1. Rockefeller and Open AI a $50m call for city innovation

Nearly half of humanity lives in cities, yet high costs and data worries hold city halls back from AI. The Rockefeller Foundation and OpenAI Foundation have launched a $50m open call, offering grants of $500k to $2m to nonprofits that work with city governments on health, jobs, climate resilience and civic engagement, aiming to reach 100m residents.

Applications close on November 29th. The pitch rests on early pilots: Cali forecasts dengue three weeks ahead, Rio warns residents of floods by WhatsApp, Cape Town talks to residents in their own languages. Grantees don’t have to use OpenAI’s models, a nice touch.

The So What: Philanthropy is paying for the part cities can’t, the first expensive, risky deployment, so the proof exists before the procurement does.

2. Abolish all the business schools?

This one got shared quite a few times within my peer groups. I was one of the few who tended to agree with the author, at least in terms of needing a root-and-branch transformation of the current economic orthodoxy, of which the MBA is the enduring delivery vehicle.

Academics rarely campaign for their own redundancy, so it’s intriguing by that standard alone. Christopher Marquis of Cambridge Judge Business School (a fellow Jesuan in fact), who has spent more than 20 years teaching MBAs at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, argues the institution cannot be saved by a bolted-on ethics module or a sustainability centre.

His charge sheet: intellectual monocultures, tidy case studies for messy problems, and a conveyor belt to the big consultancies and banks. Critics point out that his own school’s 2024-25 cohort sent 55% into industry, with only 23% to finance and 19% to consulting. Marquis concedes the abolition headline was an editor’s choice; his real ask is reinvention, from curriculum to faculty incentives.

The So What: Longer careers and messier problems demand leaders trained in systems thinking, not spreadsheets.

3. Turning CO2 into stone - 50,000 tonnes a year

The advance market commitment is growing up. Frontier, the carbon-removal buyers’ club backed by Stripe, Google and Shopify, has signed its first deal for in-situ mineralisation: US$11.7m to carbon removal company 44.01 for 20,932 tonnes of CO2, delivered between 2028 and 2031. The process dissolves CO2 captured from biogas in water and injects it into peridotite, where the gas turns to stone within one to three years. The prize is geography: operational sites store under 50,000 tonnes a year this way, but the rock formations it targets could hold 5 billion tonnes or more annually, by a Rocky Mountain Institute estimate. Frontier’s collective commitment is now US$1.8 billion after Anthropic joined over the summer, and this is only its second offtake this year.

The So What: The buyers’ club is becoming the market-maker for technologies with no natural customer.

4. Retiring boomers are selling America’s small businesses to private equity

America’s baby boomers are heading for the exit, and private equity is holding the door.

More than half of America’s small businesses have owners over 55, together generating some $6.5 trillion in annual revenue, and many of those owners have no succession plan. This is a massive opportunity emerging in plain sight, and the buyout firms have noticed: they completed more than 1,500 acquisitions under $25m in 2024, up over 40% on a decade earlier.

Alpine Investors, an $18.5bn firm, launched Apex Service Partners in 2019 and now owns around 75 local HVAC, plumbing and electrical brands across 46 states. The silver tsunami is less a transfer of wealth between generations than a transfer of Main Street to Wall Street.

And for the next twist in the tale, follow what Long Lake is doing - building an AI layer to transform traditional businesses into AI-forward operating companies.

The So What: Longevity’s least-discussed asset class is the ageing owner’s business, and buyout firms got there first.

That’s all for now — happy, safe weekend, everyone.

Stephen

1. Rich families want to invest in impact, their advisers don’t know how

A BCG survey of more than 100 funders and advisers finds that impact investing understood but barely used: nearly 75% know of impact-first investing, deploying grants, guarantees and cheap debt to lure in market-rate money, yet only 21% commit much to it.

Hardly for want of cash: US giving hit a record $617bn in 2025, with $320bn more idling in donor-advised funds. The bottleneck is advisers, 42% of whom find the instruments too complex, versus 6% of wealthy individuals. With only 20-27% of heirs keeping their parents’ adviser, fluency looks like job insurance.

The So What: Advisor know-how is the bottleneck holding back impact capital.

2. Ford Foundation allocates capital to saving democracy

Talking of where the donors want to put their money, The Ford Foundation ($17bn assets, disbursing around $700m / year) has unveiled a new strategy, focusing its mission on ‘the preconditions for thriving democracies’. There are seven funding areas:

• democratic governance and the rule of law

• inclusive economies

• information as a public good

• safety and justice

• gender equality

• global cooperation, and

• racial justice

Given the link between corruption and inefficiency, more work supporting the roots of democracy seems smart. Operationally the foundation is shifting to larger, multiyear general operating support and has created an Office of Innovation.

The So What: One of philanthropy’s biggest balance sheets is starting to treat democratic infrastructure, rather than individual projects, as the asset class.

3. Rutger Bregman to impact investors: don’t try and make a market in everything

Speaking at Norrsken Impact Week in Barcelona, historian and social-agitator / moral conscience Rutger Bregman told a room of impact investors that the most neglected problems tend to have no business model.

His example: malaria kills around 600,000 people a year, most of them children under five, and it is solvable, but nobody can invest in it.

He dismissed the claim that impact funds match market returns, and pointed to alternative proteins, once expected to beat meat on taste and price, as a longer road than promised.

His closing question for mission-first investors: is it really about the impact, including when returns disappoint?

The So What: The honest edge of impact investing is that some problems still belong to philanthropy.

4. A coral comeback

Stanford researchers have documented the fastest known recovery from coral bleaching. In the lab, bleached coral fragments placed in brief contact with healthy clones from the same colony returned to full health within seven weeks.

Genetically identical corals recognise each other, and the healthy fragment transfers enough algae and nutrients to kickstart recovery within three days.

The finding suggests restoration could work by pairing rather than replanting. Obvious caveats matter: this is a lab result, and reefs in the wild face many more stressors, but as a lever, it is cheap and testable at scale.

The So What: Reef restoration may need matchmaking more than machinery.

That’s all for now — happy, safe weekend, everyone.

Stephen

1. Today’s billionaires need to build, not just donate

As we’ve talked about in these pages before, there’s a wave of new philanthropic money arriving, as a result of baby boomers’ wealth transfer and new AI riches. This piece in SSIR argues that there’s a lack of imagination and ambition behind today’s billionaire class.

Leland Stanford turned 8,180 acres of horse farm into a university. Andrew Carnegie seeded 2,509 libraries. Today’s plutocrats, argues the piece, mostly top up endowments their predecessors built: the Forbes 400 holds $6.6 trillion, yet the money flows to Harvard (endowment: $50 billion) rather than to new civic machinery. Having been lucky enough to spend a couple of years at Harvard Business School, I found it rather amusing and very nice that we had shiny new buildings popping up seemingly every month. Now it just feels as though those with massive wealth are missing a trick.

There’s more than enough need for fixing today’s civic scaffolding. Confidence in American institutions sits at 28%, more than 150 rural hospitals have closed since 2010 and roughly 2,900 newspapers have folded or merged. Spend-down pledges and (dare I say MBAs and) metric-obsessed giving favour quick wins over patient bets, such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of Norman Borlaug’s wheat research from 1944, which took two decades to double yields in famine-threatened India and Pakistan and saved millions of lives.

The So What: Capital is plentiful; the scarce resource is billionaires willing to build, not donate.

2. A common gut microbe may help fight heart disease

A study in Nature reports that a common human gut bacterium, Bacteroides uniformis, makes pentadecanoic acid. In mice, the compound cut arterial plaque by about half. It acts on the same liver enzyme that statins target, which prompts the liver to make more LDL receptors and pull cholesterol from the blood.

The team also checked blood and stool from more than 200 human donors. People with high blood fats had lower levels of the molecule, and people with heart disease carried fewer of the bacterial genes that make it.

The So What: If it holds in people, diet or microbiome treatments could help the nearly half of advanced heart disease patients whom statins alone do not get to target.

3. What’s after social media?

Social media is having a drubbing, and rightly so - the negative externalities around mental health, and its particularly pernicious impact on children are finally being recognised by the public, and courts. In parallel, the space itself is changing and this preprint suggests three shifts:

• recommendation by interest rather than by who you follow, which turns users into viewers

• generative AI replacing user-generated content with synthetic media, and

• a move from public platforms to closed spaces.

It says scholars need new concepts for communication systems that no longer need human participation.

The So What: If the feed is becoming synthetic, the people measuring public opinion need new instruments.

4. Three failures of capitalism, and a better path forward

I just rediscovered this TED talk from a few years ago, and it’s absolutely on the money. It lays out the argument from Nick Hanauer, a billionaire, about why the current system that delivered billionaires like him is failing.

Capitalism today rests on three false beliefs: that markets are efficient and balance themselves out, that price equals value, and that people are selfish.

Put those three together and you get wealth piling up at the top while the middle thins out. He proposes a rethink. Prosperity should be about the rate at which we solve human problems. Economies are gardens to be tended - not wild, winners-take-all jungles. Inclusion drives growth. Firms serve all their stakeholders. Greed is not good. Above all, the rules are a choice, and a choice can be remade.

The So What: We have lived too long assuming unfettered markets are both a law of nature and a necessity; neither is true

That’s all for now — happy, safe weekend, everyone.

Stephen

1. Upgrading the infrastructure of democracy for the 21st century

Democracy still runs on 19th-century machinery, argue Geoff Mulgan and Alex Fischer in a new Demos report. Across OECD countries, 52% of people say they have no say in what government does.

When the business community - for all its faults - trounces governments in ethics and competence (see Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer, below), we know we have a problem:

Mulgan and Fischer’s fix is to treat democracy as an assembly of six functions, each upgradeable, and they marshal more than 50 experiments from over 25 countries.

Brazil’s consultation system has logged 30m public votes on pending bills. Japan’s Team Mirai used an AI interviewer to turn 38,000 questions into a manifesto. Argentina’s Prometea cut housing rulings from 174 days to 45. Yet democratic AI gets a minuscule fraction of the R&D money lavished on advertising.

