Not Boring by Packy McCormick - Weekly Dose of Optimism #103
Weekly Dose of Optimism #103Genetic Roadmap, International Entrepreneurship Rule, Eureka, Bloody Build!, The Nuclear CompanyToday’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Eight Sleep If you want to start every day feeling optimistic, you need to get an Eight Sleep. Puja and I used to fight over the temperature every night. Eight Sleep solved that. I go -8 cold, she goes +3 hot, and we both sleep happy. Now, with the Pod 4 Ultra it even elevates to improve air flow and stop my snoring. It is also clinically proven to give you up to one hour more of quality sleep every night. When the kids wake me up in the middle of the night, I drag the whole next day. When I get my eight hours, I float. Everything feels easier and more fun. You know what I’m talking about; nothing impacts your performance more than sleep. And nothing I’ve tried has improved my sleep as much as Eight Sleep. It’s life leverage. Invest in better sleep. It pays dividends. Join me and thousands of athletes, health experts, and founders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia, Bryan Johnson, and Lewis Hamilton who trust Eight Sleep to keep them performing at their best. Head to eightsleep.com/notboring and use code NOTBORING to get $350 off Pod 4 Ultra. Hi friends 👋, Happy Friday and welcome back to our 103rd Weekly Dose of Optimism. Been a pretty wild week since we last wrote you. Watching a presidential assassination play out on social media has been exactly what I thought it would be like. Which is to say, very chaotic. Thankfully, the assassin was unsuccessful, former President Trump is healthy, and — even if just for a few moments — the nation seemed united. Let’s get to it. (1) A roadmap for affordable genetic medicines Kliegman et al in Nature (h/t Elliot)
The scientific breakthrough is often just the starting point. To make an impact, innovations need to scale. Almost every week, we cover a breakthrough in research or drug development related to genetic medicines. The pace of innovation in gene therapy is hard to keep up with, and we believe will ultimately have a massive impact on how we manage and cure diseases in the not-so-distant future. The one issue is that gene therapies are currently extremely expensive. CASGEVY, for example, is a genome editing therapy used for treating sickle cell disease. It also cost, as a one-time treatment, approximately $2.2M per patient. CASGEVY is not alone — each of the 19 genetic therapies approved by the FDA are wildly expensive. The high prices are a result of some combination of perverse incentives, manufacturing limitations, and costly regulations. A team of researchers and policy experts, lead by Melinda Kliegman, proposed a plan for bringing those costs down. The roadmap consists of a combination of pricing adjustments, manufacturing innovation, and regulatory changes. One of the key proposals in the roadmap is a new pricing model that could reduce the per-patient cost of genetic therapies tenfold. The researchers suggest a framework that ties the final price of a product to the cost of development and deployment, while ensuring maximum insurance coverage. This approach could bring the price of a therapy down from millions to hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient - still expensive, but a significant improvement that could expand access dramatically. The team also proposes a novel business model that distributes responsibilities while leveraging diverse funding sources. This model combines the strengths of academic institutions, medical research organizations, and public benefit corporations to create a sustainable path for developing and commercializing genetic therapies. By mixing different organizational structures and funding mechanisms, this approach aims to balance the need for profitability with the imperative of accessibility. What's particularly compelling about this roadmap is that it doesn't require a complete overhaul of the current system. Many of the proposed changes, such as modifications to academic licensing provisions and manufacturing innovations, could be implemented within the existing regulatory framework. How exciting that we’re in the boring business model innovation phase of something as miraculous as editing our genes. (2) Biden Administration Aims To Boost Immigration Among Entrepreneurs Stuart Anderson for Forbes
In the final days of the Obama Administration, the International Entrepreneur Rule went into effect and over the last eight years has done little in the way of actually impacting entrepreneurship in America. The rule was designed to allow foreign entrepreneurs to stay in the United States for up to five years to build and scale their businesses. Yet since 2021, the USCIS — which manages the program — has only received 94 applications and only 73 foreign entrepreneurs have successfully completed the process Recently, the Biden Administration released this data — in an apparent call for more folks to take advantage of the rule — and updated its policy on what qualifies a for entrepreneur for the program. Based on the new thresholds, essentially all you have to do is start a decent startup…raising $265K, especially within tech, is not exactly a major feat. That said, it should attract more qualified foreign entrepreneurs to America which is just about one of the most important things we can do as a country. Around half of all "unicorn” startups have a foreign founder. I’ll resist listing all of the major companies that impact our lives everyday that were founded by an immigrant. Attracting the best and brightest from all around the world and convincing them to stay and build in our country has been America’s competitive advantage for the last 250+ years. We should make more policies (and policy updates) to ensure we keep that competitive advantage over the next 250 years. (3) Former OpenAI Researcher to Launch AI Education Company Alicia Clanton for Bloomberg
