I Cried in Front of David

🎧️ Prefer to listen? I recorded this week’s newsletter for you.

Last week I wrote about how seeing the Blue Angels inspired excellence. I was in total awe of what humans can do when they really, really care – like flying fighter aircrafts inches apart.

During the show, I had a moment where I felt so moved by it, I said I wanted to witness excellence more frequently.

When you witness excellence, it increases your possibility horizon. Humans are constrained by what we believe is possible. Seeing someone break a barrier or perform flawlessly resets your baseline of what good looks like, stretching your imagination and standard for your own work. 

The idea of possibility horizons comes from the work of Husserl and Heidegger (they’re philosophers, as I learned from Google). Yuval Noah Harari later built upon the idea of a “horizon of possibilities” – the full spectrum of experiences available to human societies based on their existing constraints.

An example from history is Roger Bannister running a 4-minute mile. People had been trying to break the 4 minute barrier for 70 years when Bannister broke the record on May 6, 1954. Just 46 days later, the record was broken again, and 3 additional runners broke the 4 minute mile in the year following!

I’m not saying I can suddenly fly an F/A-18 Super Hornet because I saw the Blue Angels. But it did expand my possibility horizon and make me want to see more excellence.

So I’ve decided to make a habit of going on excellence dates – appointments with mastery.

An excellence date is like an artist's date from the Artist’s Way, but instead of making your inner child happy, you’re raising the bar for your own potential. In some ways, these dates are the complete opposite of what Julia Cameron would recommend, but like Cameron I’ve come up with a few rules for excellence dates.

The purpose of an excellence date is an intentional encounter with mastery. It’s a deliberate choice to witness something so profoundly exceptional it demands you live to a higher standard. 

Rule 1: It must fill you with awe and curiosity. I want you to be stunned by the experience. To be so amazed, you can’t help but dig into how it’s possible: the dedication required to achieve the level of mastery being witnessed. The magicians Penn & Teller once said, “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

Rule 2: Fun but not casual. An excellence date can–and should–be fun, but it should also be consequential. It should command your full attention. You must be singularly engaged.

Rule 3: Shared effervescence. Unlike an artist date, which should be done solo, excellence dates trigger what sociologists call collective effervescence, physically intensifying collective awe. Collective witnessing helps translate emotions into shared reality, creating new understandings of what we are capable of. 

Rule 4: Make it a habit. An excellence date, like excellence itself, requires commitment. You can’t see something excellent once a year and have its impact last 365 days. It needs to be frequent enough to continue setting high baseline expectations. 

Rule 5: Journal about it immediately to lock-in your own excellence routine. When you get home from an excellence date, spend 15 minutes journaling about how you feel and what you witnessed. Then reflect on where you can raise the quality bar in your own life. 

This summer I saw The David in Florence. I had reservations that a marble statue could live up to the hype. But, I was very, very wrong. Standing in front of the larger than life statue, I was moved to tears. Even 500 years after it was carved, I knew immediately what Michelangelo was communicating: that perfection is beautiful and sacred.

“Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.” – Michelangelo 

Pick a date, grab your people, and go find a standard of mastery that leaves you wanting something new for yourself.

Frontier Tech Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

• Citrini Research used Claude to design potential building blocks for a new scorpion antivenom. Scorpion stings kill more than 3,250 people a year, according to Anthropic, mostly children in regions with limited medical care. Citrini, an investment research firm, partnered with Anthropic to see whether people outside drug development could use AI to help develop a treatment. An internal research version of Claude spent 64 hours generating and screening protein designs. Labs tested 211, and 17 met the researchers’ criteria for attaching to their target toxins. Researchers still need to establish whether those proteins neutralize the toxins and can become a safe treatment. The designs and experimental data are now public. As these models improve, more people could be able to participate in drug discovery.

• Anthropic plans to put 5% of its shares into a fund that could support people affected by AI’s impact on work. Subject to shareholder approval, the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund would be a wholly owned LLC, giving it flexibility to donate to nonprofits or make direct distributions to specific populations. The board could add another 2% of shares for every 50% increase in the company’s value above a baseline it hasn’t disclosed. Anthropic says the fund’s equity won’t be used for lobbying or political giving. Could this become a way to fund universal basic income? Anthropic hasn’t announced that, but direct payments are among the possibilities it described.

• Anthropic’s draft IPO prospectus reportedly showed an $80.7 billion loss, but most of it was a noncash accounting charge. According to reporting on documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, about $72 billion reflected changes in the value of financing obligations, including instruments that can convert into shares. That doesn’t mean Anthropic spent $72 billion operating the business. Excluding those charges leaves roughly $8.7 billion in other net losses, which still isn’t the same as cash burn. Revenue for the first half of 2026 reached $16.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier.