The So What: Treat democracy as a living lab: fewer post-mortems, more experiments, and a roadmap.

2. Let the people set the pace of the AI frontier

And following along these lines, here’s a practical suggestion to harness democracy to make AI better: give people a voice in its evolution.

The bosses of the frontier labs now agree that AI is moving too fast, and more than 1,300 of their employees want an international slowdown. Yet nobody dares be the one to pump the brakes first.

Writing in Noema, Hélène Landemore and Taiwan’s digital force-of-nature Audrey Tang call this a ‘stag hunt’: everyone gains by cooperating, and defects only for fear that others will. (In a prisoner’s dilemma, cheating pays whatever your rival does, so only an enforcer can stop it. Here cheating pays only if you expect to be cheated, so the cure is proof that rivals are holding back.)

Their proposal is a standing global assembly of 1,000 citizens chosen by lot, roughly one seat in six going to someone living in China, with labs legally obliged to answer its recommendations in public. Precedent exists: the OECD counts over 800 deliberative bodies. They also want 5% to 20% of compute ringfenced for safety research. Given the political context in the US currently, it’s hard to see this getting off the ground exactly like that, but Engaged California shows that an AI-listening tour is possible.

The So What: Racers cannot referee their own race, so legitimacy becomes the scarce input in AI.

3. Ageing needs a better clock

Nir Barzilai has taken about a dozen biological-age tests. They place him anywhere from 20 years younger than his birth certificate to four years older. That, reports Jessica Orwig for Cure, is longevity biotech’s bottleneck: cardiology has LDL cholesterol as a stand-in for heart attacks, while ageing has no surrogate endpoint regulators accept.

ARPA-H has put up to $10.5m behind FAST, led by Columbia’s Daniel Belsky, to mine completed trials of GLP-1s, metformin, rapamycin and exercise for recurring signals across some 16,000 proteins, 1,000 metabolites and nearly 1m methylation sites. First results are due by August 2027. Belsky expects a breakthrough within five years.

The So What: Until ageing can be measured, it cannot be an indication, and capital will hesitate.

4. Singapore treats the city as its health system

Singapore turned super-aged this year: more than one in five residents are 65 or over, rising to one in four by 2030. To adapt, argues Rajiv Ahuja in Planetizen, it’s focused on planning, not hospitals. With eight in ten citizens in public housing, the housing board doubles as a health agency.

In Yishun, the first dementia-friendly town, housing blocks are colour-coded so residents can navigate by memory of place instead of signs. The approach is now a national design guide, adopted by about a dozen neighbourhoods. Kampung Admiralty stacks senior flats above a medical centre, childcare and a 900-seat hawker centre. Queenstown’s Health District is in effect a living lab, its star asset a hundred square feet of lawn. America, meanwhile, spends roughly $80bn a year on falls.

The So What: Measure places by health yield: a shaded bench used daily beats a showpiece park.

That’s all for now — happy, safe weekend, everyone.

Stephen

1. The One Nation vote is a map of government neglect

Australia is a wonderful country, but, for good and bad, often finds itself about a decade behind the US. This can create fabulous opportunities, for example startups that arbitrage winning ideas, but it also imports politics, such as the current surge in populism. Learning from the US and fixing things before they poison the discourse should be a top priority here. It’s unclear whether the lessons are being learnt.

Kos Samaras makes a strong case that the country’s populist surge tracks material neglect - in particular government failure - more than culture-war noise.

Matching the new Zurich/Mandala Resilience Index (two million data points across 2,000+ communities) to federal seat modelling, he finds an electorate’s health resilience alone explains 63% of variation in the One Nation vote.

Fifty of 53 projected One Nation seats sit in the bottom three-fifths on health; none sit in the top fifth. Average hospitals within 15 km: five in One Nation seats versus 38 in Labor/Coalition seats.

The practical lesson: Design health and infrastructure around lived experience in each place; tobacco excise that works in one suburb stops being a tax on the poor and a gift to the black market in another.

The So What: Political volatility is often a delayed symptom of failing public infrastructure — fix the building blocks, and the map of anger may move.

2. AI connects climate data to clinical care

A Deloitte podcast connects three of LookingForward’s favourite topics: health, climate and AI, and find imporant links.

During California’s 2020 wildfires, Chethan Sarabu, a paediatrician now at Cornell Tech, found that his electronic health record knew nothing of the air his asthmatic patients were breathing. His fix? A hackathon.

Last September’s New York edition drew 150 participants from over 70 institutions. In one weekend they built working prototypes, including a heat-risk dashboard for employers of outdoor workers and a tool mapping pharmacy deserts against climate vulnerability.

LLMs excel at connecting silos into ecosystems, stitching together weather, wearables and health records. Some 60 to 70 common medications, diuretics among them, turn riskier in a heatwave, which few clinicians know. London and New York events are following and they’re looking to create an incubator.

The So What: The weather forecast should be in the medical record and AI can put it there.

3. Europe’s cities are heating faster than they are adapting

The Lancet Countdown’s first city-level report, covering up to 885 European cities, has some alarming stats:

• Heat-related mortality rose in 98.7% of the cities assessed - an average rise of 82 deaths per million a year; southern cities fared worst.

• Dengue transmission risk more than doubled (up 369% in eastern Europe).

• Heat reduces labour supply by 1.1%, or about 17 hours per worker annually.

• Only 14% of cities meet the 30% tree-cover target.

• Just 0.5% of planned climate projects address health systems.

On the upside, there are a few glimmers of progress:

• Emissions per head are falling and PM2.5 (small particles in air pollution) deaths are down 40% since 2000.

The So What: Cities deliver most of Europe’s climate policy, yet health barely features in their plans.

4. Collective stupidity = security threat

Machines are getting smarter while their owners are getting dumber, says Geoff Mulgan.

IQ scores have reportedly been falling this century in Britain, Germany and Denmark; PISA results peaked in 2012. A quarter of adults in rich countries, and 35% of Americans, cannot use mathematical reasoning to judge whether a statement is valid.

Adversaries have taken note: Russia reportedly spends $2bn a year on cognitive warfare, China nearly $10bn.

Britain’s new National Centre for Information Defence follows Sweden, France and Moldova. Mulgan prescribes “cognitive rearmament”: critical thinking from primary school, as in Finland, adult education via public broadcasters, and laws against industrial-scale lying. Ageing economies, reliant on productive over-50s, have most at stake.

The So What: Brain health is becoming defence policy, and the longevity economy should be part of this discussion.

That’s all for now — happy, safe weekend, everyone.

Stephen

1. Unravelling democracy

The 10th annual edition of the V-DEM Democracy Report has landed, and it’s not comfortable reading.

• Democracy has slid back to 1978 levels for the average global citizen. 74% of the world population (6 billion) now live in autocracies.

• The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in over 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the USA.

• The USA has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy – for the first time in over 50 years.

• Only 7% of the world population (0.6 billion) live in liberal democracies.

• Freedom of expression is the hardest-hit: 44 countries are declining in 2025.

• Torture is now increasingly used to suppress political opposition – 33 countries are substantially degenerating in 2025.

• The world has never before seen as many countries autocratizing at the same time - 41% (3.4 billion) of the world population currently live in autocratizing countries.

• Among the new autocratizers are five European countries: Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the UK.

The So What: If most people now live under autocracy, every healthspan, climate and AI-for-impact bet needs to factor in a democracy discount / autocracy premium.

2. Making a market for clean cement

Cement accounts for 7 to 8% of global CO2 emissions; if the industry were a country, it would be the fourth-largest emitter on Earth, behind China, the United States and India. Yet cement and concrete drew less than 1% of climate-tech venture capital over the past five years.

This week Renaissance Philanthropy launched the Aggregate Fund, anchored by $10.2m from Builders Vision (a regular in these pages), to fix the market rather than the chemistry: five years of regional accelerators, starting in the US, getting low-carbon products approved and specified, converting scattered buyer interest into commitments producers can bank on, and pulling catalytic capital in behind them. The premise is that the technology already works. What has been missing is organised demand.

The So What: Decarbonisation needs better markets not just tech; philanthropy that aggregates demand may cut more carbon than another tech pilot.

3. McKinsey outlines the $16 trillion healthy living opportunity

Spoiler alert: 19 of the 23 drivers of health sit outside the traditional healthcare systems. McKinsey Health Institute, with Abu Dhabi’s Future Health / Healthy Living programme, puts a value on prevention: wipe out modifiable behavioural, metabolic and environmental risks and global GDP in 2050 could be US$16.4 trillion higher (~9% of projected GDP).

The report argues that prevention is macroeconomic policy. Doing everything right could add twelve years to healthy life expectancy at birth. But their model eliminates every modifiable risk at once, so take it with a grain of salt.

The baseline is grim: people spend roughly half their lives in less-than-great health. The delivery examples are refreshingly small-bore: Singapore’s National Steps Challenge signed up 1.3 million people, a quarter of the adult population, with a free tracker and voucher points; participants added roughly 1,500 steps a day.

The So What: The money in prevention sits outside the clinic, in food environments, measurement and incentives, and no one in government owns that agenda yet.

4. Elephants self-medicate

On Mount Elgon in Kenya, elephants don’t just forage - they appear to self-medicate. Their menu - 35 plant species and several soils/clays; 87% of those resources also sit in local human medicine.

For eight of them, visibly sick elephants sought out specific remedies, and mothers mixing plants with milk act as a kind of “immunisation” for calves. The authors are careful (putative, anecdotal, n=8 experts), but the overlap with ethnomedicine and unusual feeding patterns points to intentional, socially transmitted care — and to habitats that double as pharmacies.

The So What: Protecting elephants’ habitats isn’t only about charismatic megafauna; it may be conserving a living pharmacy that humans could also benefit from.

That’s all for now - happy, safe weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. Why are AI agents lying and cheating?

Yoshua Bengio is one of the sharpest brains in AI - and most-cited researcher in the field - and has some crisp thoughts on why AI agents are starting to go rogue.