Speaking of foreign founders in the U.S., former OpenAI and Telsa researcher Andrej Karpathy is starting an AI company that will provide support to educators. In a very meta move, Eureka’s first product will be a classes that teaches students to train their own versions of the company’s own model. Seems like a smart recruiting tactic to me. Two things to note here:
Just another step closer to putting a Primer in everyone’s pocket. (4) Local residents will lose right to block housebuilding Oliver Wright for The Times
IT’S TIME TO BLOODY BUILD INNIT. Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party and Leader of Opposition in the UK, pledged to accelerate Britain's economic growth by removing local authorities' power to block housing and infrastructure projects. The plan includes imposing housebuilding targets on councils and intervening if they fail to comply. NIMBYism will simply not be allowed under Starmer’s new plan. Honestly, I am not sure exactly how I feel about this one. On one hand, it’s great: a government with a strong posture towards building and economic development. On the other hand, I’m glad it’s happening in the UK and not the U.S. If Senator Mitch McConnell tomorrow proposed legislation that gives the U.S. federal government unilateral control over development, I am not sure I’d be for that. Yes, certainly more things would get built, but do we really want the government to be forcing development projects against the will of local residents? NIMBYs are annoying and their influence should certainly be muted, but I wouldn’t want to wipe away their power all at once. A bit of measured balance is a good thing. That said, in the UK, desperate times call for desperate measures. There’s a significant housing shortage and slowing economic growth. Nothing a little government-mandated building program can’t fix. (5) New nuclear startup aims big Andrew Freedman for Axios
Packy here. The nuclear train keeps chugging. Choo choo. This time, with the announcement of a new company in the space, the humbly named The Nuclear Company. There are a number of exciting nuclear startups out there. What made my ears (eyes?) perk up reading this is exactly which kind of nuclear startup The Nuclear Company is: a developer. On Age of Miracles, Julie Kozeracki from the US Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office highlighted the developer model as a missing piece:
The Nuclear Company won’t be designing a new type of reactor. They’ll be using old, approved designs. What they will do is orchestrate all of the things that go into getting large reactors live, from coordinating financing to standardizing processes and holding various parties accountable to timelines to bringing together buyers ranging from utilities to corporates and industrials. As it stands, utilities — which will very likely only manage one nuclear project in any of its employees’ lifetimes — manage the process. They kind of learn everything from scratch, stumble through it all, learn a lot of hard-earned lessons, and never, ever apply them again. And then, the next time a utility wants nuclear, that utility starts all over. It’s one of many reasons nuclear is expensive and not getting cheaper. The hope for The Nuclear Company is that they’ll continue to get better and better at the process as they roll out 6 gigawatt fleets using the same reactors over and over again. If they can, maybe we can start putting gigawatts back on the map, on time and on budget. This won’t be fast — TNC wants to begin producing electricity by the mid-2030s — and it’s not as sexy as a new reactor design, but it’s important. Bonus: Chapter 1 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto Jason Crawford, Roots of Progress
Packy again. Friend of Not Boring Jason Crawford, the founder of Roots of Progress Institute, just announced that he’s writing a book called The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. In the announcement thread, he explained what he would be writing about and why:
Jason is one of my favorite writers / thinkers on the internet. He’s been into Progress before Progress was cool, and he always takes a thoughtful, balanced, and fact-based approach to understanding why humans have been able to do the amazing things we have, and how we might do more of those amazing things in the future. Progress isn’t tribal for him; it’s a critical field of study and practice. Instead of publishing the book all at once, Jason is serializing it on Substack at a pace of roughly one chapter / essay per week. The first chapter, Fish in Water, is a beautiful start. I’ve often thought that the best thing proponents of progress could create to sway those who somehow oppose it is a Counterfactual Reality Device (CRD): an immersive VR headset that puts its wearer in the place of someone living before much of the last couple of century’s advances came to be. The wearer would feel very cold or hot, probably hungry, and definitely dirty. They might feel the sorrow of losing a child too early, or the fear of fighting a battle with axes and swords. They certainly wouldn’t be able to tweet about the evils of technology from their iPhone, safely ensconced in a well-lit, air conditioned room. Until the CRD is born, Fish in Water does the best job of describing some of the challenges associated with the good ol’ days and categorizing just how lucky we are to be alive right now. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the chapters as they come out, and if you like the Weekly Dose, I suspect you’ll enjoy subscribing, too. Have a great weekend y’all. Thanks to Eight Sleep for sponsoring! We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday. Thanks for reading, Packy + Dan |
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