Hi friends 👋, Happy Friday and welcome to the 205th Weekly Dose of Optimism! Yesterday was my daughter Maya’s 4th birthday and we took the kids to the beach to spend time with family and celebrate, so I’m going short on the writeups. That said… MASSIVE week. Lots to cover, with lots more in the Extras, including cancer-fighting psychedelics? and vertiports? Let’s get to it.Your environment can make you dumber or smarter, healthier or less healthy. You should choose smarter and healthier, and Lightwork can help. Lightwork’s assessments are concierge evaluations where they test every aspect of your home that could be impacting your health, produce a science-backed, in-depth report on all their findings, and then help you fix all the issues they uncover. They came by my house a couple of months ago. It was easy, I learned a lot, and we’ve implemented a bunch of the changes. Up to you to decide whether it’s made me any smarter.Book a Free Consultation TodayCasey Handmer@CJHandmerLast week the hydrogen electrolyzer team @TerraformIndies pulled off yet another first, the sustained production of >99.9% pure H2 from our vertically integrated, California-manufactured electrolyzer stack while it was coupled directly to a solar array at our Muroc desert test 6:32 PM · Aug 4, 2026 · 282K Views137 Replies · 213 Reposts · 2.05K LikesI’m not going to do a better job explaining what Terraform pulled off than Casey did, as both CEO and the best hard tech writer on the internet. So read his. The gist is that Terraform is getting closer to turning sunlight into hydrocarbons cheaply, which would give humanity the power to basically print refined oil, make all sorts of things that require fuel, not just batteries, cheaper and cleaner, and make one of the people I’d most like to see become a multibillionaire a multibillionaire. Base Power Company Raises $1B at $13B Post, Launches Base CoreBase is a not boring portfolio company and one of two companies (with Ramp) that I’ve written multiple Deep Dives on. To understand what I think makes the company so special, check out Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, and get ready for Chapter 3 next week. Hadrian Raises $1.37B at $7.87B Post“We can’t forget the world of atoms is 100x bigger than the world of bits,” CEO Chris Power told NYSE. Amen. Hadrian is another not boring portfolio company and favorite, and a company on which I wrote a Deep Dive, way back in April 2022: Hadrian: Ex Machina Ad Lunam. Writing about Hadrian one of the reasons I got so interested in hard tech, and Hadrian’s leadership is one of the reasons so many companies have gotten into the space. Happy to see Chris with $1.37 billion more to build with. Valar Atomics Raises $1B from Sequoia & $200B in Debt Valar is, sadly, not a not boring capital portfolio company, but I’ve been a big fan of Isaiah’s since we met in 2023 and he came on Age of Miracles. The guy has been doubted the whole way - you can’t start a nuclear company without a PhD in nuclear physics! - and he continues to prove the doubters wrong. Valar is going to pump out so many nuclear reactors. Speaking of nuclear… I’m a simple man. A nuclear company goes critical for the first time, it makes the Dose. Unlike a lot of the newfangled advanced reactor companies, Oklo had to fight through the old NRC regulatory regime to get here, submitting the first-ever custom combined license application for an advanced reactor in March 2020, for a ~1.5 MWe Aurora fast reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, before getting turned down for incompleteness, as Jake shared with us on Age of Miracles. Congrats Jake and the Oklo team! Noam Brown@polynoamialThe cost of generating the proofs for all 10 of these breakthroughs combined was under $2,000 at Sol API prices. We’re excited to see what scientists and researchers are able to create with our upcoming Astra models!Noam Brown @polynoamialAn internal version of Astra, @OpenAI’s next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science.