👋 Good morning. May you get away with all your silly little schemes this week. Much like the red fox that snuck onto a cargo ship carrying cars from Southampton, England, to New York. The sly stowaway is now a resident of the Bronx Zoo, and is “settling in well” while enjoying his produce, proteins, and biscuits (because he’s British, of course).
STARTING UP
Cultivated meat goes to the dogs
❌ The problem: Cultivated meat still hasn’t taken hold with consumers, leaving startups in the lurch.
💡 The pitch: Melbourne-based Magic Valley is looking to reach human customers through their furry best friends. The company launched Rogue Pet, a brand of dog treats made with cultivated pork and plant-based ingredients. The startup thinks that by entering the pet food market — where regulation differs from human food — it can build trust, experience, and revenue before one day feeding its cultivated pork to people.
🚀 The outlook: Demand for high-quality pet care certainly exists: Nearly three in four Australian households have a pet, and more than half of Australians consider their pets as important as their children. But let’s find out if Spot has a taste for cultivated meat.
NEWS FLASH
-
If you hate cooking, Nosh Robotics’ Nosh One will do it for you. Users put ingredients into its tray and choose one of 500+ recipes (or ask it to generate one). Then, the bot adds and stirs on its own in an enclosed pot. It costs $1.5k and is available for pre-order on Kickstarter now.
-
Do you have “AI brain fry,” or what a study from Boston Consulting Group has dubbed mental fatigue caused by using or overseeing AI tools “beyond one’s cognitive capacity”? This is because, instead of having time to focus, people often end up multitasking more — although study co-author Matthew Kropp told CNN Business that this may just be temporary as people adjust to these new tools.
-
Help grandma out: Truecaller, a caller ID platform, has a new feature that lets an admin get alerts about or, if they’re an Android user, even hang up on potential fraudsters who call other members of their group. Americans received an average of 2.5B+ robocalls per month from January to September 2025.
-
IRL: Tinder unveiled several updates last week, including an event discovery feature where users can meet people the old-fashioned way. After the event, profiles will be available to swipe for any missed connections. It’ll begin beta testing in Los Angeles this summer.
EVERYDAY CASH COWS
Big money hides in plain sight
For stories like these…
-
Blue Zones: How a Minnesota company owns the idea that 5 places on Earth are the secret to living past 100.
-
Self-storage: There are 50k self-storage facilities in the US, and yes, that’s too many.
-
Stadium upgrades: The cost to the public for a new Tennessee Titans stadium? $1.26B.
-
Airplane leases: The napkin math on why airlines rarely own most of their fleets.
- Buffets: Four ways they operate on razor-thin margins.
… the people turn to Hustlenomics. Enjoy seven of our nuttiest industry breakdowns, all in one sitting.
THE BIG IDEA
A horse of the same color
You've heard of a one-trick pony, but what about a two-pony trick?
If the mallet swinging and galloping horses of polo are unfamiliar to you — apart from that Pretty Woman scene — the high-stakes, ethically dubious universe of cloning polo ponies is quite a ride.
Where horses are often regarded more highly than riders and prized equines fetch over $100k, cloning exceptional horses has become big — and controversial — business, per Air Mail.
Betting on betrayal
Not long after the first cloned horse was born — and long after Dolly the sheep — Argentinian polo legend Adolfo Cambiaso and Texas businessman Alan Meeker brought a cloned pony to auction where it fetched $800k in 2010.
- The pair ultimately partnered with the buyer — to avoid "selling the factory" — and began cloning horses to build their own team.
- After years of success, the partnership collapsed when Cambiaso sued Meeker for trying to sell three clones to a Russian billionaire — patron of a rival team — for $2.4m.
- The ponies were ultimately returned as part of a settlement, but the saga concluded tragically for Meeker.
The business of horse cloning, however, continues to gallop apace as more investors pursue the high-tech endeavor, despite ethical, financial, and legal hurdles.
The cloning industry now looks to gene editing to pre-select beneficial traits for the field. Horse racing and breeding associations, however, are drawing the line there — for now.
Seeing double beyond the polo field
The animal cloning business is dominated by a few companies — including ViaGen, Clonargen, and Kheiron — which, beyond polo matches and other competitions, are also busy cloning pets for a price.
- Interestingly, companies charge similar prices for cloning: $50k for cats and dogs, $85k for horses. (In Spain, Ovoclone clones camels and falcons.)
- Tom Brady — an investor in Colossal Biosciences, which recently bought ViaGen — recently cloned his late dog.
- Barbra Streisand, Paris Hilton, and other celebs have also cloned their pets.
Beyond pets, some researchers see cloning as a means to protect endangered species. And Colossal Biosciences aims to bring back woolly mammoths — patented, of course — a move critics deride as a mere publicity stunt.
Next stop, Jurassic Park.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Pepsi Max: A runaway hit in Europe but a flop in the US. Why? Here’s the story behind why the product fizzed out.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
How much some people are paying for eyebrow transplants, a beauty procedure that’s become popular among women in recent years, per The Wall Street Journal, especially those who overplucked their brows in the ‘90s and early aughts and are now going for the on-trend bushy brow look.
Just be careful what you wish for. The results are permanent and natural-looking, but come with an eyebrow-raising catch: The hairs, which are transplanted from the back of the head, grow faster than normal brows — so, unless you’re good about trimming them regularly, get comfortable with having a luscious Fu Manchu ‘stache framing those gorgeous eyes.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was published. Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, 100+ years after the witch trials, yet they still influenced his work.
🎶 That’s cool: A music map.
🏇 Game: Enclose the horse.
🌸 Chill out: with this online zen garden.
🐇 Aww: Rabbit or cloud?
SHOWER THOUGHT
Even though Earth has 8 billion people, the world we built only really runs on about 4–6 billion being awake at once — humanity has never experienced all 8 billion people up and functioning at the same time. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Danny Jensen, and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Clone ranger" Friedman.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Working on something big?
We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you.
Subscribe to our other newsletters
Grow your business: Starter Story | Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream
Expert insights: Marketing Against the Grain | Sell better: The Science of Scaling