What I learned this Week: June 29, 2025
2 GBU-57s are better than one
Lessons of the Week
I spent the early part of my career at McDonnell Douglas. Then, with Boeing through a merger. More on the defense side of the business, but ultimately managing R&D strategy across the company, working for the CTO. We worked on issues that spanned 20-30 years in the future, anticipating the progression of technology and the associated threats. That included, in the early 90s, developing the base of weapons that became the bunker busters used by the B2s, an 80s vintage stealth design, for a mission no other country can execute even 40 years later. Add to this the transformation of network-centric warfare and digital systems after 2000 that further advanced US defense while leveraging aircraft designed more than 50 years ago.
Which leads me to Food is Health. My conviction that we can eliminate chronic disease in the US through improvements in food and a transformation of pre-chronic healthcare comes from the same discipline of systems thinking I experienced at McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. It is within our reach to end chronic disease and improve longevity.
What I learned this week….
The 1934 Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine was awarded to three men and their work in finding a cure for pernicious anemia. The cure? Feeding a half-pound of raw liver daily to patients for two weeks.
19% of U.S. public K–12 students attend rural schools, yet only about 11% of Ivy League students come from rural communities.
Cognitive potential is not geographically determined (Link)
The Bible mentions meat 290 times. It mentions tofu 0 times. I am still not eating tofu.
There is a tick that spreads a disease, causing people to become allergic to red meat. Some scientists think we should engineer the virus to make people not like steak. (Link)
Medical students are using ChatGPT to get through med school. Perhaps that is yet more incentive for a healthy diet and exercise to ensure you won’t need their services.
Americans spend 4x more on brand-name medications compared to the average OECD nation, yet they pay 33% less for generics. Generics account for 90% of our total purchases by volume. (Link)
Signal is the most secure messaging system for commercial usage. Few, if any, governments can crack it.
You can use a drone to attract lightning to prevent damage to critical infrastructure. (Link)
This Tesla drove itself from Gigafactory Texas to its new owner's home ~30min away, crossing parking lots, highways, and the city to reach its new owner. This makes me want to buy a Tesla, though; to deliver it to my home in Michigan would require 31 recharge stops from the Gigafactory in Austin.
Some Data and Links
→ Dietary restriction of isoleucine increases healthspan and lifespan: A recent Cell Metabolism study shows that restricting the intake of the branched-chain amino acid isoleucine (IleR) significantly improves metabolic health, reduces frailty, and extends lifespan in genetically diverse mice. Unlike broad protein restriction, which can have mixed effects depending on age and sex, IleR alone was enough to reduce obesity, improve glucose tolerance, and increase energy expenditure without decreasing total calorie intake. These findings provide mechanistic support for dietary strategies that adjust amino acid profiles, such as the ketogenic diet’s reliance on fat metabolism or the Mediterranean diet’s focus on plant-based, lower-protein foods to enhance metabolic resilience. This indicates that controlling specific amino acids may be more effective than overall calorie or protein restriction in promoting healthspan and longevity. The study suggests that limiting intake of whey, casein, chicken, beef, pork, egg whites, and soy isolate can improve longevity at a fixed calorie intake. The role of Amino Acids in the diet and cancer is an opportunity for increased NIH research as the NIH shifts its focus toward chronic disease. (Cell Metabolism)
→ Scientists have 3D printed tissues inside the body using ultrasound: A Caltech team created a method to bioprint structures directly in living tissue using an ultrasound-activated bioink. This system enables the printing of drugs, biosensors, and custom implants without the need for surgery, marking a significant step toward non-invasive regenerative medicine. If you recall, Bones on Star Trek used his tricorder to repair people without the need for surgery. I wonder if he knew.
→ Fewer I-Bankers: Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says AI can draft 95% of an IPO prospectus in minutes, a task that previously required days of work from high-powered bankers, lawyers, and consultants. Is this a statement about AI, or the regulatory machine that employs a lot of effort that no one reads? To save even more money, consider providing the AI prompt for users to utilize if they wish.
A Few Comments on National Security
→ Bunker Busters: As a new engineer at McDonnell Douglas in the early 90s, I was peripherally involved in the first of the newest forms of bunker busters. It was the first Gulf War, and Saddam Hussein was underground in a bunker. In a few months, we designed and built a bunker buster to kill him. The missile body was lathed from a rusty 1940s vintage battleship barrel. The barrels were found outside Watervliet Arsenal, where they had been stored since the end of World War II. The missile was 25 ft long, mounted on an F-15. My recollection is it weighed about 25k lbs. Mostly metal, with 5k lbs or so of explosives. In the first test at Edwards AFB, it went down more than 200 ft. All from the kinetic energy of 25k lbs at 400+ knots of speed. It had no guidance, so it was dive-bombed on target. Since then, we have developed GPS-guided weapons, such as JDAM. The weapons dropped on Iran were 30k lbs with 5K lbs of explosives. They dropped two on each target. The second one was probably dropped down the same hole as the first, or close enough to compound the depth. Reports indicate that the mission had been planned for 15 years, well before the release of Maverick Top Gun II. Planned probably means they also tested the idea a couple of times. The DoD plans for every possible eventuality.
