Happy Saturday Besties,

It’s the last Saturday in July and that means….Pumpkin Spice season (August these days) is approaching. Correction: Pumpkin spice IS HERE. Because Chobani already got the squash spice rolling for the season. In 2023, Starbucks dropped the spicy menu on August 24th…

• This year: The Starbucks PSL will be of legal drinking age — it’s turning 21 (est. Oct. 2003). And it’ll likely be coming in a couple weeks (there’s a whole Reddit thread speculating).

But we’ll stick to pistachio…

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FACT(S)

🥇 Olympics Edition…

There’s a 43-year age gap between the youngest and oldest members of Team USA this year. The youngest Olympians are Hezly Rivera (who turned 16 just last month) and Quincy Wilson (also 16) who is the youngest male track team member for Team USA ever. The oldest is 59-year-old equestrian Steffen Peters. Even Steffen’s horse is older than Hezly Rivera.

US State sending the most Olympians, per capita: Vermont (for a total of 3). Nominally, California is sending the most athletes overall, by far (144). Click to check who’s coming from your state.

Olympic Village Mattresses: They’re green and scientific… designed by a Japanese startup, Airweave, that was inspired by fishing. The founder noticed his uncle’s fishing line could be used as thread. The resulting mattresses are 90% air and can hold 600 lbs…IYKYK. When games are over, they hose them down and to be donated. Squeaky clean…

One more thing…it’s the Fashion Olympics: And every nations is looking fresh this year… 💁‍♀️ Team USA is wearing Ralph Lauren, Canada is rocking Lululemon, Italy is head-to-toe Armani, South Korea is sporting North Face. Which brand won the Seine River Runway?

ICYMI

🔎 Google Search who??? SearchGPT is the new engine… but AI… and its from OpenAI, the $80B company behind ChatGPT.

And Wall Street thinks SearchGPT is potentially better than Google, whose stock dropped 2% on the news. We think it’s better than Googling too, for 2 reasons…

• More reliable results: Less misinformation, b/c OpenAI pays for real news (through licensing deals with news publishers), while Google Search scrapes anything and everything published on the web.

• More user-friendly: When it can, the AI will read the web for you, and serve up the 1 answer you were searching for. Instead of Google’s list of never-ending links. 

• The key reason: While SearchGPT may seem inferior to ChatGPT, it’s really a bridge between our search engine past and our chatbot future…making it way easier for your father-in-law (and maybe you) to use. To get to new tech, sometimes you gotta build a bridge 🌉 

EXPLAINED

👑 Royal Family Finances edition…

Get This: The British Crown generated $1.4B in royal profit from its real estate holdings last year. But disclaimer: They only keep 12% of it, the rest going to the British state. So the Royal Family gets $168M this year to fund their royal activities. Here’s the expense report of the Windsors’ annual spending:

• $60M budgeted for renovations

• $37M for staffing (gotta dryclean the tunics)

• $5M for travel expenses

• $1M on the King’s coronation (read: royal marketing)

The Big Question: How did the British Royal Crown make all that profit?

The Answer: Wind farms built on royal land and seas. For the last 20 years, King Charles leased out seabeds along the British Isles for wind farms. The Royal fam can’t rely on plundering & taxes anymore, so they must generate cash flow from the land they own. Their clean-energy real estate portfolio is how they do it. Like Richard Branson said, “Never take your eyes off the cash flow, because it’s the lifeblood of any business.”

Revenue is vanity, Profit is sanity, but Cash Flow is royalty 😁 

STOCKS

FACT: Cheez-It’s aren’t even square. One side is technically longer by 0.06 mm. But rectangles aside, the intentionally misspelled 103-year-old cracker (owned by Kellanova) just had its best year ever. Here’s what we saw…

• 😳 Cheezy Collaborations (See: Taco Bell Crunchwrap to HiddenValley cheezy Ranch cracker)

• 🏀 Big-time Sponsorships (See: The Indiana Fever’s Court)

• 🍔 Pop-Up Shops (See: Cheez-It’s diner in NYC).

• 👀 Spin Offs (See: The new squar(ish) cracker — Snap’d.)

That’s why Cheez-It had its best year since 1921, becoming the rare billion-dollar cracker brand.

BEST TAKEAWAY

The Steak Knife vs. Swiss Army Knife Analogy: A business can try to be a…

• Swiss-Army-Knife: Try to do everything (like Amazon).

• Steak Knife: Do 1 thing, really well (like Joy Cones, THE ice cream cone company).

🍩 Well, Krispy Kreme decided to be a Steak Knife last week by selling Insomnia Cookies. The CEO framed it as cutting a distraction from their deep glazed donut focus. Because trying to be a Swiss Army Knife (expanding to cookies) was coming at the expense of its core product (donuts). Focus on the #DailyDonut.

THINGS TO TELL YOUR BESTIE

• 🐌 World Snail Racing Championships were just held in England.

• 🦍 Gorillas at the zoo have a screentime issue too.

  🥹 Inside Out 2 is officially the highest-grossing animated film of all-time.

• 🦈 13 sharks tested positive for cocaine off the coast of Brazil.

And one more thing. Reply with a Best Fact Yet about the Olympics, choco chip cookies, root beer floats, or anything you want :)) We’ll get your voice on the pod.

Celebrate the wins this weekend, Yetis 🎉

—Nick & Jack