Every Friday
But we’re showing up, and sometimes that’s the win.
Somewhere Between Motion and Meaning
Happy Friday team. Hope you’re all emerging from your winter caves and shaking off the drowsiness to hit April running. Nashville and NYC are finally waking up and we’re stoked about it - drop us a comment to show proof of life!
The Hunter Thompson quote below has been rattling around in our heads this week. Maybe because everything’s a bit chaotic right now—Jack’s starting a new job after a month away, James just got into B-school and is planning one last hurrah before going broke, Macke’s bouncing between time zones while keeping his teams status on active, and Ian is going to throw his laptop in the street if he has to edit his client deck one more time. Everyone’s in motion. It’s a slog. It feels like something.
We’re all trying to thread the needle between taking risks and making “responsible adult decisions”. Trying to steer the ship while also dealing with family health scares, keeping up with friends scattered across the country (SZA knows), and corporate jobs that slowly siphon off our capacity to create. Are we nailing the balance between pragmatism and taking a swing? Absolutely not. But we’re showing up, and sometimes that’s the win.
So if your plate is full and your vibe is more “corporate drone” than “creative” this week - same. Hope this week’s edition can help you reset. Let’s get into it.
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson
“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
– Donna Haraway
Top of Mind
Behind The Screens
Nucleus Genomics’ rollout of genetic matching for family planning feels, at first glance, like a step into murky ethical waters—territory we’d rather avoid. If this becomes standard practice, is it more irresponsible to ignore it than to engage? The future is arriving quickly, dressed as a dating app for your alleged child—and we’re not sure whether to swipe right or log off entirely. Leaning towards logging off entirely.
Rippling has filed a lawsuit against Deel, alleging a multi-year scheme of corporate espionage and trade secret theft involving a former Rippling employee turned mole (with Slack btw!!!). The suit accuses Deel of orchestrating a covert operation to access internal strategies, product plans, and confidential data to gain a competitive edge. Okay, HR software corporate espionage? Not great—but for the lore, we kind of love to see it.
Anthropic’s about to drop a voice mode for Claude and it’s about damn time. Ships late but ships right is okay in our book. Their brand is so dialed - and their influencer marketing campaign kind of works? This week they also dropped Claude web search. We’re rooting for this team hard (a personal friend contributed majorly to web search!). It's refreshing to see a company with a $60 billion valuation be intentional.
From Washington
We are quietly paying an Isolation Tax—the cost of trading connection for convenience. As we prioritize efficiency, communities weaken. The collapse of local life drains shared knowledge and erodes collaboration.
When housing demand crashed during the pandemic, China’s local governments stepped in to keep land prices high using LGFVs. Selling land is their main way to make money and manage debt; however, high land prices and low demand don’t mix. The CCP’s view of itself and the lived experience of Chinese citizens are two very different things. China’s local finance system is way too hooked on land sales and it’s not sustainable. Sound familiar?
Stephen Miller, a central architect of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, has employed a bold “flood the zone” strategy to deliberately overwhelm the system with a rapid succession of executive actions. It’s very deep as the U.S. ramps up deportations, El Salvador is allegedly receiving $6mm yearly to imprison the individuals we see featured in the viral clips. Attorney General Pam Bondi, respectfully, we have so many questions.
Ctrl+Alt+Culture
Smithsonian Magazine The First Big Data Drop From the Euclid Space Telescope… — This article may trigger feelings of panic given the vast uncertainty of everything in the universe. Proceed with caution. Jokes aside, we were reminded reading this how often bad news bias can drown releases like this out, sadly. Lest we forget there are incredible, unsolved problems being pushed against for the betterment of all of us every day.
The Lindy Newsletter You Can Always Make a Comeback — We were shocked by the numbers in this post, thinking that the AI hype might drive people away from knowledge work. It seems the grasp for stability in an increasingly unstable social environment trumps those concerns. Perhaps real stability comes from assurance in oneself, rather than the purported stability of a particular career path.
You can now buy military-grade drone gear on Temu and AliExpress—and yeah, it’s a problem. AI targeting systems, long-range tethers, and other add-ons can turn cheap hobby drones into powerful, semi-autonomous weapons. It’s all easy to get, insanely affordable, and unregulated. Not that we love regulation but, this feels like a fair line to draw.
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
Have humans passed peak brain power? (Financial Times)
On Forward Momentum (Relay)
Top 10 Airport Strava Segments (Footnotes)
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
A lot’s been shifting for us outside of Relay. Jack’s finally back in Nashville after a month in NYC (long distance is tough) - just in time to start a new job. Case de Peachtree has been falling apart without him. Jack, when you read this: sorry about the shower. You were missed.
James got his first MBA admit yesterday (!!). He missed the call from Vanderbilt because he was stuck in a meeting, spiraled for an hour, and then finally got the good news. Go Comedores? He’s planning a trip somewhere international before he’s a broke student again, but has no clue where to go. He needs ideas - drop us some recs.
Ian’s been buried with work—15-hour days and screen fried. Growth arc is arcing, but we know he’d rather be binging YouTube with the boys than writing those painfully-corporate strategy memos.
Macke’s back in NYC after the weekend in Montreal and a red eye flight to Santa Monica on business. Something extra soul sucking about staring at the beach from a cubical.
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We also have a few Sunday pieces you can check out:
The competition for our clicks, attention, and time has never been fiercer. More apps, more news, more of everything. Big Tech has centralized the web, commoditizing our screen time and dictating how we consume information. As our online selves continue to age, how do we ensure we’re truly tuned in—not just absorbing, but thinking critically?
Relay is a collective effort to distill information across tech, politics, and culture. It stands in direct opposition to the hollow drift toward cheap consumption, regrettable minutes, empty engagement, and a distorted understanding of the real world. It’s a refusal to let algorithms erode our ability to think critically—and an invitation to participate meaningfully online. More signal, less noise.
Tag along (it’s free).
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this was a good one
Is there a place to submit articles or other media for the Relay fellas to comment on?