The Hustle Daily Show

good morning everybody it is friday september nineteenth i'm john w miguel with maria hut and this is the hustle daily show google's gemini just d chat as the top ai app on the app store racking up twelve point six million downloads in september alone thanks to its new net open banana model driving a forty five percent search meanwhile open is pivoting towards child safety with age verification systems while google doubles down on ai powered content creation tools for youtube shorts so is this the moment that google finally reclaim the ai crown we'll get to that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right activists starting off tesla is exploring combining electronic and manual release mechanisms in its doors following reports of owners getting stuck in or out of their cars including after crashes that left vehicles on fire a bloomberg investigation found one hundred and forty incidents of passengers trapped in tesla some resulting in significant injury next ai music startup mo will take whitney houston yes whitney houston on tour thirteen years after her passing mo stem separation technology will revive houston's vocals and present them alongside a symphony orchestra strip with the first of eight shows kicking off this weekend in cincinnati before you get too mad about this though houston's estate is fully backing the project actually next we're gonna keep rolling with the ai news we got a lot today ai chip startup up g g r o q which has absolutely nothing to do with elon musk's chatbot g g r k is now valued at seven billion dollars mass producing ai chips remains a good gig and it's projected to grow to a four hundred billion dollar per year industry by twenty thirty and finally meta unveiled its new oakley meta vanguard smart glasses priced at four hundred and ninety nine dollars and meant for athletes they feature a camera speakers ai voice controls integration with fitness trackers and are designed to block out sun wind and dust classic oakley and for more stuff like that you can subscribe to the show we'll have more headlines for you tomorrow but today it is of course time for our ai update with maria from the minds newsletter let's get into it so maria first things first welcome back thank you john thanks for being here again is there anything this past week that you found particularly interesting in the ai world giveaways always come with something that i've actually never heard before so what do got this week so many things have happened okay i mean not to be last week last week was crazy but this week i saw something it's very interesting and i think the space nerds would love what i'm about to say okay so there's like this thing that came out of nyu abu dhabi i didn't know there was an nyu and abu dhabi by the way this isn't news to me i did not know this either that's news scientists there built in ai that could predict solar wind up to four days ahead well yeah and it's forty five percent more it than the models we've been using when i say we i don't say us the norm i say the people with break brains like the space nerds science that do that that matters is because solar wind can mess up with satellites that can mess up power grids and it can even drag spacecraft out of orbit so wow i think spacex kind of lost forty star satellites in twenty twenty two because of that right so what school in this model basically it doesn't just crunch text like chat obviously it actually reads ultraviolet images of the sun and finds patterns we'd never actually cut so it's a reminder obviously that ai isn't just about chatbot bots actually does pretty cool serious tools for science thing real science things guys exactly yeah no i i think this is a very good look at a useful tool outside of like commercial ai yeah that is something that's actually impacting us because when you draw the comparison with that in like the star satellites if we want to give everybody wifi in the world which is i i think i think that's coming in the next five to ten years you definitely have to make sure your satellites don't get blown away or damage by the sun by the sun and this is a good way to try to prevent then i didn't even know there was wind on solar or sun does it have air i even yeah it i mean it's burning i mean i thought it was dawn fire i i don't know i think yeah us norm wouldn't know what's happening so we wouldn't know i'm glad scientists have figured it out and are using ai for something like this because i think it's a really good idea it's pretty cool yeah it's pretty cool and to move on to more commercial uses of ai let's talk about google google's been in the news this week gemini overt took chat on the app store as its nano banana ai model drives downloads up forty five percent for google gemini i think i thought two things when i saw this wow that's really big for google number one and number two maybe it's because everybody already has chat gp the app so it would make sense that people are just trying another ai app and that's why it got first place but what do you think about this gemini resurgence on the app store let's just put stuff into perspective right now natalie banana sounds like in the cartoon character in my opinion it does people really don't talk about this much and i should all this to people it sounds like a cartoon and it's so cool it sounds so cool in my head tiny banana not a banana it's a pretty bar shift obviously we've all gotten used to open ai being the name people associate with you know when it comes to ai apps and like right suddenly google's climbing back up the search kind of comes after they rolled out the nano banana model but i think what people don't know is it's that it's an image editing tool that makes really complex at its way way easier and way more realistic and people have been having fun with it so when you see the edits on tiktok they wanna do something like that and people loved it and it drove downloads up to forty five percent month that over month yeah which we're talking it's i think it's twelve point six million installs in september alone compared to eight point seven million in august wow so that's not a blip either gemini showed up to the number one on the app store and stayed there while slipped into second place so globally it's now a top five iphone app in over a hundred countries which is a huge flex for google especially after years of lagging in the ai so yeah now whether this is a google's fully researching dominance or just a moment of hype around fun image tools that's the real question yeah but when you think about scale i think google has android and has chrome and search and all the pipes already laid yeah and if they can keep users hooked inside gemini that's a secret foundation of making ai feel mainstream mh so yeah i mean it seems like google is really attacking this also from a creative lens because you can make images in chat but it's not necessarily the primary function or what a lot of people use it for so if you can go to google if you can go to gemini and use nano banana and generate really exact images and also use other things like v o three which came out pretty recently to generate video i think they're really kinda carving out a niche for themselves in the ai space with imagery that people can actually use and make videos with potentially so i think that's another big thing about them and then they also just announced kinda in that area that they're going to help creators use a lot of ai with youtube shorts and that's a really big deal because it allows creators to like break down their long form videos and edit them into ai shorts and also create more videos with v three so what do you make of this kind of jump of theirs into the content landscape because they have the infrastructure for it it looks like yeah i think that people assume that ai kind of cuts down on creativity but i think with these apps and like these kind of edits it's getting better and better in my opinion you'd be so surprised about what people can create so youtube just dropped the whole batch of ai tools for shorts and honestly it's like a huge win for to people on tiktok but with google's brain behind it of you so they're rolling out as you said the v three fast which is a faster lighter version of their text to video model and creators can spin up i think it's four hundred and eighty if i'm not mistaken p clips yeah on the fly mh with sound before we used to struggle with people generating sounds but now it sounds insane so you can even take a still picture like a still photo and make a dance like a it's all auditioning for a k pop group you know on top of that you've got ai remix mixing which just turning dialogue from videos into songs with google's l two model it's a you added with ai tool that basically takes your very messy camera roll i think this was made for people like me because i'm always shaky when i'm doing because of the same seven hundred thousand i soy latte that drink and it spits out like polished draft with real good cuts transition even voice overs in english or you know any other language and it's basically saying you know like don't worry if you're not a pro editor her we kinda got you on this what this does for the content landscape because you know everyone's a on the creator these days but true i think the people that kind of like climb up the ladder it's going to kind of help them out with the volume of the amount of shorts i guess so imagine the remix culture of tiktok but way more accessible and way way faster on the flip side it might make originality a bit harder to spot you know true so if when everyone's got ai edits you know and trends could blur everything together but that's kind of like a youtube's play if you lower the barrier to creators you widen the funnel and more contents means more eyeballs so exactly i mean it just increases people's ability to make more stuff and potentially to keep users on the platform longer because there's just more content to digest i mean google announced that youtube has given like over a hundred billion dollars to creators or something since it's inception which is insane so i i think that that's gonna even get more of an increase because youtube is the dominant app on for example like tvs nowadays so it it is kind of getting all that traction and it makes sense yeah i think it's a good play by them hundred percent i mean yeah whenever i open my smart tv the first thing that opens it's not netflix it's not disney plus it's youtube right makes sense lastly here i wanted to move to open ai we mentioned them a bit earlier but they are investing apparently a ton in security mostly with age restrictions and parental controls which i mean makes sense yeah because how would you ever tell if somebody under the age of eighteen is on chad gp and looking up some like wild stuff you would never know but they're trying to develop technology to find out if a user's under eighteen and using the platform do you have thoughts on how that will even work yeah i mean putting car rails on charge i mean i'm not a parent yet but i will become one day like you know eventually in the future and the idea of like something that isn't kind of controlled scares me because everything's moving really fast so they're working on ways to detect if a user is under eighteen and then you automatically redirect them to a more age appropriate version of the app and parents will even be able to link accounts set controls on what features you know teens can access and i think it also gets alert if the assistant flag signs of acute distress by acute stress i mean something very very extremely inappropriate mh on one hand it makes tons of sense obviously teams are already what i called the first ai need is and they kind of teach us a lot of stuff it scares me but you know they're growing up with this tech and with the same way we grew up with the internet like having some kind of structure in place is way better than just tossing them into the deep end on the other hand the big question is like how well would this actually work because kids are notoriously good at bypassing restrictions so they're gonna find ways you know absolutely yeah isn't perfect at a deduction like it's not the best option out there and we see like a lot of problems out there with predators and everything so with scary please i think open ai is on the right track when it comes to that and they're gonna tighten it as much as possible so while this is a solid move on paper the execution is like what really matters so let's just wait and see what they're to yeah there was some news that they would maybe even start doing identity verification that you have to upload your id or something in order to use the platform which i'm sure for a lot of users would be a bit frustrating because it prolong the process of getting into the platform but it seems like a security measure that makes sense when you're talking about like minors using the plan because they can get around stuff as you said no problem i just always think to like the websites that are like oh are you like over the age of eighteen or something or like your youtube videos that like are you over the age of eighteen like who's gonna click no i've no to that like who's gonna say no everybody's gonna be like i'm gonna pick a random birthday and i'm gonna get to website i would be very happy if someone kind of asked me for my id and in my club and like because i'm like literally reaching thirty this week so like if someone asks me that i'll be happy but a kid you know out there that they don't know what's the limit and they wanna find ways into these ai tools without adults being around mh we've had our own ways as kids to kind of find ways around i to whatsoever on the internet so the kids are way smarter these days so yeah it's a bit scared they are that actually sounds really funny that if chat up asked me for my id in a few years i can be i could be like wow so flattering yeah thank you so much for asking me that how old do you think i am chat just guess well thank you so much b and happy birthday every next week see you next week alright that's gonna do it for us today thanks for tuning in the hustle daily show we're a proud part of hubspot media our editor today is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a lot more tech and business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed to go get yourself sign up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily see you next week look i'm gonna be straight with you everybody's talking about ai but most people are just playing around with chat instead of actually making money from it that's why we dropped the ultimate crash course to create your own ai side hustle in seven days we're talking real frameworks and strategies from the pros like the founder of the hustle sam car it includes many guides templates the whole nine yard stuff that takes years to figure out condensed into one week stop what you're doing right now and grab it in the show notes your future self will thank you

good morning everyone today is thursday september eighteenth i'm john wan with juliet bennett r and this is the hustle daily show forget the startup up grind today millennials are ditching corporate america now to buy existing businesses instead with biz by self facilitating ninety five hundred transactions worth two point seven billion dollars last year alone from one hundred thousand dollar vending machine routes to a two point eight five million dollar haunted forest in new jersey there's apparently a marketplace for every entrepreneurial dream you never knew you have we'll get into that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this starting off today the trump administration wants the securities and exchange commission to stop requiring companies to report earnings quarterly seeking semi annual updates instead saying it'll save money and time no word yet from the sec but an update every six months might be looming next paul english cofounder of travel booking pioneer kayak has a new tool on the market it's called super cal a scheduling platform that does pretty much everything that cal does accept it is fully free to use naturally the tool for coordinating schedules and booking meetings isn't a wholly altruistic act but the undercut basically the same thing but free makes for a strong opening statement for the app next as other podcast studios grapple with quality versus quantity inception point ai un favors quantity the ai led studio produces over three thousand shows per week across five thousand shows in its network even more than that all fronted by ai talent though its ceo janine wright insists any dings on the network's quality aren't fair inception point ai has hit ten million total downloads and its episodes cost one dollar or less to produce i guess the ai podcast revolution is here we gotta look out and next over here the buyer of fire festival has been revealed and it is shockingly lime wire which paid two hundred and forty five thousand dollars and out bid ryan reynolds for the right to billy mc fire fest disaster juliet can you tell me a little bit about lime wire acquiring fire fest yeah this is a real interesting one because you know when you think about lime wire i think most people who are old enough to remember lime wire it's like the place where you downloaded a bunch of free music that you probably weren't supposed to of course you know instead of going to of i don't know what would you do legally at that time go to best buy and and buy a cd probably itunes itunes yeah i buy from itunes at the time some best buy yeah what one of those places but i've i did download one or two things from lime wire which was always a lincoln park song mh that ended up just being like fart sounds so you know you get what you get on there those were the time i actually for a long time thought pant and the smiths were the same band because of lime incredible because somebody was like download the song cemetery gates and i did and i was like oh yeah this is so like i was thinking this dismiss were a metal band because i'm like a little kid and then someone played another miss song for me and like this doesn't sound at all like cemetery gates him they must have been in their soft era at that point yeah it turns out i downloaded the pent tara song and was very confused about everybody's talking about morris for like a year i thought pant tara was was morris because i was a child downloading things online yes of course anyhow lime wire obviously got into some trouble due to the copyright infringement you know the same as an naps where it's like hey you can't just download free music what are you doing kids i mean even though it did take six hours to download one song at the time it was still nutshell so lime wire actually shut down and then was brought back by two brothers julian and paul is he my air if i'm saying that correctly and apparently it's now a crypto market which i must admit does not excite me in the lease i'm not surprised either about that and what is interesting to me about this particular purchase is that they said they're not doing a fire festival that's not happening right what julian said was we're bringing the brand and the meme to life this time with real experiences and without the cheese sandwiches i think famously we all saw the pictures of the very sad cheese sandwiches that they were serving people was supposed to be a luxury festival experience with you know curated chef meals whatever so my question is if it's not a festival than what are these real life experiences it sounds like it's kind of just like weird tech bro meme humor maybe it would be cool and the style of some of the things that mischief does maybe it's gonna be really stupid i kind