Well, hello!
You’re reading Mappy Monday, a free monthly newsletter about budget travel, quirky self-help experiments, thrifty money hacks, movie and book gems, and
occasional silliness.
🤖 AI Shenanigans: New Gemini Skills and Claude Projects, free
🧪 Experiment: Fixing Bedtime
🌍 Travel: The Near-Empty Forest City and the Network School Inside It
🌞 Health: Two Ways to Break a Heart
💰 Money: Three Easy Wins - $400, $400, and 8k points
🎥 Watch: The Queen of Chess
📚 Read: The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting by Evanna Lynch
💡 Mind Hack: Ask vs Guess Culture
🎈 Just because: Twenty Birds of the Czech Republic
Note: I will always tell you if I’m getting any referral bonuses and how much they are. There aren’t any in this letter.
🤖 AI Shenanigans:
Gemini Skills and Claude Projects
Google rolled out a new feature called “Skills” for Gemini in the Chrome browser, and it’s a great productivity unlock. It lets you save your AI prompts and trigger them on any webpage just by typing a single forward slash (/).
Right now, it only works in the Gemini Chrome Side Panel.
Note: If you don’t see the “Ask Gemini” button or “Open Gemini in Chrome” in the 3-dot menu in the top right corner of your Chrome browser, or want more details on how to use these new features, I wrote a quick guide on how to force-enable and use the Gemini side panel and bypass the regional locks (it takes a while to open).
The Multi-Tab Magic Trick
Once you have the side panel open, try out its multi-tab superpower. Gemini in Chrome can read, analyze, and answer questions from up to 10 open tabs simultaneously.
Imagine you have a few different websites open about how to fix the weird noise your car is making. Instead of reading each one, taking notes, or copying and pasting text from each into a separate AI chat window, you can ask Gemini to do it all at once.
Open your tabs and click on Ask Gemini button to launch the side panel.
Type out your prompt (or trigger a saved Skill with
/). For example: “Give me the main takeaways and actionable steps from all these websites.”Click the “+” button inside the prompt window.
Click Add tabs, select the websites you want it to look at, and hit submit.
Gemini instantly reads all the websites you added and spits out a single, consolidated list of takeaways. No copying, no pasting, no jumping between windows.
Bonus: Claude Projects Are Now Free
Speaking of AI upgrades, Anthropic made Claude Projects free, up to 5 of them. A Project is just a walled-off room in your account, with a permanent memory. Whatever instructions and files you drop in, every chat you open inside that Project already knows them. The free storage cap is real but generous, I loaded fifteen PDFs and used about half the space. On my paid account, on the other hand, they don’t even make a dent.
Think of each Project as a hub for one corner of your life.
For example, a Health Hub: Dump in blood tests, your current diet, post-visit notes, the lot. Then you just ask, “given my kidney values from the last three tests and what I actually eat, is this new supplement going to wreck me?” and it answers without you having to give it context over and over again.
Same trick works for appliance manuals, travel plans, or your work projects.
Set it up once, use it for months. That’s the whole pitch.
🧪 Experiment:
Fixing Bedtime
Last time I told you how I cheat at sleeping by taking glycine and creatine to make a short night feel longer. Obviously, the healthier solution would’ve been - to just sleep more.
So here’s what I’m trying.
A while back I decided to become a morning person, so I told my sister and niece that I’d send them a good-morning gif every day at 7am. And since I’m clearly much better at keeping promises to other people than to myself, it worked alarmingly well (morning sun exposure played a role, too). Now my internal clock is so dialed in that I wake up naturally, check the time, and it’s always 7-ish regardless of when I went to sleep. I’m like a rooster with a phone.
I figured the bedtime will sort itself out, but it didn’t. My body just learned to run on fumes.
New plan, same trick: At night, I started sending my sister and my niece photographic evidence that I’m in bed. It’s early days and it’s not the promised 11pm yet, but I’ve gone from a 1-2am bedtime to a heroic just-before-midnight (apart from today, of course, I have a newsletter to send!). Baby steps.
🌍 Travel:
A Near-Empty City and the Network School Inside It
I keep hearing about Forest City, off the coast of Johor, Malaysia, an hour from Singapore. A Chinese developer poured billions into four man-made islands meant to house 700,000 people, greenery on every balcony, so the towers would look like they were growing out of a jungle. Then almost nobody came. It’s become a ghost city, gorgeous and strange and mostly just waiting for residents.
Into all that empty space walked Balaji Srinivasan, former Coinbase CTO and the man who literally wrote the book on the “network state” idea: a community that starts online, pools its money, buys land, and one day hopes to be recognized as a country. His first small step was to lease a hotel in the quiet city and start the Network School.
