P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #414
Ski Poles and Podcasts
my story 🚀
🏔️ This week’s issue comes to you from the top of a mountain in Austria, and with an extra huge Thank You to my wife Kim for making it possible for me to be here!
🎧 Two recent podcast launches from friends (and fellow subscribers) that I am thrilled to share with you:
Ilya Zlotnik launched Journeys to the Summit, a “gateway to the private stories of entrepreneurs who have navigated their way to the top.” His first episode is with David Sternberg, who founded Vivaldi Capital after a successful career as an options trader in Chicago.
Noah Berkson along with Jess Mah launched the Dose of Greatness. The inaugural episode, called The First Dose, is a surprisingly open and interesting chat with tech entrepreneur Suli Ali.
fun facts 🙌
Dollar street. “Imagine the world as a street ordered by income. Everyone lives somewhere on the street. The poorest lives to the left and the richest to the right. Everybody else live somewhere in between… A team of photographers have documented over 264 homes in 50 countries so far, and the list is growing. In each home the photographer spends a day taking photos of up to 135 objects, like the family's toothbrushes or favorite pair of shoes. All photos are then tagged (household function, family name and income).” ~ learn more
Photographs of the Old West from the late 1800s. “As you look through his images below, you may find yourself realising that all of those faces once belonged to people whose lives were as rich and varied as your own. It may occur to you that nothing besides remains of their stories, except perhaps these images and Monsen’s scrawled captions. Who were they? What were their hopes and dreams? Did they live full, happy lives? We can only guess.” ~ learn more
Figgie. “Figgie is a card game that was invented at [trading firm] Jane Street in 2013. It was designed to simulate open-outcry commodities trading. Most of the skill in Figgie is in negotiating trades that benefit both the buyer and seller. Like in poker, your objective in Figgie is to make money over a series of rounds.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Anthopic’s tips for building AI agents. First, they helpfully clarify that most things people call agents are really just workflows. Also, they were not able to reference actual agents in production yet. Yet, I think there remains cause for hope. “Anthropic’s Barry Zhang (Applied AI), Erik Schluntz (Research), and Alex Albert (Claude Relations) discuss the potential of AI agents, common pitfalls to avoid, and how to prepare for the evolving landscape.” ~ learn more
The deep research problem. Ben Evans does a lot of research, and would like to use OpenAI’s Deep Research, but he can’t really. Here, he explains why: “This table looks great - hours of work compiling this data all done for for me by a machine. Before we give it to a client, though, let’s just check a few things. First, what’s the source? Ah. …” ~ learn more
The bitter lesson in scaling. This is a story about Grok 3, which has come from behind not because of the constraints (see: Deepseek), but because of their huge fleet of the latest GPUs. The author’s point is that constraints breed creativity, but its still better to take advantage untapped resources. “But more than just a win for xAI, Grok 3 represents yet another victory for the Bitter Lesson. Perhaps the clearest one so far. Contrary to what the press and critics keep saying, the scaling laws still govern AI progress—more than ever before.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
What 30 days of junk food did to Scott’s gut. Two founders in Austin teamed up for a health experiment. Cheryl Sew How of Tiny Health provided the lab tests and Scott Hickle of Throne was the n=1 subject. “For one month, he swapped his balanced, high-protein meals for an all-junk diet—frozen pizzas, fast food burgers, donuts, and packaged snacks. His goal was to isolate the impact of food on his gut and his overall well-being.” ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Beer distributors’ ‘total beverage’ power. The booze market is both heavily regulated and fragmented by state, which makes for interesting market dynamics. “The middle tier is the crucible of the American bev-alc industry, and California, a frequent harbinger of its broader tectonic shifts. So it’s worth teasing out the themes animating Tito’s RNDC-to-RBG defection, and putting them in historical context to examine the changing nature of power in the booze business, and how it’s reshaping the market for players large and small.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
How disorder toughens materials. “In a new paper in PNAS Nexus, researchers … found that adding just the right amount of disorder to the structure of certain materials can make them more than twice as resistant to cracking.” ~ learn more
Scientists created the lightest and strongest nanomaterial ever. “An AI algorithm was taught to produce the lightest and strongest possible geometric structure for a nanomaterial (depending on what it was made of). The result was a carbon nanolattice that is light enough to sit on a soap bubble without breaking it, but can also support more than a million times its own mass.” ~ learn more