Hey, it’s Dan Goldin. I’ve been thinking about how powerful the simple choice to endure the struggle can be. Today, we too often trade this mental friction for digital coping and instant gratification.
I’m concerned this addiction to convenience is a slippery slope that ends in, as Ryan Duffy calls it, the Slopocalypse. In today’s main story, I’ll share more about what I mean — I promise it’s not coming from a place of technophobia! I just want us all to think for ourselves, to remember what technical debt teaches us, and to strive for the neurological wiring of what I call “the builder’s mind.” At a psychological level, this is the key to securing the future that I know we all want.
And Ryan would like me to let you know: it’s not just Slopocalypse programming today. This issue is packed with other goodies: what we’re calling State of the Stake, Sharpie’s re-shoring surprise, a new industrial flywheel for discovery, turbines, the Arctic, googly-eyed robots, and more. Enjoy!
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Which Way, Friends? Slouching for Slopocalypse, or Striving for the Stars?
At 85, having spent the better part of my career putting 300+ humans in orbit and countless probes into deep space, I still believe that the ultimate frontier is human cognition itself.
Today, though, I write with great alarm. The cognitive capacities that let us dream of the stars, and build the machines to reach them, are under siege by digital barbarians at the gates. And we are the welcoming committee, handing them the keys to our cognition!
Inside this essay…the scary stuff:
A cognitive debt crisis: We are living with an affliction nobody wants to talk about…
Hebbian plasticity: neurons that fire together, wire together. How mental outsourcing atrophies neural pathways that transform effort into expertise.
Compound interest: Make enough withdrawals from the mental bank of effort, and compound interest adds up…
A cautionary tale: The theoretical but conceivable bright young man’s descent into “biological middleware between prompt and output.”
Too many of these loans cascade into civilizational stagnation. And I see a lot of subpar mortgages: we’re increasingly post-literate, unable to name our government’s three branches, and forgetful of history we're doomed to repeat.
The reasons for hope:
Builders still exist: We’d do well to take inspiration from the neurological wiring of the “builder’s mind.”
Technical debt teaches: The machine doesn’t care about your feelings — it either works or it doesn’t.
Brains are muscles: The pathways you exercise become a superhighway, those you abandon atrophy. But muscles can be rebuilt!
Acts of resistance: What are actions we can all take (in school, work, relationships, family, life) to build cognitive sovereignty? And how will this lead us to the promised land, an optimal hybrid intelligence future?
Most importantly…
…by joining Per Aspera, you’ve willingly opted in to reading thousands of words of intellectually dense, long-form text each week. This is strength training for the mind, with a regimen grounded in rigorous neuroscience, advanced technology, physics, economics, and civilizational inquiry.
You’re proof acts of cognitive resistance are possible, choosing Per Aspera’s countercultural programming in an era where popular culture has swung violently toward slop troughs (attention-hijacking, short-form media; constant dopamine-inducing systems; and empty-calorie content). The ironies abound:
While our AIs reach for longer context windows, ours are shrinking.
You’re reading about cognitive decline in a format that builds cognitive strength.
All the frontier AI labs are racing to recreate the magic of the human brain. We built neural nets to mimic our brains, but if we’re not careful, our minds will retrain on our AI’s distributions!
This ties directly to Per Aspera's mission. We’re a high-performance community for people doing great things. If our tribe agrees on one thing, it’s that the only way to achieve great things is through hardships. Hell, it’s literally in our name: Ad Astra Per Aspera — to the stars, through hardships. Yes, policy and money matter. But, good gosh, the individual choice to master the mind of struggle?? That’s the key to being the nation of builders I know we all want to be.
Out of This World Design (OOTWD) is a space-dedicated design agency — embedding directly into teams, moving at light speed and delivering world-class creative that makes space hardware feel alive. At IAC Sydney last week, they partnered with two companies — Starlab and Astroscale — to transform technical breakthroughs into immersive exhibitions. For those new to IAC (International Astronautical Congress), it’s where the global space community sets its future course. As you can see, OOTWD made sure the Starlab and Astroscale experience truly felt “out of this world” 😉.
🏛️ State of the Stake.
The White House is reportedly in talks to take an ~8% equity stake (via conversion of a $50M Defense Production Act grant) in Critical Metals Corp, an Australian-controlled, Nasdaq-listed company with a flagship rare earth asset beneath southern Greenlandic permafrost. (CMC’s other big project is the Wolfsberg Lithium Project in Austria).
If such a mineral megadeal closes, it would mark yet another big break from form. For a long time, American industrial policy lived in the margins of capital formation: the state showed up via grants, cheap loans, or, at the edge, offtake contracts. Shareholding was something Washington reserved for crises: airliners in freefall, or automakers on post-GFC life support.
