my story 🚀
fun facts 🙌
Queensbridge. I spent a night in Long Island City and walking from the train stop to my hotel, I passed the housing project where one of my favorite artists, Nas, grew up. “From a neighborhood perspective, the album was very important to us,” says Queensbridge resident Larry Webb about Nas’s “Illmatic.” “It was the best thing that ever happened to us.” ~ learn more
Europe demands family dynasties. “Many European countries have ‘forced heirship’ laws that require people to leave 50-75% of their estates to their children.” It can even claw back lifetime gifts, making it harder to fund charities and foundations at scale. ~ learn more
Why Japanese companies do so many different things. Toilet maker Toto is rolling in profits recently. “But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets.” The piece uses Toto’s pivot into semiconductor components to explain why Japanese firms so often end up excellent at wildly different businesses. ~ learn more
Founders Fund hosts a game of Mafia. “Venture capital firm Founders Fund gathered a group of tech leaders for an evening of Mafia, a murder mystery style parlor game. Players are secretly assigned roles and must use deception and debate skills to eliminate the opposing team before they are outnumbered.” … “Featuring: Sam Altman / Palmer Luckey / Josie Zayner / Bryan Johnson / Michael Solana / Tim Urban / Liv Boeree / Ryan Beiermeister / Dylan Field / Moxie Marlinspike / Cyan Banister / Ryan Petersen / Trae Stephens” ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
Illinois legislature may have lost its mind. They’ve passed a budget bill, pending Governor Pritzker’s signature, that will tax each crypto transaction (exchange, transfer, or storage) by IL taxpayers 0.2% of value. Is this the most aggressive thing any state has done? Indeed it is! Ask your favorite AI to read the 1,623 pages and summarize for you. I think we can all rest assured that few, if any, of the legislators read all the pages. Also, this isn’t a crypto bill! “Article 3 is only one part … that also includes targeted advertising taxes, social media platform fees, hotel marketplace taxes, gambling taxes, sports wagering changes, fuel tax changes, and many other tax provisions.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Half a billion on Claude. “An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.” Considering my experience once spending $1,000 on AI tokens in a weekend, I imagine the person responsible felt like Jafar, the most powerful sorcerer in the world. ~ learn more
AI agents, crypto wallets, and an API search engine. Zero indexes API services so an agent can discover and use capabilities on the fly, then settle metered usage directly with providers via the CLI, funded by its crypto wallet. The premise of this service seems strong. I told my agent to take advantage of the $5 free cash intro offer and set it up, but the trial money never arrived. I imagine they’ll work out the bugs and this will be useful. ~ learn more
Watch me control my computer with just my voice. “This is the future of operating systems. No hands.” A quick demo of GPT-Realtime 2.0 doing real computer control by voice, the kind of thing that makes keyboards feel optional. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Can we have Friday off? Alas, probably not, because the human competitive game is relative not absolute. “If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.” ~ learn more
We’ve made honesty too expensive for the people closest to us. “When someone tells me something hard, I’ve trained myself to say “thank you” before I say anything else.” Brent Beshore argues that defensiveness quietly teaches people to stop being honest with you, and you lose access to the truth you need to grow. ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Credit card spend on Delta’s co-branded Amex cards is 1% of US GPD. That sounds like a lot, right? It is! ~ learn more
Ford’s IPO was a circus. “The syndicate will include just about everybody who’s in the business and who isn’t, or hasn’t been, in jail,” a Blyth vice-president told John Brooks. In 1956, Ford’s IPO needed a 722 firm syndicate, mailed more than a million prospectuses, and still came out wildly oversubscribed. ~ learn more
How banks kept $485 billion of the Fed’s rate hikes from savers. “Even then, just 7 cents of every dollar of rate increase reached the average savings account.” The study tracks Fed Funds vs. the FDIC’s national average savings rate and finds banks moved fast on cuts, but dragged their feet on hikes, leaving a record gap in 2023. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
One-shot gene editing for LDL. “One dose of VERVE-102 led to dose-dependent, substantial, and sustained reductions in PCSK9 and LDL cholesterol levels.” It is a phase 1 study in 35 people, with LDL reductions up to 62% at the highest dose and durability out to at least a year for some participants. ~ learn more
Functional human sperm in a lab. “Growing functional human sperm entirely outside the body.” Little by little we’re living in an era where humans are taking control over biology. In this example, they were able to coax stem cells into sperm cells one chemical signal at a time. Paterna says it proved viability by using the lab-grown sperm to fertilize human eggs and form embryos, with early results comparable to standard IVF. ~ learn more
Rods that run cone software. Despite my comment above about humanity taking control over biology, it’s also true that we still know very little about biology. “For more than 150 years, vertebrate vision has been understood as a two-part system: rods for low-light conditions, and cones for bright light and color. That tidy division is now under the microscope, as researchers from the University of Queensland have discovered a new hybrid cell that breaks the rule: rod-shaped photoreceptors that run cone-specific genetic programs.” ~ learn more
teaching the kids 👩🏫
The cost of safetyism. “What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard. … The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.” Steve Magness argues that the big shift is a perception-reality gap, and the downstream cost is less autonomy and more anxiety. ~ learn more
on the blockchain ⛓
Unlimited counterfeit coins. Privacy coin Zcash’s price crashed 57% in 24 hours thanks to a newly disclosed bug. “The vulnerability could have been exploited to undetectably create an unlimited amount of counterfeit ZEC within Orchard,” Shielded Labs said. The scary part: “there is no way to cryptographically prove whether the vulnerability was exploited before it was remediated,” so the market is left to price the uncertainty. ~ learn more