P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #353

Happy new year!

my story 🚀

Finally made it to the famous tar pits

🏠 We’re back in Austin after spending the week visiting family in Los Angeles where we got to see a beautiful sunset and a very packed theme park. Wishing you all a Happy New Year!

i’ve been thinking 💭

How long will this newsletter last?

I am blessed with heaps of curiosity and pretty good follow-through. Those of you have been cornered by me when I have questions and I think you have answers already know this. When I face the “known unknown” with my curiosity engine running, I love nothing more than to fill in the blanks.

That’s probably why I read so much each week. I’m also a social creature, and it makes me feel great to share things I’ve learned. That’s mostly why I started this newsletter.

Like many things in my life, I just began doing it one day — no real plan. While the links I send to your inbox each week are fresh and new, the newsletter has not changed much since 2017. Since then, email newsletters have become somewhat popular. I’ve seen the most successful newsletters narrow their focus to a single topic, or a single lens to analyze multiple topics.

Meanwhile I have been quite pleased to bring my family photos, a dozen or two assorted links, and occasional ramblings to about 500 of you each week. Thank you, dear reader, for sticking with it!

As we enter the 8th calendar year of this newsletter’s existence, I want to increase the chance that it survives another 8 years. And that means grounding it in purpose.

P.S. You Should Know… exists to be a conduit of knowledge to fellow curious people.

And with that said, I think it follows that the job is never done, and that it can always be done better. So next year I will look better deliver on this purpose. See you in 2024!

fun facts 🙌

When the western world ran on guano. “For the second half of the 19th century, the Western world pretty much ran on a game-changing, nation-making, super-powerful substance—bird poop. At first glance (or, fine, maybe second), guano is an ideal fertilizer. Made almost entirely of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, it’s basically a splat of straight-up energy for plants. Plus, thanks to the social habits of the birds that produce it, it tends to be available in huge, concentrated, perpetually regenerating heaps.” ~ learn more

Why do tattoos last? Most cells in the body only live for about a year. Skin cells are on this schedule. “Therefore, skin cells should divide and dead cells be cleared out in under a year, not the decades that tattoos would suggest.” So what’s happening here? Read on for the answer. ~ learn more

PlayPhrase: a site for cinema archaeologists. Type in any phrase and get a compilation video of that exact phrase across a library of movies. Do you feel lucky? ~ learn more

The Pontiac Aztek. If you remember this car, you probably remember how unattractive it was… “a car so ham-fisted in its execution it became a metaphor for the clownshow that was pre-bankruptcy GM.” Professional car designer and writer Adrian Clarke tells the story in detail: “The Aztek’s problems arose from the corporate environment that managed its development, the cynical way it was marketed, and mainly its customer-repelling appearance.” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Guilty verdict for alderman-racketeer Ed Burke. “The conviction caps a stunning fall from grace for an old-school politician who wielded his power for decades as the head of the City Council’s Committee on Finance, which controls much of the city’s spending. … The 79-year-old Burke was convicted by a jury of 13 of 14 counts after four days of deliberations. Burke was convicted of racketeering, attempted extortion, using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity, corruptly soliciting things of value and federal program bribery.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Lessons from acquiring 586 companies. This was a top notch discussion with Justin Ishbia of Shore Capital. They’ve deployed $7 billion of capital with an average transaction size of $12 million. It’s all down to the repeatable systems and tons of sports analogies by which to remember them. ~ learn more

Cell-based therapies are medicine’s endgame. This is an approachable explanation of a current frontier in medicine and what could become of it’s rise. “A little over a decade ago… For the first time, patients were cured of disease using genetically engineered cells as a medicine in their own right. If synthetic chemistry gave us an armamentarium of small molecules and molecular biology further expanded it with big molecules, the disciplines of cellular systems and synthetic biology are opening an entirely new frontier of programmable cell-based medicine.” ~ learn more

Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India. “Early this year, in an effort to improve production and ready the plant to manufacture Apple’s upcoming flagship iPhone 15, Foxconn dispatched more Chinese workers to Sunguvarchatram. Engineers like Li would get the India plant up to China speed.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Unleashing your secret identity. Todd Herman helped Kobe Bryant craft his alter ego, the Black Mamba. He is a performance coach who uses the tool of identity, “because your identity—the person or the view of yourself that’s going out to perform on that field—is where all of your habits, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs sit; they’re on top of that identity of you as that performer.” ~ learn more

Picking a purpose. Technologist David Heinemeier Hansson (known as DHH) is now a bit of a philosophy student as well. “Eric Fromm followed the same path of wisdom to additional insights. In The Pathology of Normalcy, he spells out exactly what makes modern man condemned: Getting everything he wanted while having nobody asking him for anything. The satiation of every desire paired with a relief of every responsibility is a psychological death sentence to many.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Why are sales down? “Several fashion retailers and e-commerce platforms are playing the blame game when it comes to Temu and Shein.” ~ learn more

Amazon’s lowering fees to compete with Shein. The author of this post suggests this won’t really solve anything… “Amazon rarely changes referral fees, and reducing the fee by 70% for items in Shein’s key price segment is unquestionably a response to Shein. But even if fees were to go to zero, Amazon would still have no answer for Shein.” ~ learn more

Celebrity-led brands are the future of consumer products. “You might dismiss as mere gimmicks products from YouTube stars like MrBeast and Logan Paul—think Feastables snacks and Prime energy drinks, respectively. But billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen leans toward another view: that they represent the future of consumer-product relationships.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought. The approach works by sampling proteins found only on the patient’s specific cancer cells and then prompting the bodies to make them to prime the immune system. “In 2022, they reported that the combo therapy reduced high-risk patients’ risk of recurrence or death by 44% compared to only Keytruda in the two years after treatment. They’ve now announced that people who received both therapies were 49% less likely to experience recurrence or death a median of three years after treatment compared to people in the Keytruda-only group.” ~ learn more and make sure to read the cell-based therapies link above if you’re curious about the bigger picture

big ideas 📚

How to scale nuclear power. Venture investor Ryan McEntush writes that the tides are turning for nuclear energy after a long hiatus from building new reactors. Not only does it seem that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is speeding up its review process, but also a new generation of technology enables safer operations with safer fuels. “A new generation of reactors present strong promise, many starting small and refining designs with unit prices that utilities can stomach.” ~ learn more

Quantum computing’s hard, cold reality check. “The quantum computer revolution may be further off and more limited than many have been led to believe. That’s the message coming from a small but vocal set of prominent skeptics in and around the emerging quantum computing industry.” ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

A conversation with Charlie Munger. This was published shortly before the famous investor’s recent passing. One excerpt: “Berkshire is pretty extreme in culture. We are deeply aware of how bureaucracies tend to create their own internal dynamics so that everybody protects everybody else and nobody changes anything, ruffles any feathers. And the net result is that a lot of bureaucracies make some very stupid decisions and we try and avoid that. But the way we've done it, mostly, is by not having anybody around.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!