🔋 The ultimate battery life

Remember the old-fashioned way? When a person swiped, and swiped, and swiped, then met the love of their life?

We can romanticize those good old days, but the AI-powered future is here — bots are increasingly getting in the middle of getting together.

Apps keep rolling out

Of course the AI gold rush would target dating apps, a $4.6B market.

• One new app, Teaser AI, is pretty wild: Before members swipe right or left, they can screen their potential match — by chatting with an AI likeness of their personality.
• Don’t want your romantic fate entirely in AI’s hands? YourMove.AI is more writing assistant than vetting service: it’ll help with profile creation, brainstorming opening lines, and crafting replies.
• Then there’s Teleport, an invitation-only app launched this month, which uses an “AI matchmaker that learns from a user’s every activity,” per Bloomberg, to give members (paying $111/month) just three matches a week.

Established dating apps have long succeeded by matching via algorithm — but trusting AI, which can’t even read air quality data right, to provide quality over quantity is a different story.

If you don’t want AI to help you find dates…

… you can always just straight-up date AI.

A Bronx woman effectively married her virtual companion, Eren, created on the AI chatbot builder Replika. She knows the union isn’t legally binding, but told Insider the connection feels real and enduring all the same.

BTW: The jury’s still out on whether emotional relationships with AI chatbots count as cheating. A recent survey found 74% of respondents said no — but it was run by Illicit Encounters, a UK site for people seeking affairs, so not exactly an unbiased crew there.

It’s your first day working at Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps in Vista, California, a company known for the densely packed messaging on its 18-in-1 soap labels.

You walk past the garden and are greeted by the Foamy Homies in tie-dye coveralls, who, to the hum of a fog machine, have you introduce yourself with a disco dance move.

CEO David Bronner — that’s cosmic engagement officer, by the way — introduces the company and delivers a sermon, enlightening you on his grandfather’s “All-One path,” their Christian background, psychedelic rebirth, and more, according to GQ.

Unusual but effective

In 2022, Dr. Bronner’s revenue reached $170m+, down from 2020’s pandemic-driven $188m, but up from $4m in 1998 and bankruptcy before that. Uniquely…

• The company’s highest-paid employees cannot make more than ~$300k, or 5x that of its lowest-paid vested employees.
• Benefits for its 300+ staff include up to $7.5k in child care and 10% bonuses, free vegan lunch, Zumba classes, back massages, and ketamine therapy coverage.

A Certified B Corp, Dr. Bronner’s donated $23m+ to drug advocacy and research between 2015 and 2022.

Riches through rags

David’s grandfather, third-generation soap maker and not-actually-a-doctor Emanuel Bronner, emigrated to the US from Germany in 1929, where his family was later killed in the Holocaust.

In America, Bronner consulted for soap manufacturers, was admitted to — and escaped from — the Elgin State Insane Asylum for preaching his “Moral ABCs” a little too much for some, and eventually founded Dr. Bronner’s in 1948.

You may not know much about Dr. John B. Goodenough, but you know about his body of work — in fact, you’re almost certainly holding it right now.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist, whose breakthrough work on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries powers many of our devices, passed away Sunday at 100, per The New York Times.

A lasting impact

In 1980, Goodenough was researching battery designs at the University of Oxford. Four years of work resulted in improved batteries similar to the high-voltage, low-volatility ones in use today.

It wasn’t initially a hit — Oxford passed on the patent and Goodenough relinquished the rights to his discovery. In 1991, everything changed when Japanese scientists building upon his work produced a safe, commercialized lithium-ion battery.

Judging by the nest of charging cords in view while writing this, applications for those rechargeable batteries went wild: smartphones, laptops, and tablets, for starters.

• Also: Electric vehicles, defibrillators, wheelchairs, power tools, flashlights… and far more.

So, why isn’t Goodenough a household name?

His story is incredible — from growing up dyslexic to publishing eight books and 800+ scientific journal articles — but until the 2019 Nobel honor, Goodenough was “relatively unknown beyond scientific and academic circles and the commercial titans who exploited his work,” per NYT.

• Having signed over the rights to his work, Goodenough received no royalties for his battery innovation.
• By 2031, the global battery market is projected to be worth $298.1B.

His last decades as a University of Texas professor suggest missing out on the financial spoils didn’t phase him — Goodenough shared patents and donated award stipends to research.

His story isn’t over just yet: Goodenough stayed active into his late 90s developing a new superbattery he hoped could store and transport wind, solar, and nuclear energy.