06-reference

not boring weekly dose optimism 199

2026-06-26·reference·source: Not Boring·by Packy McCormick

Why this is in the vault

Issue #199 of the Weekly Dose of Optimism covers five major positive signals across health, policy, energy, neuroscience, and scientific recovery — sponsored by Mercury (AI banking). Notable for a strong nuclear week (DOE $17.5B in AP1000 loans + Aalo Atomics reactor approval + Valar Atomics hitting 24hr continuous power) and a bipartisan housing bill passing 358-32. Cuby (Not Boring Capital portfolio) is mentioned without explicit disclosure in the housing item — structural bias flag.

⚠️ Sponsorship

Sponsor: Mercury — "Mercury Command" AI-native banking product. Explicit sponsor block at the top of the email with CTA "Try Mercury Command →". Separately, Not Boring Capital's portfolio company Cuby (modular housing construction) appears positively in item #2 without a conflict-of-interest disclosure — Packy notes the investment but frames it as enthusiasm rather than a formal sponsor callout.

Curation section

(1) Stripe Intercept — $500M Philanthropic Initiative to End Respiratory Infections

Stripe's Nan Ransohoff announced "Intercept," a $500M philanthropic push to make respiratory infections (common cold, flu, pandemic-risk viruses) a thing of the past, using broad-spectrum preventatives and air-cleaning tech. Funded by Stripe, Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation, Flu Lab, and Jane Street. Source

(2) Congress Passes 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

The House voted 358-to-32 on bipartisan housing legislation that loosens federal regulations, eases lending rules, rewards building communities, and limits institutional investor purchases of single-family homes. As of the issue date, Speaker Johnson was formally sending the bill to the White House after a productive conversation with Trump, who had previously threatened a veto to leverage his SAVE America Act. Veto-override math is favorable. NYT source

(3) DOE Bets $17.5B in Low-Cost Loans to Revive Nuclear Power

The DOE Loan Program Office conditionally committed $17.5B to support construction of 10 Westinghouse AP1000 gigareactors (1GW each), structured so $3.5B per project is front-loaded once $1B equity is committed — targeting long-lead procurement bottlenecks (containment vessels, turbines). Additionally: Aalo Atomics received DOE Secretary sign-off to turn on their first reactor (would be 3rd advanced reactor to go critical before July 4th); Valar Atomics (covered last week) achieved 24 hours of continuous 100% power operations. WSJ source

(4) Aleph Neuro Obtains Highest-Resolution Extracranial Brain Image

Startup Aleph Neuro (founders Marley and Lev) injected contrast microbubbles into their own bloodstreams, fired ultrafast ultrasound through their skulls, tracked individual bubbles through brain vessels, and computationally combined thousands of frames into the highest-resolution 3D brain map ever taken from outside the skull. Long-term goal is "telepathy" (brain-to-brain communication). Positioned within a broader ultrasound-on-a-tear narrative that includes Prophetic's dreaming headband and Midjourney's scanner. Source

(5) Analogue Group Funds Soviet Papers Translation (SovietRxiv)

Aishwarya Khanduja's Analogue Group announced the inaugural cohort of its Revival Fund — restoring neglected, illegible, or prematurely dismissed research to active circulation. Standout project: "Seconds" is building SovietRxiv to translate old Soviet research papers, many of which have quietly seeded modern startups (including Longshot Space, whose $20M raise was announced the same day). Other Revival Fund projects: DNA Learning Systems for programmable biology, brain-in-vat perfusion research, and China's anomalous-phenomena research from 1979–1999. Source

Mapping against Ray Data Co

The nuclear item is the strongest signal for RDCO's capital-cycle thesis — the DOE's $17.5B AP1000 loan structure and the concurrent SMR/advanced reactor milestones (Aalo, Valar) confirm the Phase 2 capital deployment thesis is accelerating on both large and small reactor tracks. The housing bill is medium-relevance background context: bipartisan political will to build is the kind of macro tailwind that affects construction-tech and real-asset plays adjacent to RDCO's thesis. The brain-ultrasound and Soviet-papers items are intellectually interesting but weak direct relevance to current RDCO bets.

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