P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #459

ChatGPT corrects my math

my story 🚀

🗑️ We returned home from our mountain vacation to discover our trash bin was missing. I had to rewind almost an entire week of security camera footage to figure out what happened. A brazen theft in broad daylight! I hope whoever took it really needed it, and that it serves them as faithfully as it has served us.

🧮 ChatGPT officially counts better than me. As I began to write this week’s issue I was curious to recall what date my very first newsletter hit inboxes. I told the AI last week’s send date and issue # and asked it to figure it out. It did some calculations and gave me a date. I checked and that date was wrong. I accused it of screwing up, and it politely told me that I must have skipped a week. It turns out that I am the one who screwed up. In May 2025 I used the same issue number twice in a row. All hail the AI revolution.

fun facts 🙌

Jingle bells, batman smells. This playful study explores the many variants of "Jingle Bells (Batman Smells)" across the globe. ~ learn more

Decline of cash credited for drop in NHS surgery for children swallowing objects. "Historically, coins accounted for over 75% of objects swallowed by children under six years old, and fewer coins in homes due to contactless payments have likely helped reduce the number of these procedures." ~ learn more

Selling plasma reduces payday loans and increases retail spending. “After a plasma center opens nearby, demand for payday loans falls by over 13% among young borrowers.” The paper suggests that plasma donation helps individuals avoid high-interest loans by providing an alternative source of discretionary income. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

OpenAI’s $6.5B stylus play. “It sounds ridiculous. It sounds like Silicon Valley has finally run out of ideas and started raiding the stationary cupboard. But here’s the thing: They laughed at the AirPods, too. They looked like broken toothbrushes. Now they generate more revenue than Spotify.” Their new AI-powered pen aims to address a major bottleneck in human-computer interaction: the keyboard. ~ learn more

NVIDIA’s going to drive cars now. CEO Jensen Huang explains: “It’s trained end-to-end. Literally from camera in to actuation out; It reasons what action it is about to take, the reason by which it came about that action, and the trajectory.” ~ learn more

AI’s second-order impacts. “The second-order impacts of AI are the most interesting thing to invest in in 2026.” Isn’t it convenient when someone else does the pre-work for us? ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Warren Buffett’s timeless investing lessons. “In 1998, Warren Buffett gave a 1-hour masterclass on how to never lose money investing.” He was speaking to an MBA class and explained to them his concept of “the 10% ownership test,” among other things. ~ learn more

The suck is why we’re here. “The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger.” ~ learn more

Try the Napoleon technique. “[Napoleon’s] practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself and no longer required an answer.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

A rogue hacker. These unsuspecting retailers were just living their ordinary lives when someone hacked a Shopify app they had installed and, "ran a script to refund millions of dollars in seconds... crazy." The internet is a dangerous place. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

I genetically engineered myself to fix lactose intolerance. “Recently my friend Gabriel Licina, renowned biohacker and genetic engineer, gave me access to the tools and materials I needed to make a therapy that could potentially fix the issue.” The therapy employs an AAV virus to tackle lactose intolerance, a personal mission years in the making. ~ learn more

The evolution of bacteria. “The longest-running and most celebrated of modern evolution experiments is the appropriately named Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE). Started by Richard Lenski in 1988 at the University of California, Irvine, and continuing in the hands of Jeffrey Barrick at the University of Texas at Austin, the LTEE has been running nearly continuously for 80,000 generations of E. coli over nearly 40 years. This is equivalent to two million years of human evolution.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Inflatable space stations. “Volume restrictions are why inflatable stations, like the ones modeled on Goodyear tires proposed early on in the space age, may be ready for a comeback. Volume is a problem they do not face: the difference is like carrying a packed tent in a backpack versus trying to fit a prefabricated modular home into a bag.” ~ learn more

Data centers’ water usage debated. Despite numerous headlines suggesting otherwise, “data centers have not raised household water bills at all, anywhere.” The concern over data centers affecting local water costs turns out unfounded. ~ learn more

Dr. Keefer does not like Meta’s nuclear power plans. “Choosing a vaporware, pre-revenue nuclear startup for 16 so-called ‘advanced’ 75 MWe sodium fast reactors, a rehashed 1960s technology that has never proven itself commercially.” The skepticism lies in the clash between Silicon Valley’s fast-paced ambition and nuclear power’s rigorous risk management. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Crypto faces a reckoning. “In crypto today, we can definitively say that the tide has gone out. And it’s not coming back in until all the naked swimmers have been exposed.” The crypto industry’s glory days of easy gains have passed, revealing the underlying need for robust business models and investor relations akin to public companies. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

Larry Gies: scaling purpose to 25,000 employees. For a brief moment in time Larry and I guest spoke to the same class at the University of Illinois. On average that year, each of us guest speakers donated $15 million to the University. Of course that was all thanks to Larry, whose name now graces the Gies College of Business. “Founder and CEO of Madison Industries Larry Gies chats with Ravin and Al about building a business, finding purpose, raising kids, and fixing the USA.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!