👋 We hope your weekend didn’t stink, but it might have if you were one of the thousands of spectators who waited hours in line to smell Putricia at the Royal Sydney Botanic Garden. The corpse flower — of which there are less than 1k in the world — blooms every seven to ten years and smells like “gym socks and rotting garbage.” Yum.
🎧 On the pod:We saunter through the wild world of AI scams.
NEWS FLASH
🥚 Egg prices will likely stay rotten: A strain of avian flu and inflation have converged to spell bad news for your grocery bill, and it’s likely not going away any time soon — egg prices are projected to increase ~20% in 2025, compared to 2.2% for general food prices, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Between November and December, bird flu killed ~17.2m egg-laying hens — nearly half of all birds killed by the virus in 2024 — and the average price of a dozen large, grade-A eggs jumped from $3.65 to $4.15.
🤖 Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but “this will be a defining year for AI”: This according to one Mark Zuckerberg, who probably used the same exact sentence in 2024, 2023, 2022… But OK, we’ll play along: Zuck shared more of Meta’s grand AI plans, highlighting a hiring push, a comically large 2+ gigawatt data center under construction in Louisiana — and a mindblowing $60B-$65B total investment for the year. AI may be wildly expensive, but it’ll torment Zuckerberg for free: Earlier this month, he was named in a lawsuit from a gaggle of writers claiming Meta trained its Llama model with pirated works.
🎶 Just us or does “national anthem writer” sound like a fun job?: Composer Hans Zimmer is not eligible for an Oscar for his Dune: Part 2 score because it contains too much preexisting music from his score for Dune, but he has been asked to rearrange a national anthem. Turki Alalshikh, Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority chair, said the composer has agreed to “broad outlines” on a series of projects that also includes a musical, a concert, and the soundtrack for a new film. The announcement comes as Saudi Arabia attempts to modernize its image and as work continues on Neom, its controversial $500B city.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Costco is trading in the Pepsi it’s been serving in its food courts since 2013 for Coca-Cola. Costco’s beloved $1.50 hot-dog and soda meal has held the same price since 1985, and the company sold ~150m combos last year.
Fitbit will pay a $12.25m civil penalty for delaying reports that the lithium-ion battery in its Ionic smartwatch can overheat and cause burns. Reports of the issue began in 2018, but the company didn’t voluntarily recall the watch until March 2022.
UnitedHealthcarenamed Tim Noel, a company exec, as CEO following last month’s murder of former CEO Brian Thompson. It also revealed that a 2024 cyberattack affected the data of 190m people, the largest health care breach in US history.
PEOPLE SKILLS 101
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That means keeping projects on track and people on point in spite of increasing targets, mountains of tasks, and clashing personalities. Here’s our full guide to doing it right.
Full-body scan startups see dollar signs under your skin
If WebMD hates to see you coming, you’re probably the target customer for Neko Health.
The Stockholm-based startup — co-founded in 2018 by Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek — just closed a $260m Series B round, valuing the company at $1.8B.
If that feels like a lot, you might be underestimating the demand — Neko’s waitlist has grown from 40k people just months ago to 100k+ today, perTechCrunch.
For ~$373 a pop…
… customers step into a monochromatic, futuristic clinic room:
A cylindrical chamber filled with 70 sensors and dozens of cameras creates a composite picture of your body using 50m data points.
Patients then move to an exam bed for two more scans, eye- and blood-pressure measurements, a grip test, and a blood test.
Each hourlong visit includes a doctor consultation and recommendations for annual follow-ups if needed; according to TechCrunch, 80% of customers have rebooked and prepaid for another appointment.
So far, Neko has scanned 10k patients at its clinics in Stockholm and London. With its freshly raised capital, the company is eyeing expansion into new markets, like the US.
Scanning the competition
Neko isn’t the only startup looking to take your money in return for a hefty dose of health anxiety, though its most of its competitors focus on MRI tech:
Prenuvo, which charges $1k for a torso MRI and $2.5k for full-body imaging, recently surpassed 100k scans.
Ezra’s offerings range from a $1.5k full-body “flash” MRI scan to a $2.7k full-body MRI and CT scan.
One of the problems with the practice…
… are those price tags. While celebrities and VCs might love full-body scans, your wallet might not.
Plus, some physicians worry that full-body scans will do more harm than good, heaping false positives, extra costs, and unnecessary anxieties onto patients.
Luckily, at these prices, many of us don’t have to weigh the pros and cons quite yet.
Is your business missing hidden income streams?… Well, is it? Listen to this, then answer that question for us.
Watch and learn: How to use text-to-image tools for your small biz.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Number of bees on which entomologists glued QR codes to track their life cycles and movements.
Researchers used shellac glue to attach paper QR codes to the bees, which were logged by a scanner above their hives each time they left or returned.
The biggest surprise involved the bees’ lifespans. Honeybees were thought to live for ~28 days, but researchers tagged bees foraging for as long as six weeks — a process they don’t start until they’re already about two weeks old.
AROUND THE WEB
⚖️ On this day: In 1992, video re-creation of an alleged crime was allowed in court for the first time. Prosecutors hoped an animation depicting a shooting would prove it was premeditated, but ultimately had to admit it was speculation.