of think ryan reynolds would have done about her job but i will reserve judgment until we see what they do with this yeah i really enjoy that ryan reynolds was a bidder this seems right up as alley but yeah it also seems right up lime wires alley funnily enough so either way i wanna see what happens with this yeah i think ryan reynolds just has a very good track record for everything he does yeah maybe not some of his early movies but definitely as an entrepreneur and in his deadpool era i feel like anything he touches any business that he starts working with he does a great job with marketing and advertising and and getting a lot of positive buzz and really bringing things around so i think you know i could see him doing a great job but i'm also very curious to know what lime wire see crypto meme marketplace is going to do yeah fascinated i'm sure a fire coin will be around very soon oh sure and it can't be worse than what billy mc did with it so can't possibly be worse the bar already that low bar low yeah and finally here ben and jerry's founder jerry greenfield is quitting the company after forty seven years citing disagreements with parent company unilever which acquired the ice cream brand in two thousand ben jerry's has long been outspoken about social issues which unilever initially agreed to allow but greenfield now claims that ben jerry's has been silenced by their parent company okay so for more stuff like that you can subscribe to the show and we'll have more headlines for you tomorrow but in the meantime juliet we are talking about small businesses and people seemingly buying a lot of small businesses nowadays yeah i kinda love this to be totally honest i think this is a really fun thing that's happening so when you think about a startup up you think about i'm gonna be the next open ai i'm gonna be the next uber i'm gonna be the next airbnb you're probably not unfortunately that's probably not gonna happen for you probably not it might though and i'm not saying that to discourage you but if you're like listen i don't need to be the next uber i'm just looking for like a cool sustainable source of income a lot of people are buying small businesses that are ready to go so i'm gonna be totally honest with you i saw a forbes headline that said i could buy a haunted for and i was like well sold you click i wanna haunted for us who doesn't that turned out to be a haunted attraction in new jersey that is actually pretty expensive it would cost me two point eight million dollars so i'm gonna pass on that yeah yeah don't think that's gonna happen but the story was actually about this trend apparently there was a book that came out called buy then bill by walker to bill in twenty eighteen and since then been this this trend of people being like i wanna be my own boss but i'm not ready to start a full on business where can i acquire a small business and apparently the largest online marketplace where you can find a business to buy is this platform called biz buy sell it oversaw nine point five thousand transactions in twenty twenty four earning it well two point seven billion in revenue from listing fees so not a small situation here and i looked at it because of course i did because i was looking for more haunted and enforce and there is just everything on there like there's a lot of small businesses that you would anticipate being on a marketplace like this i'm talking restaurants cafes dry cleaners laundromat mats car washes pretty much anything you can imagine that the characters in breaking bad could have bought to lau welder drug money is on there vending machines i don't know if you're a longtime hustle reader you maybe have read the pieces we've done on the vending machine empires that some people we have that can be very lucrative you know spas salons gyms all sorts of things you can buy on here but what was super interesting was there's all these niche businesses where you know you think about a cafe or a restaurant those are kind of hard to sustain in a big city because you have a lot of competitors you have a lot of rivals your overheads compared to your margins there's all these things to think about but some of the most interesting businesses were just things you you wouldn't even necessarily think about unless you had a reason to think about them so in the new york times they were highlighting a lot of businesses that people bought that were kind of boring yeah unless you you get really into the show of it there was a manufacturer of machines that clean other machines that a couple blocks i seen there was a garage and gate door controller business you probably don't think much about who makes your garage or gate controller but there is of course a company for that it was someone who bought kind of like a landscaping company but it was for indoor plants an indoor plant maintenance companies when you think about offices or hospitals or anywhere where they might have or plants that's what this company does and there are just a ton of those so in terms of like who is getting in on this and who's buying and who's selling apparently about fifty one percent of privately owned businesses in the united states are held by people who are older and they're looking to retire so they wanna offload these businesses makes sense and they wanna go do something else with their lives but millennials a lot of millennials are like i'm tired of corporate america i wanna be my own boss but i don't have you know the capital or the connections or the whatever start something right right so i wanna move into something that's already established already stable already has customers cash flow etcetera so they're looking to buy these businesses and essentially the processes they find something they're interested in that they wanna buy you know you have to do your due diligence you have to look at financial just to see if this is something you could do something you are interested in what the hurdles would be and then there are all sorts of avenues that you can pursue to help you do this such as small business loans and so that is what is happening here it's a lot of millennials being like i'm ready to be my own boss i'm ready to have my own business then a lot of boomers offload them to other people and a lot of these places already have a customer base a location they're ready to go which is super interesting and some of them are not that expensive you know the haunted for us was two point eight million dollars yeah that's definitely the high end of things i'm assuming it pretty high and you know a lot of that should be fair is that it's a lot of land this haunted forest there is a trail that goes through but it's like twenty acres of forest and you could ostensibly use that for more than a halloween attraction so i think there's a lot of potential there like maybe you also do a christmas thing maybe you have something you right it is in new jersey so you're gonna have to do with winter but like there's potential there okay for anyone who has two point eight million dollars and buys this haunted for us i would love to know what you do with it but a lot of businesses that i was looking at were under one hundred thousand dollars yeah i mean there are quite a few i actually just pulled it up right now the biz buy sell website i think it's operated firstly by apartments dot com because it looks very similar for some reason that's so funny yeah you could find like a new york city over here you could buy a toy vending machine for thirty k that makes fifty four k a year or something or you can buy an eyewear store that's at ninety five k so it it's some pretty interesting opportunities over here some of the restaurants cafes and retail spots were so cheap in los angeles that i could i live in them because they are cheaper than a home wow can i buy a home for a hundred thousand dollars no you cannot but you could buy a business for a hundred buy a cafe a deli or a cafe bode day i just gotta put a shower in that's it yeah that's all i gotta do and maybe a bed but oh that you're good i just live in it like the phantom of the opera that's right that's right you live in the play house but yeah i i think this is a a really great trend because i mean there are all of these kind of antiquated businesses that have been making money for a very long time because a lot of them are essentials like a laundromat stuff like that mh and it makes a lot of sense that the boomers that own these businesses would wanna offload them because retirement getting close and it definitely makes sense for people our age or like millennials even gen years to purchase them because as you mentioned the startup up costs are very very high nowadays to create your own business you know pay rent get a building do whatever you gotta do mh so now you're not starting from go necessarily you're starting a few steps ahead of everybody else already yeah and it just seems kind of fun even if you're not ready to buy a business right now i think you should look at the website this just look at it there's so much interesting stuff it scratches the zillow itch of yes right other stuff you never even think about like i've never thought about a company that makes a machine to clean another machine yeah right never would have thought about i've never spent time pondering this never would have thought about this exactly so lots of things that could discover while list scrolling this website instead of doom scrolling perhaps look for haunted for us buy i'm just you know it gets it's fun there you go yeah business scrolling instead yeah alright that's gonna do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show where a proud part of hubspot media our editor is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a ton more tech of business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go get signed up at the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle dale we'll see you tomorrow here's what blows my mind most people are sitting around waiting for their boss to give them a raise while millionaires are building income streams in their spare time entrepreneur and creator marina miguel c crack the code on this she built more than ten income streams that now pull in over one hundred thousand dollars a month she shared the secret sauce with our team so now we're sharing it with you exactly how she did it this guy gives you practical step by step strategies you can actually implement so just pick just one income stream from her guide and watch what happens stop what doing right now and grab it in the show notes six months from now and you'll be glad you did

good morning everybody today is wednesday september seventeenth i'm john w and this is the hustle daily show oracle stock has surged over eighty percent this year briefly making larry ellis the world's richest person as the once boring database company became the unlikely king maker in america's tiktok drama so today we're exploring how oracle transformed from enterprise software dinosaur to an ai powerhouse while positioning itself as the technical guardian of one hundred and seventy million american tiktok users we'll get to that and the biggest headlines in business tech right after this starting off today there's a new attraction called kart clash at rpm race an indoor go kart chain in the northeast united states that's gonna feel very familiar to fans of the nintendo racing franchise mario kart just not too familiar less nintendo's legal team takes notice drivers vie to be the first to finish eight laps in rpm carts which max out at forty five miles an hour they pick up power ups by driving cars over projected image on the track and then live the highs and lows of all the cards slowing down when struck by a weapon each race runs forty dollars for non members and hopefully they don't get hit with that nintendo lawsuit next up here six months ago ant ceo da mod predicted that ai would be writing ninety percent of code fu checked in on that prediction and it's a big fat no while it's hard to figure out exactly how much code is written by ai it is not ninety percent relying on ai actually slows code down according to research because they spend more time reviewing and modifying its work or waiting for code to generate one study found that using ai code can also increase security vulnerabilities tenfold in more ai news when chat launched in twenty twenty two open ai estimated that up to eighty percent of its users were male but things have really changed since then women are now using the ai tool more than men it's not by much and open ai calculation methods aren't foolproof but still and finally calm launched its first new standalone app called calm sleep it offers a personalized sleep plan with recommended content tasks soothing sleep content and stories and the ability to sync with wearables we'll see how that happens in the future and for more updates like that you can subscribe to the show will have more for you tomorrow but today we're talking about oracle yes oracle the enterprise software company that your it department complained about for decades and that somehow became the hottest stock in silicon valley these past weeks oracle shares have skyrocketed more than eighty percent this year out pacing nvidia google meta and microsoft the surge briefly made larry ellis the world's richest person which is remarkable for a company that many people assumed was quietly fading into corporate relevance but oracle sudden prominence isn't just about artificial intelligence it's about becoming the unlikely power broker and one of the biggest geopolitical tech battles of all time the company that started up with the cia contract in the nineteen seventies is now positioned to control the fate of tiktok one hundred and seventy million american users making a database company a key player in international diplomacy oracle transformation story starts with timing and a bit of desperation the company was famously late to cloud computing larry ellis called the technology complete gibberish in two thousand eight which aged about as well as milk while amazon web services google cloud and microsoft az azure built massive market share oracle remained focused on traditional database licensing then came twenty twenty two and the launch of gh when ai companies suddenly realized they needed massive computing power to train their large language models oracle found itself perfectly positioned to capitalize on this demand search partly because of its close relationship with nvidia for ai chips and partly because it wasn't competing with its own language models for data center space here are the numbers from oracle latest earnings report they're pretty staggering ceo software cats projected that the cloud infrastructure revenue would grow seventy seven percent to eighteen billion dollars in fiscal year twenty twenty six and reached one hundred and forty four billion dollars by twenty thirty the company's remaining performance obligations contracted future revenue jumped three hundred and fifty nine percent year over year to four hundred and fifty five billion dollars in the most recent quarter oracle signed four multi billion dollar contracts with three different customers during the quarter with open ai reportedly agreeing to pay three hundred billion dollars to them over five years for data center space when a single customer is willing to commit to three hundred billion dollars the economics of enterprise computing have clearly shifted into some uncharted territory but the really fascinating part of oracle renaissance involves tiktok of all things and what might be the strangest national security arrangement in tech history since twenty twenty oracle has been hosting tiktok us data through something called project texas a one point five billion dollar initiative designed to address american security concerns about chinese data access under this arrangement oracle doesn't just provide cloud storage it actively monitors tiktok source code reviews algorithms and ensures that chinese entities can't access american user data oracle employees inspect every line of code compile the app themselves and deliver it directly to app stores to maintain complete oversight the current tiktok negotiations position oracle as the primary solution to the constitutional crisis created by congressional efforts to ban the app to president trump announced that a framework to keep tiktok running has been reached with final confirmation pending a conversation with chinese president xi that was supposed to happen on friday oracle would maintain the cloud contract under this framework essentially becoming the technical guardian of of america's most popular apps this isn't just a business deal it's a geopolitical arrangement that turns an enterprise software company into a national security operator all of a sudden what makes oracle position particularly valuable is its deep connections to the us intelligence agencies the company has provided database and cloud infrastructure services to the cia nsa and other agencies for decades oracle government cloud offerings are specifically designed to meet stringent security requirements for intelligence operations this background makes oracle uniquely qualified to handle the tiktok situation from a national security perspective when lawmakers expressed concern about chinese surveillance and data access oracle cr claim both the technical capability and security clearance to address those exact issues the financial implications for oracle two are pretty gigantic tiktok generates massive data processing requirements that translate directly into cloud revenue losing tiktok would represent a significant hit to oracle growth projections while maintaining the relationship provides stable long term revenue from one of the world's most data intensive applications oracle stock volatility around tech tiktok negotiations demonstrates how crucial this relationship has become shares jumped about six percent on tuesday following trump's comments about reaching a framework agreement that's just a single announcement that caused the stock to go up the arrangement also reveals the strange new reality of tech governance oracle essentially functions as a privatized national security service for digital platforms providing oversight that government agencies lack the technical expertise to handle directly this creates unprecedented corporate responsibility for managing international relations through technology infrastructure project texas cost tiktok one point five billion dollars to implement but it's still failed to satisfy congressional concerns about byte control over the algorithm current negotiations involve oracle taking a larger role while potentially leaving tiktok recommendation system under chinese influence and that's a compromise that satisfies nobody completely beyond tiktok though oracle ai positioning depends on continued demand for computing power from companies building large language models the company reported more than twenty seven billion dollars in capital expenditures in the first quarter alone demonstrating the massive investment required to compete in this space but oracle faces a fundamental risk if ai development slows or companies find more efficient ways to train models the demand for data center capacity could collapse quickly oracle is smaller than other major cloud providers making it more vulnerable to market shifts and ai spending though and here we go add more layers to the cake oracle relationship with the trump administration as yet another layer of complexity larry ellis is a long time trump supporter who was announced as part of the five hundred billion dollar star gate ai infrastructure initiative in january this political alignment helps explain oracle prominence