Thursday, August 6, 2026

Tinder’s tired. Bumble’s humbled. The new way Zillennials are finding love? Excel — Spreadsheet Singles are using Excel data to discover dating patterns… and it’s working. One woman turned her dating spreadsheet into a $10/month subscription, and 10K people now pay for it. You can find out if “he’s the one” with a little conditional formatting (no error? Green flag).

Hilarious fact you can drop on your buddies this weekend: The inventor of Pringles requested that he be buried… in a Pringles can (RIPringle).

But no two Pringles are the same — 705M lbs of potatoes a year and 200 variables (dough humidity, flour particle count, skin thickness) decide whether a chip snaps just right. Pringles enforced consistency as best it could with human “doughmakers” who inspected the potato at every phase of production. But now Pringles has pulled off the ultimate AI case study: The Perfect Pringle.

And it’s all thanks to a new AI concept you gotta know: The Digital Twin:

• New sensors detect potato/chip variances and feed them into an AI model that builds a digital twin of the chip.

• The AI then sends that digital twin through a simulated production flow to see how it comes out.

• This allows pre-emptive tweaks to the real-life machine settings to ensure a real-life perfect chip.

The Takeaway Pringles just gave the industry its new metric: ROAI.

Lululemon’s CTO wrote an op-ed saying AI hype is overblown, while Chili’s canceled almost all of its AI projects this year. Pringles is one of the few companies with an actual number to point to with a return… Return on Artificial Intelligence. Now if only AI could fix sour cream & onion breath.

MySpace’s owners are teasing a 3rd comeback, they announced it in a new documentary about its rise and fall. Justin Timberlake, who once played the guy who helped kill MySpace in The Social Network, actually helped buy the real thing in 2011 — life imitating art with extremely on-the-nose casting.

• Founded in 2003, MySpace was once the world’s most visited website in 2006.

• In 2005 it sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580M — But that was the peak.

• In 2011 it sold for $35M, a 95% drop.

• MySpace walked so that Facebook could run… all over it (Got Zuck'd by Zuck)

Meanwhile, Disney struck a deal with TikTok Wednesday to pipe “thoughtfully curated” content straight into Disney+ Verts tab. Oh, and it’s not alone: Peacock is adding Bravo-branded microdramas this summer, Fox took an equity stake in vertical-drama studio Holywater, and Paramount+ is testing its own short-form vertical feed.

Horizontal TV companies are pivoting to become Vertical phone companies.

The Takeaway Two roads diverged in a wood: MySpace 2.0 or DisTok.

One is a return to static profiles and picking your own top 8. The other is Disney joining the algorithmic infinite scroll. Maybe the digital-detox crowd brings us back to the MySpace era, or maybe the pull of the feed is just too strong so we stick with TikTok. Or maybe it’s a combo of both. Either way, these 2 opposite stories reveal our 2 potential social media futures.

Nine years after getting pushed out of Uber, Travis is back — and his new company Atoms just partnered with Joby, the electric air-taxi maker. So what’s he building with ‘em? “Vertiports”:

• Picture a compact parking garage with helipads on the roof and 3 levels of robotaxi charging underneath.

• A multimodal hub where flying taxis, self-driving cars, & rideshare all converge in a downtown building.

• It’s like a train station designed by Luke Skywalker after he took ketamine with Elon.

Kalanick calls it “digitizing the physical world”… His Uber did it for taxis, his ghost kitchens did it for restaurants, & next up is his vertiport.

The Takeaway The next era of public infrastructure is going to be built by private companies, not governments.

The 1st transatlantic commercial flight in 1939 took off from Long Island in a seaplane, not from JFK or LGA… because those airports didn’t exist yet. Same story now: Existing infrastructure doesn’t fit air taxis or robotaxis.

With the cost of building things so high and our government less capable than in the past, it’s Joby and Atoms building the new transit depot instead of the gov’t.

If you find your true love in cell B7, congrats on the win.