The Hustle Daily Show

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 for us today thanks everybody 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 got a lot more technical about this coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go get sign up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily 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 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 horrors 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 and happy friday it's september fifth i'm john w miguel here with maria had and this is the hustle daily show apple is lagging behind in the ai race that much has been covered the company is taking action though now by leveling up siri for its next update potentially with the help of google all while across the pond french ai company mist reaches a year fourteen billion dollar valuation so get ready for this week's ai updates we'll get into all that we'll also get into the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to produce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move fast like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright to start us off here look lookout star link because amazon is also getting in on the wifi game jetblue airways is now the first airline to integrate project keeper amazon's low satellite internet network this should start up in twenty twenty seven for jetblue blue and users will be able to stream video conference and more imagine somebody being on a zoom call right next to you on the plane next fizz a social media app for college students is teaming up with go to offer grocery delivery fizz is active in over six hundred and twenty us campuses where students already use its marketplace to coordinate group food deliveries so ceo teddy solomon told tech crunch that the partnership is a great fit and i think so two gop puff is really available on college campuses so makes sense over to the west coast san francisco browns stone shared housing which rents sleep pods for seven hundred dollars a month is apparently gaining a foothold despite its spare accommodations which are curtain off four foot tall boxes shared with a few dozen people fresh off of its first thirty pod h its ceo said that its new goal is to hit ten thousand new beds in downtown san francisco crazy world we live in and finally as we all know the beer business is in a steep decline but not for the kelsey brothers garage beer the ups star beer brand from football players turn pop culture figures is on track to at least triple last year's revenue per wall street journal and it's raising at a two hundred million dollar valuation pretty insane for the beer market 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 webcast and for more updates like that you can subscribe to the show and we'll have more free you tomorrow but for right now let's get to our weekly ai update with maria from the minds newsletter okay maria welcome back for another ai weekly update thanks for being here yet again thanks for having me yes great so i'm gonna kick it off first thing we do every week what's the most interesting ai i thing that you've kinda come across this past week so bezos is doing something really really really cool amazon basically wants to turn your camera into your own shopping cart they just dropped something called lens live and basically you can point your iphone camera at literally everything and amazon matches it in real time and gives you a swipe of carousel of options to buy wow it's like google's gemini live except amazon skip the whole like let's answer your questions kinda part and went straight straightforward here's a buy button on your entire life buy the thing wow yeah they've even plugged in ru which is ai shopping assistant if no one knows who roof his ears so now it'll summarize product description can compare reviews and answer your questions instantly so no more scrolling through four thousand listings trying to the code which base sofa is actually actually beige and it's ios only for now unfortunately for anyone that does not use apple but this is one of those features that completely change how we shop so wow you know if you see it you want it you buy you know the ariana grande song and rings i see it and buy it exactly hair something like that yeah you see you wanted it you buy it and zero friction and i think my bank account is gonna suffer and tremble by the knowledge of this so yeah it's quite a good integration for them i feel like it makes a lot of sense because we haven't seen a lot of ai wearables and like ai cameras pop up especially on phones that are like okay well tell me what this is and they tell you what it is but there hasn't up until this point to my knowledge been something that you can point it at anything and it'll be like yeah here's a link to buy it you can buy it right now if you wanted it that bad so it makes a lot of sense it kinda takes the pains out of like searching for anything that you need to search for anymore which is a a common theme with ai nowadays oh sense yeah it just brings you direct to the shopping cart and i think it's really smart i think it's again really unfortunate for all of our bank accounts but i think it's a smart easy decision it's awesome i can't wait for that obviously but also i need to read it in because i'm probably going to buy literally everything that i see so she's just fine everything that you see amazing and you know going from one big company to another gonna talk a lot of apple today kinda talking about search they're planning for an ai search tool to compete with open ai and complexity and they're gonna make it themselves they're calling it internally world knowledge answers which i hope they pick a better name it'll be integrated into the siri voice assistant when that update rolls out eventually so for this like search integration what do you make of this with apple going into it do you think it's a little bit too little too late or are we gonna see the common apple trend where they come out and say we invented ai search and everybody's gonna be like yeah you did yeah honestly world knowledge answers very mouth terrible it's like an encyclopedia mouthful it's all what who will on the know but basically it's an answer engine baked straight into a siri the whole goal is to make siri actually useful again because the last time it was useful and it wasn't in twenty eleven i think yeah been we're able to ask complex chat sour questions which is cute it's awesome and it will pull