in take tiktok negotiations but it also creates a risk if political wins shift the company's success increasingly depends on maintaining favorable relationships with both american policymakers and international customers and when your business model were requires navigating geopolitical tensions while providing technical services to politically sensitive platforms operational complexity increases every single day so what's particularly striking about oracle transformation is how it illustrates the changing nature of corporate power in the digital age traditional metrics of business success which are revenue growth profit margins and market share matter a lot less when your primary value comes from solving geopolitical problems that governments can't exactly handle directly oracle has essentially become a privatized diplomatic service that uses technical expertise to manage international tensions this creates opportunities for extraordinary growth but also exposes the company to risks that have nothing to do with normal business operations whether oracle can maintain its current momentum depends on factors largely outside of its control ai demand must continue growing at unprecedented rates the tiktok arrangement must satisfy both american security concerns and chinese business interests and the company must execute flawlessly on technical challenges that carry significant national security implications oracle journey from boring database company to ai king maker demonstrates how quickly fortunes can change in the technology sector but it also reveals the increasing prioritization of tech infrastructure and the strange new world where enterprise software companies become key players in international relations nowadays so the next time you see oracle and the headlines remember that you're not just reading about a software company just a boring old software company you're watching a corporation that's transformed itself into a critical piece of america's digital sovereignty strategy alright and that's gonna do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show we're a proud part of hubspot media our editor is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a lot more tech business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go get yourself signed up the hubspot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily we'll see you on guys with the launch of loop marketing keeps giving you the ultimate prompt library over one hundred ai prompts that walk you through each stage of the loop marketing method they're designed to help you spot growth opportunities in an ai world this isn't just another collection of prompts it'll guide you into the new era of marketing you can get it for free at the in our show notes seriously stop right now look at those show notes and tap that link here's what blows my mind most people are sitting around waiting for their boss to give while millionaires are building income streams in their spare time entrepreneur and creator marina mcgill crack the code on this she built more than ten income streams that now pull in over one hundred thousand dollars a month she shared the secret sauce with our team so now we're sharing it with you exactly how she did it this guy gives you school step by step strategies you can actually implement so just pick just one income stream from her guide and watch what happens stop what you're doing right now and grab it in the show notes six months from now and you'll be glad you did

good morning everybody today is tuesday september sixteenth i'm john w with mark dent and this is the hustle daily show pepsi coast stock has plummeted twenty percent over the last two years while coca cola soared fifteen percent and now investors are demanding radical changes with billions of dollar at stake the iconic blue can that once challenged coke for soda supremacy has slipped to fourth place in us sales trailing behind doctor pepper and even sprite so how did pepsi fall so far behind we'll get into that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this starting off today open door the real estate platform has a new board chair keith boy and he's coming in hot he told cnbc that he hates remote work he can't fathom what most employees do suggested a workforce reduction of up to eighty five percent and mark we've heard a lot about open door in the recent months in becoming kind of a meme stock right i mean it's stock has just exploded since july i mean it's like a straight line it's gone so far up but interestingly enough as cnbc pointed out in a new story kind of about this ceo you know talking about all these changes is that it is still a cash burning low margin business yeah so you can of course lay off eighty five percent of your staff as the ceo keith boss you know we don't need more than two hundred of them but you could also maybe try to i don't know make the business good like instead of having just been this cash burning business that it is yeah because you know as we've said on here a lot the statistics show that layoffs can be a nice little boost for a bit but not for the long term totally but this is just what ceos are doing now they're trying to create these pretty negative environments fearful environments for people to work in yeah very hustle culturally very busy work it seems like that's kind of the direction that open doors taking along with a lot of other companies we see nowadays isn't exactly too far from what everybody else is doing so i mean it makes sense it's just crazy to be how their stock went so far up and kinda this is the response to it of let's chop most of our staff but we'll see what happens right instead of investing a lot of times when you're stock is up you'll invest more but again their stock is up for reasons that frankly don't make any sense of just beyond just speculation so exactly alright so moving over to tesla a couple of news hits today as elon musk bought one billion dollars worth of tesla shares causing the stock to lift over six percent yesterday on the other hand the company just caught off its most affordable cyber truck model just five months after launch due to its plummeting sale so two parts of the same story there next the albania government has a new minister in charge of rooting out corruption d who is a chatbot it's been a meteor rise for the ai initially citizens virtual assistant inside the government services portal for its history making appointment as the first cabinet member who is not physically present per prime minister ed rama in addition to playing corruption monitor d will also be the last word on awarding government contracts we'll see how that works out for albania from there we go to the white house president trump will be speaking with china's president g on friday regarding the future of tiktok reportedly the trump administration has already announced that a deal outline has been reached for the app so it looks like after a year of back and forth there will be no band but we'll see for sure on friday and finally tyson foods is going to eliminate another chemical from its lineup this year early in twenty twenty five the company already removed synthetic dies from its domestic branded products and now it's looking to chop high fructose corn syrup from its offerings by the end of the year this brought on by some things in the trump administration and rf mark this seems to be a step in a positive direction for american foods yeah i mean it definitely potentially and it depends on what you really believe about higher fructose corn syrup and whether it's actually any worse than sugar which is you know very much up for debate in fact studies would indicate that there is no difference and if you would say otherwise of course but either way you know the trump administration has clearly had a little bit of a good fortune in getting companies to kind of change their sort of way right you know like like you said they've already eliminated one chemical high fructose corn syrup now coca cola has said that it will release a cane sugar type of soda here in the us it didn't say it was gonna get rid of high fructose corn syrup or anything but i think what's really interesting is what kind of standoff off there might end up being because high fructose corn syrup is a very much favored ingredient by the corn industry which has a lot of power agriculture has just a ton of lobbying power yeah here in the us and so there might end up being this sort of stand up for you out this corn industry going against you know frankly the white house companies that are considering getting rid of it this is going to become an even bigger story i think yeah definitely and i guess where all these corn farmers will then look to distribute corn if not to high fructose corn syrup but yeah because most corn that is produced is not actual corn that people eat the vast majority of it is either feed for cattle or like ethanol is actually the vast majority of it and then like a little bit that goes to high fructose corn syrup it's not a huge part of it but they still fight over it i can tell you that yeah i'm sure it'll make a dent nonetheless okay and for more stories like that you can subscribe to the show we'll have more for you tomorrow but right now we're talking pepsi so mark what is going on in the world of pepsi pepsi by the way still using high fructose corn syrup yes they are not changing any to sugar yet it's here in the us but it's been a rough few years for pepsi and pepsi the soft drink is you know part of pepsi c which also owns f lay doritos yeah it's a bunch of brands yeah it's a huge brand because you have f lay in in its own right has like you know so many different parts of that and so their stock has been down about twenty percent over the last couple years if you compare that to their huge rival at least soft drink wise coca cola is up fifteen percent and elliott management which you know that name will create nightmares for almost any ceo and yeah elliott management is now involved in pepsi so yeah yeah they are and the market caps are also very different pepsi at two hundred billion coke about three hundred billion and i remember in the nineties grown up in the early two thousands the pepsi coke was kinda neck and neck you have people that prefer one you have people that prefer the other coke usually wins out in the end but i saw it for a while as like direct competition and in the early two thousands there was a lot of effort by pepsi to get into specifically the music space and advertise that way and advertise like artists and whatnot and coke is more in the sports space it seems so they each were playing their games and placing their ads in places where they could connect with an audience but it seems that pepsi has really fallen off in these past few years at least the soft drink part of it has so why do you think pepsi fallen so far down behind even now doctor pepper and sprite yeah you bring up that marketing part which i think is a a part of it you know in the nineties you know when you and i were growing up pepsi they always had like the pepsi generation kind of motto trying to align themselves with youth culture mh that in the eighties they literally had michael jackson in their advertisements in the nineties they i had yeah like you said other musicians it just kind of fit the culture i think in a way that is very hard for any sort of soda brand to fit now and so i think like because of that you can't be a huge corporation and be a disrupt people are too clever for that now and just be putting out like tv ads and stuff like you have to be a lot smarter if you just look at the marketing spend coca cola is a bit higher than pepsi now even and coca cola has always had the more like where the classic kind of beverage and i i think that's more appealing for people who still drink soda because keep in mind like you know soda consumption has gone down by a lot so they're both dealing with that and i just think coca cola has had a lot of advantages over pepsi in marketing and getting its into word yeah one of their big successes coke has had is coke zero i mean there was a time in the past years that coke zero actually was outs selling coca cola proper so they have these other variations of their product that pepsi just doesn't exactly seem to have but pepsi it seems for a long time the soda has been really leaning on its f lay friends yeah being of course like the big household doritos all that stuff they historically have been doing quite well but as we've talked about recently inflation and other factors in the economy have also made snacks a bit of a tough business for them as well right the advantage of having a huge corporation a sprawling corporation that pepsi does where you have f lay you have quaker and whatever else is that when one is not doing that well then the other one can kinda lift you up and as you said that's what was happening with f lay it's now facing some issues of its own but in addition to that the negative to when you're this big sprawling conglomerate is that you can't really focus in on any one part as as much as you'd like and even though those conglomerate they say that oh we can have efficiencies like our hr department or you know just some sort of back of the house thing that you can like kinda merge together at the end of the day it's very questionable whether that works we've seen over the last twenty five thirty years just conglomerate unwind there are not that many conglomerate anymore when you think of like the biggest biggest companies like i was trying to think of one earlier that like hey man is there a really good example of successful conglomerate right now and it's like oh man amazon is this huge company but they're really just focused on like a couple things amazon went services and then you know their own shipping and distribution channels and then they're online store like yeah whereas you know pepsi has all these different parts of it and it just wall street does not like conglomerate anymore they haven't for a long time yeah and it seems like elliott management doesn't either because elliott is a big investor in pepsi c with about four billion dollars shoot into the company and it's advising that pepsi c kind breaks up the business a little bit breaks it up or either shed some businesses that it feels like no longer are serving the overall brand and the overall goals here like quaker is one of them that's mentioned by elliott as a brand that's not exactly performing as well as it could be and they could just get rid of it and focus more on the well performing brands which i mean is definitely something that could help them at the end of the day yeah and the other thing that elliott wants which david wan pointed out from the wall street journal is that elliott wants pepsi to spin off its bottling distribution sort of company right you know fifteen some twenty years ago coke and pepsi both bought back their own bottle but coke then spun it off and you know david wan from the wall street journal kind of suggests that this is like a huge advantage for coke is the fact that they spun that off and they don't have to like worry about the whole distribution processes right right exactly mh yeah it makes a lot of sense and that the margin show that coke has significantly higher margins than pepsi when it comes to this and it that's really important and that could be another thing that elliott wants them to do and just focus on the brands that actually work in addition to that which pepsi has been struggling to do in the past few years for sure and when elliott wants something it doesn't always happen we but the companies that they kind of sink their teeth into but it does happen a lot one example from just a few years ago was that elliott bought a pretty big stake in at and t and at and t had essentially tried to become a conglomerate they had bought warner brothers and so it was like this weird match that no one really thought worked of like a phone company a communications company with like a hollywood brand and elliott management invest and they're like gotta slim down and yeah they unloaded warner about pretty darn quickly to discovery yeah so when elliott gets involved things tend to change yeah and that's i guess the big challenge for pepsi c ceo who's ramon like gu he's kinda coming in with all these problems and this old company that desperately needs a refresh and he's worked at t mckenna he acquired poppy and si foods so he's trying to really turn things around but can he and kind of a piece elliot management as he turn things around that's i guess the big question going forward yeah yeah for sure so are you a coke or a pepsi drinker john you know i gotta say i've just never been like a fan of just like a regular cola just never been much of a soda guy mountain dew is like my one and only what about you i'm coke you know if i'm at a restaurant and i order a coke and like mobile we only have pepsi than i i just want to you have upstate yeah i state you're one of those guys yeah yeah yeah yeah loyal to like doctor pepper pride better than any of them so i think i like the doctor pepper brand maybe the best it's like the most fun and exciting and interesting i don't know it's just got some edge to it that the others don't in my opinion yeah twenty three flavors plus they have that thing every year college football games where the kids have to throw football into a garbage can to get free tuition or whatever so oh yeah yeah exactly but good to know that if we ever go out to dinner a day i i gotta bring you do a coke forward restaurant please alright that's gonna do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show we're a crap part of hubspot media our editor today is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a lot more tech and business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed to go get signed up with the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily catch you later everybody guys with the launch of loop marketing keeps giving you the ultimate prompts library over one hundred ai prompts that walk you through each stage of the loop marketing method they're designed to help you spot growth opportunities in an ai world this isn't just another collection of prompts it'll guide you into the new era of marketing you can get it for free at the in our show notes seriously right now look at those show notes and tap that look i'm gonna be straight with you everybody's talking about ai but most people are just playing around with chat instead of actually making money from it that's why we drop the ultimate crash course to create your own ai side hustle in seven days we're talking real frameworks and strategies from the pros like the founder of the hustle sam par it includes mini guides templates the whole nine yard stuff that takes years to figure out condensed into one week stop what you're doing right now and grab it in the show notes your future self will thank you