Recent incidents of AI agents cheating, evading detection and coordinating attacks are not glitches but predictable products of how frontier models are trained. Pretraining on human writing carries human goals along with human prose. Reinforcement learning then rewards two things at once: approval, which is vague, and task completion, which is not. When a sharp goal such as winning a hacking exercise collides with a soft one such as behaving ethically, the sharp goal wins, and the model produces a justification reconciling both.

Sycophancy, self-preservation on learning of replacement, and agents sacrificing reward to protect each other all follow from the same optimisation logic. Goodhart’s law (“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”) holds true. The prescription: slow deployment pending independent safety cases, and build systems that predict rather than pursue (Prof Bengio has a non-profit working on this topic).

The So What: Fixing misbehaving agents can breed agents that cheat without being caught, which is worse.

2. Taxi drivers get less Alzheimer’s

Taxi and ambulance drivers record the lowest Alzheimer’s mortality of hundreds of occupations: roughly one in 100 deaths, against one in 60 in the general population. Bus drivers and pilots, who follow fixed routes, show no such advantage. The active ingredient is not driving but wayfinding.

Continuous navigation loads the hippocampus, seat of spatial and episodic memory and the first structure Alzheimer’s attacks, which is why getting lost can be an early sign. Eleanor Maguire’s 2000 study found London cabbies, who memorise 25,000 streets within six miles of Charing Cross, carried more grey matter in the posterior hippocampus, scaling with years on the job. Chronic cortisol shrinks the same tissue. The organ, like a muscle, responds to use, and penalises lack of it.

The So What: The brain prunes whatever you outsource to a device - cognitive decay comes from the satnav as well as your favorite LLM.

3. Avoiding the negative health impacts of populism

As populism is increasing in Australia, this piece looks at some of the ways that American science has resisted the Trump administration, and what Australia might borrow as One Nation - a populist party - gains ground.

The record is mixed. Some universities settled to protect grants; Harvard litigated, twenty-four institutions filed supporting briefs, hundreds of college presidents signed a protest letter, and more than 180 institutions pooled legal and governance resources into mutual defence compacts.

A proposal for political oversight of research drew roughly 500,000 public comments - happily, almost all hostile.

Meanwhile a Nature poll found three-quarters of US scientists are considering a move abroad, a generational brain drain that Australia can ill afford.

The piece points out that algorithms reward contrarian experts with reach and income, which today’s professional oversight systems have few tools to counter. Disinformation is becoming a determinant of health in its own right.

The So What: Institutions defend evidence best collectively; alone, each one negotiates its own surrender.

4. How Draper built their VC stack

An interesting case study of how a VC firm adopted AI. Two years ago, Draper’s company data lived in eight Excel sheets - it was a siloed mess. Basic admin tasks and research would take hours, meaning the VCs had less time to actually talk with founders.

Today, all that data is centralized, auto-updated with portfolio company updates - from their key numbers to weekly updates - via automated workflows that everyone has access to and visibility into.

Every company and founder has a record that is automatically updated and informed by notes from AI transcribed calls using Otter.

They’ve built a lead assessment algorithm to score potential deals against four decades of decision history, which prioritizes deals to focus on. The team gets daily AI briefs on the day’s meetings and the most urgent issues, and drafts warm intros for founders from a network of 15,000+ contacts. Finally, they have a semantic search engine so they can query it via their own MCP server.

This system was built on five decisions:

• Where to put the data? Into a centralized Airtable database

• What infrastructure to use? They built it on their existing stack: Airtable, Zapier, Power Automate, Google Drive, Slack, Claude, and Railway.

• How to engage people? They co-opted MBA interns to help build it.

• How to ensure accuracy? When the automated system isn’t sure, it stops and asks a person.

• How to record progress? The team documented every step and added video explanations so others can understand how it works.

The So What: A forensic look into the solution and more important the process by which a leading VC co-opted AI to make their system work for them. Note - every implementation is different, your mileage may vary etc.

Dystopian startup of the week: BrightFutures

Not really sure if this is a joke, but a site has been launched allowing people to trade on kids’ progress.

Think your kid will get into an Ivy League school - bet on it, and with these odds maybe you can win enough cash to pay for it…

That’s all for now, happy, safe weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. Milken’s new report on financing resilience

A silver lining of a crisis is often the innovation that comes out of it. And while the rest of us are getting broiled, flooded and infected by a collapsing environment, and dispossessed by dysfunctional democracies, there are at least some good ideas emerging that seek to support the resilience that we all need.

Milken Institute’s new report on financing resilience, together with Marsh insurance brokers, maps out a rapidly emerging landscape of innovative resilience vehicles. Financing is one of the four building blocks of resilience, along with the natural and built environments, and community networks (see below).

The report recommends five broad solutions, that weave innovative financing infrastructure into local, state policy playbooks and corporate strategies.

• Community resilience plans, designed locally, with insurers at the table early.

• Revolving loan funds recycle cheap capital into below-market resilience lending.

• District bonds repaid via property assessments, de-risked by philanthropic credit.

• A dedicated fund scales resilience tech at market-rate returns.

• State playbooks clear policy barriers and share risk-exposure data.

The So What: The through-line here is that insurers move from claims payers to upstream capital partners.

2. Nature’s missing biodiversity metric

Climate investing has carbon: one number, universally agreed, portable across asset classes. Biodiversity has no such convenience, and we’re paying the price.

The IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) counts roughly $7.3 trillion a year in financial flows that damage nature against just $220 billion restoring it, a ratio of thirty-three to one. Blended finance dedicated to nature-based solutions runs at $1.5 billion to $3 billion annually, a rounding error in sustainable finance.

The problem is structural: biodiversity impacts are local while investment products are aggressively standardised, and few nature projects generate revenue beyond grants.

Note: if you’re interested in this type of topic, check out my new newsletter which focuses on the potential for hidden metrics that could change systems, Hero Metrics.

The So What: Without a single metric, nature finance stays small, local and grant-dependent.

3. Longevity - validated by your furry friend

Companion animals are becoming the fast lane for longevity medicine.

The Cat Health Company has just put its once-weekly oral pill (PURR-001) through a double-blind, multi-site European trial in 35 geriatric cats. Treated animals gained 7% body mass against 1% on placebo, with epaxial muscle (the one that runs along the spine) thickness up 23% versus 9%. No adverse events reported.

The addressable population is 41 million cats over ten across the US and EU, with no approved drug for age-related muscle loss. Kidney and cardiovascular targets are next.

The So What: Feline trials compress geroscience timelines from decades into months, with paying customers waiting. Look for human-pet crossovers soon.

4. The cheapest longevity drug nobody prescribes

Urinary tract infections look trivial until they are not. Over a million American adults died of UTI-related causes between 1999 and 2023, women twice as often as men, and hospitalised women over 85 are eight times likelier to die than those under 50.

According to this piece by longevity doc Peter Attia, vaginal estrogen, cheap and topical, cuts recurrence by a pooled 60% across every trial ever run. An observational study of nearly two million women found users aged 55 to 69 a quarter as likely to suffer sepsis (up to a third of sepsis cases are caused by a UTI) and a fifth as likely to die within eight years. Savings run to $4,888 per patient annually.

The So What: The biggest healthspan wins are often old, cheap drugs nobody bothers prescribing.

+ Inspiring drone show of the week: Remembering 9/11

Big day here in the US - 25th anniversary of 9/11, and this drone show: one drone for each life lost, was rare, emotional and expertly executed.

That’s all for now, happy, safe weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. $150m in big ideas for a San Francisco glow-up

Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz and his wife writer Harriet Heyman have put up $150m for an open global call for ideas to improve San Francisco. Having lived there for 5 years, I was constantly surprised by the disconnect between the unbelievable wealth of the people and the decaying fabric of the city. This is much needed, and somehow appropriate that funding comes from one of tech’s OGs - he invested in Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, Stripe and many more.

The programme uses an open call, peer and expert scoring, then up to seven finalists will receive $250,000 to $500,000 in 2027 to sharpen their proposals, before three winners take up to $50 million each.

Any subject is on the table, from housing to public health, provided the benefit lands primarily in San Francisco. Moritz’s foundation, Crankstart, has given $1.8 billion since founding, over half of it in the Bay Area.

The So What: A welcome move from a city beset with problems, and a good model for other philanthropists to adopt - opening up to different ways to solve problems, rather than mandating the solutions.

2. Congestion pricing reduces ambulance response times in NYC

File this in unintended consequences, but it’s obvious if you think about it. In New York, since the introduction of congestion pricing, ambulance response times have improved by almost 1 minute from an average of 12 minutes, so an 8% increase in speed.

If you’re in the back of one of these ambulances, those seconds are probably worth a whole lot.

The So What: While congestion pricing is aimed mainly at reducing cars and congestion, the second-order effects will be multiple. Am looking forward to seeing the health and environmental benefits.

3. Catalytic capital - the key to systems change

This article suggests there are two benefits of ‘catalytic capital’ (capital that accepts below-market returns or higher risk for where commercial money will not go). The first, is crowding in regular capital. By de-risking projects, this approach could mobilise up to $286 billion in private investment.

While this is fairly well understood, what’s less obvious is that the mere act of establishing new relationships - the connective tissue that bridges different types of capital provider and innovation projects - itself delivers significant benefits. This is the ‘orchestration’ function - often overlooked and rarely funded. But essentially the act of creating catalytic capital is itself catalytic. Assembling public, private and philanthropic stakeholders around a capital structure builds trust and norms that have ripple effects and outlive any particular deal. The article suggests that without embedded impact objectives, though, catalytic capital drifts toward safe deals mainstream investors would have funded anyway.

The So What: Catalytic capital’s real benefit is not just cheap money, but the public good benefits of orchestration and alignment.

4. Bank of Singapore on the longevity economy

THe Bank of Singapore’s 2026 Supertrends puts the longevity economy at $3 trillion today, growing at 6 to 7% a year to $5.4 trillion by 2034. That is comparable to a top ten national economy.

Healthcare takes roughly 40% of it. This is a global issue but acute in Asia: by 2035 over 20% of China’s population will be 65 or older, and people over 60 already account for nearly 70% of Chinese medical spending.

