religions, many forms of Christianity in the U.S. are highly decentralized, allowing for a wider range of interpretations of core teachings. Secondly, the concept of reincarnation was popular in the ancient world, particularly among Greek philosophers and early Christian groups such as the Gnostics and Cathars. These groups were ultimately deemed heretical, and their teachings were rejected; however, these ideas do have a historical connection to Christianity. Finally, some Christians who believe in reincarnation may not be fully aware of the theological incompatibility with mainstream Christian teachings.

No matter where you sit on the matter and what your background is, there are some intriguing insights to be gained by delving into the topic of reincarnation. For instance, one user on Reddit explains a unique viewpoint I hadn’t considered before:

Another thing people fail to realize is that if you believe in reincarnation, half of your belief already came true. Think about it for a second. You literally came to life. Reincarnation is the belief that it’s just simply going to happen again. So half of your belief has already come true. However, no one has actually been to heaven, hell, or experienced the void. So reincarnation comes the closest to actually being real because we’ve already experienced half of it.

In comparison to other viewpoints of the “afterlife” or “hereafter”, reincarnation viewed through this lens does offer some sense. It’s easy to look around us throughout our lives and see cycles (death and rebirth, sun and moon, weather, the seasons, etc.), so the ideas of reincarnation make more intuitive sense than some other fields of thought. However, just because it makes sense doesn’t mean it’s “true” (whatever meaning you describe to that word).

Another interesting perspective is offered by Bryce Haymond in a 2019 essay on the matter titled “The Mystical Resurrection or Reincarnation of the Ocean in Every Wave.” He writes:

I like to use the analogy of a wave in the ocean, as many others have used. The ego or individual is like the wave. The true Self is like the ocean. A wave arises in the ocean. It is unique in form, in shape, in size, in speed, in arrangement of its atoms, in its duration, etc. It has a host of qualities which are particular to its specific manifestation, and these endure as a kind of pattern through time.
But eventually the wave subsides back into the ocean, or crashes on the beach. It comes to an end, a total, complete, thorough, absolute end. That particular wave will never rise again. Ever. In all eternity. It was unique in itself, a unique manifestation of the ocean, with all its particular qualities. It will never be repeated. Ever. That is not what repeats.
The ocean will wave again. Another wave will arise in the ocean, with a different set of qualities, a different but similar form, shape, size, speed, arrangement of atoms, duration, which are all particular to its specific manifestation, and these will endure through time until it comes to its end.
What these waves do not know is that they were not merely unique waves, they were the ocean. If they had minds, they might be quite fearful of their dissolution on the beach, fearing that they may never rise again. But they have forgotten that they are really the ocean. Did the ocean cease to be when the wave subsided or crashed on the shore? Not at all. And it will rise again in new waves, each one unique and particular in itself, but never a repeat of a previous one. Each and every one will be a new unique manifestation of the ocean. It is the ocean that endures through innumerable lifetimes of waves.
When we realize we are not merely the wave, but the ocean, we have in essence been “resurrected,” realizing we are the “reincarnation” of the Divine, because we now know our true eternal identity, that which has arisen as all prior forms/beings, and that which will arise again in all future forms/beings, eternally.

In his perspective, there’s this centralized “form” that we all reincarnate into and from, and, as such, we become similar but unique versions of ourselves, all stemming from the original source. It’s a complicated concept, but it might have resonated with you given your personal experiences or upbringing.

Lastly, the final perspective I want to present was articulated by Thomas Ryan in 2015. In the article, he discusses the differences between Eastern and Western views of reincarnation.

In Hinduism, for example, the cycle of rebirth is generally a fearful thing referred to as the “wheel of karma.” The wheel is tied to notions of guilt and punishment and evokes fright; it’s something people want to be liberated from as soon as possible.
But among North Americans and western Europeans, reincarnation is often given a very different spin: it represents new and positive opportunity. It’s not a burden but a comfort positively associated with new possibilities for self-fulfillment. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it is a reflection of our modern “buffet” approach to life—the more variety and diversity I can have, the tastier and more interesting this “meal” will be! So the prospect of being able to come back to the table of life without limit is a positive one.

In essence, there are at least two potential mindsets with which reincarnation can be addressed. The first is how our commenter above treats it: primarily as a burden, a fearful occurrence of endless reincarnation. The second is how some in the West may be approaching it: seeing the positives and recognizing it as an opportunity to continuously learn and improve over time.

Long story short, the goal of this essay isn’t to convince you one way or another. I don’t think I’ve even convinced myself one way or the other. It’s primarily to showcase that there’s probably a large dialogue concerning reincarnation that we’re not considering in our lives for many reasons.

For me, I haven’t spent a lot of time with it because I haven’t had many people around me who have died, so I haven’t needed to consider what’s happening to them after they die. I’m also young and haven’t considered what’s next for me because there’s still so much here now for me.

I’ve brought up a couple of intriguing perspectives and resources so far, but there are thousands more if you’re interested in diving deeper into this subject. We don’t necessarily need every answer now, but it’s good to know a little more about what we don’t know.

To conclude, there are many different views on reincarnation throughout history. There’s no consensus across the U.S. or even across the world today. There are convincing arguments on both sides of the aisle. You may be like me, stuck solidly in the middle, or you might be on one side or the other.

Ultimately, whatever works best for you is what you should pursue. Maybe you’re like me and haven’t fully considered where you stand. In contrast, you might know exactly what you’re looking for and where you are. Either way, continue learning, stay curious, and remember you might not know everything—you might find you resonate with things you’ve never considered before.

That’s a wrap on this deep dive.

Found this analysis valuable? The best way to support Brainwaves is to share it with someone who’d benefit from these insights.

