Summary
Hi friends 👋, Happy Friday and welcome back to our 208th Weekly Dose of Optimism. While there was a ton of good news this week, the videos of the floods in Nepal and Tibet are some of the most heartbreaking I’ve ever seen. We’re going to cover the good stuff, but if you’d like to donate to the relief efforts, I’m giving to DirectRelief’s Nepal Flood Relief 2026, where 100% of donations support Nepal response activities. Now, August rules: you should be outside as much as possible while you can, so we will just quickly tell you to check out “Matthew’s” Field Notes from China, and then… Let’s get to it. Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Create Dan and Sienna rolled out what looks like the most delicious creatine ever made, the Lemonade Collection. To celebrate, they agreed to give not boring readers 50% off through the weekend. Go get your Lemonade Creatine + Electrolytes and code notboring50 at checkout. Xavier Martinez for WSJ Pancreatic cancer has long been one of the deadliest and hardest to treat forms of the disease thanks to a mutation that sticks the RAS protein on and causes runaway cell growth. In terrible news for cancer and great news for people, the FDA has approved a drug, Revolution Medicines’ Rasonque, that targets the mutation and helped subjects in a late-stage study live for more than 13 months instead of around 6.7 months for those who receive chemotherapy alone. The drug does have side effects, and 13 months isn’t forever, both issues personified by “Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who went public in the spring with what he described as a significant reduction in his tumors while in a clinical trial of the drug, appeared on television with his face covered in red blotches.” Sasse lived longer than expected, but he still expects to pass away, as discussed in his incredible conversation with Leopold’s wedding officiant Ross Douthat, titled “How Ben Sasse is Living Now That He is Dying.” Still, this is a massive win, one that drew a standing ovation at a cancer conference last spring when Revolution announced the results. As one patient, former Disney exec Jay Williams, told WSJ, “What it does is buy you time, and that’s one thing you don’t always have with pancreatic cancer.” And speaking of time, good on the FDA for approving this so quickly. Per the Agency, “The FDA granted Rasonque Breakthrough Therapy and Orphan Drug designations. Rasonque received Priority Review for this indication. The application was also reviewed under the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher pilot program, which is intended to help accelerate the review of therapies that address national public health priorities.” As a result, it was approved about 6.5 months faster than the standard PDUFA timeline, which means means it went through in roughly half the usual already-accelerated window for a priority oncology drug. Patients, oncologists, all of us, and regulators are saying the same thing: get fucked, cancer. Naman Pushp for Airbound Last year, I invested in a company called Airbound founded by a young guy from India who taught himself physics and engineering on YouTube during COVID and used that knowledge to build better drones. After we got introduced but before we met, I didn’t really think I’d invest - drones are a fairly crowded space and Zipline is awesome. Then I met Naman, and decided to invest immediately. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the chance to work with him on his Manifesto for Airbound, in which he did a great job laying out the future where all movement is in the air that got me so excited in our first conversation. He published it this week, along with the news that he raised 2.2B Janus program. Radiant is [getting 1B that is growing rapidly.” While the business side is awesome, the most important piece is what this might mean for warfighters. As Doug said in the deep dive, “Over 55% of US soldier casualties in the two Iraqi conflicts are from ambushed convoys. And convoys move ammo, water, and fuel. So if you could put a reactor in one of these locations, you completely remove all those fuel shipments, you save tens of thousands of lives.” As a bonus, our portfolio company Standard Nuclear has signed a binding agreement to supply Antares with TRISO fuel through 2035 for microreactors built for defense and space missions, which means it’s now supplying both Janus-winning startups. And speaking of nuclear fuel, Actinide became the first startup to enrich uranium and produce HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium), the fuel that many advanced reactors use (it goes inside the TRISO pellets). They did it using their particle accelerator, Endurance, designed and built in Texas, which had been producing “enriched Yb-176, a precursor for cancer therapies worth roughly 12.9 billion. Open source makes sense for Nvidia - commoditize your complements! So when Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf tweeted on Thursday morning, he tweeted what was on everyone’s mind: “We have a huge news to share today!” The news, though, was that Pollen Robotics, which the company acquired in 2025, was “unveiling the first truly accessible RL robot - welcome Microduck.” The thing is cute, costs $399, and you can train it yourself with reinforcement learning. Before you do, it can do a bunch of stuff out of the box, like “walk, sit, crouch, roller-skate, pick up objects with its articulated beak, and recover on its own.” Asked to comment on Hugging Face’s big week, Billy Madison said, “That’s quacktastic!”