Every Friday
Sprinting into summer: the week before Memorial Day
This week, we’re thinking about what it means to live and die by the kudos.
If you’re unfamiliar, the Relay boys love a Strava notification. We trade comments and kudos late into the weekend send and then wake up checking that damn running app.
On Strava, you get kudos instead of likes. Post an activity, receive a kudos.
A few years ago, I (Ian) showed up to a wedding reception turned East Nashville bar hop. As the bride and groom set off on their honeymoon and I was just arriving, the groom stopped me and goes “Man I haven’t seen you in so long but you stay giving me kudos.”
That stuck with me. Our friends do stay giving kudos. Maybe because it’s a small but steady daily reminder: someone is out there chasing the pain cave.
There’s a lot of mention of building legacy or working towards something lasting in this week’s Relay and generally that seems to be the theme of what we’re all collectively reading lately. Aiming for something beyond what we think is possible and reaching for a goal is aspirational and worth our time - but if we get bogged down with making sure the end result has enough scale, we’ll never make any progress. It’s the three month segments that get you there.
This is for us as much as you all this week: start with what you have. Let’s get into it.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
— Mary Oliver
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
— Theodore Roosevelt
Top of Mind
So here we are, masters of efficiency, architects of the temporary. We can summon food to our doors in minutes and code AI that mimics human thought, yet we cannot build a city that stirs the soul, nor invent a papacy that unites a billion believers. The paradox of our age is not that we lack power, but that we lack the something that stops us for building things that last centuries and millenia.
To no one’s surprise, more Paul Skallas. We default to assuming the past will look like the future. That we will build upon those before us to an ever better and more grand future. While generally over time most of us would agree we have done that, it is a sobering truth remembering that we, as human societies across time, can collectively forget. Things that made us great, lost to the grating passage of days.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text. Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations.
A generation of elite college students is arriving on campus unable—or famously unwilling—to finish full-length books. Even top students at Columbia now struggle not with comprehension, but with attention and ambition. The curriculum response: assign less, expect less.
As Joseph Henrich argues in The WEIRDest People in the World, the West’s psychological evolution was shaped by the Reformation’s push toward individual reading. If that habit collapses, the cultural consequences could be just as profound. More on this in Vincent Wei Zhang’s essay, LLM’s are making me dumber.
The treaty limits “commercial enterprise” to direct support of naval or coaling operations, but who’s enforcing it? Cuba already disavows the lease. Let them shake their fists up at a wall of battlefield-grade Sentry Towers beneath a sky full of Starships.
Palmer Luckey, one of Relay’s favorite defense tech founders & one of the most e/acc, based, black pilled founders in the game is in Pirate Wires this week calling for Liberty City: an American-esque Singapore, built in Cuba. Proclamations for techno-accelerationist cities of the future are usually a bullish flag in the tech market, see: Praxis, Neom (The Line). There is something alluring about starting fresh, a new city for new gilded age of growth, whilst sweeping history & current circumstance under the rug. As a American capitalist (Macke) & closer to a techno-accelerationist I too love the idea of “... gilded megafortresses broadcasting capitalism’s bounty on the coast of a failing communist state” however, a quiet part of me knows this is just a scifi dream.
e/acc
noun
A loosely organized internet and Twitter-based group or ideology advocating for "effective accelerationism," a philosophy that promotes the rapid advancement of technology and capitalism as a means to solve societal problems and drive human progress. Members often engage in online discussions supporting innovation, artificial intelligence, and economic growth, while critiquing regulatory constraints and stagnation.
Example: "The e/acc community on X frequently debates the ethics of unchecked AI development."
Best of Substack this Week
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
The internet is an overwhelming mess of headlines, ads, and mid takes from the worst people you know. Big Tech owns our attention spans. Everything is content. Nothing makes sense.
We’re not here to “fix discourse” or “build a better internet.” Relay is just our attempt to riff on what we’re already talking about at happy hour without feeling like we’ve been hit by a content truck. Some analysis, some memes, call it a day.
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Yall stay not giving me kudos
Hey thanks!!