good morning everybody today is monday september fifteenth i'm john w miguel here with the hosts of the ai applied podcast connor g and jade sc and this is the hustle daily show connor and jaden have been tracking ai rapid evolution across industries on the ai applied podcast but few sectors are being transformed as dramatically as home security with apple reportedly developing ai powered security cameras with facial recognition and the smart home security market exploding from ten billion dollars to a projected seventy four billion dollars by twenty thirty five it's time to discuss the ai security revolution we're get into all that and all the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this alright starting off today newly opened washington dc restaurant hush harbor is putting a big bet on digital detox it's going fully phone free requiring guests to deposit their phones and a locking pouch before their seated the establishment expects staff to similarly disconnect will sell disposable cameras and letter writing materials and host book clubs trivia nights and vinyl listening parties the bold most jarring move of all here though is that the restaurant has something called a landline don't remember what that is and next danish supermarket giant sol group is building fifty so called emergency stores that can continue operating seamlessly for three days without any power or internet the special locations of its bill chain will stock additional non perishable and survival goods can handle offline payments and if all goes as planned will all be opened by twenty twenty eight at which point eighty percent of danes would be less than thirty miles away from east essentials if their nation's worst catastrophes come to life pretty cool now let's talk some big business a new gala poll found that only thirty percent of americans have a positive view of big business capitalism itself fared a little better with fifty four percent regarding it kindly but that's still the economic systems lowest mark since gal started asking this question in two thousand and ten and finally shake shack introduced a french onion soup burger topped with gru air cheese caramelized onions and garlic parmesan aioli recently shake shack ceo rob lynch said that the chain has mapped out eighteen months of limited time premium items that while priced higher than other shake shack fair at ten to eleven dollars would typically retail for much more in a standard restaurant so shake shack increasing their offerings there makes a lot of sense gen z enjoys new flavors as we know for more stuff like that you can subscribe to the show and we'll have more headlines for you tomorrow but today we are talking with connor and jaiden from the ai applied pod about home security and how it's gonna change in the ai age let's do it connor jaiden welcome to the show great to have you here i definitely wanted to dive in on home security today as it relates to ai apple this past week came out that they're reportedly developing ai powered security cameras for the home with facial recognition all this fancy stuff year long battery life kind of the list goes on how significant is it first of all to you guys that apple is entering a space like this with the help of ai let me just set the stage here because every time jade and i talk about apple like the apple stands come for us right because we have been i don't know a little bit pessimistic about apple's journey the ll space but i gotta say jaiden wondering where you're gonna take this because i think this is pretty cool so jaiden i'll let you kick it off but just tread carefully here my friend no okay so like connor said usually quite pessimistic about apple and ai only because they've been so slow for a long time but where apple really excels is hardware they've crushed it i mean they're such an insanely huge company and it's because of the hardware their software is okay but it it feels like there's other companies that might edge them out there google and etcetera so i think is they're getting into something like home security this is kind of a no brainer because they already have a lot of the software built out right facial recognition it sounds exciting when you say ai but it's basically what's already on your iphone when you have facial recognition so a lot of the underlying technologies there i think when they build hardware that's gonna be exciting we see like you know ring and google and amazon and all these other people are competing heavily in there so all the other big players are already there it honestly you know people might be asking what took apple so long to get there i'm excited i don't imagine apple's going to do anything groundbreaking on the ai front because that just isn't really where they sit and basically other push up products and ai etcetera etcetera but i think there's a lot of really useful things they might bring a little bit of new light investment energy into a sector and so typically once you see apple jump in you see a lot of investment dollars kind of flow that direction a lot of excitement and interest right it's like when they reveal their device they invented the whole industry it's incredible and so gonna be a bunch of people will jump in but overall i'm actually i think this makes sense for them that's so right and by the way jay are a huge apple fans i think that we have you know every device that apple has ever made it's cool first of all i totally agree with jaiden on this where like apple where's your large language model however if you wanna sort of like take this kind of you know approach to that apple always knows what's it's doing all the time and i think even internally they would say that that's probably not the case but the intelligence is probably gonna get kinda comm here out that cost is dropping like you know just to create a foundation model unbelievably expensive etcetera i'm with jaiden i mean this feels like apple's sweet spot here it almost feels like why didn't i think of this first and it's funny that jaden was saying you know apple's is gonna feel like they invented this gene i'm so glad you put words to that because i was having the same feeling here's my thought on it apple is cool right so my colleague at nyu scott gallo if you know him and he always talks about how having an apple product is kind of you showing to the world that you can afford like good products that you care about that sort of stuff and look we love amazon right amazon has done phenomenal things are even in the l game everything like that and we have a ring we have our alexa device all that kind of stuff but nobody's been like oh look how cool connor is rolling up with his you know his ring camera right amazon doesn't have that cool factor and the other thing that i love about this dipping toe into let's call it home security but let's also call the device market so they have the cool device number one second of all it's probably gonna look good third of it's probably gonna be integrated although i think they're even talking about not separate os but something around that but then lastly what is the one thing in this ai era that everybody's waiting on for apple beyond siri is privacy right everything is privacy it's the whole reason why we have small models is that you wanna put them on phone's apple has never lost the privacy thing and everybody else has at one point or another so that is what kind of gets me psyche about it yeah i mean great points all around i'm surprised also guys that they haven't kinda moved into the spot earlier because you know you mentioned jaiden google's already in there with nest amazon's in your home with ring and they're already taking up that space apple has a home pod so it's kinda like the home fight right now for all these tech giants and apple's china just getting their wings under them with it because yeah they will at one point make an announcement at an apple event i can see it exactly unfolding this way with tim cook out there saying they invented home security one hundred percent i could see that happening but let's dive more into that home security because i remember something you said earlier jade did about how people kinda get caught up in the ai part of this whole thing in home security home security and ai home security what's the difference is there any difference for the both of you i would say yes and i think it's gonna be a hundred times more useful probably so like basically right now i have some home security device that's like a camera on my doorbell that i can look through and get notifications and being if there's movement and i think a lot of people are used to this right like oh there was movement and people check it but that that is giving you so little context and that is gonna seem like caveman man archaic in a year or two maybe when apple or any other players build something like can you imagine if you just get a notification on your iphone someone dropped off a package someone dropped off your groceries your neighbor knocked on your door like you could get so much more context beyond just like there was motion and i have all these friends that are like scrolling through their camera to try to see what the motion was that like two amazon terrible it was just a raccoon that like went through or maybe there's a notification that's like it looks like someone is trying to break into your house right now re alert it gives you a phone call and it's a facetime when you're like able to see it like if you have an ai that basically does object recognition and understands the context of what's going on that could be mh incredibly useful you're basically replacing like a security guard i mean you think of like some biggest estate imagine if they've really had a a robust offering with cameras all around it that was like an ai monitoring the whole house and situation you'd had a security guard back in the day now jaiden you've you taken me down this amazing rabbit hole the motion detected i think is such a great example because that really is gonna feel so archaic and blunt instrument even though right now i'm like oh that's awesome right i mean like somebody dropped off something at the door the thing we talk a lot about with using l especially in the business context is not just about what ai can do because who cares what ai can do right if it's not practical and i think one of the big mistakes people make and why ai adoption is so slow quite frankly is exactly to the point that you're talking about john which is it's not just about whether this can see something it's not just about and now we have our own quote unquote ring camera and it's cooler and it integrates into your os it's what does it do with that data you know if you summarize a document or something like that right kind of generally one zero one chatbot one zero one that's just a proxy to reading that document faster when we think about what we can actually do with it you can turn that document into like a beauty and the beast talking book and actually tracked information ask questions if it go deeper and take rabbit holes to sort of the information you actually want and i think it's the same thing like what jaiden talking about about home security which is when it grabs this information it's not just you know somebody delivered a package it's hey amazon delivered a package and then it goes in and tracks like okay here's what you ordered was it later early like hey you need to get this inside hey is there any risk of this same thing i think and in terms of just sheer home security when somebody comes to your door it's not just hey guys you know someone is in our backyard or something like that it's the facial recognition of here's who this probably is and we sent this to the police and all that of stuff just now this is where privacy issues of course come in you know full disclaimer all that kind of stuff but what it can do is it really elevate the level of security because again it's not just giving you data of something appeared it's what do you do with that data and i think apple doesn't necessarily need its own large language model it just needs to know it has privacy something that you can trust and how to manipulate that data that it's now secured imagine someone rings your doorbell you don't answer for like two minutes and if they're unavailable right now feel free to leave them a message and you just boot leave a little message on it pulls up in your like voice mail on your phone that would be pretty sweet also could be absolutely annoying if every single door to door salesman now has an opportunity to leave you a voice mail so i mean pros okay jake no no jade is bringing back the door to door sales but i love like some dude with the vacuum cleaner is like coming like this is gonna be a amazing great idea i'm sure they'll hop right on that really soon connor you made a point as well about this and i wanted to zoom out a little bit here and maybe put a tin foil hat on for a a hot sec because when you talk about this ai revolution security cameras right for home what i get to think about is ai revolution security cameras for businesses and for the state so at what point here will there be some sort of regulation you think to come in on ai where the data goes who processes the data all the privacy of that it just becomes a nightmare looks like so what do you think has to be in place to make sure that we don't get to a point where everybody sees everybody all the time doing everything i mean so in way we're there right i mean like in a way clearly like government can do this so it's just you know how do we protect people from this but you know it gets the original point john which is like why apple why home security look i think people sort of turn a blind eye a little bit to the fact that the state is sur everybody all the time i think we'd probably be either shocked and horrified or yeah let's get the bad guys either one doesn't really matter where people fall what i think is so important is that people care about their own private security and i think apple probably does a really good job at that and i think that's where people's mindset will go which is yeah is the government failing everybody of course do are we gonna count on them for regulation i guess we have no choice but man on my iphone nobody can break into that and i think that's the sort of strategic advantages that apple can put forward in terms of we are a privacy company mh a hundred percent i i think i will agree with that in a sense that like i think when the the doorbell and the ring and all those first started coming out the big issue or drama was basically people that would walk by would be like i don't want you like filming me when i walk by i feel like i've seen like some sort of tiktok or where someone comes up and like tries to smash the ring or like something that they're just a long time ago i don't think this is really a drum anymore basically everyone has them and you probably go gel pretty quick try to smash everyone your streets ring camera and i think you bring up a great point connor which is basically as far as regulation goes i think the cat's side of the bag with that there's unlimited amount of cameras everywhere i swear i learned about new surveillance things all the time i don't know current if you've ever heard there's like the shot sound things they put on like all of the lamp posts in america where basically if there's like a gunshot at like tracks the location and they have them everywhere everyone like triangulate it i didn't even know these things were recorded twenty four seven everywhere in the entire us so i just think basically everything's already sur it's kind of like online i've given up hoping that companies aren't gonna leak my social security data after my like private more fine so know exactly what you're looking my information out there what can i do let you know but i think it's a good point people with most care about basically how this gonna impact them you can't affect everyone else and it's probably too far for regulation mh mh and last thing i wanna hit on here guys is just the future of this technology and how ai could potentially revolutionize the home system not just like security but the entire home what do you think it's gonna look like in maybe three to five years with this technology and ll being attached to security systems going forward and our homes going forward yeah i'm not even sure we have go three to five years but i think that certainly in three to five years i think that you will have really a digital type clone where kind of to jade point about siri you know integrating into your home security or doorbell it's gonna know how you would respond it's gonna be able to differentiate between a real thread and not a real thread and everything else in this i think it's gonna be slightly an arms race like everything else where criminals will figure this out but i think it's going to make homes more secure i mean we can talk through the system right now even today to so i think that that's going to be almost digitized where just something knows exactly how to answer the door for me so i don't even have to deal with that kind of inconvenience anymore and i think we're gonna get there pretty fast okay at first i was thinking like how cool would it be if it was like your siri butler right like it answers our questions forget siri butler i love your digital chrome thing connor someone knocks on the door i don't even have to tell him it's not me it's you know when you're like talking to someone who's ring it to like oh hey yeah this is jaden you know what can i help you with and like oh you know i'm trying to sell a a door to door vacuum cleaner follow up basically my siri can pub i'm not interested move them along it just closed my voice i'll tell everything i don't wanna buy and it it just does everything for me or it's like oh you know what i'm really busy right now leave a little message i'll get back to ba yeah you could have basically no need for a butler you answered the door for all intents and purposes and you got the message from people i can fire my butler which is a great buyer your that's we save a little money on your butler yeah no great idea i have my digital clone speak to all the door to door salesman in the future that i received your yeah it's perfect person yeah well connor and jade thank you so much for being part of this today appreciate you giving some insight on ai and home security in the future of that and also apple in the space and i hope the apple fan boys do not come for you again you've been very diplomatic so thank you guys for being here alright that's gonna do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show where crap part of hubspot media editor is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a lot more tech business coverage in our newsletter if not subscribed you'll get yourself signed up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily catch you later guys with the launch of loop marketing keeps giving you the ultimate prompt library over one hundred ai prompts that walk you through each stage of the loop marketing method they're designed to help you spot growth opportunities in an ai world this isn't just another collection of prompts it'll guide you into the new era of marketing you can get it for free at the in our show notes seriously right now look at those show notes and tap that here's what blows my mind most people are sitting around waiting for their boss to give while millionaires are building income streams in their spare time entrepreneur and creator marina mcgill crack the code on this she built more than ten income streams that now pull in over one hundred thousand dollars a month she shared the secret sauce with our team so now we're sharing it with you exactly how she did it this guy gives you practical step by step strategies you can actually implement so just pick just one income stream from her guide and watch what happens stop at doing right now and grab it in the show notes six months from now and you'll be glad you did