Backstopping → buying in. To secure leverage in a literal, financial sense, the U.S. is thinking beyond procurement, blurring the lines between industrial policy and portfolio management. It’s joining cap tables of those who control the spice, whether it sits at Mountain Pass or the Tanbreez mega-deposit in the Arctic. Below, the latest “State of the Stake” — visualized, project by project:
🖋 Actually, American Manufacturing Can Boost Your Bottom Line.
Newell Brands has achieved the ultimate narrative violation: reshoring manufacturing from China and lowering costs simultaneously. Newell, maker of the signature Sharpie marker, spent nearly $2B to reshore production from China to the foothills of Smoky Mountains. It now makes most Sharpies, in all 93 colors, at its Maryville, TN factory.
Can we make it in Maryville? Newell asked itself this in 2018 and got to work figuring it out. The company developed a low-cost, high-volume playbook, automating assembly, centralizing supply chains, and retraining workers into higher-skill roles (without layoffs or price hikes). The “Maryville model” shows cost parity with Asia is possible under the right strategic blend, and it’s a welcome contradiction to the entrenched narratives that A) offshoring is always cheaper & B) “made in America” means premium pricing.
🧪 Bell Labs 2.0?
Periodic Labs is out of stealth with a $300M seed (!) round, backed by a murderer’s row of blue-chip VCs and strategic investors (a16z, Nvidia, Accel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt). Founded by OpenAI and DeepMind veterans, Periodic wants to accelerate scientific discovery by pairing AI “scientist” models with autonomous labs that run real-world experiments.
Unlike most AI efforts trained on internet-scale, static data, Periodic will generate its own — capturing even negative results that rarely see the light of data — and close the loop between idea, experiment, and learning.
This is a radical reimagining of scientific progress that, if successful, may drive breakthroughs in superconductors, materials science, and decarbonization technologies.
🧬 Per Aspera POV: Hark, a much-needed departure from the endless wave of B2B AI application-layer megarounds! With a $300M war chest and truly stacked founding team, Periodic has a real shot at building a new industrial flywheel for discovery, where robots act as researchers, data compounds as IP, and models learn from nature.
💸 While we’re here: AI companies raised 63.3% of all VC dollars in the last quarter. We unpacked this in last week’s Antimemo, Megafunds, Deep Tech, and the New VC Order. Give it a read, if you haven’t already!
FRIENDS IN HIGH, HARD PLACES
What did friends of Per Aspera get done this past week?
🚢 Array Labs x ONR. If you didn’t know, your Editor-in-Chief Ryan Duffy’s day job is running BD at Array Labs. He’s got some news for you all! The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has selected Array Labs to study how distributed radar satellites can enable wide-area AMTI. For context, AMTI = airborne moving target indication = the detection and tracking of aircraft, drones, etc. This mission has historically lived on capable yet vulnerable, expensive, and decades-old manned aerial platforms. Now, the U.S. is racing to bring the mission to space, looking to satellite operators like Array to rewire how we watch the skies.
💯 TIME100 Next. Firefly’s Ray Allensworth, Spacecraft Program Director, has been named to the TIME100 Next list, recognized for leading the “Ghost Riders” team behind the first successful commercial Moon landing on Blue Ghost Mission 1. The honor highlights both her leadership and Firefly’s broader push to redefine lunar exploration, showing how private spaceflight is beginning to achieve milestones once reserved for nation-states. Go Ray, 👀 we see you!
EDITOR’S PICKS
Extra stories, signals, and data that stood out while we put together today’s issue.
U.S. energy storage sets new record, with 5.6 GW of new Q2 builds // AI-driven gas turbine shortage drives energy crunch & backlog boom for Siemens, GE Vernova, and Mitsubishi // EIA: U.S. nuclear utilities likely to face uranium shortages, with 184M pound global supply gap expected // Under CEO Kelly Ortberg, Boeing has kicked off a ground-up, clean-sheet, narrow-body 737 MAX successor, eschewing recent incrementalist tendencies // China opening Arctic Express shipping route to Europe // PRC strikes $1.4B deal with Zambia and Tanzania to revamp railway network between central African copper belt and ocean port // Bain reckons $2T of AI revenues are needed to profitably fund datacenters by 2030 // scratch that, Brookfield says $7T needed to finance AI’s rapid growth // Has Waymo gone end-to-end AI? (recall our summer writeup on deterministic vs. probabilistic systems) // on 200th bday, trains still inspire awe and wonder // American hydro power at make-or-break moment // there are too many drone startups // DJI loses military classification lawsuit // demystifying the science behind fission & fusion // the quest to sequence the genomes of everything // DoorDash launches Dot, pictured below, a small, googly-eyed L4 delivery robot that goes on roads, bike paths, and sidewalks — some engineering details on the 8Y program to build Dot, which has 9x cameras, 4 radars, and 3 Lidar sensors // Inversion unveils Arc reentry spacecraft, pictured below, designed for one-hour precision ≤500 lb. deliveries from orbit.
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