🎓  Influencer U

👋  Good morning. If that early alarm still gives you flashbacks to your freshman-year intro to psychology lecture, you’ll appreciate this news: The University of Michigan won’t record letter grades for some first-semester freshmen next year as part of a pilot program created to address student mental health. Students will instead receive pass/no-credit marks on their transcripts as they “acclimate to the demands of college.” Now if only your employer could follow suit and drop that next performance review…

NEWS FLASH 

🏍️  Not so rusty anymore: Beachman Bikes wants to save your old motorcycle from the junkyard. The startup launched a Special Vehicles Division that converts broken bikes to electric for a starting price of $10k. The company’s showcase project transformed a 1974 Honda CB500 with a blown engine and destroyed clutch into an electric bike with a 14.4-kilowatt-hour lithium battery and a digital dashboard. Maybe it’s not too late for that abandoned midlife crisis?

🐟  In a world full of problems…: you probably aren’t thinking about sea lice very often. But the parasite is estimated to wreak ~$4B worth of damage every year, most notably felt by salmon farmers losing loads of fish to disease. That’s why German biotech startup AquaNab is expanding development of its sea lice treatment. It’s some wild stuff: their “precision nanoantibodies” — derived from alpacas — are added to fish feed, ultimately entering and fortifying a salmon’s bloodstream.

👷‍♂️  Construction adds AI to the tool belt: Startup Trunk Tools — created by a teenage carpenter turned tech founder — has raised $70m to make sense of 3m-4m pages of documentation generated by an average construction site. The startup’s AI agents review contracts and drawings, flag inconsistencies, and answer safety questions, making sense of piles of complex data.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Alt meat is still cookin’: Swiss startup Planted plans to double the production capacity at its facility in Germany where it uses fermentation to turn plant proteins into large pieces of meat that can be sliced into steaks, cold cuts, and other products. 

• Little shoes, big bills: The average sale price of kids’ shoes rose 7% in the first half of 2026, while the number of pairs sold fell 9%. Any bump in price makes a dent in parents’ pockets: Kids ages 7-10 outgrow shoes every 6-9 months.

   

• Bidding revs up: Classic car auctions at Monterey Car Week could hit a record $500m this year, with millennial and Gen Z collectors pouring money into modern supercars and driving the Hagerty Supercar Index up 30% in the last year.

• Here comes the wave of junk: Prime Video’s “Castle Walls,” a 30-minute historical drama, became the first fully AI-generated show to appear on a major streamer. A YouTube comment on the show’s trailer sums things up nicely: “Can we just die already?”
  

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THE BIG IDEA

Want to be an influencer? Hope you have $142k for tuition

Ever daydream about ditching your day job to travel the world like those glamorous influencers on your social media feed?

Well, you can finally live out your TikTok fantasy — if you're willing to shell out.

Arizona State University offers aspiring influencers a content creation degree — though you'll need to part with a cool $142k for tuition, per Fortune.

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More than teaching selfie techniques, ASU's content creation B.A. promises hands-on training to prepare enrollees for entrepreneurial and professional roles in social media strategy, brand storytelling, digital marketing, podcasting, and multimedia production.

Comprehensive stuff.

The estimated annual base tuition varies depending on where you attend:

• Online: $12k
  
• ASU's Los Angeles campus: $25k
  
• Downtown Phoenix campus: $35k

For that much money, one would hope to receive more than just tips on promoting a sports drink on your feed.

Indeed, ASU suggests the degree could potentially lead to lucrative (albeit more traditional) jobs, including marketing associate ($133k/year), PR manager ($147k/year), or marketing manager ($166k/year).

And ASU isn't alone — schools in Florida and even the Ivies are offering courses and degrees for aspiring influencers.

But who actually wants to be an influencer?

A lot of people apparently:

• 57% of Gen Zers and 41% of adults want to become influencers.
  
• 30% of Gen Zers say they'd even pay for the opportunity.
  
• 53% of Gen Zers consider content creation a reputable career choice, and roughly the same number would ditch their current jobs if it paid enough.
  
• More teens now earn money through digital channels (42%) than traditional jobs (38%), according to one survey.

They're bound to have plenty of applicants.

But be warned: For those considering a career in content creation, the creator economy income gap is widening.

• Only 11% earn $100k+
  
• Top 10% receive 62% of total ad payments in 2025

Brands also now expect much more from creators, treating them as on-call cultural advisors who must deliver what an entire marketing team once did.

But considering the creator economy is valued at $250B, and expected to reach $480B by 2027, we're bound to see more students enrolling.

Get those ring lights ready.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Who should you take investment advice from? Ray Dalio is a good bet. He shares his holy grail of investing. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Number of units at the newly opened Stacks Auto Loft, a gated luxury condominium community for car collectors located just outside of Las Vegas. Many have already been sold for prices as high as ~$1.6m — not a crazy price for a home these days, except these condos won’t be housing the actual owners of these luxury vehicles but the cars themselves.

It’s the latest of several car condos to open around the US, per Business Insider, with enough wealthy collectors willing to throw down millions to free up space at home and show off their cars to other people who might care.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1973, hip hop was born at a teen party in a Bronx rec room.

🥁  That’s cool: Hear what shapes would sound like as drums.

💰  Game: Guess how much these celebs charge for Cameos.

🗺️  That’s fun: Find strange sites on your next roadtrip.

🐶  Aww: Sleepy doggy.

SHOWER THOUGHT

In the Toy Story universe, "the toys are alive" is probably a popular conspiracy theory. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Singdhi Sokpo, Ben Berkley, and Danny Jensen.

Editing by: Sara "PhD in doomscrolling" Friedman.

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