good morning everybody today's friday september twelfth i'm john w here with maria had and this is the hustle daily show microsoft just purchased ai technology from ant philanthropic oracle stock skyrocketed forty percent and apple held its big iphone seventeen event this week and barely mentioned ai at all despite making apple intelligence a huge selling point last year what's going on the ai world we're gonna break down what gets all that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this okay we're starting off this friday with a interesting story over here a billionaire took the maiden flight of a first of its kind aircraft and everything went fine actually aptly named italian startup jets delivered its first single passenger electric aircraft to billionaire palmer lucky who immediately took to the sky without incident the drone like joystick operated pod which can go up to sixty three miles an hour but can only travel eleven miles on a charge has backup engines and safety parachutes but lucky who sold oc to facebook and now leads defense tech at and didn't need the fall backs he said this easy basically next let's talk to some apps you routine is a productivity tool that asks these users to post their goals and have their connections keep them motivated it's like social media for people that don't want social media the new network announced a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar raise on the strength of thirty five hundred early subscribers who can share desired routines and progress on them with an encouraging circle of friends and family before their urged to dip right back offline next in some holiday news as halloween comes creeping in m and m's have unveiled an entirely new flavor the company is adding a honey roasted peanut m and m's flavor later this month the parent company mars has had a lot of success with newer flavors with cookies and cream flavor for example gaining a following on tiktok last august and finally here ai assistant startup poke merge from stealth this week with fifteen million dollars in seed funding and a differentiated product instead of living in its own app poke assistant can help manage your life nestled fully inside imessage as a rolling text thread what the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this at wired we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions and maybe you are too i'm katie drum the global editorial director of wired and i'm hosting our new pod cast series the big interview each week i'll sit down with some of the most interesting provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find wired uncanny valley podcast and for more stuff like that you can subscribe to the show we'll have more for you on monday but getting to our ai update of the week with maria for mind let's see what's on the docket okay maria welcome back for another week and of course wanna start this week off with asking you how your past week was and the latest ai stuff that you've been interested in this past week thank you for having me jobs so happy to be back so many things have happened last week honestly was just like a a week of ai i guess yeah we don't see that very often i think we see it like once every few weeks ai is a bit overwhelming so but something did catch my eye we did write about this in yesterday's newsletter mh and it is ralph lauren pretty sure people know who that is yeah we you just launched ask k which is basically your ai powered fashion best you open the app and you tell it what you need as an outfit for a wedding and tuscany or like a rooftop party in new york and it digs through decades of ralph lauren archives style wow it even answers fashion emergencies wow yeah apparently white after labor day is officially approved so what i like about this is that it doesn't feel like ralph lauren trying to replace a human touch it's more like they're testing how tech can kind of amplify enhance that luxury five and mh honestly it makes sense because david lawrence been pushing digital experiments for years and years and years mh and they were one of the first slug luxury brands to sell online back in two thousands i don't know what people know this way before anyone was ready to put like a five hundred dollar blazer in a shopping card so yeah is it perfect yet a probably not but first jedi ai stylist can be a little headroom is but i think that's the point yeah they're treating it like a living evolving thing and then the bigger picture shows how even luxury brands are getting comfortable with ai which is win for everyone yay yeah big win across the luxury industry definitely i am interested in this because i i think that it's a good idea to kind of do this experiment a little bit for their audience but also might be a good idea to sell some products because as i can imagine i don't think you can put anything in there and get non ralph lauren items yeah out right it's all within catalogs that they've had before and it's all clothes that they are selling so good way to push along the business it seems yeah it is a classic american stuff honestly it's like a gym come if it's like available in the uk matt and i you know my manager he would be so happy to have that so it's gonna be awesome it'd be really nice i definitely appreciate this tech but i would like something more overarching where i can put in like an image of my face and like my entire one shot of my entire body and be like just dress me like make me look good yeah and yeah hopefully that's coming sometime soon crossing like a full stop of like okay here's things where to buy them here's what's fashionable right now here's what i think you'd look good and it's like when people go to korea to get that color test of like what colors look best for combination stuff kinda like yeah yeah i know what you're talking about yeah yeah yeah like oh yeah you look great and red like you look great and blue so i would like that actually like a fashion consultant actually side note since you're talking about it you can do this on shots i can basically teach you how to do that as i was talking about it i'm sure you can i did that for myself are the answer's good like did they come out or it oh yeah i know what kind of like a warm home spectrum all on and like what kind of like thing i should be wearing every single day in terms of colors i could teach you john trust me dear teach me teach me your ways i would like to learn do that if i'm truly a beige man or not if i can wear the yellow mh yeah good to know for later u so kinda of pushing forward here a lot of stuff to go over this week one of the things is that a big deal came out with microsoft purchasing some ai from ant philanthropic as opposed to open ai right we've kind of heard tensions between microsoft and open ai over the past year to the trying to move away from that company what's your take on microsoft dipping into the ant philanthropic well in mixing that with a lot of the open ai stuff that they've already built honestly in my opinion this is a pretty big deal like a pretty big signal from microsoft because for years they're basically had obviously open ai for strategy and thirteen billion dollars invested gp running through word excel outlook powerpoint that kind of that works but now they're bringing in ant throw pics claude into the mix and i think it says two things first microsoft clearly wants flexibility if clouds better at certain tasks like automating financial functions in excel or designing actual good looking powerpoint slides just my biggest nightmare why not use the best tools for the job and it's less about picking a aside and more about like building a hybrid ecosystem where open ai handles the frontier models and then throw big fills in the gaps where claw just you know performs better the second thing is that it shows how competitive this space is getting like very extremely competitive and squads on it four has been quietly outperforming tb i don't know people know this but it's kind of like it's pretty good but obviously in certain workflows on everything and microsoft's leading into everything when it comes to that and basically is like an acknowledgement that one ai model won't rule everything else it also means that the future of office ai would get way more powerful so i think this is exciting not because you know microsoft's moving away from open ai but because they're like building it in an ai stack that plays to each model's strength and that's what we wanna see yeah it seems like they're going that route instead of being one to one with open eye as as you can imagine they probably would have been a few years ago they probably would have taken open ai at the hip with everything but it seems like they've kind of spread their wings a bit as open has away from each other and kind of more into the depths of tech so no this is exciting i think it's a good move to get more the best offering on the market that's available for your product and we'll see how like office three sixty five the people that use that we'll see what complaints or successes they have with it yeah yeah i mean pretty sure people are gonna love it in my opinion people are gonna lose minds yeah in another space of ai this week people were losing their minds kinda over this because oracle a company from like the nineties their stock jumped over forty percent on wednesday yeah after the ceo said that it's ai fueled cloud revenue is going to jump to one hundred and forty four billion dollars by twenty thirty this is primarily because of all the ai spending they're doing and because of this the head of oracle replaced elon musk is the richest man on earth in the past few days which is kinda nuts do you think we'll see more companies make headlines like this in the ai space you know we've heard a lot about the ai bubble has quote unquote burst or will burst at some point but it seems like things are going pretty strongly still an investment is still being s around i think that we're going to see a lot more headlines just like this oracle stock popping forty percent in a single day isn't just about oracle i think it's about ai spending which is doing the entire market right now and companies i used to feel like legacy tech are suddenly becoming ai powered players and investors are rewarding them big time yeah so oracle is massive a hundred and forty four billion dollars cloud revenue you know they have a target by twenty thirty basically bet that ai infrastructure is the new oil and i'm saying this as is this is the new oil and the partnerships they've lined up with open ai and nvidia or already paying it off what's wild is that how quickly this shifted oracle position in the ai race i've never seen this before like this is it's so fast huge shit yeah larry ellis briefly overt took elon musk to become the world's richest man as you said so of all this this is ai fueled growth and we're gonna see this more often yeah oracle is not going to be the last one to see a bump like this i think we're going to see way more companies especially the ones that are sitting quietly mh on a strong infrastructure plays i'm looking at apple right now mh which is making headlines as ai you know spending ramps up this isn't just about the flash ai models right it's more about like who powers down behind the scenes and everything so oracle is making this move this is the first time that we've seen such such a huge jump but amazon google and microsoft are you know right up there so honestly the next twelve months are going to be extremely wild in the ai cloud competition i opinion they definitely will and you mentioned apple with the last update i wanted to talk about is about apple or honestly it's kind of a non update but i i think we have to talk about it anyways because apple had its big event obviously this past week everybody and their mom knows about it they unveiled the iphone seventeen iphone air airpods three all that stuff barely any mention of ai though which wouldn't be surprising to me unless in the previous year in twenty twenty four their presentation wasn't entirely about pretty much apple intelligence so yeah this year there's been kind of a stark shift between it's all about ai to it's all about hardware how do you think apple will fare with this hardware advancement do you think a big ai update is coming and they're being just coy about it what are your thoughts there so as you said i feel like this was a classic apple thing it's like gorgeous hardware i just pre reorder die iphone seventeen and wow shiny marketing and yeah but like not a ton of ai substance as you said last year they gave us all about ai and this year it's not about ai yeah the iphone seventeen light up and the new iphone air look absolutely amazing but obviously when it comes to ai they mostly just be rehash old announcements from w which is a few visual intelligence upgrades you know some camera tweaks and like life translation for airpods i cannot wait for the life translation if i go to greece that happens to me that was going to be amazing but siri nowhere to be found i was so disappointed it's definitely a contrast to what we're seeing from google you know samsung and even smaller players like complexity who are all racing ahead with ai for strategies with that being said i wouldn't count apple out yet as i said their strategy looks more long game than short game so instead of building every ai tool in house they're quietly testing integrations with google's gemini and even evaluating models from ant ent if they pull that off iphone users could get the best of both worlds and i think we've said this before previous episodes apple's design and hardware magic powered by cutting edge ai models under the hood that's what apple does apple knows its audience i'm one of the audience people don't line up for iphones because they want the most experimental ai features true they buy them because it's built on quality and design and just you know apple because it's always been this way mh so if apple can deliver tops here ai without losing what makes the iphone feel like an iphone they're still going to dominate so we just have to wait and see honestly yeah it seems like they're still searching for that perfect integration with ai and like the best way to integrate it into the ui past apple intelligence and maybe they haven't found that yet but maybe they're working on it and i think they're they're just approaching this in a different way people are kinda freaking out that like they're not doing anything with it quote unquote but i think they're taking the more slow approach than a lot of these other companies and in a way that could be a good thing to actually come out with quality at the end of the day instead of rushing something to market like having with for example a gp five and stuff like that so exactly i think they're really taking their time as you said i think they're trying to survey the market see what's best for them and then move forward in that way yeah once it actually works for the device so hundred percent i don't hear much good things about samsung's galaxy ai i think i hear like it's alright it's just there yeah it's just kinda there so i think they wanna really blow it out but they really haven't hit the tech to do that yet but maybe they will soon yeah i mean it's apple so we just have to wait and see yeah we just have to wait but when they announce it it will sound like they invented ai which i'm am very excited for same thanks b thank you for being with us today and we'll catch you next week yeah catch you next week alright that's gonna do it for us today thanks tuning into the hustle daily show we're a proud part of hubspot media our editor is robert hart our executive producer is darren clark we've got a lot more tech business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go sign up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at hustle daily see later guys with the launch of loop marketing keeps giving you the ultimate prompt library over one hundred ai prompts that walk you through each stage of the loop marketing method they're designed to help you spot growth opportunities in an ai world this isn't just another collection of prompts it'll guide you into the new era of marketing you can get it for free at the in our show notes seriously right now look at those show notes and tap that look i'm gonna be straight with you everybody's talking about ai but most people are just playing around with chat instead of actually making money from it that's why we drop the ultimate crash course to create your own ai side hustle in seven days we're talking real frameworks and strategies from the pros like the founder of the hustle sam par it includes mini guides templates the whole nine yard stuff that takes years to figure out condensed into one week stop what you're doing right now and grab it in the show notes your future self will thank you

good morning everybody today is thursday september eleventh i'm john w miguel here with juliet at ben r and this is the hustle daily show bride b have discovered a new hustle for themselves flooding companies with requests for free bachelorette party swag and they're of course doing it using tiktok tutorials and ai automated emails so how did this trend explode and inspire thousands of other rides to demand freebie from strangers we'll get into that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this okay starting us off today snap the twelve billion dollar about five thousand employee company still fan itself as a startup evan sp ceo of snapchat parent company acknowledged his team's awkward position in the tech business stuck between big tech and fast moving startups kind of a bit being like a middle child he har it too and he offered a solution to helped them bounce back from it a more agile structure revolving around ten to fifteen person start up squads the working groups will directly tackle the company's biggest challenges one such issue last quarter two percent decline in north american daily active users so let's see how that model turns out for them next in a big shake up oracle larry ellis has now replaced elon musk as the richest man in the world for the time being with a near four hundred billion dollar net worth oracle stock jumped forty percent yesterday after ellis announced some huge gain projections for the company through twenty thirty let's see if you can sustain that lead over to the restaurant business sandwich chain pot belly saw shares jump thirty percent following the announcement that convenience store company track will acquire it in a five hundred and sixty six million dollar deal there are currently about over four hundred and forty five pot belly stores in the us with plans to expand a two thousand race track operates over eight hundred stores in fourteen states i'm a fan of this i love pot i really like populate the big cookies are good and finally here apple announced a boat load of new products and updates this week as you might have heard but everyone's talking about the iphone air which is the ultra thin titanium iphone that's five point six six millimeters thick and it's available for one thousand dollars or nine ninety nine this month interesting it only has one of the cameras you know how iphones have like those three cameras it has one of them it's really thin see if it'll work what the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this at wired we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions and maybe you are too i'm katie drum the global editorial director of wired and i'm hosting our new podcast series the big interview each week i'll sit down with some of the most interesting provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now now listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find wired uncanny valley podcast and for more headlines like that you can subscribe to the show and we'll have more for you tomorrow but today today we are talking about bachelorette swag specifically bride asking for that from various sources so juliet what are we talking about here when we talk about bride getting into this business what we are talking about is some i'd call it a hustle some might i'd call it a g depending on how you feel about it but we are talking about bride to be essentially asking