What I Read This Week
What follows is a cross-sector roundup of what’s been capturing my attention lately—grouped across the theses I’ve been tracking.
Beyond Mobile
What Comes After Mobile? – a16z Podcast w/ Meta’s Andrew Bosworth
This conversation altered my brain chemistry; it hints at the tectonic shift beneath the surface of consumer tech—from mobile-native to intent-native. Bosworth sketches a vision of a post-phone future where the interaction paradigm flips: no more tapping into apps, just expressing intention and having AI route the outcome.
A few things stood out:
Interface as intent: Boz believes the real leap isn’t just in hardware (glasses, AR, etc.) but in understanding—AI that can anticipate and infer what you mean, not just what you click.
The death of the app store? Today’s app model is predicated on users making choices about providers (e.g., "open Spotify"). In a post-mobile world, the system should just "play music." It’s not a UI change, it’s a business model revolution.
Phones as a launchpad: Meta sees phones not as obsolete, but as transitional. Glasses won’t replace them immediately, but instead act as an ambient layer that increasingly handles real-time context.
AI agents as distribution: Developers will stop building for users and start building for AI agents that field user intent directly.
Boz calls this “Xerox PARC–level” work. Whether they get there or not, it feels like we’re seeing the first sketches of a consumer computing architecture that’s not mobile-first. Maybe not even screen-first.
I don’t see this vision ending with applications in content or productivity. It lays the groundwork for a more ambient layer of personal health, too. As biometric wearables become more sophisticated and unobtrusive, we’re entering a world where health monitoring shifts from reactive data dashboards to proactive AI agents. Anticipatory systems, built on continuous biosignal sensing and agentic reasoning, could intervene early (suggesting hydration before you realize you’re dehydrated, flagging mental fatigue before burnout, or surfacing patterns in behavior that correlate with anxiety, inflammation, or even early-stage illness). The technical stack Boz describes—sensors on-face, models that “see what you see,” and assistants that infer intent—may turn out to be the same substrate for real-time, AI-driven health companions. In that light, the post-mobile world isn’t just more seamless; it might also be more preventive, more embodied, and more human-aware.
Health Aids
If ambient computing is the new UI layer, then biometric monitoring is the sensor network feeding it real-time context. We’re seeing a shift from passive tracking to active prediction: wearables that don’t just report on your health but intervene before you need to ask.
Oura x Dexcom: Glucose insights without a needle
Oura is now partnering with Dexcom’s Stelo, an over-the-counter glucose monitor, to offer metabolic tracking without a finger prick (heyyy Billy Evans). The promise here is a fully closed-loop feedback system: your ring sees how your meals affect your glucose, your sleep, your stress—and eventually, your AI coach can nudge behavior in real time. It’s subtle, powerful behavior change hiding behind a gold-plated ring.
Limitless AI: The AI wearable for your memory
Time to shout out my favs once again: Limitless isn’t just building an “AI assistant”—they’re constructing an externalized memory. Worn like a pendant, Limitless constantly records meetings, tags conversations with semantic memory cues, and lets you query past moments like a searchable timeline. It’s prosthetic cognition, right on time as longevity (and memory-related illnesses) shape the next frontier of healthtech. Limitless hints at a future where our memory, attention, and even focus states are augmented by always-on agents.
P.S. - I’m in Limitless’s ICP Slack, but still pendant-less. That hasn’t stopped me from experimenting on my own: I built a custom GPT called Thought Keeper, modeled on a similar mission. The use case that keeps looping in my mind? Surfacing my old undergraduate political theory notes the day my child (inevitably) asks about the state of nature—or pulling journal entries from a specific age so I can remember how things actually felt when I’m in conversation with my future child. Not for nostalgia’s stake. Just continuity. Across time, self, and story.
Teal gets FDA approval for first at-home cervical screening
Teal’s FDA approval is a watershed moment: a move toward decentralized diagnostics that don’t require a clinical visit. It’s not AI in the modeling sense, but it’s AI in the systems sense: a more patient-led, personalized, and ambient care pathway that removes friction from early detection.
WHOOP 5 gets a rebrand
WHOOP’s pivot toward performance-as-a-lifestyle has commanded attention this week. They’ve always owned the “strain + recovery” niche, but their rebrand is clearly trying to broaden the market. Better battery, better UX, and a cleaner subscription tiering model. It’s an attempt to escape being seen as a niche elite tracker and become a mainstream health operating system.