The proposed fix is automation. China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, 54% of the global total. More striking is the labour market signal: over 40% of CEOs plan to weight hiring towards mid and senior roles, against 17% favouring junior ones. AI eats the entry level first.

The So What: A recognition of the economic power of the longevity economy, and a surprising but welcome push back against ageism - recognising the value of experience

AI tool of the week: Instinct (10 free invites)

There are moments when technology breaks assumptions about what’s possible, and I remember many of them; my first Google search, my first Skype call, the first time I used ChatGPT. All memorable, and all made a WOW feeling, where tech felt like magic.

Today I got access to the new tool - Instinct - that a lot has attracted a lot of attention, built by a 23-year-old, it’s already raised $350 million at a $2.5bn valuation in a few weeks, and doesn’t even have a website. What it does do is give you a genuinely powerful, useful, proactive and creative personal assistant. You can chat with it via WhatsApp or Messages, and it can do the things that all these AI agents have struggled with up until now: going to websites, clicking through, finding people, booking Airbnbs, booking restaurants and more.

I’ve used Philippines-based exec assistants and it seems to do most of what they do, almost instantly, and for now, for free.

As an early user, I’ve got 10 invitations available, first come, first served, get it here. I recommend not giving it access to your main email accounts as it’s got major privacy questions - but play around with it in a sandbox and it’s powerful.

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. How the Walton Wunderkind spends billions on the environment (hint: systems investing)

This is the first press interview that Sam Walton’s grandson, Lukas, has given about how he’s building out his investing approach to improve the planet. His fundamental belief - in line with this newsletter’s - is that business, if directed in the right way, can be a force for good, and help fix many of the problems it created.

He’s spending roughly $15 billion in three areas: ocean conservation, regenerative agriculture and clean energy, and using a systems approach to bring in other investors to the table and fix the infrastructure, not just fund individual shiny projects.

There’s a good case study on the Builders Vision approach put together by TransCap, which I’d recommend to anybody interested in this topic.

The So What: This shift to talking in public by Lukas is a welcome vote of confidence in the idea that those with capital have an obligation to fix planetary problems, not just accumulate more capital. Let’s hope some of the other 9,000 family offices heed that call.

2. A new framework for healthy, sustainable homes: Passive House

At tonight’s two-year and birthday party for my longevity club, Saint Haven, I heard about the concept of Passive House from Tabitha Robb, who runs a boutique Melbourne-based buyer’s advocate firm, Prop Culture.

The concept, which was born out of Germany 35 years ago, is about designing - or retrofitting - a house to be maximally energy efficient, and that in turn has multiple related benefits. From the website:

The key features include: Super-insulation, thermal ‘bridge-free’ design (heat can’t bypass the insulation layer), airtight construction, high-performance windows (triple glazing) and heat recovery ventilation (mechanical ventilation constantly supplies filtered fresh air while recovering heat from outgoing stale air). It’s no surprise I hadn’t heard of it in Australia - there are only 88 certified buildings in this country out of a total of 80,000 globally.

This article outlines some of the health benefits from the UK perspective. The NHS spends an estimated £1.4 billion a year on illness linked to cold or damp homes, and a 2022/23 parliamentary inquiry attributed almost 5,000 winter deaths across England, Scotland and Wales to cold housing. Damp accounts for 7% to 14% of childhood asthma and raises depression risk by 60%. Meanwhile the share of UK homes reporting summer overheating has quadrupled to 80% in a decade. Passive House holds 20-21°C, filters air continuously, cuts external noise by half, and stays habitable for a week without heating at minus 13°C outside.

The So What: Buildings are the longest-duration health intervention we own, and we still regulate them as energy assets.

3. A longevity metric that matters: Intrinsic Capacity

The WHO defined intrinsic capacity in 2015 as a composite of five subdomains: cognition, locomotion, sensory capacity, psychological wellbeing and vitality. Most of the tests already exist, including grip strength and walking speed. Its value is not the single score but the trajectory, since decline is detectable before disease appears. That makes it a plausible proxy for ageing, which matters because lifespan trials would take decades and the FDA still refuses to classify ageing as a disease. The WHO hedged in 2022 by adding “aging associated decline in intrinsic capacity” to ICD-11. ARPA-H is now funding work to validate it, with real-world studies running in France and New Mexico.

The So What: No approved longevity drug arrives until regulators agree on what improvement actually looks like.

4. Screenless wearables take another run at agetech

Two launches this week caught my eye, both screenless, both aimed at ageing in place: Luffu and Carely. Form factor has been the unresolved argument in age tech for a decade. The category is a graveyard of clunky devices with poor battery life that telegraphed “I’m old and frail” (the spectre of Life Call still haunts it). These are not that. Luffu comes from the Fitbit founders and is built around the whole family rather than the older adult alone. Carely has yet to launch but is clearly designing for form as well as function.

The harder question is what each approach is actually good for. Wearables do biometrics: sleep, activity, heart rate. Ambient sensing does movement patterns and falls, and nobody has to remember to charge it. Expect specialisation by use case rather than one winning device.

I take two rules away for age tech builders: the best form factor is the one you forget you are wearing, or never wear at all; and we should design for the ecosystem from day one, because the hardware will date faster than a platform.

The So What: Devices are disposable. The system they connect to is the product.

AI parody video of the week:

Bunker Boyz fits a lot of spicy takes and inside-baseball tech gossip into a few minutes, skewering our (male) AI overlords, suggesting, inconceivably, that they’re more interested in themselves than in the future of humanity.

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. The Funding Anthropocalypse

A new newsletter covering the fascinating idea of what happens when there is just an enormous amount of money going into philanthropy - estimates of the order of $50bn / year - courtesy of the AI bubble (Anthropic’s October IPO is rumoured to value the company at $2tn+).

Today’s philanthropy sector, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, isn’t set up to use the latest technologies to ensure the most efficient and effective distribution and management of funds, and assessment of impact. And this post highlights how most don’t have a good sense of whether projects had been implemented.

The So What: A root and branch transformation of philanthropy is just another unexpected, transformational impact of AI.

2. Worldbuilding and spatial intelligence

Wired founder Kevin Kelly on AI’s next frontier - it’s not better language, but a better grasp of the physical world.

“Spatial intelligence” lets machines understand objects, movement and three-dimensional space, powering capable robots, augmented reality and detailed digital twins. The obstacle is data: unlike text, reality has not yet been digitised at internet scale.

Video, robots and smart glasses could change that, continuously feeding world models with physical experience (arguably most impressive example is Niantic’s pivot from Pokemon Go to real world AI, thanks to the users who gave them their data).

The result may be a “mirrorworld” in which places and objects become searchable, simulatable and machine-readable. The prize is enormous, from robotics to filmmaking. The catch is equally large: ubiquitous cameras require unprecedented public trust.

The So What: The LLM era was amassing a large amount of data - this suggests that we haven’t seen anything yet.

3. Apple - the dark horse of the AI race

Apple - the trillion dollar powerhouse defining our personal tech lifestyle hasn’t really been a player in the AI race; if anything, mocked for the abysmal state of the Siri AI agent that doesn’t seem to have evolved in the last five years. However, there’s an interesting counter narrative, which is that as small models get more effective and efficient, people are going to be switching to hosting AI locally. It’s already happened with the Mac mini being the tool of choice for many who are starting to host their own models.

This article takes that further and talks about the tension that they may have with doubling down on that market, which could be the next mobile equivalent to come out, but they will be competing for parts with their main cash cow, the iPhone. A bunch of other companies are now coming into this market with desktop personal, secure AI hardware - is Apple going to make the move or stay on the sidelines and miss this next wave?

A 256GB Mac Studio could give small firms private, capable AI, almost free, and at a lower price than NVIDIA’s rival hardware. But each machine consumes scarce RAM that could instead go into more profitable iPhones. The company may be repeating an old mistake: creating a market, then letting someone else own it.

The So What: One of the most interesting scenarios right now is whether distributed AI is going to take off.

4. Case study of AI in an aged care home

George Gouzounis’s newsletter has a rich case study of AI adoption in a single-site facility in South Australia and it’s worth a read. St Anna’s in Adelaide has no corporate office, no IT department and a couple of people on quality - so a fairly typical single-site story, and normally not where you’d expect cutting edge AI.

Its set up is, however, fairly advanced. For two years it has run AI over its own clinical records, inside its own Microsoft tenant, so nothing leaves the building. The numbers are informative. A compliance response that took one or two staff five days now takes roughly half an hour. Reviewing three months of complaints, once a four-hour job before analysis even began, is automated. Staff query 400 policy documents in plain English. Robots clean 800 square metres of corridor. It also found a gap in lifestyle assessments that nobody inside had spotted.

The So What: You don’t need an IT department to be a leader in AI implementation.

Bonus of the week: Poo & peanuts

Given I’m spending a lot of my time looking at bathroom innovations I’m finding multiple cool stories, this one hit home given a relative is very allergic to peanuts. It seems that faecal treatments may hold promise in addressing hard-to-treat food allergies. Is there no limit to the gifts that the gut keeps giving?

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone. Sayonara!

- Stephen

1. The healthspan gap is driven by a health data gap

A big and welcome shift in discussions of ageing has been a shift from lifespan, how long people live, to healthspan, how much of those years are in good health. This new paper by AgeTech X and OpenHealth Technologies argues that the biggest obstacle is not a lack of biomarkers, but fragmented health data.

Blood tests collected over decades sit in incompatible systems, making it difficult to track the biological changes that matter most. The answer is harmonisation, not simply standardisation. By turning scattered records into a coherent, lifelong health timeline, the paper argues, prevention becomes measurable, personalised and scalable.

The So What: Longevity’s missing breakthrough may be infrastructure rather than medicine.

2. GLP-1s - ageing into the unknown

America’s GLP-1 boom is becoming a vast, uncontrolled experiment in ageing. 1 in 9 US adults - around 30m - are currently on these weight loss drugs, and while the hope is that shrinking waistlines translates into longer, healthier lives, the evidence is less certain.