A few hundred people now live there together, forming the Network School and the whole thing runs on four words: Learn, Burn, Earn, Fun. Learn is lectures - Balaji, the residents, and some big names do the teaching. Burn is the health side, daily workouts and a longevity-minded diet built on Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint. Earn from your remote job, your startup, or community tasks. Fun is, presumably, what keeps a few hundred strangers content in a shared hotel.
It runs about $1,500 a month per person if you share a room, $3,000 if you want your own, and includes food and the use of the whole place (gym, sauna, pools, classes, coworking spaces, beach). And yes, they take crypto.
I’d go. And I’d drag the hubby with me. We’d spend the entire time plagued by impostor syndrome, as the oldest non-techies on an island full of 6am-workout-crypto-bros, but I’d go in a heartbeat just to see what it’s all about. Here’s the trail to the rabbit hole, if you want to fall in too:
The mission: Network School website
The Walkthrough: A couple’s experience of the “Learn, Burn, Earn, Fun”
A day on the ground: A Day Inside Network School, a resident walking through the daily rhythm and looking at the place through the Japanese idea of en, the invisible threads that connect people.
More walking tours: Moving in as a family and 6 months inside the experiment.
And because no place should only show you its highlight reel, here’s one disillusioned resident’s take after a month.
🌞 Health:
Two Ways to Break a Heart
High cholesterol is said to be the archenemy of heart health. But Fountain Life, a high-tech longevity clinic that runs (very pricey) full-body scans, says their data suggests that high A1C (which measures your average blood sugar over 3 months), is also a huge predictor of heart disease.
The Arterial Highway
Imagine that healthy arteries are a smooth, high-speed highway.
The “Cars”: Cholesterol particles are just cars driving on that road.
The “Potholes”: High blood sugar is like a crew of vandals throwing acid on the pavement.
The Pile-Up
Chronically high blood sugar and glucose spikes, the kind a daily pastry ritual quietly feeds, are some of the culprits that strip away the slippery inner lining of the arteries (Endothelial Glycocalyx Damage). This creates “potholes”, sticky, jagged rough patches. The cholesterol “cars” get caught, fall into the cracks, start to “rust” (oxidize), and cause plaque. If, one day, they block one of the roads to the heart, it’s a heart attack. When they block one in the brain, it’s a stroke.
But the density of traffic matters too. Pack enough cars on a flawless road and you get problems.
Biotech’s New Hope: Ban the Traffic
Just a few weeks ago, Eli Lilly published results from a small trial for a single IV infusion (VERVE-102) hoping to lower cholesterol for good. You sit down for a four-hour drip, and that’s it. This is how it works:
The PCSK9 Gene: We all have a PCSK9 gene. Under normal circumstances, it produces a protein that makes it harder for your liver to clear out LDL cholesterol from your bloodstream.
Loss-of-function variants: Some people are born with a genetic mutation that “breaks” their PCSK9 gene. Because of this, the liver's natural "cholesterol vacuums" never shut off. They frantically sweep up almost every speck of LDL (the “cars”) the moment it enters the blood, so they have far fewer heart attacks and strokes than the average mortal.
Verve-102 uses microscopic fat bubbles to deliver gene-editing instructions to your liver to switch off PCSK9, which massively upgrades the liver's clean-up system.
The trial is still in early days, only 35 people, with Phase 2 due to start by the end of this year. The earliest patients have now been tracked up to 18 months and the effect is holding strong, with some seeing up to a 62% drop in LDL. No long-term data yet.
Just remember, fewer cars on a pothole-filled road is still a pothole-filled road. For now, the bakery habit is ours to solve.
💰 Money:
Three Easy Wins
$400 for a Direct Deposit
BMO bank will hand you $400 for opening a new checking account. The Smart Advantage one has no monthly fee, which is the one I like. Route $4,000 of direct deposits into it within 90 days, your paycheck, pension, Social Security, whatever lands electronically from a real payer. The $400 shows up about 100 days after you open. You’ve got until September 8th to start the clock, it’s one per person, it’s US-only and for people who haven’t had a BMO checking account in the last year.
Another $400, but Business
If you run any kind of business, even a one-person side gig, Wells Fargo will give you $400 for opening a new business checking account. Open their Initiate Business Checking by July 7th, send in $2,500 within the first 30 days, and keep that $2,500 sitting there through day 60. The bonus lands within 30 days after that. The account has a $15 monthly fee, but you dodge it by keeping a $2,000 daily balance, which you’re already doing to qualify, so it’s a non-issue during the bonus chase. One per business, and you can’t have closed a Wells Fargo business account in the last 90 days.