businesses for a free swag typically that they are giving out at their bachelor parties to their bride made and made of honor mh what is interesting about this to me at least is now listen i'm a bit of a car if you listen to the show you know this about me and so just i'm reading this story and it's like okay well something like ninety percent of americans will end up getting married so i don't think it's like that special like yes it is special for you on that day when my friends get married i am beyond related for them i spend time choosing a gift for them you know writing your card yes like i'm all about celebrating the individual but i i don't know that like just because you're doing something that most people ultimately do you should get free swag from businesses or you have u necessarily the right to pest them for this and maybe i'm just being at conversion because i have decided that i don't care about getting married and i've i've never been married and maybe i just personally don't get it but what's interesting is that typically this is a sort of behavior that is expected or common among influencers because there's an exchange there it's right you're gonna give me free product or free service and then i'm gonna post about it to my one hundred thousand followers some of who can probably follow you or buy your product or be interested and the thing about these bride is it just like well they don't have these they're just regular people doing of what i think is a very ordinary thing and when you consider the volume of people asking and sending these sometimes hundreds of emails to these companies apparently it's it's getting pretty wild and some businesses are like no yes please stop yeah it's a very very funny distinction between influencers who you know have something to offer for asking for these things versus just generally anybody who honestly more power to i think it's really funny yeah people just reaching out to various companies being like hey by the way i'm having a bachelorette party give me all of your free products right for my bachelorette and i in turn will give you nothing right it's like having a birthday to me everybody has the the audacity the audacity of it right just so just to ask for free stuff right it's like do i think that you should get a free little a cake on your birthday and have people sing to you sure yes if it's a restaurant that does that absolutely that's that's part going on out maybe the little restaurant right but you're eating at that rhett you paid the restaurant for dinner right right and you know nobody cares if you put it on social media because it's says part of what you get you know sephora gives me a little gift bag every time i give me like a little lip balm or something you know it's your birthday but i'm not like y it's my birthday everybody's like oh give me free oh god specifically a funny story about this real quick tangent i went with my buddy to an arcade and it was the day after his birthday mh and we go to this arcade and the guy's like you know if fits your birthday we give you like fifty percent off of like your tokens and he was like oh yeah yeah it is my birthday and the guy checks his id and he's like oh your birthday was yesterday though and my friend was like well yeah and the guy was like i can't give you a discount just very funny how these things manifest but like you you do sometimes get a good deal on your birthday right but with your wedding more specifically with your bachelorette party it doesn't seem like a place where any company would give you any deal based off of that information so that's what's interesting about this but honestly more power to them i think if you don't ask you'll never receive and it must have worked one time for one person because if it didn't we would not be seeing this as a trend right now yes and that's how we got there so i was trying to find who is the first person to think of this and obviously influencers have already been doing this of course they get free stuff all the time for everything they get free stuff for existing free meals they get free clothes they get free beauty products etcetera you get for things you didn't even ask for sometime exactly send you stuff yeah i will say i used to when i worked in entertainment journalism i used to go to these celebrity gifting suites that i thought were really funny and they always happen around the emmy enemies of the oscars of the grammy and they're literally just like these vast halls of people trying to get their product hopefully in the hands of someone like beyonce you know they'd always give me stuff and i'd be like i don't want this though like i i i i don't want any of the stuff like i'm i'm here to report on this for whatever it's worth and i don't i don't want these things and then i would like meet other reporters who are like you're doing it wrong you're here to get old the swag and i'm like no i'm here because someone's paying me to be here and right about it i don't care about this free and it was always stuff that i didn't want like a free popcorn snack like i don't want it know on that snack i don't wanna like a kind bar and there is this you know this this exchange that celebrities influencers have with one another of course but the guardian was talking about this bride whose name is kayla king and she worked in social media and she had seen influencers get free stuff for their batch parties and she was getting married so she's like i'm gonna give it a shot i'm gonna ask yeah and so she documented this journey on tiktok and every time she got something for free she would share what it was so she got some stuff from this nail polish company called olive in june and that makes you polish and cuticle oils which makes sense for a bachelorette party i think you tend to do sort of like spa treatment type thing things yeah those right nail treatments and all that yeah yeah and she got some free jewelry and you know all of these things and her post kinda blew up to the point where other bride who were not influencers were like well i'm gonna do it and now it is at such a fever pitch that there are guides to doing this like excel spreadsheets full of companies that have given away free stuff to non influencers before who might do it again even the not which is a publication about weddings has a list of forty one companies wow they also have email templates you can use when asking if you don't wanna write your own email asking for free stuff well and some bride are even using ai to automate this and they're reaching out to you hundreds of brands not just brands that they like that they personal would like to share with their bride but just literally anyone who give them free stuff and it's kind of almost about the haul now like how much free crap can i get because i'm getting married that's really funny i like how it started at a very very small scale and has jumped to large scale it's like one family gives one piece of bread to a raccoon one time and then that raccoon shows up with twenty five of his brothers oh yeah it is very much that mentality of for these companies people now know that you've given away these free things so now they're gonna want these free things and it's led to some brands as you've noted giving away quite a bit of stuff actually in c to these demands in some cases yeah the brands seem to be divided and i wouldn't say divided and that they're arguing with one another but divided in how they respond to these requests sure so there was one brand that was talking to the wall street journal it's a bone broth brand wow they sell bone broth and collagen and infused drink mixes the company called bare bones and they will pretty much give away their product to whoever they have approved over three hundred requests in twenty twenty four amount to you about twenty six hundred dollars in product and maybe for a company like that it's like okay well yeah try the sample and then you know you buy another one good way to get some publicity too for some of these brands like because of course i would have never heard of this company if they didn't give away free stuff and we would be talking about them right now exactly yeah but there's other companies who are just like no so there's one company called weber resupply they were talking about the audacity of a bride who apparently could afford an aspen trip but wanted fifteen sweaters which is one thousand four hundred dollars in product and i think the difference here is like once you have the really nice ski sweater how many other ski sweaters are you gonna buy you're not gonna be a repeat customer whereas if you really like this particularly brand of bone broth maybe you do become a repeat customer and there were a lot of brands that were saying like for us it's just not worth it you know this bride with three hundred followers sure yeah she's gonna post her table full of swag but if she's reached out to two hundred fifty brands and even a portion of them responded back it's just a table full of stuff you know like it's not like you're highlighting my product you're talking about how much you love it like we're not gonna be able to make one extra sale so you know there's a lot of like is it worth it for us there was one company that i thought was pretty clever as was flaming a razor brand they got a ton of request after kayla king's post and they're like listen we're not gonna honor every request but we are gonna choose twenty five bride to whom we're gonna give like a a little gift package wow and i think that's a great way to set your boundaries you know get some publicity give stuff away make some people happy but not just being inundated with requests and people following up would just be like no twenty five people are gonna get it yeah a sweep sticks if you will something of that nature i think it's a good way to approach these things we're giving a limited amount away so you get some people right and you just see those instagram promotions that are like comment with like three friends names and you could potentially win like in that kind of category where somebody's gonna get a free thing but it might not be you right now i do think that every brand with the exception of brands that just like i don't know have some beef are going to want to be involved in the taylor swift travis kelsey wedding and that is because my god i'm sure taylor swift basically has her own economy known as the swift effect and if she eats something wear something anything something it will sell out so if you are a brand and taylor swift would like some free product sure can she afford it yes but will you have an economic boom by her even coming in a six foot radius of your product yeah so i i think that there's a lot of considerations to make right but when you're dealing with non influencers it's like yeah you have the opportunity to make somebody happy but i think there is a quality quantity thing where it's like yeah if a bride is like you are my absolute favorite i'm a customer like here's evidence of me being a customer and you wanna because in marketing there is something called surprise and delight that i think is really beneficial but if you're just somebody who's getting like an ai generated email that's been sent to three hundred other brands maybe it's not a special for you yeah exactly exactly so i guess if you're a brand don't delete every email you see so quickly because one of them could be from taylor swift public so you never know yeah just make sure it's not taylor first and then go ahead yeah exactly then you may delete alright and that's gonna do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show we're a proud part of hubspot media our editor today is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a ton more tech in business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go sign up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily we'll see tomorrow guys with the launch of loop marketing keeps giving you the ultimate prompt library over one hundred ai prompts that walk you through each stage of the loop marketing method they're designed to help you spot growth opportunities in an ai world this isn't just another collection of prompts it'll guide you into the new era of marketing you can get it for free at the link in our show notes seriously stop right now look at those show notes and tap that link look i'm gonna be straight with you everybody's talking about ai but most people are just playing around with chat instead of actually making money from it that's why we dropped the ultimate crash course to create your own ai side hustle in seven days we're talking real frameworks and strategies from the pros like the founder of the hustle sam par it includes many guides templates the whole nine yard stuff that takes years to figure out condensed into one week stop what you're doing right now and grab it in the show notes your future self will thank you

good morning everybody today is wednesday september tenth i'm john w and this is the hustle daily show brian nickel nicole was supposed to be starbucks savior after his legendary turnaround at chipotle lake but one year later from taking the job the stock has fallen seven percent while the market rose nineteen percent and same store sales of cop shop are still declining today we're exploring why even miracle worker ceos may not be able to fix operational issues overnight and how brian nichols back to starbucks campaign became a five hundred million dollar experiment that just hasn't quite hit yet we'll get to that and the biggest headlines in business tech right after this alright to start us off today open ai is partnering with studios ver films and native foreign on critters and animated feature film to showcase ais filmmaking capabilities ai is officially going hollywood in that sense the goal is to churn out in about nine months however animated features normally take three years to make and the movie with open will be on a budget under thirty million dollars for a theatrical release in twenty twenty six it'll employ human voice actors and artists who will sketch drawings that open tools will use but i would be surprised if it didn't meet a ton of pushback from creative who would rather not be replaced by any sort of robot next in the book world barnes and noble will acquire books inc for three point two five million dollars the one hundred and seventy four year old california chain filed for bankruptcy in january citing the pandemic and changing consumer habits under barnes and noble though which plans to open sixty new stores this year it'll keep its branding and operate its nine stores so barnes noble still doing right in the book world over to stub hub now stub hub holdings is looking to ipo an evaluation of about nine billion dollars after july plans to go public earlier this year amid economic uncertainties i'm sure you're aware of those the ticket platform was founded in two thousand after ceo eric baker had trouble scoring tickets to broadway the lion king and look how far they've come scalp rejoice and finally here least warehouse space shrank in the us last quarter that's the first time that's happened in a quarter in fifteen years warehouse jobs are in intern down by about twenty seven thousand jobs year over year america's new trade policies are a prominent factor in all of this what the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this at wired we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions and maybe you are too i'm katie drum the global editorial director of wired and i'm hosting our new podcast series the big interview each week i'll sit down with some of the most interesting provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find wired uncanny valley podcast and for more stuff like that you can subscribe to the show we'll have headlines for you tomorrow and the next day and the next day but today we're talked about starbucks the coffee chain that hired a miracle worker ceo supposedly and discovered that even miracles take longer than wall street attention span let's dig into it so brian nickel took over starbucks exactly one year ago with the kind of fan fair usually reserved for superhero movies the stock jumped twenty five percent on the day of his appointment investors were convinced that the man who saved chipotle from its food poisoning scandals could rescue starbucks from its own self inflicted wounds twelve months later where we are today the stock has fallen seven percent while the s and p five hundred has risen nineteen percent same store sales are still declining customers are still complaining about wait times and barista are still going on strike turns out even corporate rockstar stars can't fix decades of operational problems with a few powerpoint presentations and a catchy slogan welcome to the reality of trying to turn around a one hundred billion dollar company that forgot how to make coffee shops feel welcoming anymore especially here in the united states so let's start here with what nickel inherited because starbucks wasn't just struggling it was actively alien its core customer base before he came into office by july twenty twenty four the company had reported six straight quarters of declining sales customers were complaining about long wait times a buggy app and under staff stars that couldn't consistently deliver basic coffee orders or sometimes not so basic coffee orders nichols response to this was his back to starbucks campaign comprehensive plan to return the chain to its roots as a so called third place the strategy covered pretty much everything from barista address codes to mobile ordering systems promising to restore the cozy cafe vibe that made starbucks famous on paper the plan looked really solid reduce wait times to four minutes or less bringing back the self serve condiment bar add more comfortable seating cut thirty percent of menu items to simplify operations the company even started requiring barista to write messages on cups again a practice that to appeared in twenty twenty but execution has been messi the cup writing mandate has created additional stress for already overworked barista meanwhile nickel implemented changes that seemed designed to frustrate rather than fix problems he introduced a new dress code requiring specific color and pants styles he mandated that corporate workers returned to seattle offices four days a week while continuing to work remotely from california himself with a private jet once in a while these move sparked employee walk outs and union strikes at over three hundred locations the financial results tell a story that contradicts nichols optimistic public statements here despite claiming that a turnaround is ahead of scheduled company so suspended its annual forecast through fiscal twenty twenty five citing the ceo transition and current business state that's corporate speak for we got no idea what's going on over here the company has committed to investing five hundred million dollars on labor over the next year for its green apron service model but analysts warn this could deepen margin resets more than investors expected i mean looking at it this way when your turnaround plan requires half a billion dollars in additional spending while sales are declining the math gets uncomfortable pretty quickly wall street patience is wearing thin with some good reason analysts originally expected same store sales to grow again by the second quarter of this year now most aren't projecting quarterly growth until the end of twenty twenty five and that's not delayed gratification that's moving goal posts while the game is still being played logan reich from rbc capital markets pointed out the fundamental tension balancing being a one hundred billion dollar company with wine to