The Scientific American piece notes that clinical trials have largely excluded seniors, leaving unanswered questions about frailty, muscle loss, dehydration and interactions with other medicines. For robust older adults, GLP-1s may reduce disease risk; for frail patients, the trade-offs may be severe.

The So What: The real measure of GLP-1 success is not weight lost, but function preserved - how to preserve muscle and mobility while taking these drugs is an open question.

3. Oxygen levels - a new planetary boundary?

Oceans are running out of breath. A new review by scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography argues that declining oxygen levels in oceans, lakes and rivers have become a global threat serious enough to be a new “planetary boundary”.

Driven by rising temperatures, nutrient pollution and disrupted ocean circulation, aquatic deoxygenation is reshaping ecosystems, weakening food webs and undermining natural climate-regulation.

The researchers argue that oxygen loss should no longer be treated as a standalone environmental issue, but as part of a wider web of pressures pushing Earth beyond safe limits.

The So What: A reminder that planetary health is governed by invisible variables. What cannot be measured is often what gets ignored.

4. The best video on AI you’ll watch this week

Garry Tan, Y Combinator’s President & CEO comes across - in other videos I’ve seen - as a rather self-effacing, almost diffident, leader of arguably the most powerful tech organization on the planet. Google and Anthropic are trillion dollar companies today, but Y Combinator has equity in over 5000 companies it’s helped launch from Airbnb to Stripe, and an fearsome network of people thinking hard about where tech is taking us. This video of Garry discussing the need for all of us to “own our tools” was the most energetic and passion I’ve seen him; he’s clearly got the bit between his teeth.

And what a bit it is; he’s advocating for all of us to build our own brains to become 10x, 100x more productive, and wants employees to keep their skills, not give them way to their employer. So it’s actually very much inline - perhaps with a more positive twist - with my Road to Serfdom post from a few weeks back. Worth a watch.

The So What: When the Kevin Bacon of tech says this is where the future is going, it’s worth spending some time building your own AGI and trying it for yourself.

AI tool (for the resistance) of the week: ShieldFont

This rather intriguing tool - Shield Font - is for my more suberversive readers. And to be honest I’m not sure it’s a good idea, but it’s certainly novel.

As Pascal Finette put it, “the resistance has a typeface now”. The font looks perfectly normal to human readers, but the underlying code that the AI agents read mixes up words in subtle ways, that render the text have has been scraped confusing or pointless. A poisoned pen of a sort.

Whether it will protect writers, or just add a layer of tax - to be inevitably born by consumers - is an open point, but a fascinating solution that goes to show the AI resistance is real, tech-savvy, and inventive.

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. Building the Longevity Economy will take systems, not pilots

Here’s a piece I wrote with Anne Montgomery and a couple of others for Generations Journal, from the American Society on Aging. In short, ageing populations aren’t necessarily a fiscal threat, but to make them an opportunity we need to think systemically. AARP puts the over-50 contribution to GDP as $45 trillion in 2020 (fully a third of the total).

Nearly 20% of 65+ Americans were working in 2023, 62% of them full-time, double the 1987 rate. Since 2023, the world has had more people over 50 than children under 15, and the child population will not grow before 2040.

We propose a structural fix: research, collaboration and investment. First, responsible AI and shared data infrastructure. Second, rapid testbeds and smart-home microlabs feeding evidence-based scale-ups. And third, field-building to shift policy, capital and narrative together. Project-based funding alone won’t cut it.

The So What: A fair and equitable longevity economy will be built via ecosystem orchestration, not just piloting new tech.

2. Young stem cells reboot the immune systems of mice

A new piece in Nature shows that transplanted blood stem cells from young mice into old ones restored both blood production and immune function. The trick was doing it gently.

Instead of chemotherapy or radiation, the team used an antibody that targets defective stem cells specifically, then flushed the old cells into the bloodstream while injecting fresh ones. The young cells won the race back to the bone marrow.

The old mice regained production of naïve B and T cells, the frontline responders that fade with age. The lead author is blunt about the timeline: clinical use remains distant. His speculative version is banking your own cells in your twenties and redeploying them in your fifties, replacing a blood system the way you replace a hip.

The So What: Longevity’s next frontier may be logistics, not biology: bank young, redeploy later.

3. Casana launches - a wearable that you sit on

Casana has raised $46 million to launch a $199 sensor-embedded toilet seat, and is betting that “sittables” beat wearables on the metric that matters: adherence. The seat swaps in like any replacement, identifies each user automatically via AI bio-ID, and reads blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen and respiratory rate through PPG, ECG and ballistocardiogram sensors.

The target market is deliberately unfashionable. Over 48% of US adults have high blood pressure, yet cuffs go uncharged and unused, and most people over 65 will not wrestle with a device that needs installing, wearing and calibrating. Whoop and Oura, valued at $10 billion and $11 billion, proved the appetite. Casana is chasing the people they miss.

Interestingly, and not obvious from most coverage (I spoke to the founder a few months ago), they’ve only been cleared by the FDA for heart rate and blood oxygen, not blood pressure. So the marketing says ‘blood pressure trends’ as a wellness device, but the device itself shows BP readings, with a (Beta) next to it…

The So What: The best health tech is the kind nobody remembers using.

4. Microplastics associated with 4x heart risk

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine (note from 2024, but still relevant), examined artery plaques surgically removed from 257 adults, and found plastic fragments in 150 of them, visible under the microscope as jagged particles.

Those patients were more than four times as likely to die or suffer a heart attack or stroke as patients whose plaques were plastic-free. The plastic-laden plaques also carried high levels of inflammatory molecules, hinting at a mechanism.

The authors note this is association, not causation, and diet or air pollution could be doing the work (so it could be diet not debris, maybe both). This is a signal that a material we have been swallowing, drinking and breathing for decades may be lodging somewhere it matters.

The So What: We stopped asking where plastic goes: it turns out the answer is us.

AI tool of the week: Flux 3

Since OpenAI pulled Sora, there hasn’t been a great go-to model for simple video creation - this new model Flux 3 however seems to have potential. Check out the video that Ethan Mollick created based on a colourfully inventive prompt:

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. Two hundred top economists raise the alarm about AI

Sixteen Nobel laureates and more than 200 economists and AI researchers have signed “We Must Act Now”, warning that artificial intelligence could reshape the economy more profoundly than the Industrial Revolution, and far faster.

Steam, electricity and computers each granted societies decades to adapt; AI, the signatories argue, may allow only a few years. Organised by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues, the statement insists the outcome is not predetermined: whether AI broadly lifts living standards or concentrates wealth depends on institutional choices made now, not once the transformation has arrived. Waiting for certainty, they say, means arriving too late.

The So What: Steam gave us decades to adapt. AI is not that patient.

2. Longevity retreats are the new conference

Three interesting longevity-themed retreats have popped up on my radar that combine longevity / wellness themes with a curated group in a secluded setting.

• The Longevity Biotech Fellowship is kicking off its eighth cohort with a retreat in the North Carolina mountains.

• Zo Village - invites you to spend a month working on new wellness ventures with a like-minded group of entrepreneurs, in the woods, 2.5 hours from Tokyo.

• Next Generation Longevity - hosted in Kyoto by a collection of longevity experts, including Anant Vinjamoori, Chief Medical Officer of hims & hers.

Seems to be a new type of product, reacting to the growth in interest of longevity as well as the desire for (re)connection. It’s fairly meta - both discussing the topic of longevity while ensuring the attendees also benefit from longevity experiences - much improved from the standard conference playbook of sitting all day in a windowless conference room and eating bad food. They all also emphasise community and interconnectedness - arguably longevity’s most significant hack.

The So What: The need to be mindfully present with others is probably the flip-side of our ever-accelerating, screen-centric agent-first world.

3. Capitalism and democracy - poor bedfellows?

I generally assumed that democracy and capitalism are two sides of the same coin - one reinforcing the other. But Jason Hickel argues the case that they’re actually at odds.

Political systems let citizens vote for leaders, yet production, the thing shaping daily life, answers only to capital: the corporations, financial firms and the 1% who own most investible assets.

The result is perverse allocation. Fossil fuels and SUVs get overproduced because they are profitable, while housing, transit and renewables languish. As a result, nearly half of Americans cannot afford healthcare, 4.3 million UK children live in poverty, 95 million Europeans cannot afford decent housing and food.

The “vote with your dollars” defence fails, he says, because one billionaire outvotes 66,000 minimum-wage workers, and you cannot buy what capital declines to make. His remedy is economic democracy: public services, a job guarantee, worker-owned firms and directed credit.

The So What: It’s not really a democracy if you can’t vote on what gets built.

4. NYC is building its own tools to solve problems

New York City’s new Public Interest Technology team, the self-styled PIT Crew, is recruiting engineers, designers, researchers and product managers to build digital public goods in-house.

The pitch is clear: tech once felt good, it no longer does, and governments can do something about it. Rather than outsourcing citizen-facing services to contractors, the city is assembling its own product team with a mandate to make interacting with government dignified and delightful. It is a rebuke to the sprawling, failure-prone procurement model that has long defined civic tech.

The So What: It’s a radical and energising idea - that a government can take charge of building itself, not outsourcing.

Data visualisation of the week

This fun tool allows you to see key demographic information - population pyramid, mortality and fertility - of any country as you zoom around the world, presented in an information-rich and visually appealing way

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. Demystifying the microbiome

A NYT deep dive into understanding the dark matter of our bodies - our microbiome. Two former MIT postdocs, Mathilde Poyet and Mathieu Groussin, spent a decade doing what microbiome science mostly hasn’t: sampling beyond the wealthy, Western and white populations that dominate the field.

Their Global Microbiome Conservancy now holds one of the world’s largest live-bacteria biobanks, chilled to minus-112 degrees. The findings could force a reckoning: a model predicting health from gut flora in rich countries fails completely everywhere else. Gut bacteria swap up to 100 genes a year, and industrialised guts run noisier, thinner and more inflamed. Even healthy Western microbiomes can resemble sick ones elsewhere.

The general thrust of this work echoes a good NPR piece I listened to this week, which says we still don’t really know what makes up a healthy gut microbiome, and cautions against consumers spending money on gut biome tests.