Free Hyatt Points for Trips You’re Taking Anyway (worldwide)
If you stay at Hyatts, register for this before you book your next one. Sign up between now and September 1st, and Hyatt gives you 2,000 bonus points for every two nights you stay this summer, up to 8,000 points total. The one catch worth understanding: it only starts paying on your second stay after you register, so think of the first stay as the cover charge. Stays count from July 1st through September 7th. You have to register first, though, so a stay you’ve already taken won’t backfill. Takes 30 seconds, costs nothing, and rewards trips you were going to take regardless.
🎥 Watch:
The Queen of Chess
In communist Budapest in the 1970s, an educational psychologist László Polgár had a thesis that geniuses are made, not born. So he did what any reasonable scientist would do, he ran the experiment on his own three daughters, Susan, Sofia, and Judit. He started teaching them chess.
It worked. All three became chess prodigies. Susan became Women’s World Champion. Sofia once beat Bobby Fischer three games in a row in their family’s apartment. And Judit, the youngest (who, at 5, looked exactly like five-year-old me with a bowl haircut), broke Fischer’s record for youngest Grandmaster ever and went on to spend the next two decades quietly dismantling every man who’d said women couldn’t play. Including Garry Kasparov, who’d said of her: “She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche.”
Her psyche beat him anyway.
Ninety minutes on Netflix, directed by Rory Kennedy. Judit still lives in Budapest, an hour and a half by train from where I’m sitting. Practically neighbors. Watch it.
📚 Read:
The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting by Evanna Lynch
This month’s pick from the Hubby:
If you’re looking for a memoir that completely bypasses the usual celebrity fluff, pick up The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting by Evanna Lynch (best known as Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter).
It’s a raw, surprisingly funny and deeply self-aware dive into her battle with anorexia, which she frames not as a diet gone wrong, but as a terrifying addiction to emptiness and control. The title itself is a metaphor for perfectionism: “butterfly hunting” is the urge to catch something beautiful and pin it down until it’s perfectly still and dead, while the opposite is accepting the uncontrollable reality of actually living. She never preaches or hands you a tidy “how-to-heal” checklist; she just brings you into her world, letting you stumble, laugh, and grow right alongside her.
💡 Mind Hack:
Ask vs Guess Culture
You know when you ask a simple question, like “What time should I come over?” and get back this:
“Well, the dad is sleeping, it’s getting cloudy, later it might rain, the baby just woke up and has a warm sweater if needed.”
You stare at the message, completely baffled. Instead of “At 2pm”, you got a meteorological forecast and an inventory of available outerwear.
After one of these, I went down a rabbit hole and learned there are two kinds of communicators in the world. Askers and Guessers.
Askers ask for anything. We use words literally, we say what we want, and we’re fine if the answer is no. It was one of the possible outcomes after all.
Guessers think asking outright is intense and rude and puts the other person on the spot if they need to refuse. So they drop hints, hand you context, and trust you’ll do the math and come up with a solution that works for everyone. They ask a direct question only if they believe the answer is 99% yes. To another Guesser, this seems graceful. To an Asker, it’s totally confusing.
It turns out some of the people I love are Guessers, and I’ve spent years steamrolling them without realizing it.
If you’re an Asker, stop asking Guessers yes-or-no questions. They’ll twist themselves into knots trying to figure out the kindest answer. Instead, give them multiple choices. That way they’ll know you’ll be fine with any of the options. Their dignity stays intact, and so does your sanity.
If you’re a Guesser, try once in a while to just give a clear answer. Askers aren’t trying to corner you, we just genuinely don’t know what you want until you tell us. Even if we can read between the lines, the ambiguity drives us nuts. We’re not going to be hurt by directness, we’ll be thrilled you finally said the thing.
🎈 Just Because:
Twenty Birds of the Czech Republic
The soundtrack adjacent to my current corner of the world has been recorded, labelled, and posted on YouTube by Jarmila Kačírková. Six minutes of twenty different Czech birds singing, each one named on screen: common name, Latin name, and timestamps so you can find your favorites. I couldn’t name three of them before. (I still can’t name twenty.)
Put it on a loop and pretend you’re drinking coffee in a Central European garden.
So there you have it. We unlocked some hidden AI features, peered into a near-empty Malaysian city full of crypto optimists, collected 400 dollars here and 8,000 points there, and played the Guesser/Asker game. Now if you'll excuse me, I’m off to take a picture of my bed.
Be Mappy,
Mags