• A new ring lets you whisper a message or an AI instruction instead of typing it. Dünya Baradari introduced Plato on October 20, with preorders priced at $199 and the first batch expected to ship in December. The ring captures softly spoken words and connects to software for dictation and AI tasks. You can hold its touchpad to dictate, or use gestures to edit selected text and delegate work to an assistant. The team says its app supports local processing as well as encrypted cloud processing. It’s designed for situations where speaking at full volume would be awkward, like working around other people. The device hasn’t shipped yet, so its performance is still based on company demonstrations.

• Meta released a downloadable AI model that developers can customize and run on computers they control. Muse Spark Open launched October 15 for coding and tasks that require an AI to work through multiple steps. It’s an open-weight model, meaning developers can download the trained model and adapt it for their own applications. That gives them more freedom over how it works and where their data is processed, without depending on Meta to host it. It still requires substantial hardware: Meta demonstrated it running on two high-end Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios. Developers can also use hosted versions through outside providers, and Meta’s license includes commercial conditions.

• People are using AI to strip ads and unwanted software from their smart TVs. Developers have shared projects called dumbtv and cleanyourtv that help replace cluttered home screens and disable unwanted features, including some that track viewing habits. One developer says he used Claude Code to clean up his parents’ television and build a simpler interface with their apps. Others have posted demonstrations of faster menus after similar changes. TechCrunch spoke with the developers and documented users trying the projects. They remain experimental, with different results across television models. Some users got stuck during the process, and one reported leaving their television unusable.

• Mastercard announced a tool to help banks spot risky stablecoin payments before sending the money. Stablecoin Security combines payment information with blockchain data to check where funds came from and flag potential fraud or sanctions exposure. It gives financial institutions a risk score before a payment is completed, helping them decide whether it should proceed or receive further review. The tool connects to banks’ existing fraud and compliance systems. Borderless.xyz and Keyrails are the first announced partners. Mastercard says it will launch in North America first, with worldwide commercial availability expected in 2027.

• Visa and Mesh want to let people spend crypto directly from participating wallet apps wherever Visa is accepted. Wallet providers would integrate Mesh, which would handle funding and conversion while the merchant receives a standard Visa payment. Customers could tap at a contactless terminal or pay online without first transferring the money to a bank account. Merchants wouldn’t need new hardware. Visa’s network spans more than 175 million merchant locations, but that figure describes the network’s reach, rather than an already completed rollout. The companies still need to announce participating platforms and initial availability.

• Researchers developed an AI tool that estimates cancer survival risk from a photograph of a patient’s face. The Mass General Brigham team wants to help doctors assess a patient’s physical condition before recommending intensive treatment. Two people of the same age can have very different levels of frailty, and facial images may contain signals that help measure those differences. Researchers developed separate tools to estimate biological age and survival risk in patients with cancer. In the study published October 19 in The Lancet Digital Health, combining them improved the survival model in an external validation group. The eventual goal is to help personalize treatment. The study hasn’t yet established that using these tools improves care or patient outcomes.

SheFi Global Events + Opportunities 🌎

Stay connected with SheFi around the world. From meetups and summits to workshops and special partner events, this is where you’ll find the can’t-miss gatherings happening across our global community.

10/29 Virtual: AI Will Survive: Get Up to Speed and Ready to Start Using AI at Work

for a free, beginner-friendly, 90-minute live class to help you understand the tools available and get your workspace ready.

​What we'll cover:

• ​AI + LLMs: what they are and how they work

• ​The AI landscape: understanding the main tools and what they're useful for

• ​Setting up your workspace

• ​Context, instructions, and prompts: how to give AI what it needs to help you

• ​Getting connected: connecting AI to the apps you already use

• ​Maggie’s AI stack: the tools she uses in her own work

• ​Your first simple workflow: a live walkthrough of a beginner-friendly example

Register here: https://luma.com/9jo7q59f

Celebrating SheFi Successes 🎉

• Sury spoke at the UN General Assembly Science Summit about blockchain education and opportunities for women in tech.

👉️ Share your wins so we can celebrate them 👈️

Crypto Events 🌎

Going to ETHCC, Token2049 or Devcon? Join our Global Events Telegram Chat: https://t.me/shefisummit

• 10/22 SFO: Open Source AI Summit SF: RSVP here

• 10/25 Chicago: BRING IT TO LIFE: A HALLOWEEN BUILDATHON, GAME LAB & PARTY: RSVP here

• 11/11 London: AWIC x DAS London Panel "Phantom Assets: Counterfeit Tokens, Collateral Risk and Digital Asset Resilience": RSVP here

• 11/17-18 Florida: EthWomen Florida: RSVP here

• Volunteer x Web3Privacy Now: Sign up here

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