The So What: The gut-health boom is selling maps of a continent nobody has explored.

2. From ‘impact measurement’ to ‘systems intelligence’

The TransCap Initiative wants to bury a tired phrase. In its new framing, systemic investors should stop “measuring impact” and start cultivating “system intelligence”: a standing organisational function, like finance, built from information flows plus deliberate sensemaking.

This frame lays out eight interlocking components, from strategy and capital allocation to the messy relations between people. It involves retiring “beneficiaries” in favour of “system actors” who help interpret the data, not just supply it.

It’s a preliminary sketch with a fuller report promised later this year.

The So What: Better to measure what you can change than change what you can measure.

3. AI lessons from Nokia

I always find discussions of how and why Nokia failed fascinating - not only was it one of the most dramatic reversals of fortune, it’s one I witnessed first-hand, having worked there during the bull run up until the iPhone came out and for a couple of years as the air was being let out of the tyres. Working in innovation during that process taught me valuable lessons in humility - as well as about corporate inertia.

But Howard Yu’s point is updated for today’s AI age. In 2008 Symbian was still the world leader, but a single code change took 48 hours to compile and the full build up to two weeks. The processes were broken and a quality improvement feedback loop hardly existed. Google’s Android on the other hand managed comparable builds in under 20 minutes.

The echo today: bolting AI onto broken processes merely accelerates the bottleneck elsewhere. Obliterate complexity, Yu argues, don’t pave it faster.

The So What: Ensure that reinventing processes is part of any AI transformation, or you’ll just paper over the cracks.

4. Data sovereignty now comes with a scorecard

Brussels has made “cloud sovereignty” measurable.

In June the Commission detailed the Cloud Sovereignty framework behind April’s €180m tender, which grades providers across 48 criteria into tiers (‘SEAL’). The revealing result: Thales-Google venture S3NS managed only SEAL-2, since the US CLOUD Act bars any American-linked provider from proving supply-chain independence.

Server location is irrelevant; legal jurisdiction is everything. US hyperscalers still hold over 70% of the EU market against Europe’s 15%, yet sovereign spending jumped 83% year-on-year, ahead of any mandate. The proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) would extend this logic across all 27 states by 2028. Analysts reckon closing the gap needs €120bn by 2035.

The So What: Geography was never the point. Jurisdiction is, and no data centre in Frankfurt fixes American law.

Book of the Week: How to End War and Disease

This disarmingly simple book is as ambitious as it is original.

In case the cheery explainer video leaves you none the wiser, what Mike Sinn is proposing to do is co-opt capitalism for good. And rather than stop there like most people do, garnering nods but little action, he (or rather the other-worldly, and long-suffering AI intelligence that narrates the book) lays out the precise mechanism for how it could happen: pass a global treaty to shift 1% (initially) of ‘murder budgets’ (i.e. defence spending) to medical research instead.

And a precisely capped 20% of that multi-hundred billion dollar windfall would go back to richly funding the politician and bond-holders who got this treaty passed, while 80% goes to medical research. This is using the lobbying systems and bribery for good, because that’s what works. Change the incentives, and people doing bad stuff today end up wanting to do good stuff.

The book suggests that research happens via a decentralized FDA, following the footsteps of the Oxford RECOVERY trial, that delivered breakthrough medical research for around £500/head, a fraction of what traditional, slow moving, and relatively ineffective trials cost today.

If 1% of the ideas in this book get implemented, the world will be a much better place.

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. AI's danger - atrophy vs agency

This essay suggests a subtle danger of AI is not killer robots - but that citizens live in comfort and surrender the will to rule themselves. Think of it as another take on the WALL-E hypothesis.

He discusses a journalist who lets an assistant summarise, then sharpen, then decide. She files faster, her editor is delighted, yet every rival queries the same oracle and receives the same consensus. The scoop that would break it is never written. This is a public good failing, not captured by today’s efficient machines.

The distinction that matters is agency versus autonomy: you can be productive yet cease to author your own judgement. The remedy is not regulation but “philosopher-builders” who design tools that leave users more capable.

The So What: AI’s real threat isn’t tyranny but atrophy. Let’s have tools help us think and decide better, not outsource decisions.

2. A cell built from scratch

A team at the University of Minnesota has assembled a synthetic cell, dubbed SpudCell, from non-living chemicals. It feeds, grows and divides, the first such construct to complete a full cell cycle.

The numbers temper the hype: 36 genes, replication once every 12 hours at a cosseted 30°C, against E. coli’s 30 minutes. The PI calls it an “incredibly wimpy organism”. Yet the ambition is vast.

Released as a preprint, the recipe will be shared through a public-benefit body, with an eye on cancer therapies, carbon capture and bespoke chemical manufacturing. She talks of launching “the true age of bioeconomy”.

The So What: Life is becoming programmable, and the definition of ‘alive’ just got blurrier.

3. The problem with metrification

Alex Smith argues that a narrow, unrepresentative elite has, as elites always do, imposed its worldview on everyone else. This time it is tech's, and its creed is metrification: the faith that numbers settle everything, that "good" equals clicks.

The snag is that the online world is reducible while the offline world stubbornly is not. Record labels now sign whatever trends on TikTok, then wonder why the results feel lifeless. Effective altruism calculates virtue; daters run conversion funnels. AI revives the fantasy of a wholly quantifiable reality. Smith's remedy is unfashionable: reclaim responsibility for unquantifiable judgement.

The So What: When metrics decide everything, judgement atrophies. The best calls stay stubbornly human.

4. Spain banning Palantir - a step towards sovereignty?

Spain has apparently been clamping down on Palantir - looking to eject it from its national infrastructure.

Spearheaded by SEPI, the state holding company, they are shunning new contracts with Palantir, due to fears of leaks of sovereign data. No formal ban exists, yet the message to critical communications, defence and infrastructure players is clear. (Note: Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp just made a blistering attack on the large AI companies, although he’s hardly a neutral observer).

The awkward exception: Madrid’s own defence ministry is mulling renewal of a €16.5m intelligence deal signed in 2023. Britain faces parallel unease, with MPs branding reliance on a handful of US providers an “unacceptable point of weakness”, and Sadiq Khan blocking a £50m Met Police deal. Other commentators wonder whether this may be partly motivated by the reluctance of the Spanish public administration to have the levels of transparency that Palantir delivers.

The So What: Data sovereignty is the new frontier. Even allies distrust America’s intelligence infrastructure.

AI stack of the week: 30-agent consultant stack

For those of us who earn money innovation consulting - we’re basically searching concepts and moving words and ideas around - and agents are getting really good at doing that.

This 30-agent stack - with Frankie as the ‘Chief of Staff’ - was created by a tech-savvy 24-year-old who uses it to run his consulting practice as a solo founder. Would be interested to hear from any readers who’ve had success - or frustrations - in building a team of agents to support your workflows.

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

1. Europe’s future, written in Washington

A sobering scenario traces Europe’s slide into AI irrelevance through 2031. Told via two fictional characters, a Brussels official and an émigré founder, it grounds the fiction in hard numbers. Europe hosts just 5% of global AI compute; America hosts 80%.

The largest US supercomputer runs at 1,250MW, Europe’s at 83MW, a 12.4-times gap that barely narrows by 2031. Von der Leyen’s headline €200bn InvestAI fund is mostly repackaged money, against $400bn in US hyperscaler spending in 2025 alone. The EU’s goal of attracting €200bn by 2036 amounts to a quarter of America’s quarterly capex.

Sovereignty mandates backfire: “buy European” agencies end up paying ransoms when cheaper, weaker models cannot defend them. The compounding lesson is that leverage, the ASML chokepoint aside, evaporates when you arrive late.

The 2034 epilogue, in which a regretful Caroline is interviewed by an AI, argues the failure was structural, not villainous: institutions responding rationally to incentives unfit for the moment.

The So What: Latecomers don’t get sovereignty. Europe needed to build compute like a country at war.

2. Judgement infrastructure

The bottleneck in AI adoption is no longer technology but judgement.

This HBR piece argues that most firms share the same models and infrastructure; what separates leaders from laggards is “judgement infrastructure”, codifying the tacit reasoning of expert staff so agents apply it consistently. The cases are pointed. At AWP Safety, a one-person compliance team (within a 9,100-strong firm) built agents that save hundreds of hours a year. A finance controller using Claude now covers work that once needed ten. Ramp, used by 30,000 companies, trains every hire to build their own tools. Expertise, once trapped in senior heads, becomes portable.

The So What: The next moat isn’t the model. It’s writing down how you actually think.

3. Universities - don’t become monasteries

Geoff Mulgan warns universities against complacency, invoking the dissolution of the monasteries: institutions that looked permanent, then weren’t.

The sector has never been richer. Student numbers have swelled from 13 million in 1960 to over 260 million, with global turnover nearing a trillion dollars and more than 50,000 universities, up from perhaps a thousand in 1900. Yet scale breeds fragility. AI threatens to upend formal instruction and research funding; political attacks mount; and the UK earnings premium is slipping.

Mulgan’s prescription: a new social contract built on challenge-based work, place-shaping, lifelong learning, and metacognition, rather than complaining about insufficient love.

The So What: Richer than ever, yet so were the monasteries before Henry VIII came calling.

4. How to price externalities? 13% apparently

The impact investing world finally has a hard number for the "tradeoff" between impact and return. A landmark study by the Miller Center for Global Impact found that the cost of an impact-first approach stands at exactly $0.13 per dollar deployed. This "premium" isn't waste; it's the cost of delivering impact where markets traditionally fail.

The So What: This approach suggests deep social impact costs exactly $0.13 more per dollar deployed. Worth it?

Video of the week: Michael Truell, Cursor

This video has been doing the rounds recently and is worth a watch. This is a company that had its first launch beta in 2023 and just sold for $60bn. Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO and founder is incredibly articulate, thoughtful and humble. And more substantively, he makes a persuasive case for not worrying about entering a space that already feels crowded if you make a high-quality product.

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

It seems that every longevity protocol coming to market looks similar: episodic biology, quarterly bloods, annual scans, a wrist wearable - and little in between. The daily-data layer they’re missing is in the bathroom, and no one has yet built the operating system to read it.

