Coffee With Tanya #31

Hello, coffee lovers! 🍂

September always feels like a month of turning pages. Summer’s blaze softens, routines return, and we start looking ahead to the last quarter of the year.

New beginnings, quiet reflections, and small sparks of change.

Here’s what we have on our menu today:

1. Health - Who’s driving the future of health 🧬
2. Real Estate - When AI becomes your agent 🏠
3. Travel - Tokyo’s bookworm paradise 📚✨
4. Gaming - Dataguessr: how little you actually know 🎮📊
5. Word Bites - Komorebi, the light between the leaves 🌿☀️
6. September in History 🌍

"It's never too late to be what you might have been" // George Eliot

Who’s Driving the Future of Health? 🧬🤖

I’ll admit it: I love keeping an eye on healthtech. Not just because it’s full of breakthrough science, but because it’s one of those industries where the stakes couldn’t be higher - it’s about our lives!!

At Morgan Stanley’s big annual Healthcare Conference, the world’s top pharma companies and investors came together to share where medicine is heading next.

Here’s what stood out to me (no medical degree required to read it 😉):

1. Breakthroughs you can actually feel - Imagine diagnosing Alzheimer’s with a simple blood test instead of a spinal tap. Or detecting cancer’s return from a single vial of blood. And yes, those mRNA vaccines that saved us in COVID? They’re now being tested against cancer.
2. AI as the backstage helper - Right now it’s cutting costs and speeding up clinical trials. But the bigger promise is designing and discovering new drugs faster than humans could ever manage alone.
3. China’s rising role - With giant patient pools and lower costs, China is becoming a hub for new treatments. Exciting, but also complicated, given the geopolitics 🤔.
4. The price puzzle - Governments are pressuring companies to lower drug prices. That’s pushing pharma to experiment with new models like direct-to-consumer or subscription-style access.
5. Team-ups and takeovers - Big companies buying smaller innovators, hospitals merging, labs being pulled into the mix. It’s all about keeping pipelines fresh and patients connected.

The feeling I walked away with?

Healthcare is moving fast, maybe faster than any other industry.

The science is breathtaking, but the real question is: will the systems, policies, and business models keep up? Because at the end of the day, it’s not just about data or deals. It’s about people waiting for answers, for hope, for a better tomorrow.

Read the full Morgan Stanley article here.

The World’s Coolest Book District 📚✨

As a lifelong bookworm, this year’s pick for the world’s coolest neighborhood felt extra special.

Every September, Time Out crowns the coolest neighborhood in the world.

Last year it was Marseille. The year before, Medellín.

And in 2025? 🥁🥁🥁

The crown goes to Jimbōchō, Tokyo - a pocket of the city with over 130 bookshops 📚, most of them second-hand 😍. Imagine entire streets lined with shelves of old novels, rare editions, and dog-eared manga, tucked inside slightly antiquated buildings.

Locals call it the “hangout of intellectuals.” Students and retirees sit next to each other, drinking coffee, leafing through yellowed pages, or slipping into one of the district’s famous curry houses.

It’s the kind of place where the past is always whispering into the present, and still somehow buzzing with that sense of now.

Coolness, it turns out, isn’t about flashy clubs or futuristic towers.

Sometimes it’s about neighborhoods that let us slow down, wander, and get lost in stories.

If you could spend a day anywhere in the world, would you choose the newest hotspot - or an old street where books outnumber people?

When AI Becomes Your Real Estate Agent 🏠🤖

Picture this: you step into a hotel lobby 🏨, and instead of a receptionist, a humanoid greets you, checks you in, and suggests the best rooftop bar nearby.

Or you’re apartment hunting 🏠 (like me 🥲), and a virtual assistant gives you a 360 degrees tour, answers all your questions, and never once asks for a coffee break.

This isn’t a trailer for Black Mirror. It’s already happening.

Wait, what?!?

Morgan Stanley estimates that AI could automate 37% of real estate tasks and unlock $34 billion in efficiency gains by 2030.

From sales to building management, entire workflows are shifting:

• Self-service first - One self-storage firm found 85% of customers now prefer digital options, cutting labor hours by 30%.
• Lean teams, higher output - A residential company reduced staff by 15% but reported productivity gains.
• Surprisingly, happier people - Both customers and employees said satisfaction went up, not down.

The promise is huge 😮.

Hotels, resorts, healthcare facilities, and brokers could see double-digit cash flow improvements. Brokers might get a 34% boost by adopting GenAI tools for valuations, climate risk analysis, and energy optimization.

But here’s the catch... There is always a catch...

Real estate depends on a healthy job market (makes sense). If AI cuts too many jobs, fewer people can afford homes, offices, or vacations. The same tech that boosts profits could also shrink demand.

So is AI the invisible realtor making our buildings smarter, or a wildcard reshaping who gets to live and work in them?

I believe that, like every healthy thing in life, the answer lies in balance: using AI to reduce inefficiency, but without losing the human warmth that makes a house a home! 🏡.

Dataguessr 🎮📊

Want to know how little you actually know about the world? 😂 Try this.

Dataguessr is basically GeoGuessr for data. Instead of streets, you get dropped into a chart and you have to guess what country, year, or stat it belongs to.

The categories keep it fun (and humbling):

• Geography - place the country on a map from its data.
• Time - match a trend line to the right year.
• Statistics - figure out which dataset belongs where.
• Mixed Mode - chaos mode: a little bit of everything.

One round it’s population growth, the next it’s coffee consumption or avocado imports. You think you’ve got it - and then realize you’re wildly off 😂.

It’s quick, addictive, and teaches you things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. Numbers stop being abstract and suddenly tell little stories about how the world works.

So if you’re ready for a dose of humility (and some laughs), give Dataguessr a try.

Word Bites! 📚🌟

Komorebi (木漏れ日) 🇯🇵

A Japanese word for the dappled sunlight filtering through trees.It’s not just “light through leaves” - it captures the harmony of shadow and brightness, stillness and movement. A reminder that beauty often hides in the in-between moments.

September in History 🌍

• September 1, 1939 - World War II begins ⚔️ Germany invades Poland, sparking the most devastating conflict in human history.
• September 5, 1972 - Munich Olympics tragedy 🏅 Terrorist attack shocks the world and forever changes global sports security.
• September 11, 2001 - 9/11 attacks 🕊️ The day that reshaped geopolitics, security, and personal freedoms worldwide.
• September 15, 1835 - Charles Darwin lands on the Galápagos Islands 🦎 The trip that planted the seeds of On the Origin of Species.
• September 26, 1983 - Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov prevents nuclear war ☢️ He judged a missile alert to be a false alarm — and was right. One decision saved millions.
• September 30, 1955 - James Dean dies in a car crash 🎬 His early death cemented his legend as Hollywood’s eternal rebel.

Recommendations 🌟

What I’m reading / watching / listening this month:

• 📖 Book - "The Apartment in Paris" by Lucy Foley
• 🎧 Podcast - "The Ultimate Guide to JTBD" by Lenny
• 🎬 Series - ״Black Rabbit" - WOW! Read more here this incredible piece!!

Wrap-Up

That’s all for today. Stay tuned for the October coffee with me! ☕

You can also find me writing about Product management on LinkedIn, running my business at velonova.io, rating movies on IMDB, or making playlists on Spotify.

You made it all the way here.... thank you for sharing this coffee with me ☕❤️.

If there’s a topic you’d like me to dive into next, just send it my way.

Ciao!
- Tanya

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