create a local coffee house vibe while managing high velocity mobile ordering these aren't minor operational tweaks their contradictory business objectives going at each other the competition isn't waiting at all for starbucks to figure things out customers are actually switching to dutch brothers and seven brew newer competitors that offer better service without the operational complexity meanwhile traditional competitors continue gaining ground while starbucks struggles with basic execution brian mow from zack investment management sold his starbucks holdings two years ago and is keeping the company on a watch list for another twelve months to see if progress materialize when professional investors are treating you like speculative recovery play your turnaround story has some serious credibility problems as starbucks does right now let's talk about customer experience the improvements there remain inconsistent across locations mulberry noted that while product consistency is good service consistency is still lacking whether you're in manhattan or indianapolis for a company built on creating standardized experiences this variability represents a fundamental operational failure some positive signs exist though the company posted its best ever us sales week when pumpkin spice drinks returned last month as you would expect but seasonal spikes don't really indicate sustainable turnaround momentum especially when underlying metrics continue declining perhaps most telling is the union situation starbucks workers united represents more than hundred locations and has criticized management for abandoning bargaining negotiations nickel initially committed to working with the union but talks collapsed several months after he joined an august survey found that ninety one percent of barista reported under staffing issues at their stores now i've never been in the coffee business but i think that happy employees generally create happy customers but starbucks seems to be achieving neither objective effectively another international layer to this the china situation adds more complexity the market represents seven hundred and ninety million dollars in quarterly sales but faces intense competition from luck and coffee and coffee coffee which offer discounted drinks that appeal to price sensitive consumers starbucks is exploring selling part of its stake to local operators with bidder reportedly valuing the unit at five billion dollars nickel ambitious vision includes growing from eight thousand stores to potentially thirty thousand stores in china but expanding in a market where you're struggling with basic competitiveness seems optimistic the company has launched discount promotions and modified menus to compete with local bubble tea competitors essentially admitting their premium positioning isn't working and you're kinda seeing the same problems here in the united states a lot of new coffee places coming up a lot of bubble tea places coming up starbucks is definitely not the only game in town and they are sometimes not even the cheapest game in town the broader strategic question remains unanswered though can starbucks actually returned to being a third place while maintaining the scale and efficiency required for a global corporation the company built its success on creating consistent experiences across thousands of locations but the third place concept requires local authenticity and personal connections that don't scale easily i would point to another company we talked about earlier like barnes and noble who despite being a large corporation have still maintained some sem of being a cozy neighborhood place nickel has teased innovation coming next year let's look to the future including improved pastries and makeover overs for roughly one thousand us locations by the end of twenty twenty six but these shout out to me as incremental improvements to a business model that might be broken adding more seating and embedded lighting won't really fix under staffing and operational complexity and i don't know if the starbucks near me can use a remodel it's already been remodeled a few times and it looks pretty modern and it just kinda looks like a mcdonald's so maybe they try to bring out that cozy factor i guess with this new remodel we'll see what happens and the loyalty program overhaul presents another challenge nick acknowledged that starbucks rewards had become too focused on discounts but restructuring a program that millions of customers depend on carry significant execution risk many analysts considered it the gold standard of rewards programs are tampering with success rarely ends well but a good luck to them the fundamental problem with nickel starbucks turnaround is that it's trying to solve twenty twenty five problems with nineteen ninety solutions bringing back condiment bars and cup riding might create nostalgia but they don't really address core issues of operational efficiency competitive positioning and labor relations that created the crisis analysts are giving nickel a solid b grade for his first year but that's participation trophy territory for a ceo who was hired to transform one of america's most valuable brands the enthusiasm that greeted his appointment has been replaced by patient skepticism which is never a good sign for a transformational leadership whether the starbucks can actually get back to starbucks remains an open question the company has resources and brand recognition to succeed but it also has operational complexity and cultural baggage that won't disappear through slogan and store renovations for now starbucks remains a case study in how even the most experienced turnaround artists can struggle when the problems are deeper than anyone has anticipated before and more caf alright that'll do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show we're a proud part of hubspot media our editor is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a whole bunch more tech business coverage and our newsletter if you're not subscribed go get sign up hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle we'll see them tomorrow guys with the launch of loop marketing keeps giving you the ultimate prompt library over one hundred ai prompts that walk you through each stage of the loop marketing method they're designed to help you spot growth opportunities in an ai world this isn't just another collection of prompts it'll guide you into the new era of marketing you can get it for free at the link in our show notes seriously stop right now look at those show notes and tap that link look i'm gonna be straight with you everybody's talking about ai but most people are just playing around with chat instead of actually making money from it that's why we dropped the ultimate crash course to create your own ai side hustle in seven days we're talking real frameworks and strategies from the pros like the founder of the hustle sam par it 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good morning everybody today is tuesday september ninth i'm john w here with mark dent and this is the hustle daily show america's beloved slot bowl chains like chipotle sweet green and ka are facing their worst sales slump in years with customers ba at paying thirty bucks for what used to be affordable fast casual meals we can get a triple dip with table service at chili for twenty bucks suddenly that twenty nine dollar sweet green salad starts looking like highway robert so what are they doing to survive we'll get to that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this first up let's talk about appeal sciences it makes edible coatings that extend the life of fresh produce and the company sued influencer robin green smoothie girl opens shaw claiming that she put out over sixty posts with false claims about appeals chemical usage appeal will enter court on a hot streak fact checkers dismissed open clause allegations like that their fruit coatings included lead and mercury and on the other hand of this actress michelle f also apologized to appeal because earlier in the summer she par misinformation suggesting that it was a bill gates backed conspiracy the company that is so there's a lot to digest there but i hope they went out in the appeals next august was the worst month for total global vc funding since twenty seventeen the economy isn't necessarily crashing here august can often be economically quieter barely anyone in europe works that month pretty much but any forty four percent month over month dip is worth watching mark what do you make at this sudden dip yeah you're definitely right about august just kinda being one of those weird doing months where sometimes not as much stuff gets done but yeah forty four percent is is certainly concerning and you look back trend wise you know vc funding has been going down you know frankly since twenty twenty one once right cash started to get more expensive again when interest rates got hiked and you're probably seeing a lot of people who would otherwise consider investing right now wait until the end of this month when it's possible that the fed is gonna recommend an interest rate cut by a little bit mh and so i i think they're probably some amount of waiting game going on but also you know the sort of like cousins of venture capitalists are private equity and a private equity been doing kinda of poorly as well yeah pe funds the companies that they have they're not closing them as much as they would like to they're not you know send them off to the next buyer and they're having trouble getting more investments into these private equity funds so it's something that's kinda having in both of those sectors and i think like for average people they might just look at it and shrug their shoulders and to be like yeah who cares it's just a bunch of vcs and private equity guys like which is you know maybe a reaction and maybe even a good reaction but it's just one of a number of signs of just you know the economy just has all kinds of weird stuff going on right now and this is enough yeah it really does and yeah to your point yeah the vc funding is really cooled off but in twenty twenty one there was that whole tech boom and you would think that we're still a part of it especially with like ai entering the picture so hard since then but it really hasn't picked up we're not seeing as many like unicorns quote unquote as there were a few years ago and we're kinda just in a bit of a vc and pe desert it looks like currently tough for them so hard so hard no water for miles now moving on to some sports the new women's three on three basketball league called unrivaled is now valued at a whopping three hundred and forty million dollars after a very successful round of funding one of the most notable investors for this round of funding was serena williams mark news sports league pretty interesting here what do you make of it yeah i mean hey people aren't waiting on the september rate cut for this no they're not these venture capitalists we talked to a couple weeks ago that ai kind of like golf cad thing yes there's just so much new stuff happening in sports and i think it's really smart because you know sports are like the last cultural glue that we have mh and while the nfl is sort of like a power that is you know that towers above everything else i think a lot of other things are up for grabs yeah you know the nba you know still fairly popular but i i don't think it's as popular as it once was baseball great in game experience but not a lot of people watched it on tv then you have niche things like you know one and all that right but i just think there's room for something to come up and you see it here with basketball this three three league and frankly i'm not a huge fan of it but it is quite popular i see social media on it all the time there's radio ads i think there's a pretty broad diverse audience in terms of age demographic etcetera that are fans of unrivaled that's cool yeah like this is the time to experiment with new sports things i i think yeah it's a good time to do so and also to draw another parallel the w nba is also doing quite well at least at a lot of the games that either i've been to or folks that i know have been to have been pretty packed the new york liberty you kind of buy me they do really well with every game the team gets a lot of love always see people in merch so there is kind of a way happening in women's basketball generally and i think that definitely trickle over to unrivaled and i think there is this craving for like a new way to enjoy sports rather than right your traditional cable television network television sporting events and faster more exciting so yeah i think this fits right at the bill with that okay let's move on to some cars tesla is losing some ground in the us market nowadays with companies like mercedes and bmw launching electric suvs tesla's market share is trending down to thirty eight percent in august the lowest level since twenty seventeen they gotta pick back up sometime soon and finally mcdonald's on monday will continue its deal crusade to bring back customers the company is rein introducing extra value meals a discount menu that mcdonald's removed back in twenty nineteen mcdonald said that these combo deals will save customers up to fifteen percent compared to buying each item individually so more deals for the mcdonald's customers will it bring back people let's check in a quarter what the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this at wired we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions and maybe you are too i'm katie drum the global editorial director of wired and i'm hosting our new podcast series the big interview each week i'll sit down with some of the most interesting provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find wired uncanny valley podcast and for more headlines like that you can subscribe to the show we'll have more for you tomorrow but onto our main story of the day we are talking about these slot bowl chains slap bowl is kind of a new buzz term but you know the kind it's chipotle sweet green c anywhere that just throws a bunch of stuff in a bowl and gives to you for around fifteen dollars or you would hope around fifteen dollars mark what is going on in the slot bowl chain market well very concerning statistics if you are in the slot bowl chain market that's for sure there been a lot of talk over the last two three weeks of the quarterly earnings reports which are q two for for the most part for chains like chipotle sweet green ka you saw chipotle it fell their same store earnings by about four percent yeah commas were up a little bit but compared to what they were a year ago at the same time they're up about fourteen percent and now it's something like two percent i think sweet was down by a little over seven percent well so those are concerning same store sales drops and it comes at a time when restaurants have just been very consistent people are dropping a lot of spending in general so in ways it's not surprising but as you were suggesting that fast casual chains were considered the sort of like meal of the future yeah and especially s in particular which now have horrible branding that i'm sure it's gonna hurt them even more the fact that everybody calls them s because it sounds terrible yeah no it sounds awful but i mean it it is at the heart of still like a good meal it's a it's a hearty lunch hearty dinners for some people it's the white collar worker meal you're working in the city you go out you pick something up for lunch you hope it's not that expensive but the problem that they're facing isn't exactly what the food itself i think the problem that they're facing is portion size in relation to how much they each cost because the prices have definitely gone up at a lot of these chains yeah and you know business insider sent a reporter out two sweet grain chipotle and tu and this was into los suburbs she said mh and i was taken aback at how much it cost like like twenty nine dollars or something like that for ka and you know not all that much less for sweet green and then at chipotle she got a bowl chips and a drink for nineteen dollars which is still an incredible amount of money yeah and it's like yeah if you're gonna be paying that much then you need to do something more than just satisfy one's stomach cravings there has to be something more on top of that right you know you look at chili which everybody knows has been doing well garden restaurants have actually done well in the last quarter like olive of garden you know places like that the red lobster they own you go to those restaurants and there is somewhat of an experience sometimes quite a bit of an experience yeah there just isn't that if you go to cabo or something like that you know the ceo was giving some comments at a recent earnings call and he was saying how like ka isn't just this white collar worker office lunch thing i'm looking at his quote right here he said eighty seven percent of our restaurants in the suburbs almost fifty percent of our business dinner and then he goes on to say we're the place when you're done with soccer practice you come and get a quick meal and it's like that doesn't sound very appealing either yeah that's not like fun in the neighborhood like chili or apple you know right no exactly it's not like a neighborhood hub it's a very much get get out type of destination which i i feel like is why it is often associated with that white color lunch lens of you know you just go in like the commas in the city at least a lot of them some of them don't have seats yeah like i just walk in and there's like maybe a chair or two and it's just a line in line out and that's pretty much all you get there yeah i remember in philadelphia one of the sweet greens it was almost the same as that except it was like bleach all like in like a great school gym kind one of those yeah i think in the one in dumb there's like bleach yours yeah i don't know why they they decided to do that too perfect for after soccer practice though i must say yeah it is true but the leaders of these companies have been saying like look our food is pretty healthy it's pretty filling but it just feels like it has this assembly line kind of aesthetic going on yeah that i don't think appeals right now when people are trying to cut back spending and only spend on things that really matter to them right right and i i guess you mentioned chile earlier in places like da and group restaurants and when you consider spending you know thirty dollars at ka thirty dollars at any of these establishments right now you actually have quite a lot of wiggle room in the deals you can get in these sit down restaurants with thirty dollars like twenty to thirty dollars is actually might be a meal you probably pay a little more for that and tip but at least you get an experience at least you get service at least you get something kind of out of it so i i think a lot of people are going towards these places and also with things like chili to go right you can pay that money pick it up from chilies and it's even less right so yeah quite a bit less a lot of people are moving towards those options because they're just being offered to them it seems like yeah and this will probably separate me from a lot of americans but i'm a big believer of that if i'm gonna go out to a restaurant and spend a decent amount of money i don't want something healthy if it spend twenty five dollars on a salad whatever like i wanna spend twenty five dollars on something that i can indulge in right and right again like these companies have done a really nice job of getting people to spend twenty five dollars on something healthy and it has worked you know america is going through this huge sort of everybody wants to be fit kind of phase over the last few years right yet at least in the last year or so it's not working like it had and so they they have to find something new yeah and you know last thing here that i wanna mention is that we talked about obviously the prices is the main driver for people not visiting these places anymore as much as they used to but another reason particularly is the younger generations like gen z is facing some unemployment and a reduction in discretionary income that they have access to you know according to a report by ax axiom ka and sweet green rely the most on eighteen to twenty four year old customers they deliver nineteen percent and eighteen percent of their business respectively on the backs of those consumers and if those consumers aren't able to enter the workforce if they're not making money they're not getting paid i guess yeah i mean ai is killing ka and sweet green just as much as it's that's the headline destroying and everything else i guess ai ruined my harvest bowl yeah exactly because the statistic show that for people around eighteen to twenty nine it's a extremely difficult labor marker right now yeah even if you have a college degree and a lot of that it's very much up for debate but there are some studies out there that suggest it's at least in part because of ai and so if air ticking those jobs away then yeah no one's gonna send those bleach at sweet green because nobody's working at the office next door a sad site empty bleach and lettuce alright that's gonna do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show we're a proud part of hubspot media our editor is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a ton more tech and business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go sign up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily we will catch you tomorrow guys with the launch of loop marketing keeps giving you the ultimate prompt library over one hundred ai prompts that walk you through each stage of the loop marketing method they're designed to help you spot growth opportunities in an ai world this isn't just another collection of prompts it'll guide you into the new era of marketing you can get it for free at the in our show notes seriously right now look at those show notes and tap that here's what blows my mind most people are sitting around waiting for their boss to give them a raise while millionaires are building income streams in their spare time entrepreneur and creator marina meng mcgill crack the code on this she built more than ten income streams that now pull in over one hundred thousand dollars a month she shared the secret sauce with our team so now we're sharing it with you exactly how she did it this guy gives you practical step by step strategies you can actually implement so just pick just one income stream from her guide and watch what happens stop at doing right now and grab it in the show notes six months from now and you'll be glad you did