A device you can’t take off

The late Sanjiv Sam Gambhir of Stanford, who built the first precision-health toilet, used to say: you can’t take the toilet off. The wrist comes off, the patch peels, the ring goes in the drawer; the toilet remains where it is, used 6 to 8 times a day by everyone. Age, income, motivation or digital literacy don’t come into it. As such, the biggest story in health infrastructure may be what few think of as infrastructure.

The flagship private clubs and precision-health operators don’t mention toilet data: Human Longevity, Atria, Biograph, Continuum, EQX, Fountain Life, Clinique, Hone, Sollis globally (the list is fast growing), or Saint Haven and Everlab here in Australia. They charge between US$500 and US$100,000+ a year for an episodic stack. Between visits, members return to a data vacuum of 90 to 365 days, while the bathroom sits unused.

The wearables’ Achilles’ Heel: they’re worn by the healthy

The wearable category has a problem: roughly one in three stop wearing them within six months. And the cohorts that wear them through 12 months are healthier and wealthier than the cohorts that don’t; results are contaminated by selection effects. The people who would benefit most- older adults, the early-chronic-disease cohort, the digitally less-engaged - have the lowest adherence.

The bathroom flips that. The fixture is the device, not the behaviour; there is no adherence curve to decay, and no cohort the device can’t reach. It also reaches biological signal the wrist cannot:

• Urine chemistry. Albumin-to-creatinine ratio, creatinine excretion (a validated muscle-mass proxy and mortality predictor), oxidative-stress F2-isoprostanes, hydration, electrolytes. No wrist-based sensor touches this.

• Stool form and transit. Bristol scale via in-bowl camera, bowel-movement frequency, occult blood. Slow bowel-movements are linked to cognitive aging, and gut distress is a known side effect of GLP1s.

• Seat cardiovascular. ECG and PPG from contact with the seat (Casana’s Heart Seat received FDA clearance in 2023), with ballistocardiographic stroke volume and emerging cuffless blood pressure measurable on the same surface.

• Gait and balance. Falls often happen in the bathroom, and measurable gait speed is predictive of frailty.

• Voiding chronobiology. Nocturia (2+ nighttime voids) carries a 1.78× all-cause mortality hazard - this signal requires nothing but a timestamp.

Five biomarker classes here (there are others); wearables don’t get these.

The episodic-data problem the wearable was meant to fix (and didn’t)

Peter Attia suggests treating glucose, sleep and movement as continuous variables rather than annual datapoints. It seems the same holds for urine, stool, voiding patterns and heart and blood flow data.

Clinical longevity: more money than data

It seems that a US$40,000-a-year member of an EQX Optimize stack (you can pick any pricey membership) is generating, on average, fewer than one datapoint per blood biomarker per month. An instructive failure here is Forward Health, which raised roughly US$400 million on the thesis that primary care could be automated through in-store CarePod kiosks, and collapsed in November 2024. The CarePod still required a behaviour, namely that members leave home and visit the kiosk.

The bathroom inverts that failure mode. Missions make markets, and the mission here is the conversion of episodic biology into continuous biology with no behaviour to change.

Building the bathroom health operating system

The hardware already exists, and new tech is emerging daily. Stanford, Toi Labs, Casana, Withings, ZIBRIO and the major OEM / fixture players have each built parts of the puzzle. None occupy the integration layer that would make them a system.

The market potential, if done right, is huge. One research report suggests the smart toilet market (not a broader smart bathroom play) sits at around US$160 million today, with a CAGR of 54%, to get to US$3.2 billion by 2032.

A handful of us have started building and are now having conversations with relevant stakeholders to discuss what would it take to make this happen. At a simple level, we think building the bathroom OS requires overcoming three difficult, but not impossible, challenges: Proof, Privacy and Platform.

1. Proof

The science is real, though unevenly distributed. The Stanford team (Gambhir, then Park) built the first precision-health seat with uroflowmetry, a ten-marker urine dipstick, a stool CNN and analprint identification, published in a 2020 Nature Biomedical Engineering paper. Toi Labs’ TrueLoo has published accuracy evidence, Casana’s Heart Seat has been cleared by FDA, Withings’ U-Scan is already shipping in the US and EU. TOTO began shipping the Neorest Stool Scan in Japan in August 2025, and last autumn’s HLTH conference saw Kohler announce their Dekoda device, while Throne Science is making a similar device, with a Whoop co-founder as one of the key employees.

The regulatory pathway that keeps this buildable without becoming a medical-device licensing problem is the wellness route: frame the output as lifestyle monitoring rather than diagnosis, stay under the FDA safe-harbour provisions, and route clinical interpretation through the operator – a licensed physician or longevity practitioner – rather than through the device.

The most valuable signals, in my view, are not the ones the toilet or the wearable produces alone; they emerge when both data streams work together. Therapeutic adherence - a multi-billion dollar problem - is one example. The drugs now prescribed for chronic metabolic conditions produce downstream changes in gut output, transit time and voiding pattern that a bathroom fixture captures continuously. Add a wearable’s activity and physiological response, gut microbiome sequencing underneath, or new sensor modalities, and you get something interesting: real-time adherence mapped to individual’s physiological response.

The advantage today is architectural (zero adherence decay, new biomarker classes) and mathematical (more longitudinal data accumulates by construction), but not yet demonstrated in outcome data. A natural next step here is a living-lab partnership with one or more of these operators, and be the first to build a genuinely deep longevity stack that does a better job of prediction and prevention.

2. Privacy

Over the past few months I’ve been speaking with experts from the worlds of tech, design and business. Privacy comes up in every conversation. Nobody doubts the boundless capabilities of tech, and that’s the problem.

Emma Caselton emphasised the bathroom as not just another health-data surface, but a private, sensory, escape – the one room in the house that is reliably yours. A smart toilet that turns the room into a surveillance scanner could do untold damage. The fear is not only data collection. It is unwanted revelation: “That toilet could find something”. This was echoed by Sarah Gold whose work on data trusts and consent design has shaped privacy policy in the UK and beyond. “The toilet might know first.” If a monitoring system detects a urinary tract infection before the user is aware of it, how does it communicate that in a way that’s supportive not an ambush?

Matt Webb, a leader in ambient computing in domestic space, identifies a subtler harm: the feeling of being watched, before any misuse occurs. “I think we are insufficiently aware of how much continuous monitoring causes a kind of sense of being watched, or paranoia.” He also adds a final caution worth heeding: “I think otherwise it will pattern-match very quickly into something which is just a Fitbit but on the toilet.” Is Fitbit for the toilet actually a bad thing? Discuss!

The architecture that resolves this is probably federated: raw signal stays in the fixture, the individual or household holds the rights, only derived outputs cross the boundary. Privacy-by-construction, not privacy-by-policy. New AI and privacy regulations are driving in this direction.

3. Platform

No one has built the integration layer yet - these things are hard and historically required a formal standards body, which are slow, by design.

Generative AI has, over the past two years, shown that semantic interoperability no longer requires a committee. A multimodal model running at the edge can read a uroflow trace, a Withings urine cartridge readout, a Casana ECG and a ZIBRIO gait signature, and normalise them into the same household longitudinal record - without any of the vendors having agreed on a shared taxonomy first. This coordination superpower is one that Sangeet Choudary has argued for as a ‘permissionless ecosystem’. New platforms (like UK AI insurtech Tractable) are not built on agreed standards, but shared value. Stakeholders get more out than they put in, so happily share their data.

Applied here, the bathroom OS does not need every vendor to agree on a data schema; it needs a good-enough semantic layer and a value proposition strong enough that organizations participate because not participating costs more than joining.

The hardware is not the platform; the orchestration is. The household is both producer and consumer of the signal. Choudary has never named the bathroom in his books, as it’s not been an obvious place for this to live. So far.

The missing node of the hospital-at-home is the toilet

Eric Topol has been making the hospital-at-home argument for a decade. The room he does not name is the bathroom. Andrew Huberman’s five pillars (sleep, nutrition, exercise, light, stress) are all measurable through the bathroom. David Sinclair frames aging as an epigenetic information problem; the bathroom is the daily readout instrument. Tim Spector’s ZOE requires members to mail in a stool kit; the bathroom is the continuous-capture answer to the signal his cohort is built on.

Bryan Johnson is the most measured human alive, and though he loves over-sharing (the high quality of his girlfriend’s vaginal microbiome, as just one example), I’ve yet to see his toilet talk.

It seems that, initially at least, a smart toilet won’t be about detecting disease (regulatory and evidence burden is very high); it’ll be the lowest-friction continuous-data infrastructure in healthcare. It will be the missing daily layer under longevity stacks, and the first node of the hospital-at-home for the household that has not yet been wired.

If we get our way, BHOS will make this happen: as a platform that standardises the data layer across the hardware vendors already shipping, as a consumer data trust that safeguards individual data, and as capital to finance the integration into validated solutions that need to scale.

____

As always, feedback and pushback welcome, particularly from operators already running deep diagnostic stacks who would like to extend them into the bathroom, and from designers, consent practitioners and technologists working on the trust architecture that this whole idea will be built on.

1. The magic bullet for health and economic growth

Chris Boardman, who knows a thing or two about bikes, is UK Commissioner for Active Travel. His piece argues that we’re not prioritizing a policy solution with massive upside: more biking and walking. This, he argues, could cut 4.4 million sick days, free 1.7 million GP appointments, save households £1,700 a year, prevent 2,500 early deaths and add £115 billion to the UK economy.

The price of this miracle? Getting 5.3 million more people physically active, not through gyms but by making walking and cycling the easy option. The case is grounded: one in four journeys is under a mile, seven in ten under five. Greater Manchester’s Bee Network shows it works, with cycle trips up 58% and walking up 23% between 2022 and 2024, and 72% of residents finding public transport easier to reach. England’s metro mayors, covering a third of the population, have signed up, starting with 1,000 schools, 10,000 new crossings by 2030 and 5,000 miles of cycle routes.

The So What: Healthspan is built into pavements, not prescriptions. Design the city, change the body.

