👋 Good morning. If you still have black crumbs wedged in your keyboard from the Oreos you were stress-eating last night, know that those cookies have changed a lot since their invention in 1912. The original Oreo recipe contained lard and launched with a lemon meringue flavor. The cookie’s name itself has changed, too: Known as Oreo Biscuit when it debuted, it changed to Oreo Sandwich less than a decade later, followed by Oreo Creme Sandwich in 1937, and finally Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie in 1974. Or, as we call it, “I had a bad day and it’s time to treat myself.”
NEWS FLASH
🍕 Automation is getting lost in the sauce: California Pizza Kitchen plans to sprinkle ~1k automated pizza machines across the US. The vending machines can spit out a pie in ~90 seconds and, hey, even if they break down all the time, they’ll still smell like pizza, so at least there’s that? The first kiosks have been installed in airports, with hospitals and sports venues eyed as the next places where you can feel weird about considering a meal with no humans involved.
🧑‍🏫 The $700 Harvard professor: Harvard Business School cloned its faculty members for a $699, eight-week online bootcamp for aspiring entrepreneurs. The program gives participants 24/7 access to the AI profs and lets them rehearse investor pitches, stress-test business ideas, and prep for customer conversations. The program, dubbed HBS Foundry, has been piloted at 100+ universities across the country since April, and no Harvard affiliation is required — just a startup idea and maybe a pitch deck that needs refining at 3am.
🍣 They are basically printing money: A new tourist trap called the Sushi Bus will hit the streets of Tokyo in October. It’s a double-decker tour bus outfitted with a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant experience on the upper level (the kitchen takes up the first floor). It’ll drive 20 diners at a time around the city for a ~$100, 70-minute meal.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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Crocs are back, baby: After two years of near-constant decline in revenue growth, the foam clogs that millions of people somehow wear without shame are on the recovery path — Crocs hit $1B in quarterly revenue for the first time ever.
- Slop, drop, and roll: More than one-third of web pages published since ChatGPT’s release show signs of AI-generated writing, per a Pew Research Center analysis. Ew.
- Ouch: The Dutch Data Protection Authority is fining Uber $966m for automatically suspending drivers without warning or human oversight. Uber will appeal the penalty, which is the second-largest issued under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.
- r/blocked: ChatGPT dropped its Reddit citations by 86% between Aug. 7 and Aug. 14, according to AI visibility platform Promptwatch, from making up 3.8% of all ChatGPT search citations to 0.5%.
CHAT CHEAT SHEET
7 no-code AI agent tools that can really do your work
Check out seven standout agents for workflows to learn how AI can execute multi-step tasks completely in the background. We spotlighted the top options for research, calendar management, recurring workflows, and even complex pipeline generation.
Pass tasks to these tools:
- ChatGPT Agent Mode – browse the web and generate assets
- Manus – tackle sophisticated tasks and make reusable skills
- Claude Cowork – give Claude access to select folders
- OpenClaw – 24/7 assistant for email, calendar, and research
- Zapier – connect apps and automate event-trigger workflows
- n8n – a more powerful Zapier that gives you technical control
- Claude Code – the best option for no-code software
Copy-paste prompts included.
THE BIG IDEA
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Too hot for clothes? These brands don’t think so
It’s hot — too hot — and thanks to climate change, it’s only getting hotter.
During the summer, that’s made doing anything outside more physically intensive than simply existing increasingly unbearable. Especially running (which is bad news for all the people who’ve suddenly made it their personality).
To beat the heat, runners usually just wear less clothing. But activewear brands are betting that the best solution to staying cool might actually be layering up with “active cooling tech”: textiles and constructions engineered to lower the skin’s temperature, per The Wall Street Journal.
Dripped out from head to toe
- Omius’s $234 Cooling Cap is embedded with patented graphite stones with a hydrophilic coating that absorb water and spread it evenly across your forehead, promoting faster evaporation and helping you feel cooler.
- East Peak’s Ice Bandana is a neoprene bandana with a zippable pouch that can hold two pounds of ice that slowly melts through the perforated fabric.
- Mission’s $20 Cooling Sun Sleeves are made from a chemical-free material that the company claims can cool to 30 degrees Fahrenheit below the average body temperature when activated by water.
- For $150, you could have less than a full shirt: Nike’s lightweight ACG Radical AirFlow top has gaping holes in the armpits and forearm area and tinier holes throughout to provide ventilation.
Many athletes swear by them — ultramarathoner Viktoria Brown credits Omius’s hat with helping her break world records — though one expert told WSJ that stripping down is still the best way to keep cool (not to mention free).
But the rest of us are hot, too…
… and being half naked isn’t always an option, a fortunate thing for fashion designers, many of whom are now spinning up their own cooling apparel.
- Some wedding dress designers are using zinc oxide to create fabrics that are cool to the touch, so that summer brides don’t faint on their way down the aisle.
- In recent years, brands like Rick Owens, Junya Watanabe, and Anrealage have debuted inflatable tracksuits, jackets, and dresses with built-in fans that seem better-suited for the Michelin Man.
The global air-conditioned clothing market is currently valued at ~$2B and expected to hit $4.6B by 2034, per the Financial Times, but the true cost of comfort is still style.
Brands like Japan’s Hidesign are working on making cooling clothes more fashionable and functional — but for now, good luck trying to pull off this fit.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Day in the life: How a solo app builder runs his $40k/month business.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
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Number of pages in a digital dossier built by McDonald’s on Wired writer Reece Rogers, who requested a copy of his data from the fast-food chain’s loyalty program and was hit with some unsavory insights about himself — like how often he orders, what and when he orders most, how much he’s likely to spend, and how it predicts he’ll never forsake the golden arches.
If you, like Rogers, are or ever have been part of McDonald’s loyalty program, there’s likely a dossier on you, too, filled with data that might be harder to digest than that late-night cheeseburger.
AROUND THE WEB
đź“… On this day: In 1958, businessman Momofuku Ando invented Chicken Ramen, the first-ever instant noodles.
🗝️ That’s fun: Escape the website.
đź‘ľ Game: Guess the pixelated picture.
🛥 That’s cool: Peruse a database of 50k boat names. Good luck finding one better than Bilboat Baggins.
đź’• Aww: Unlikely besties.
SHOWER THOUGHT
Just like our browsers auto-detecting foreign languages, they should give us an option to convert imperial units to metric. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Don’t sweat it" Friedman.
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