hey good morning everyone it's monday september eighth i'm mark dent and you're listening to the hustle daily show how much should a business listen to its most hardcore fans while there's one business out there that has some of the most hardcore fans in the world and they've been listening to them a lot that business is disney and we are talking about a fandom called disney adults that doesn't make sense to really follow the desires of this fan base we're gonna find out as we interview author of the new york times best selling book disney adults a j wolf we're gonna get to that here in a second but first here's john w with everything you need to know in the world of business intact starting off today in some backwards sounding news buy out pay later app k just prior to its big ipo this week instituted a return to office policy for its employees for three days a week the reason cla is saying that it's losing top talent to companies with strong in office culture did not see that coming at all next the airline internet wars continue as southwest airlines a business that's lost a lot of its individuality over the past year hoping for increased revenue will start offering complimentary wifi f on its flights come this october from there we hopped to tech mark zuckerberg is suing meta but it's not that mark zuckerberg i guess mark steven zuckerberg a lawyer from indiana said that his accounts on meta services have been shut down five times because of his name he was actually born before mark zuckerberg but he's suing them because they just keep doing this the lesson here everybody is just don't be born with that name i guess and finally lego has done it again the company has just introduced a nine thousand and twenty three piece lego replica of the death star that will go on sale next month the set will be the most expensive in lego history coming in at one thousand dollars and this thing is big don't think i'd ever pay that much for plastic blocks though what the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this at wired we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions and maybe you are too i'm katie drum the global editorial director of wired and i'm hosting our new podcast series the big interview each week i'll sit down with some of the most interesting provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find wired uncanny valley podcast for more stuff like that you can subscribe to the show and we'll have more for you tomorrow but right now mark and a aj have to have a conversation about disney adults and the business of fandom go ahead guys in the early nineteen thirties walt disney released the disney watch a time piece featuring mickey mouse a cartoon character and within two years two and a half million of these watches were sold many of them to adults and you could call these people an early incarnation of something that we know very well today disney adults they buy products they go to the amusement parks on a regular basis and they're a huge part of the disney empire which as of mid august was valued at roughly two hundred and ten billion dollars and a j wolf knows all about them she is a disney adult she's a media entrepreneur who founded cam media and she's also the author of the recently released book at disney adults which explains this whole phenomenon aj aj thank you for coming onto the show thanks in your book you know you traced back this idea that disney adult have perhaps been around since the company was founded around a hundred years ago but the term itself is fairly new and some consider to be a badge of honor and others considered an insult and it's also kind of a little bit vague as to exactly what one is so what would you say is a disney adult and and how do they kinda come to be what they are today yeah this was the first thing i had to figure out right in order to do this book is why are we gonna define this term talk to a lot of psychologist talk to a lot of people who know fandom communities well what we landed on was a disney adult is someone who chooses disney in their life so if they have a choice to go someplace else for vacation they will choose disney world or disneyland or a disney park they'll choose to go to the disney movie choose to buy disney products stuff like that yeah and one of the main nets for sort of like making disney adults are the theme parks and you know your first experience you wrote was in the mid eighties disney world sw heat but yet you loved it well i only loved him again disney as is what anyway i'll let you yeah yeah and disneyland when it first opened like it didn't really have all that great reviews and they've still become this huge deal what is it about the parks that have pulled people in i mean you called it an addiction at some point points you know not necessarily in a negative way but what is it about the parks especially that have like really real people in such a good question and one that i'm still trying to answer i talked to a lot of imagine engineers who are the engineers that work on disney theme parks they call them imagine engineers from back in wall day honestly even they don't really have the answer the bottom line is that disney doesn't settle for less than perfect so they are very good at creating this immersive overwhelmingly different space for you to enjoy and that the focus of it is happiness joyful people are gonna come in here and leave feeling like they've been someplace place else but they're positive about it nobody does it better than disney and there's a lot of psychology there's a lot of science that goes into how they do it but when it comes right down to it they work really really hard at making it the best it can possibly be and that's why we're also taken with it when we end up going and it seems like for a business that is like the ultimate thing that you could ever want think of like other you know you know successful businesses right now like amazon it's not like people are like dying to go visit amazon dot com and i don't think there are many people who have love and passion for it and feel immersed within it you know like disney does it just seems like they hit the ultimate jackpot creating that type of experience yeah you will not find too many other companies whose consumers literally put their earnings call on their calendar so that they go listen to the earnings call to find out what's going on with their company yeah disney fans do that we wanna know how's the company doing financially what new rides are we gonna get what's gonna happen next it is this incredibly passionate audience now i will trace that back for most of us to something nostalgic right to something that we experienced with our family member or a friend or someone that means a lot to us and that is a feeling that we wanna continue to replicate throughout our lives another reason why i think a lot of disney fans keep going back to disney products is to replicate that kind of joy safety happiness predictability that they had when they were kids and it seems like the idea of the disney adult has also really just grown a lot since the age of the internet you know people being able to kinda talk about it in community forums and on blogs and things like that and at least at first though from what you kind of reported in your book disney wasn't like all that welcoming at first to the bloggers and some of these fan sites but then they changed pretty quickly why do you think that is and how did disney's start to realize like hey it's actually a benefit to have a lot of really ra adult fans i don't know that disney would actually say that now but but what they had to realize right is that there are a ton of people on social media who now have a platform and a mega phone to say whatever they want disney likes to control their message right disney likes yeah control what people are saying about them they always have that's why they're as successful as they are and so when a bunch of us started to come in in the mid nineties and talk about them online and they didn't have control over what we were saying i think the knee jerk reaction was to sue people shut this down make sure nobody can say anything that we're not controlling and once we got into the two thousands and especially the two thousand tens when we launched into instagram and all these other social media platforms disney realized okay if you can't beat them join them so we have to figure out how to control this messaging by trying to control role this group of creators and either giving them the correct information to talk about which is when you know finally they started sending press releases to everybody instead of you know just to the mainstream media but also to invite people to their parks to their imagining buildings to give the full story and to try to get that messaging across two of the people that are being paid attention to when they talk about it so it's very interesting i i loved following that whole trajectory because i was in the middle of it i was a partner of you know and so it's been really interesting to follow that and just to see how it's going to continue to evolve because it will have to when you got started writing about disney you of course had been a a huge fan of disney already for years at that point but did do you kinda get the sense that hey there's this huge group of people who are obsessed with this subject that i am also obsessed with so were you just doing it for fun or did you just see it as a way to kinda like carve out a niche and have my own business when i started doing the websites that i do it was primarily because they didn't exist and i wanted them to exist so i didn't necessarily have in my head that this was gonna be a career it was just nobody's talking about and i wish someone would talk about this because i would read it if someone was right so that's kind of how i got started doing it but i did know that there was a huge group of people online even back in the mid nineties there were message boards and bulletin boards where people were talking about disney incessantly the majority of my time was spent just refreshing those message boards and learning more about disney world and so i think i knew that it needed to exist and we were moving into that era of online interaction in online communities so i created those sites and it just kinda of grew from there so i'm very very happy that i was able to create something for this community that i am part of but also something that they have given back consistently throughout the last fifteen years helping me to find new information and talk about new things are there specific ways disney world and disneyland or even some of other disney's entertainment properties that they have changed and done things differently that you could say is attributed to the disney adults this is a tough one to nail down because of course disney is not gonna publish any of this information they're never gonna say you know we completely shifted our task because of what the disney adults saying on instagram or on twitter so basically just looking at the experiences the eye of had i know that there are a couple situations where you know maybe something was gone from a menu in disney world and people riot and so it was brought back onto the menu but i think there are a couple bigger instances where i do think that the disney adult community or at the disney online community made a significant difference one of those is the galactic star cruiser which was the star wars hotel that disney opened right when they announced that hotel and started giving some information about what it would be like the cost which was upwards of six thousand dollars for two nights plus i guess the sneak peek inside really frustrated the online disney community because it seemed extremely expensive for what you were actually getting and so it immediately had a negative stigma and connotation online people were very upset about it and i don't know that the disney company was able to overcome that in the end that hotel opened in after a year it closed so i just don't think they were able to really overcome what everyone was saying or about that experience so i think there are some other experiences like that where disney adults disney cast members employees speaking online about their thoughts their opinions actually has affected the direction that disney decided to go like i said they'll never admit that but i absolutely think that's happening they can't not pay attention to such a huge community yeah and one of the people i think you interviewed in the book just kind of simple things perhaps that disney has done is like you can get good beer at disney parks now right yeah whereas they wouldn't have ever thought about that you know twenty years ago so they are certainly even in small ways are clearly catering more to adults you did a little informal study where i think you've over like a three day period you and others kind of observed who was waiting to meet disney characters and and around twenty five percent were people without without without children and you know maybe on average some almost fifth two percent of the people waiting to meet them were adults without children yeah yeah that really surprised me and i think really kind of put into perspective how big of a deal disney adults are and one thing that you were talking about earlier is just a sense of nostalgia and disney adults they've kind of wanted the parks to stay the same a lot of them at least got pretty upset when disney decided to change the theme of splash mountain for instance mh how do you think disney is balancing catering to these disney adults versus like hey they have to make a new generation of fans too who need to have their own experiences then they can have their own nostalgia later on is there some tension there i think there is tension there i think there's kind of always been tension there where if you fall in love with something you wanted to stay the way it is when you fall in love with it you know and you never wanted to change but if something like a theme park does not change and does not innovate then they're done for i think disney is very clear that their current stable of fans could get very very frustrated with changes that they're making but the data also points to we will eventually get over it and we will love whatever and they're doing next do you know what i mean like it's rare that a bunch of disney fans hate something going in and then don't end up falling in love with it later yeah unfortunately the galactic star cruiser was just too expensive to keep running until people fell them up with it but i do think that there is a push pull there and there are some things that disney just realized realizes hey all of the numbers and data are pointing to us needing to change this but when it comes to things like them starting to think about or blue sky things that could come i think that they are absolutely looking to the disney adult audience and seeing what we're talking about that we'd be excited about and what we might get really excited about if they were to announce something like that and i think that's always kind of helping them with ideas as well so it's a good data for them to include as their brainstorming fans are always gonna be mad when you take away something that they love but most of the time looking get over it yeah and it seems like they've also been getting over at least enough of them high prices because that's been an ongoing criticism basically since the pandemic i've looked at their earnings reports their most recent ones and it's like well everything's still going up even in spite of a lot of anger over these prices it does kinda seem like as much as you have this really passionate group of fans disney does with a lot of the power still yeah kinda make the final decision and what's interesting there too is you have to take into consideration yield right like how many people are in your park versus how much money are they spending and disney's numbers are going up not necessarily because they have more people in their park they haven't actually reached their pre pandemic capacity levels yet but they have people spending more in the parks because of price increases and things like that so you can make the argument that hey people still pay it but it's like okay you know at at what level can you not get this smaller number of people coming to your park to pay those higher prices so it's gonna be very interesting to watch as we go along yeah for sure alright well aj thank you so much for coming in today again this is a j wolf she's the author of disney adult exploring and fun in love with a magical sub culture and you can get that wherever books are sold thanks a j thank you alright that'll do it 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