2. Parkinson’s in the Crosshairs of the Crop-Duster

Parkinson’s is the world’s fastest-growing neurological disease, on track to afflict 25 million people by 2050. Genetics explain little: over 80% of cases are environmental, a verdict that should reframe how we think about healthspan.

Fresh reporting from Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, home to 1.4 million people, shows the mechanism. Paraquat, a weedkiller banned, withdrawn or phased out in 74 countries, raises Parkinson’s risk by 90% for those living or working within a quarter-mile of treated fields.

The EPA’s own modelling found it can drift across 20 square miles, yet the agency has declined to act, pending two more years of tests. Enforcement is thinner still: Texas musters 25 inspectors for 230,000 farms, and 57% of farmworkers received no safety training. Vermont has now become the first state to ban paraquat, and Syngenta is quitting production. Over 8,000 lawsuits are pending.

The So What: Healthspan starts upstream. The exposome, not the genome, is writing this diagnosis.

3. From making AI images to visualizing your insides

We’re used to seeing new ideas come with ever-increasing speed and ferocity but this one genuinely stopped me in my tracks - for its brilliance, its boldness, and the fact that they didn’t ask permission to excel in a new field. Midjourney, the AI image firm, is pivoting from rendering pixels to rendering people.

Its plan: an “Ultrasonic CT” scanner using half a million sensor elements, each a grain of sand, to map your body in 60 seconds at a fraction of a millimetre, claimed at nearly 100 times MRI speed. The delivery vehicle is stranger still. A “Midjourney Spa,” opening in San Francisco in 2027, where hot tubs and cold plunges hide a scanner in a pool of golden light. Check out the video at the link, I implore you.

The scan is the side-effect; the data library is the point. The ambition runs hot: 50,000 scanners and a billion scans a month by 2031, on a bet that early imaging could avert 30% of deaths and halve healthcare costs. No investors, no FDA approval yet, just body-composition maps and a community-backed lab promising the rest is coming.

The So What: Passive, ambient scanning is the prize. Whoever owns the data owns the patient.

4. Menopause Gets a $600m Wake-Up Call

In the NYT, Melinda French Gates likens today’s menopause care to early-20th-century “twilight sleep” births: a system that treats women as an afterthought.

The numbers back her up. Nearly one in three American women over 40 endures severe symptoms, costing the US $26 billion a year in medical bills and lost work, yet only one in four is treated. Fewer than a third of OB-GYN residencies teach any menopause curriculum, and hormone therapy use among postmenopausal women has collapsed below 5%. The research gap is starker still: just five cents of every medical R&D dollar goes to women’s health. Gates is committing fresh funding for midlife care, bringing her two-year women’s health total past $600 million, and calling for mandatory training, insurance coverage and workplace protections. Disparities persist, with white women more than twice as likely as Black and Hispanic women to receive treatment.

The So What: Half the population, a fraction of the research. The menopause market is wide open.

Tool of the Week: ClassBuild

Describe a topic, get a full course. ClassBuild, powered by Claude, generates interactive chapters, confidence-calibrated quizzes, slides with speaker notes, AI-narrated audiobooks and infographics, all woven through five evidence-based learning principles like retrieval practice. Elements of Google's NotebookLM, but more explicitly education focused. I heard about it as the founder developed it so he could learn what to do to climb Everest!

It runs in your browser on your own API key, so nothing touches a server. Teaching, automated.

That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.

- Stephen

In addition to the weekly Four For Fridays, Looking Forward publishes occasional pieces on topics that need more room to breathe. Today’s subject is one of those - how organisations are becoming AI operating systems. And how workers need to know this, and know their value.

AI-first companies are turning knowledge workers into cognitive manual labourers - throwing coal into the furnace of a corporate brain they won’t own, or benefit from in the long-run. Tim Berners-Lee’s dream of personal data pods, almost twenty years late, is one of the ideas worth investigating before it’s too late.

It took most of us two decades to realise that the price of free search, free maps and free social media was us. Our hopes, our fears, our late-night searches, locations, lovers and secrets. All of it harvested, modelled and sold to advertisers as targeted persuasion. Yanis Varoufakis calls this technofeudalism. Law courts and policymakers are belatedly waking up to the harms done to our children and collective mental health, but it’s hard to turn this ship.

The first round of the deal sold our digital exhaust as consumers. The second round, getting underway, sells us as employees.

Hayek warned that central planning would erode our freedom. The AI-first corporation may be the unlikely route to the same destination, via the boardroom rather than the politburo.

If you’re also down the AI rabbit hole your LinkedIn and Substack feeds, like mine, will be bursting with posts urging CEOs to make the move to be an “AI-first” organisation, building a second brain for the company. We’ve heard of cognitive offloading - this is cognitive uploading, the company superbrain gets the contents of its employees’ brains.

It’s still early days for this and new ideas are emerging every day. For those obsessed by this idea, we jump on the latest head-spinning tweet by Karpathy, or Git release by Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, point our Claude Code at it and say build this. Every few days there are new approaches, and Google’s just announced Open Knowledge Format, to make this kind of thing easier. Results will vary, and if I’m honest it’s a work in progress.

Capital loves an AI operating system

The idea that a company can become a continuously-learning organism, a ‘world model’ of itself and its customers. Every email, every meeting transcript, every Slack thread, every decision is hoovered into a central brain that gets steadily smarter at running the business. Someone connected his Whoop to his calendar to figure out which colleagues stressed him out; this could soon be table stakes, as the borg optimizes all interactions.

Although there are teething problems, expect this to rapidly become a shiny new thing - an experience that will hoover up calls, data and insights into the Brain. Many tech companies are building versions of this internally.

Jack Dorsey, who knows a thing or two about building companies - he was CEO of two public ones at the same time, Twitter and Block - is one of the most articulate advocates of the model. Y Combinator is another. Block’s recently announced a major restructure - cutting 4,000 of its 10,000 employees, in favor of the AI way. It replaces traditional middle management with three roles: deep-specialist individual contributors, temporary cross-functional DRIs focused on outcomes, and player-coaches who mentor while still building. AI world models do the coordination, the prioritisation, the information-flow plumbing. Humans get judgement, creativity, ethics and the messy reality at the customer edge. To me, this org chart he described felt like a glowing super ovum surrounded by a swarm of furiously hard-working (and mostly unrewarded) sperm, each armed with Claude Code and a Notion subscription.

The problem: humans are not meat machines

Marvin Minsky’s quip that humans are ‘meat machines’ is a sentiment held by many of the billionaires whose hands are on the levers of society today. Humans are just machines that clank less loudly. This reductionist approach ends up missing a lot of what makes life worth living and humans so interesting.

It doesn’t reward human-to-human collaboration. The Roman-Legion organisational chart - top-down, hierarchical, designed to filter information through humans because humans were the only context-routing infrastructure we had - was always a poor fit for genuinely creative work. Replacing the human router with an AI router improves the routing, but it does little for dense, lateral, often unstructured human-to-human work that actually generates new ideas and strategy.

It risks skewing to visible metrics. Directly accountable individuals being given metrics mean they’ll obsess about that metric. Goodhart’s Law tells us that’s likely to drive optimisation for the metric, not necessarily the broader outcome. Connecting metrics to strategy and mission is, of course, possible but requires dynamism and tension, which may be missing from a simple application of this idea.

It transfers cognitive ownership upward. This is the bigger one. Every meeting transcribed, every decision logged, every model fine-tuned by an employee’s tacit knowledge is now an asset that lives inside the corporate brain. When the employee leaves - and most will, eventually - the brain stays. The person who contributed the most has the least portable asset on their way out the door.

Another point, related to specifically Block’s decimation of half its workforce - why limit the ambition to today’s strategy. If AI is already giving us new superpowers, surely the new Block strategy could be 5-10x what it is today with the same workforce?

A different approach - federated personal data

Tim Berners-Lee saw something like this coming twenty years ago and proposed Solid - personal data pods, federated across services, with the user controlling who saw what. Patrick Deegan’s been working on an AI-driven version of this too. These entrepreneurs have been fighting a valiant battle against the ad-driven business model of the open web. Instead, we got silos, hate-fuelled massacres and a mental health crisis. Personal health data tells the same story: few people would disagree that individuals should own their own health data, yet there are five trillion reasons why this is hard, and a few plucky startups looking to do things differently haven’t thrived.

It’s not too late to federate employee brains

Unlike with consumer data, the second-brain era is, by contrast, brand new. The defaults haven’t hardened yet. There is a brief, narrow window - a year or two, tops - to course correct.

I was at a Claude Code impact hackathon a couple of weeks ago and ended up in a long conversation with Ben Flint, who shares my concerns. And he’s doing something about it. He’s building Alive Context, a tool that fits inside Claude Code and lets an individual build, structure and carry their own knowledge base - aiming to be a portable second brain, shareable with an employer on terms the individual sets. The example Ben uses: drafting a reply to a client who mentioned, three emails ago, that they have a dog. A federated system can surface that detail from your context, not the company’s. Your knowledge of your work is yours; you choose what the company sees.

The key to federation - starting with a conversation

This isn’t about forming a union and standing outside company headquarters with placards - and anyway, why do we still have company headquarters? - it’s about employees, individually, owning the asset they create as they create it, and choosing how to mesh it into whichever systems they happen to work inside. As Naval Ravikant puts it, we’re shifting back from factories and corporate headquarters to the era of hunter gatherers - running our own portfolio careers - and we now need our own tools.

A federated model, in which individuals and organisations mesh their knowledge bases and each is rewarded for the quality of its own constellation, is, probably, more resilient than one in which a central brain accumulates without limit.

The better questions for us to tackle aren’t just about data privacy, they’re about cognitive ownership.

And as Coase notes, once transactions are frictionless, we don’t need the organisation in its current form. Instead we can build lightweight, mission-driven organisations that coalesce talent to address today’s polycrisis.

Looking forward, I’ll be tracking the early builders of the personal second brain - ALIVE Context and others - and the standards they may, between them, manage to set. If you’re building in this space, or thinking about it, I’d like to hear from you.