Every Friday
Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend
Halfway Through Q1 & Begging for Summer
Happy Friday folks. Hope you made it through in one piece (and happy White Lotus week to all who celebrate).
Relay update: Lots of side quests this week. Work was brutal for a few of us—but at least 1/4 of Relay escaped the snow for a West Coast bachelor party and the Tokyo Marathon carb-load means a shameless 4,000 calories a day. Small wins.
Jumpscare central this week: did anyone catch the meteor NASA flagged that’s hurtling toward Earth? Impeccable timing, because LinkedIn decided to bless some users (including James) with a beta test of their new short-form video tab. Honestly, we'll take the asteroid—it's a hellscape. Save us, Substack.
In other end-of-an-era news, Apple officially killed off iPhones with a home button this week. RIP to our youth, and condolences to the final holdouts (looking at you, Granddad… and maybe also Ian?).
In cased your missed it Kodak Black (???) appeared on the official White House Instagram page, right above a wildly out-of-pocket-ASMR-style deportation video that somehow felt like a new low—even in this bleak information era of never-ending new lows.
Keep grinding, America.
“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride… and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well… maybe chalk it up to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”
- Hunter S. Thompson
“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democrat answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”
- John F. Kennedy
Top of Mind
Behind The Screens
Biden admin continues to be anti big tech — Biden's former FTC chair argued this week that the rapid advancements in AI made by DeepSeek highlight the case she has been making for the past four years in her efforts to break up them up. She asserts that the tech giants' calls for increased federal investment and more lenient policies are fundamentally flawed. Rather than safeguarding the U.S. economy, the lack of competition and the immense size of these companies actually make both the tech industry and the nation more vulnerable to China. Don’t know if we agree with all of her take but it’s probably a good thing to have public voices keeping big tech on their toes.
We tuned in this week to listen to Palmer Luckey on the Shawn Ryan Show talk about how he has at one point considered both things: creating a company to make zero food out of petroleum in order to binge eat with no consequences and designing a liquid-cooled mortar system to enable constant use in the field. Then, Anduril drops this anti-recruiting recruitment video. Out of the box thinking, you might say.
From Washington
In the middle of the primary bloodbath last cycle, one bright spot for the Democratic Party was the election of Senator Ruben Gallegos over Kari Lake (lmao) in an increasingly purple Arizona. Gallegos outperformed Harris across the state and even poached some Trump voters along the way. He sat down with the NYT to do an autopsy of the Democratic Party and to lay out his vision for how they should move forward. It was refreshingly pragmatic, no-nonsense, and in clear contrast with some of the party leadership messaging.
We know half of you cancelled your NYT subscriptions in solidarity with Bari and the other half worships their editorial board - but regardless of your stance on the Times - Senator Gallegos is going to be a crucial voice shaping where the party lands ideologically as we roll into the 2026 midterms. He’s a model for how Democrats can win competitive statewide races and could become the left’s answer to J.D. Vance, with a surprisingly similar background (grew up below the poverty line, multiple Marine Corps tours, Ivy League education, etc etc.)
The Free Press Editorial Board issued a rare opinion piece pushing back against Trump’s claim that Ukrainian aggression is to blame for the invasion. They didn’t really pull any punches, calling out his own shipment of billions of dollars in weapons during his first term and his chest-beating about steamrolling Putin. The real kicker came at the end:
A dishonest narrator of the war cannot be an honest broker of peace.
Oof. This raises a bigger question we’ve been thinking about for weeks—how long can Trump Inc. ride the wave of positive public opinion before the cracks start to show? His coalition - MAGA bros, granola moms, institutionalist war hawks, the sweet elderly couple next door, & pissed-off dems sick of the far left - makes for interesting bed-fellows.
Ctrl+Alt+Culture
Kyla Scanlon (yes, the Gen Z economist who had Fox Business & Bloomberg using the term “vibecession” last year) wrote this banger of a piece on her Substack. She argues that differences in how three distinct cohorts within Gen Z experienced the analog vs. digital world, and when COVID impacted their schooling and careers, have shaped priorities in ways beyond traditional political divides. What might appear as a political shift is actually a generation grappling with meaning in a world where stability and success are no longer guaranteed and praying to the algorithm gods is a viable career path. It's a fundamental shift in how they (we?) view work, opportunity, and identity. It gets a little dense toward the end but worth a read.
Every so often an article like this one from Charles C. Mann comes across the feed and serves as a refreshing and in many cases much needed reminder that despite the bickering and doomsday spouting things are pretty good compared to what they could be. Could they be better? Absolutely. We should all do well to remind ourselves to remain on the path that attempts to makes them better. Looking forward to the rest of this series.
Father Karp (Alex Karp, Palantir CEO & Founder) released his long-awaited book, "The Technological Republic," this week. The book critiques the decay of Silicon Valley values while celebrating the cultural strengths of the region, emphasizing empowered individuals within collective enterprises. Co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska, it explores the interplay between technology and national identity, drawing on Palantir's experiences to address aligning America's engineering elite with public accountability. Karp and Zamiska advocate for leveraging Silicon Valley's lessons to rebuild a "technological republic" driven by ambition and pragmatism.
If Karp waxing poetic about the state of the union isn’t your thing - we’ve been loving Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. In full transparency, as of the current reading, I (Zach) am 100 pages away from completing Words of Radiance (book 2). Only 3 more (~3600 pages) to catch up with James…
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
If you’re a Fred Again fan - we certainly are - Swimming Paul might be right up your alley.
Shoutout to Nashville’s favorite chef jumping on the Substack train.
I currently have 57 iPhone Safari tabs. - Zach
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
50 years of travel tips (Kevin Kelly)
Hong Kong has more outdoor basketball courts than any city in the world (CNN)
Nancy Pelosi's stock picks continue to surge (Futurism)
Unique internet spaces +1 (ribo.zone)
Satya Nadella – Microsoft’s AGI Plan & Quantum Breakthrough (Dwarkesh Podcast)
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
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, despite apathy becoming the social norm.
We’re focused on more signal, less noise. Tag along (it’s free).
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thank god for karp
witch