“Weekly Dose of Optimism #189” — @Packy McCormick

Why this is in the vault

Two themes worth tracking: (1) the next wave of always-on baseload energy candidates (superhot geothermal + offshore wave) — relevant to the AI compute power-demand thesis, and (2) non-invasive neurotech (EEG-dense BCI hats, ultrasound for lucid dreaming and sonogenetics) which keeps showing up across multiple Not Boring issues as a Packy-tracked frontier.

Sponsorship

The “brought to you by Create” sponsor block is for Creatine + Electrolytes, a product co-run by Packy’s brother Dan (a long-time Dose writer). Packy explicitly discloses the family relationship and is selling a 30%-off code. Treat the placement as paid + family promo, not third-party endorsement. Bias note: this sponsor has appeared repeatedly in Dose issues — it is functionally a recurring house ad, not a rotating advertiser.

Issue contents

Quaise Energy — superhot geothermal (Project Obsidian, Central Oregon). MIT spinout drilling 10–12 miles down with a gyrotron (millimeter-wave rock vaporization, no mechanical contact). Phase III >1 GW. Targets 2030 commercial ops. Differentiator vs Fervo: Quaise targets 300–500°C supercritical-water rock, not warm rock.
Panthalassa — wave-powered offshore floating data center power. 80m-tall lollipop-shaped self-propelling units; one moving part; targets 90% capacity factor and ~$1,500/kW. First customer use case is GPU power. Ocean-2 prototype trials in Puget Sound matched simulation.
Vital Lyfe Access — personal desalination unit. $749 / 25-lb box, 6 gal/hr from seawater. Founders are ex-SpaceX (Dragon, Starlink). Pitch is “decentralize what couldn’t be centralized” — the Starlink playbook applied to clean water.
Sabi — non-invasive BCI in a beanie. 70–100k EEG sensors compensating for skull dampening; backed by Khosla, Accel, Initialized, OpenAI VP Kevin Weil. Building a Brain Foundation Model targeting 30 wpm thought-to-text. Ships end of year.
(4b) Prophetic — transcranial ultrasound for lucid dreams. Demonstrated activation of the Central Executive Network via prefrontal ultrasound; subjects reported greater lucidity and deliberate dream control.
Salk / ARPA-H sonogenetics ($41.3M). Engineer cells to express ultrasound-sensitive proteins, then control them with focused ultrasound — optogenetics without fiber-optic implants. First target: peripheral neuropathies including diabetic neuropathy.

Extra Doses (truncated in email): Friedberg appearance on Modern Wisdom, plus expanded Science Breakthroughs section now with one-sentence plain-English summaries.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

AI power-demand thesis (strong). Items 1 and 2 both frame their differentiation around GPU/AI compute as the demand sink. Geothermal-as-baseload and floating wave power are two more candidates to add to the list of “what powers the inference build-out” alongside Stargate-style nuclear and natural gas. This connects to the Power in the Age of Intelligence thread in 2026-02-18-not-boring-power-age-of-intelligence and the AlphaEvolve/lithography energy-efficiency angle in 2026-04-10-not-boring-weekly-dose-188.
Decentralized infrastructure pattern (medium). Vital Lyfe explicitly invokes the Starlink playbook — collapse municipal-scale infra into a unit-economics-friendly box. Same shape as the COO-as-software pitch RDCO is making: capabilities that previously required a team of staff become an individual-deployable unit.
Non-invasive neurotech as a recurring Packy theme (medium). Sabi + Prophetic + Salk sonogenetics in a single issue is a deliberate editorial frame (“Body’s Electric Age”). Worth tracking as a Packy thesis arc — he’s compounding on it across issues, not one-off coverage.
No direct data-engineering or AI-agent architecture content this week. No mapping into the operating-rhythm or content-as-product threads.

Curation section — notes

All six items are third-party companies, not Not Boring portfolio cross-promo or self-link recycling. Sabi disclosure check: Packy did not disclose a personal investment in any of the six companies in this issue body. Lowercarbon Capital’s Ryan Orbuch is namechecked for the Panthalassa intro — that’s a sourcing disclosure, not a sponsor relationship. The only sponsor in the issue is the Create / Creatine + Electrolytes block (family relationship, flagged above).

No deep-fetches performed — the in-newsletter blurbs already give specific enough hooks (Quaise gyrotron drilling, Panthalassa lollipop geometry, Sabi 70k-sensor count, Salk ARPA-H award amount) that following links wouldn’t add load-bearing facts for vault assessment. Reserved the 2-link budget for issues where the blurbs are thin.