Disaster relief 🌪️, dining solo 🍽️, self-driving cars 🚕

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

On Friday, You Can See Everything, the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, hit theaters. Filmed in the 34 days before she began an 11-year federal prison sentence for fraud, it follows Holmes through her final days at home with her husband and two children.

Without giving away any spoilers, the movie studies the nature and psychology of Holmes’ behavior by documenting her every move. It acts as a meta-analysis on documentaries themselves and sheds light on our desire to see things as black and white. This isn’t meant to be a movie review; there’s a point to all this commentary (though we highly recommend going to see it).

The most profound part is taking fiction‘s unreliable narrator trope and flipping that on its head by using it to describe reality, something that should have an objective truth regardless of the narrator. While we’d like to believe we’re rational actors using evidence to make each and every decision, our nature is emotion-based. We place trust in the institutions telling these stories then warp ensuing facts to fit that narrative. That mindset puts a lot of pressure on the news you consume (and the writing we do) to break through the perspective someone else may approach storytelling with and try to find the truth in it.

Theranos was a case of investors taking corporate data at face value until a reporter uncovered the truth. Each story this week is backed by corporate data. Companies want to present themselves in a good light. But it’s up to you as readers and us as writers to dig through that narrative and understand what underlies that presentation, and if it’s true and worth learning about. In this case we think these stories are. Nonprofits and corporations like Amazon are showing up in advance of natural disasters to better support communities. The numbers show that solo diners at restaurants are on the rise as a way of spending more me-time. And Waymo, the self-driving car company, published new data showing monumental safety gains over human drivers.

With gratitude,

The 3GT Crew

A little over a week ago, a hurricane made landfall in the US for the first time in two years. Isaias swept through Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, wiping out power across nearly 900,000 homes and businesses. Isaias was just a tropical depression three days before, meaning winds of 38 mph or less versus 96-110 mph for a Category 2 – the difference between your umbrella flipping out and getting blown off your feet.

Despite this, resources showed up in advance. Nonprofits like World Central Kitchen positioned teams in the area and set up a mobile kitchen that could make hundreds of meals in a few hours. The Red Cross opened 21 shelters housing more than 1,000 people. Corporations showed up too. Comcast opened up more than 26,000 free public Wi-Fi hotspots, and AT&T and Walmart set up charging and internet stations with a nonprofit.

Stepping back: not long ago, relief preceding the damage was the exception. When Michael, a Category 5, hit Mexico Beach eight years earlier, 85% of customers in rural Panhandle counties were still without power six days later and officials warned it could last weeks longer. Within five days of Isaias however, Florida Power & Light restored electricity to 95% of affected customers, led by crews staged beforehand. Historically, companies handed over a check to the local community, a helpful gesture, but not what was needed in the moment. Now, businesses are responding by leveraging their infrastructure.

Take Amazon’s Disaster Relief program for example: started in 2017, it has provided aid at more than 200 disasters worldwide. The team deploys kits that act as a rapid response technology system built around three jobs: power (solar panel and batteries), connectivity (satellite links and Wi-Fi), and sensing (drones and sensors for mapping damage and locating people). Each kit is light enough to be carried solo and straightforward enough to set up in minutes by someone with no technical experience. Amazon says that a system of kits can power a 50-bed hospital off-grid for 72 hours, support over 2,500 hot meals at a shelter, or power a portable oxygen machine for months. Amazon’s delivery network can get resources to ground zero in hours.

And they’re being used for free by the nonprofits who don’t always have the budget for big equipment. After Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica last fall, Amazon flew 2,500 pounds of solar batteries and satellite Wi-Fi gear from its Atlanta hub to support hospitals, police stations and local community centers. Amazon is looking to 50x the number of kits it delivers by 2027.

Why it matters: In the US, there are over 4.5 million Medicare beneficiaries reliant on electricity-dependent equipment or essential home healthcare. In Milton, Florida, $10 of generator gas bought one woman just eight hours of oxygen after Isaias. A blackout used to come with the risk of waiting. Now, a power source and an internet link can show up before the storm hits.

After you’ve ordered, the waiter walks away and you’re left facing an empty chair, acutely aware of how alone you are. Everyone else in the restaurant has someone to talk to. You start to wonder where to look, what to do with your hands, what everyone around you thinks. But somewhere between that moment and signing the check, that awkwardness starts to fade. You can slow down, be present in the atmosphere, and realize there’s something liberating about having nowhere else to be and no one else to entertain but yourself.

That’s the feeling diners describe when recounting their solo experiences. And this contingent is rapidly growing: parties of one now make up nearly one-quarter of full-service restaurant visits per Circana, a market research firm. It isn’t for a lack of people to go with. The most cited reason for dining alone was ‘personal time,’ almost four times as common as ‘no one could come.’ Nearly 70% of Gen Z and millennials have dined alone at a sit-down restaurant in the last year and two-thirds say they plan to keep it up.

The restaurants like this too. Per OpenTable, the per seat economics crown solo diners as the better guest at $94 per head in one seat compared to $60 per head in larger parties. They can also fill bar stools and counter seats that couples would rather avoid, and regular solo diners will return frequently with friends and become something of a restaurant ambassador. Solo reservations still represent a sliver of bookings because most of them just walk into the bar or counter.

That counter is where restaurants are redesigning to better accommodate this growing crowd. The Catbird Seat, a Michelin-starred counter restaurant in Nashville, hands solo guests custom crosswords and word searches built from restaurant terms and ingredients. The co-executive chef says the games make the room feel more like a dinner party and some people even use them to meet other solo diners. The more willing people are to try things alone, the fewer experiences they have to put on hold until someone else is free.

Riding in a car with nobody behind the wheel still sounds like a bad idea to a lot of people. Waymo checked the numbers: its newly refreshed Safety Data Impact Hub compares its crash and injury statistics to human drivers. The verdict? Robotaxis are markedly safer: across 271 million miles of driving (nearly 11,000 laps around the equator), Waymo found 93% fewer crashes that injured a pedestrian and 95% fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes. For context, the seatbelt, the most effective safety device ever put in a car, reduces fatality risk by about 45%.

This isn’t just Waymo grading its own test either. Waymo’s crashes come from reports it’s federally required to file with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The human benchmark comes from state police crash records and miles driven in the same counties, limited to the kinds of streets Waymo drives on. The insurance industry’s own crash research institute independently ran the federal data and reached the same verdict.

For now, Waymo barely registers: about 1 in every 15,000 miles Americans drive. The other 14,999 still have a person behind the wheel, on the same roads where there were over 36,000 traffic deaths in 2025, per NHTSA estimates. Among them were nearly 7,000 pedestrians.

The objection: one of the first concerns people have when they hear about self-driving cars is the potential job loss associated with it. In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a forecast which included taxi driver job growth of 12% over the next 10 years, much faster than the 3% average. Separately, self-driving cars can create jobs. At Nashville’s new depot, opened this month, there are more than 70 new full-time positions (think fleet technicians and operators) with half of the hires being former or current Lyft drivers.

Zooming out: the robotaxi’s safety predecessor, the seatbelt, illuminates some interesting parallels to what Waymo adoption could look like: humans can be resistant to change, even when it’s objectively safer. The first US seatbelt law came 25 years after invention, and even today, only 9 out of every 10 people wear them (unbelted people account for nearly 50% of occupant deaths). Still, Waymo’s goal is to double its weekly ride count by the end of the year and expand from 15 to 20+ cities. That’s where the comparison breaks in Waymo’s favor: a seatbelt only protects the person who wears it. A safer driver protects everyone on the street, including the pedestrians.