But are users burning out?
Not all is smooth. WHOOP’s recent update stirred backlash over its upgrade policy, adding to a broader sense of wearable fatigue. Between WHOOP, Oura, Apple Watch, and now emerging AI pendants, it’s starting to feel like a full-time job to manage your health tech stack. The promise of this next era (ambient, intelligent, anticipatory) is that we won’t need five dashboards and a spreadsheet to understand our bodies. If these tools are to become truly indispensable, they’ll need to fade into the background: integrated (ideally no more than two devices on me at once, pls), always on, always learning, and increasingly invisible.
MAHA: Foundational Systems Repair
We know this: there’s a new current building, and it isn’t about step counts or semaglutide. It’s about a collective realization that American health has been quietly deteriorating under the weight of industrial shortcuts, regulatory capture, and medical groupthink. RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) platform taps into this sentiment, calling not just for reform, but for a full audit of what we’ve normalized: fluoride in water, seed oils in food, overmedicated care models, siloed medical practices, and a chronic disregard for root cause prevention.
Dental health, fluoride, and the silent vascular crisis
This recent episode of The Diary of a CEO surfaced a sobering claim: chronic inflammation in the mouth—partially driven by fluoride overexposure—may play a causal role in both neurodegenerative and cardiovascular disease. The mechanism: Nitric oxide, a molecule critical for vascular dilation and regulation, begins its production in the mouth. When we kill off beneficial bacteria (via antiseptic mouthwash or excessive fluoride), we may be impairing the body's ability to produce it, quietly degrading cardiovascular function over time.
While trace fluoride in toothpaste or water may not be categorically harmful, it raises a deeper question: Why are we still using a public health practice from the 1940s, when dental hygiene was poor and cavities rampant—especially when today’s fluoride is often an industrial byproduct of phosphate fertilizer manufacturing? The science may not be settled, but the unease is rational. And it connects directly to a broader blindspot in American medicine highlighted this week: the early arterial dysfunction affecting women, going undetected for decades.
Fluoride and filtration: how we’re reclaiming water
Americans are reclaiming water as something more than a public utility. We’re witnessing a grassroots rejection of the assumption that tap water is safe and sufficient. The new health stack includes countertop reverse osmosis systems, re-mineralizing drops, and home testing kits. Where wearables gave us metrics, water gives us agency—a daily ritual of sovereignty in a system too slow to adapt, all the way through to aesthetic stainless steel Stanley's as health status symbols.
Collaborative Fund’s Chris Dowd does a phenomenal job mapping the full landscape of water from source, to treatment, to how it shows up in our homes.
Heart disease: the hidden epidemic—especially for women
Heart disease remains the #1 killer of American women—claiming 16x more lives annually than breast cancer. The MAHA movement is reviving interest in preventative, holistic, plaque-oriented diagnostics, especially for populations historically overlooked by medical guidelines. If GLP-1s bring metabolic urgency, coronary artery calcium scoring (CACS) brings arterial truth.
A Slow Rebellion Against Collapse
The rising generation is quietly stepping off the path. The combination of economic instability, eroded institutional trust, and chronic emotional fatigue is giving shape to a different kind of life design: slower, more relational, less tethered to legacy ideas of status or success. The result is a subtle but widespread ~recalibration~, rooted in belonging.
Financial precarity is no longer an exception, it’s the baseline.
As The Cut recently reported, even those with stable jobs are seeing their discretionary income disappear under the weight of housing, groceries, and health-related costs. “No margin” is the prevailing sentiment. At the same time, Bloomberg shows a rising number of Americans (especially younger ones) are only making minimum payments on their credit cards. Financial survival is becoming a month-by-month exercise.
Meanwhile, interest in graduate school is surging again, but not out of optimism—more as a way to delay a difficult job market. And even this is a gamble. You’ll recall, MBAs struggled to secure offers this cycle, and student loan repayments, once paused, are beginning to hit hard.
I wish I could send this in invisible ink: This section is calling me out. Recession pop princess roll call.
Institutional trust is unraveling and worldviews are splitting.