Unless you have worked in the DoD environment, it is hard to explain the depth of planning and the degree to which they think about possible conflict in the future. We were working on ideas, like the recent attack by Ukraine on Russia with FPV drones, in the late 90s. We anticipated that the cost of precision-guided weapons would collapse (from UAVs to biological weapons), making it easier for non-state actors to do substantial damage. Israel’s dominance over Iran’s airspace represents how far advanced the US and Israel are versus virtually every military in the world. When I was in Boeing Phantom Works’ advanced studies group (1997-2000), we were thinking about how to win conflicts in 2025. There has been very little that has happened in conflicts (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, COVID, etc.) since then that we did not anticipate. It is a systematic process that involves wargames, design studies, and advanced R&D. Although it is not perfect, it is highly effective.
→ Secure Communications: Signal, a popular messaging app, is likely the most secure form of commercial messaging. The lack of any content from Signal in a criminal case is one bit of evidence that its security remains unbroken. It is vulnerable to key capture devices or screen capture, which has little to do with the app itself, but instead with your iPhone or Android device. Concerned that text messaging was compromised, the Biden administration instructed all government employees to begin using Signal. Knowing full well it could not comply with record-keeping rules. It is no surprise, but unsettling, that the national security team is using it for rapid communication.
Having used classified systems to design and communicate in development of military platforms I can say they are a pain in the ass. To be truly secure, you need to operate on a classified network within a properly protected set of hardware. Not connected to the internet. It is very tempting to work around. But keeping secrets is important. I recall working on an important project 30 years ago on a VaxStation, programming in Fortran, using a slow Bernoulli drive for storage. The product of that engineering is still effective in combat today. Keeping secrets matters.
My experience is that more senior people are less disciplined in keeping secrets. Politicians are the worst. Several Presidents and Senators have inadvertently revealed billions in secret technology through their offhand public slips. I think this is partly because they do not fully understand what makes the classified technology work. So, they do not understand what disclosures make them vulnerable. Industry is much more rigid about classifications. Senior defense executives, like CEOs, are often not cleared on the technology they oversee. This prevents inadvertent disclosure.
What people likely do not understand is how far we go to gather intelligence on nations. Or how other intelligence agencies target us. Russia, China, Iran, Israel, and others are constantly probing high-value targets in the US, looking for any crack in the system. Even one small disclosure can unlock substantial information in the hands of experts. I frequently back-solve to classified capability based on the smallest of public disclosures.
To get a sense of the vulnerability, you should take the time to watch this video about a compromised secure phone the FBI inserted into the global drug trade. Then, realize this is a routine kind of thing we do. And something we excel at.
Recent events in Iran demonstrate Israel and the US have very precise information from inside Iran’s networks and communications. Iran is aware of this, which makes it even more challenging for Iran to defend itself.
→ Boeing F-47: Boeing St. Louis win of the next gen fighter makes me want to go back to building military aircraft. Even as technology advances, the original ideas for this aircraft go back decades. Mostly because physics does not change. It does take time for the manufacturing technology to catch up to the design.
The F-47 maintains similarities to the Bird of Prey, which was developed in Phantom Works in the 1990s, utilizing many of the rapid prototyping technologies developed for the F/A-18 E/F program. That manufacturing technology, novel at the time and a significant part of my life from 1989 to 1995, was critical for the development of Tesla and SpaceX, including high-speed machining, new alloys, friction stir welding, design for manufacturing, unitized structures, and finite element modeling. The design also deserves a hat tip to Alan Wiechman and George Muellner, who, although they have both passed away, made significant contributions to the advances that form the basis of Gen 6 fighters. Even with decades of development, US technology is well ahead of other nations. (TWZ)
This Weeks Charts
Do you wish you had invested in Amazon when it was an online bookstore?
Avocados: America’s obsession with avocados is fairly recent. 90% of the consumption is imported from Mexico. Now subject to a 25% tariff. Will this lead to increased avocado production in the US? If grown from seed, they take 8-13 years to fruit. If grafted, 3 to 5 years. So it will take a long time to build new capacity. (WSJ)
In case you missed 3rd grade, everything is made of Chemicals
Air travel is not as bad as you thought
😂 To #4