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A confession: I've become hooked on Celsius. The caffeine hits, it's actually refreshing, and it's become the drink before every session. But I'm self-aware enough to know what got me to pick up the first one, and it wasn't the taste — it was the zero calories printed on the front. I know exactly what's been done to me and it hasn't slowed me down at all.

Some of that is probably occupational. We've been deep in energy drinks for months working on Cebado, a yerba mate brew coming out of Argentina, and I can't wait to show you the identity. Discovery for that project sent us through the whole category, and the brand that kept coming back up was Poppi.

Poppi is a fermented apple cider vinegar drink that started life as Mother Beverage, in glass bottles with handwritten script and a story about ancient ritual — every rule the health aisle has ever written. Then it took $400,000 on Shark Tank and threw all of it away for neon aluminium cans that look like 1984 Miami. The category thought that was suicide, because bright and fun reads as sugar. PepsiCo bought it for $1.95 billion. This week we get into what it costs to betray your own origin story, and why the brands that stayed loyal to theirs can't follow.

I'm off to the mountains this weekend with mates who obviously know a bit more than I do. No plan, a hammock, and an offensive lift at 1am. I feel like I'm embarking on a Navy SEALs trip, which is exactly why I said yes. It matters to me, having something locked in at the end of a week that I'm actually looking forward to.

In today's issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

The Poppi house at Coachella 2024 was slime-green floor to ceiling, packed with people who treat "clean girl" as a full-time job, all holding neon pink cans that looked like they'd come out of a Miami basement club in 1984. You had to turn the can round to find out it was health food.

It had been health food all along. Before Poppi it was Mother Beverage, sold in Dallas in glass bottles with handwritten labels and a lot of respectful copy about apple cider vinegar, doing everything the health aisle asks of a brand and selling to the small number of people who actually enjoy a co-op. Rohan Oza put $400,000 in for a quarter of the company and told the Ellsworths to pull it all down. Allison's said since that they knew the baby was ugly.

The neon gets the credit for what happened next. What actually moved the can out of the fridge and onto a Target endcap beside Coke was quieter, and it's the same thing that cost them $8.9 million in court in early 2025 over how much fiber is really in there. PepsiCo bought them not long after, at $1.95 billion.

👉 Read the full piece

I read Yesteryear in two sittings. Caro Claire Burke's novel opens with a homesteading influencer waking up somewhere she never asked to go, which is the actual nineteenth century — just her hands, the real work, and a silence where the ring light used to be. The joke only lands if you already suspect the fantasy these women perform was never really about 1955.

I went looking for more afterwards and found Savanna Faith Stone, twenty years old, close to half a million followers, arguing that the Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake. She wants one ballot per family, cast by the husband, and she said so from a stage in San Antonio this June to thousands of young women at Turning Point USA.

A woman who believes her husband should be the final political voice in her house has built an audience larger than most cable news anchors, and charges a monthly subscription to teach other women how to submit. The algorithm doesn't care whether you're asking for power or giving it away, only that you're loud about it.

👉 Read the full piece

There wasn't a working wall outlet anywhere in Madrid-Atocha, which was mid-renovation the day I sat there waiting for a train with a laptop and a deadline. The 10,000 mAh power bank in my bag got me back up 25%, enough to keep working until I boarded and found a plug at my seat. Most of those two months came down to something small in the bag standing between me and a lost afternoon.

I spent them moving across Europe and the UK on a full-time remote workload, and the thing that surprised me was that having to work made the travelling calmer. With nothing to log into I'd have run the itinerary from sunrise to sunset in the name of maximising it, and burned out somewhere around week two. Having to start and end each day at home slowed the whole pace down, and I actually absorbed the places I was in.

The rest was learned the hard way. Long-distance buses are not a place to open a laptop, unlimited data in Europe is not unlimited, and the hotspot cap your carrier keeps quiet about sits well below the one it advertises. Madrid has free municipal study rooms with good Wi-Fi, real desks and no ID check, which beats a noisy café on every count. And if there's no empty day built into the schedule, two days is roughly how long it takes before you want to go home.

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Nathan Shoop spent three days thirty feet above Sunset Boulevard in a bathrobe, eating cereal in a living room three feet deep. Ninety degrees on the street, air conditioning in the box, none of it reaching the cars stuck at the light below him. A reporter held a whiteboard up from the pavement to ask if he was bored, and Shoop wrote back through the glass that only boring people get bored.

Netflix has been buying that stretch of road since it paid north of $300 million for Regency Outdoor in 2018, so the wall cost nothing. What they paid for was a set, an air conditioner and an actor nobody could name. Ten auditioned. The one who got it was best at looking like an ordinary man stuck in his house, which is a harder brief than it sounds, and a stranger call than the Charlize Theron billboard they'd run in Times Square four months earlier.

The film he was up there selling had already started streaming, four taps away inside a subscription everyone driving past was paying for anyway. Someone asked him by whiteboard what he'd put on if he could. What he wrote back is the whole problem Netflix has had this year.

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