As the Washington Post recently argued, the pandemic didn’t just isolate Gen Z physically, it splintered them ideologically (cue the Meaning Revival). With school closures, institutional failures, and minimal social scaffolding, many were forced into early adulthood without a reliable map. The result is a cohort that shares a sense of systemic disillusionment, but not a unified response.
For some, the answer has been to double down: hustle harder, stack credentials, optimize health and productivity. This is the residual girlboss instinct, remixed for a post-pandemic world where the stakes feel higher and the safety nets weaker. Education, personal brand, and self-discipline are still the tools of survival.
For others, the pandemic triggered a different kind of clarity: that the game itself might be broken. These young adults are leaning out: from career ambition, from social media visibility, from modern dating, even from cities. They’re turning toward domestic rhythms, family closeness, slower days, and less performative versions of adulthood. Think: tradwife, cottagecore, off-grid influencers, spiritual sobriety.
What’s emerging is a bifurcation within the same generation. One half is trying to adapt to the old system under new pressures. The other is starting to walk away from the system entirely. Both groups are shaped by the same conditions: economic stress, burnout, disconnection. But they’re building radically different futures in response.
If you ask me, this is the cultural foundation on which neotribal life is being imagined: not as a reactionary impulse, but as a pragmatic move toward safety, meaning, and proximity. For a generation that no longer trusts the system to provide security or coherence, the only stable unit left may be the small group. The village isn’t just a metaphor anymore. It’s a return. We’re not romanticizing the past; we’re reactivating it.
The cultural scripts are loosening.
In The New York Times, a growing cohort of young adults is described as entering “mini-retirements”—not to relax, but to, again, escape unsustainable pressure. Some live with friends or extended family. Others freelance part-time and opt out of the traditional productivity treadmill. The goal isn’t to quit working. It’s to rethink what a livable life feels like.
This reframing also extends to relationships. As The Wall Street Journal reports, more women are choosing not to marry at all, citing economic instability, a lack of relational security, and exhaustion with the emotional labor expected in traditional partnerships.
All the while, mental health continues to decline. The New York Times Magazine recently profiled how teens (despite access to better tools and more vocabulary around emotional health) report fewer experiences of joy, spontaneity, or true connectedness.
It’s sort of like… we’re forgetting the whole point is to… have a shared backyard homestead with your best friends and frolic… Do you see the vibe? Do you see the vibe I’m creating?
A broader study on flourishing confirms this: today’s young adults report markedly lower well-being scores than past generations at the same age. Meanwhile, darker signals continue to emerge. A recent Scientific American article outlines the link between rising cannabis use in teens and increases in psychosis, a reminder that the search for calm or control can backfire without structures of support and care.
In response, many are moving inward — and closer to home.
One WSJ piece notes a telling shift: a growing number of young adults are choosing to work for their parents’ businesses. For some, this is practical — they want flexibility, stability, and meaningful work. For others, it’s about alignment: shared values, shared goals, shared trust. The prestige economy is weakening, and with it, the cultural pressure to make your name through credentials alone.
This instinct is mirrored in the home and social sphere. Shared housing arrangements are more common. Meals are more often communal. Parenting, for those stepping into it, is increasingly approached as a group endeavor. One NYT op-ed makes the case that the pandemic reopened a conversation about proximity and care (especially for fathers) that’s now feeding broader questions about how we structure our lives, households, and communities.
Even children are feeling the ripple effect. A Fortune piece on Gen Alpha’s career dreams found that top aspirations included “YouTuber” and “influencer”—but maybe not only because of fame. For many kids, these careers are associated with control, flexibility, and emotional expression. That same thread runs through a NYT story on student-athlete influencers, who are not trying to monetize fame so much as build lives on their own terms. Not waiting for permission.
The new aspiration isn’t freedom in the abstract. It’s togetherness. It’s durability. It’s a life you don’t have to survive alone—the kind we may have never been meant to face alone.
Closing Thoughts
Each of these stories, tools, and shifts—whether in AI interfaces, biosensing, water filters, or intergenerational careers—feels like a fragment of a bigger mosaic. I’m less interested in whether any one of them “wins” and more curious about what they reflect back to us: how we’re rethinking infrastructure, redistributing trust, and renegotiating what it means to be healthy, connected, and human in a changing world.
If you’re tracking adjacent trends or reading something you think belongs in this stack, please send it my way.