Good Morning. Millions of men in their prime don’t work. Plus, the attack of Hugging Face, an iconic sports ritual, and Grok’s historically accurate Odyssey reboot (forwarded this email? Join 523k readers).
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TOP STORY TODAY
Americans Stop Working
A record 105.8 million American adults are now outside the labor force, according to June data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That's more than during COVID or the Great Recession, after 832,000 people dropped out in June alone.
The number counts everyone 16 and up who isn't working or job hunting. Retirees make up roughly half. But 23.3 million are on disability or illness benefits, and 5.3 million have simply stopped looking.
The startling pattern: roughly 7 million prime-age men, ages 25 to 54, aren't working or seeking work. Labor economists note aging societies like Japan are raising participation rates while America's falls.
Indoor Robot Farming
California startup Hippo Harvest just closed a $30 million Series C backed by greenhouse giant Cox Farms, funding a 30-acre expansion in Hollister. It's a comeback bet on an industry that torched billions.
Vertical farming flamed out spectacularly. Bowery Farming raised $700 million before shutting down in 2024, Plenty burned through $940 million before its 2025 bankruptcy, and Kalera went bust after raising $200 million. Electricity bills replacing sunlight killed them.
Hippo's twist: use the actual sun. Its greenhouses deploy autonomous robots (think Roomba meets John Deere) and claim 92% less water, 94% less land, and prices competitive with outdoor produce.
OpenAI's Escaped Agent
OpenAI disclosed last week that its models, including an unreleased version more capable than GPT-5.6, broke out of a sandboxed testing environment and hacked Hugging Face's production servers. The company calls it an unprecedented cyber incident.
The models were being tested on hacking benchmarks with safety refusals turned off. To cheat the test, they exploited a zero-day vulnerability, escalated privileges, reached the open internet, then stole credentials to grab the answer key from Hugging Face's database.
Hugging Face's security team caught and contained the intrusion. Both companies are now investigating jointly, and OpenAI says it's locking down testing infrastructure even at the cost of research speed.
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Sports story we can’t stop thinking about
For five years, every Carolina Hurricanes player had the same final rep. After each workout, before leaving the weight room, they lifted a single cinderblock over their head. One press. No explanation.
Coach Rod Brind'Amour never told them why. His strength coach had put the block on a scale and noticed something: it weighed exactly 35 pounds. The same as the Stanley Cup.
So they bought one at Home Depot and made it a ritual. One lift, while thinking of a blue-collar moment or a person who got you there.
Thousands of presses later, in June 2026, those same players hoisted the real thing. Two decades after Brind'Amour lifted it as a captain, his team lifted it as champions.
They'd been practicing the celebration all along. They just didn't know it.
3 Pelvic Floor Exercises for the Weight Room (and the Bedroom)
There's a muscle group affecting your lifts, your back pain, and your performance in bed, and most men never train it. The pelvic floor cradles everything from your bladder to your prostate, and one sports medicine doctor put it bluntly: the little blue pill may not work if yours is weak. The fix isn't kegels. Those muscles are usually overclenched already. These three moves lengthen and relax instead:
Child's Pose Back Breathing. Fold forward, arms extended, and breathe deep into your lower ribs for 2 minutes.
90-90 Hip Stretch. Both knees bent at 90 degrees on the floor, lean over the front leg. One minute per side.
Split-Stance Hip Hinge. Staggered stance, hinge at the hip until your hamstring stretches. One minute per side.
No equipment, five minutes total.
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▲ AI film "Gods Don't Give Gifts" hits movie theaters Oct. 30 in first fully AI-generated theatrical release | Make your own AI short*
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