P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #482

Lemonade

my story 🚀

🏺 After a flight cancelation left us with a surprise weekend in New York, we committed to making the best of it. We took life’s lemons and literally set up a lemonade stand outside the kids’ cousin’s elementary school on a hot and sunny Friday afternoon. It was a hit! The next day we visited the Met in Manhattan (my first time!) and saw an impressive collection of ancient relics, including the Temple of Dendur, an actual Egyptian temple. Now we’re settled in Chicago for the summer and I’m excited to stay put for several weeks!

fun facts 🙌

Cucumbers used to be called “cowcumbers.” “By the end of the 18th century, ‘cowcumber’ had become a standard pronunciation, and even spread to the U.S.” It later became a class marker, and Dickens used it to signal lower class characters. ~ learn more

An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction. Dry as a….? “You’ll notice that the top 3 bone, desert, and dust make up 43% of all usage, and there is a pretty quick drop-off after that with a long tail of rarer choices.” A fun data dive through similes data. ~ learn more

Who is C F Frost? It’s the name on all American Express cards in their ads. “Charles Frost--or Chuck, as we like to call him--is a real person.” American Express used his name on sample cards in the “Do you know me?” ads to avoid accidentally picking “the real name of some joker in Pocatello who would sue for privacy infringement.” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Illinois wants more money and they’re coming for it. I shared a bit about this budget bill that passed the Illinois legislature. Well, it’s been signed into law. It includes several new taxes, including one on social media platforms. The way it’s written, that includes poor little AllTrails, a little app for discovering hiking routes. “A platform of this size has to pay ‘$165,000, plus $0.50 per month multiplied by the number of Illinois users over 1,000,000.’” The claim is that this would put AllTrails on the hook for about 8% of their revenue. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Midjourney Medical is building the future I want to live in. This is so cool. It reinforces so much of my optimism about the future for humanity. They call it “Ultrasonic CT” and say the scan takes as little as 60 seconds with just sound and water. The video is so cool I thought it was maybe just to show off generative AI, but nope! “Our goal at Midjourney Medical is to deploy around 50,000 of these scanners around the world over the next 6 years and use this fleet of sensors to do a billion full-body scans every month.” ~ learn more

How to earn a billion dollars. “Exponential growth is like magic. It generates outcomes that seem impossible.” Paul Graham does the math on what it takes to go from a few million to a billion, and then explains why the real trick is building something users love enough to share. ~ learn more

Tokenmaxxing was a mass delusion. “Tokenmaxxing was a mass delusion, something like a commercial form of AI psychosis.” Markie Wagner argues companies should stop celebrating token spend and start measuring “Return on Tokens” like any other investment. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

How entrepreneurs figure out what they want. Taylor Pearson argues that you get unstuck by inventorying your means first, then letting the goals emerge from them. “Assuming you have some vague goal or sense of which direction you’d like to move like “earn a living helping people be healthier,” ask: “What do I have?” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

What he does and doesn’t do in early prevention. Derek Flanzraich, writer of Healthyish, is a great resource on the topics of preventative health and wellness. “And while I can’t give pointed advice on which tests to take (I’m not a doctor and none of this is medical advice… think of me as your friend with health benefits 🤓), I can share which early preventive tests I do/don’t do and why.” ~ learn more

Blood cleansing for microplastics. “Among patients with the highest levels of circulating microplastics, average levels fell from 52.2 to 21.1 particles per 100 microliters of blood after a single treatment.” Therapeutic plasma exchange is an FDA-cleared procedure, but the study does not show that lowering microplastics improves health outcomes. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? “in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will force the bank to foreclose on it.” The piece explains why a half-empty storefront can still make more sense to the owner and the bank than cutting rent, because the building is treated as an income stream, not a building. To those of you who know a lot about this topic, I’d love to hear from you if there’s anything this author gets wrong! ~ learn more

Go unsexy. “Go for those categories that are ripe for disruption that really need someone smart representing the needs of the consumer.” PrettyLitter scaled past $100M in sales with about a dozen full-time employees and only $1M raised, before selling to Mars for $1.4B. ~ learn more

Walmart’s drones are coming. “Walmart is bringing its Wing drone delivery service to the Philadelphia region.” Living in Austin and seeing Waymos drive around everywhere feels like the future. Hard to imagine delivery drones on top of that, but it’s coming! ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

This specially-designed jacket pulls drinking water from thin air. “The textile incorporated into the jacket collects moisture and funnels it to detachable harvesting units. Those units are placed in a foldable collector piece and heated to produce water. The jacket produced between 400 and 900 milliliters of drinkable water per day, about 14 to 30 ounces, depending on humidity levels.” ~ learn more

Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy. Ruxandra Teslo argues that for CAR-T, paperwork-level thresholds and noisy tests can block drugs that still work, and turn manufacturing into the real bottleneck. “Legend Biotech’s leadership later calculated that if those stricter commercial standards had been applied retroactively to the original trial data, the out-of-specification rate would have risen from 2 percent to 18 percent.” ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Not going to tell my kids about Fairy bread. “It features soft, squishy white bread, butter, and sprinkles. That’s it.” An Australian kids party classic, it seems! ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Tuition refund if students don’t generate $1M of gross profit. “Graduate from its new Founders High School without earning $1 million in gross profit, and the school refunds your full $600,000 in tuition.” The pitch: two hours of AI-driven academics in the morning, then an entrepreneurship bootcamp in the afternoon where teens build real businesses. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Oil and gas is mind-bogglingly big. I can’t help but share another interesting post by Casey Handmer about Terraform, his company that makes synthetic natural gas from thin air. “The oil and gas market is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Handmer argues that even small cost improvements unlock enormous new demand for synthetic fuels, which makes scaling feel less like a gamble and more like math. ~ learn more

Private money builds rockets. “SpaceX founded in 2002: $12B in capital invested VOLUNTARILY to transport humans, satellites and rockets into SPACE.” Darin Feinstein contrasts it with California’s high speed rail as a simple case study in incentives and accountability. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

The mom who runs a household with a staff of AI agents. “Claire is just one of the AI agents on Genet’s household staff. There’s also Sylvie, who runs her kids’ homeschool; the Wests — Clark, Dan, and Chloe — who deal with legal and financial paperwork; and a team of coding agents that can build pretty much any app Genet describes. A year ago, none of this was really possible.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!