Drew Jackson

Founder & Writer

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Next Deep Dive: The Circular Economy - March 4th, 2026
This Saturday: Weekly roundup of breaking developments across energy, space, venture capital, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy
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The Saturday Morning Newsletter #77

Drew Jackson — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:35:15 GMT

This Week I’m Tracking: 13 developments across the sectors shaping our future

Reading Time: 6 minutes of curated insights

New to these updates? They pair with our bi-weekly Brainwave analyses for comprehensive sector coverage. Wednesday’s deep dive explored revisiting value creation and capture - catch up here.

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Let’s dive in.

#1: The Bland Company

Description: The Bland Company is a developer of protein from agricultural byproducts.

Why Is This Company Interesting? The Bland Company recently raised $2.7M in venture capital funding. The Bland Company is developing a proprietary bland protein for use in supplementing baked goods, powders, and other food products. Through a stable supply chain, companies can source proteins at low cost with minimal environmental impact.

#2: Constellr

Description: Constellr is a developer of thermal intelligence technology.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Constellr recently raised $44M in venture capital funding. Constellr is developing a thermal intelligence system mapping the entire Earth’s surface. This has use cases for governments, maritime activities, urban development planners, energy conglomerates, and many more entities. They have a network of satellites in orbit that can measure heat signatures across a wider range than competitors in the current market.

#3: Project Omega

Description: Project Omega is converting nuclear fuel into power sources.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Project Omega recently raised $12M in venture capital funding. Project Omega emerged from stealth this week, designed to address the advanced nuclear recycling challenge. Nuclear energy production over the last few decades has created a large stockpile of waste that could be recycled into new fuel. Project Omega is tackling this complex project to create a domestic supply of nuclear fuel through a proprietary recycling process.

#4: Waste to Energy

Description: Waste to Energy is a developer of modular waste-to-energy plants.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Waste to Energy recently raised $10M in venture capital funding. Waste to Energy facilities use a range of biomass feedstocks to generate usable energy. They ran a pilot project in 2022 and are now ready to scale further, delivering circular waste management and energy generation across the industrial sector.

#5: Hades

Description: Hades is a critical minerals mining and geothermal energy startup.

Why Is This Company Interesting? Hades recently raised $15M in venture capital funding. Hades is a mining company that, in its pursuit of core minerals deep underground, uses its drilling sites to establish geothermal energy plants. This model is ingenious, as the company can leverage the technology and margins on the front end without creating unnecessary waste at the end.

ABC News: Why China Continues to Build Many Coal Power Plants

China opened 50 coal plants last year, more than doubling historical averages. Why? China remains in a rapid development phase and seeks to capitalize on momentum around artificial intelligence, which consumes significantly more energy. As the country continues to lead the world in the clean energy transition, critics argue that this detracts from its main message.

The New York Times: EPA Rejects CO2 as the Cause of Human Detriment and Lower Well-being

It’s a dark day for America’s impact on climate change. Trump announced that he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment. This ends the national government’s ability to control pollution, unleashing caps and limits. The long-term impact of this decision could include higher death rates, increased climate change, and continued failure to meet the Paris Agreement.

The New York Times: El Niño May Be Back This Summer

Prepare now, as this summer may experience a similarly severe heat wave that could significantly affect quality of life and exacerbate global uncertainties. Droughts and floods are expected to begin in June, so now is the time to ensure you have sufficient food storage, resources, and stability to weather any disruptions.

Pitchbook: Fusion Eliciting Outsized Raise Activity

Fusion investments are breaking every venture capital mold, as these companies can raise hundreds of millions early on, without any products or significant traction. Many believe this is a side effect of the AI craze, as investors understand that the first company to properly commercialize fusion energy will capture a large share of the market, driving significant returns.

Pitchbook: Fintech Surged Ahead of AI in European Valuations

Especially in earlier-stage valuations, fintech startups commanded up to 41% higher valuations than AI startups, suggesting that European investors may be less willing to pay aggressive premiums for AI companies, instead prioritizing stable, ecosystem-focused investments such as fintech.

Big Think: Which of the 5 Philosophical Archetypes Are You?

This author posits that there are 5 core philosophical archetypes we all fit into. Here are the 5 (read more about them in the article):

The Sphinx: Someone who argues constantly, without totally articulating their position, for the sake of disagreement
The Leviathan: Someone with a vast answer for everything under one unified framework.
The Kitsune: Someone who uses wit, paradoxes, and role-playing to approach, critique, and defend their position.
The Minotaur: Someone lost in the sadness of human suffering, mortality, freedom, and absurdity.
The Garuda: Someone who won’t have a conversation without defining all of the terms first.

Big Think: The Pursuit of Mastery

Epictetus offered a radical idea: we can only truly master one thing in life. Initially, you’re probably disagreeing, but I promise there’s some good theory here. In this case, Epictetus isn’t talking about dominating our external circumstances, but rather cultivating our capacity for sound judgement. If we do this, we shape our intentions, values, and character. “Master that, and while you may not be in control of your circumstances, you will have mastered something far more important: yourself.”

Neura: A New Study on Life Expectancy

A new study found that genetics accounts for roughly 50-55% of human lifespan.

Previous studies estimated 15-30%, indicating there is still much to learn in this field and that it may differ significantly from prior assumptions.

Age seems to be a highly heritable trait similar to height. “This confirms that aging is not merely random wear and tear, but a genetically regulated process, validating the search for gene therapies and drugs that directly target the rate of human decline.”

Many intuitively agree that people live longer even though they don’t put much effort into healthy living.

What does this mean for you?

Well, firstly, look around in your family tree - there might be some hints for how long you might live. Given that you may live long (or longer than you had previously thought), what are the ways that you can best set yourself up for success in the long term?

Maybe it’s time to start that healthy habit.

That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.

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Drew Jackson

Founder & Writer

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