out info from a across web and summarize and even mix in photos videos and like local recommendations mh is it to relate maybe but also maybe not because apple has always done this they've played everything strategically instead of building everything far scratch they're teaming up with the heavyweights which is google's gemini and even testing ant throw clogged behind the scenes to power parts of siri it's less apple trying to catch up more apple quietly assembling whatever they need to assemble and with open ai and complexity already reshaping search apple kind of is banking on its ecosystem advantage with like two billion active devices yeah this is insane user loyalty and siri living natively on every iphone siri is useless at the end of the day but yeah it's pretty good i wouldn't underestimate them just yet m mh you mentioned something really important they do have a big hardware advantage i think where a lot of people have paused with apple lately is their software disadvantage and how their ai tech is behind quote on unquote but it seems like they're not exactly going to have to build up a new ai from the ground up because other reports indicate that siri this new version of siri which you mentioned it could be powered by google's gemini there's also some ant philanthropic in there what do you think about that potential collab for an apple and google kind of power couple here on this ai tech i think it's a big win honestly for both companies i mean everyone agrees that apple hasn't been winning the ai race hasn't been leading the first place and siri being so delayed kind of like frustrate everyone i've asked siri yesterday to put it in a reminder for like five am in the morning to go through the train station and it was like and you say that again no i don't wanna say that again like get it together you know i said it perfectly fine the first time you just have to understand what i am a foreigner but i can speak perfect language english like just you know get it together but i think teaming up with google gemini i could fast track them into relevance again in my opinion mh for google it is a huge huge flex because getting gemini and embedded into as we said two billion active apple devices would give them the reach that no other ai model has done ever yeah and for apple it means they don't have to reinvent the whole wheel as we said so they can focus on making the experience seamless while leading on google's horsepower under the hood because it's google at the end of the day so yeah the interesting part is that this could reshape how people use siri entirely so hopefully we're hoping for the best what's interesting about this to me is it seems like forever competitors like apple and google are kind of banding together to maybe preserve themselves against the new guard of open ai complexity all these like new or ai companies and that's interesting to me because maybe ten or twenty years ago i could never see apple and google working together in this capacity but maybe they need each other for certain things and they're beginning to kind of use those relationships i think a lot of people have seen these strategic kind of like deals happening sure but not to this extent yeah like we've talked about stories with like meta and google working together in some capacity but yeah this is like a big hardware and software integration so we'll see how it goes i wanna turn the conversation over to europe mh because i feel like we we talk a lot about big tech in the us and like these big companies but there are a couple of european companies they're actually doing really really well in the ai industries specifically mist which is a french ai company they got a near fourteen billion dollar valuation right now what in your perspective is mist unique position in the ai market and what do they offer that maybe these other companies don't i think they're in such an interesting spot right now because they're basically becoming europe's and sur to open but with their own european twist like most us players mist is going all in on open source which makes their model kind of more transparent easier for developers and businesses to build on which has made them a bit of a a darling in the european tech ecosystem and timing is definitely on their side there's a huge regulatory push in europe for ai sovereignty the eu wants less reliance on us giants like google and open ai and mist is perfectly positioned to benefit from that they have a chatbot i know if the people know this but it's called russia which is built specifically for european audiences which helps some stand out globally too so if this fourteen billion dollars valuation lands it's immense mist the most valuable ai companies outside the us giving europe a serious player in ai race yeah it's nice to see i guess other countries popping up with ai potential because i think the conversation is so focused on the us and china yeah that it's kinda hard for these other companies stand out but mister is a real real standout in europe and in in france specifically because i mean in general european ai companies had about fifty five percent more year on your investment in q one of this year so there's a lot of growth over there especially in the european sector so yeah it's exciting to see like what they're going to do compared to the american companies and chinese companies and how their services are going to stand out and maybe as you said it could be a thing where all of europe is suddenly using mist instead of open ai and all these other platforms a hundred percent i think i want to put themselves away from the us and the you know other crowds which is understandable i mean they are their own entity so yeah totally speaking like a great european citizen and yourself yeah maybe well that's gonna be it for our update today but thank you so much for joining with us again this week and sharing some knowledge and chat with me as per usual as per the use alright that'll do it for us today everybody 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 to go get yourself signed up the hustle dot c slash email and follows us on instagram at the hustle daily we'll 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 link 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 them a raise while millionaires are building income streams in their spare time entrepreneur and creator marina mcgill c cracked 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 thursday september fourth i'm john w with the cmo of hubspot kip bad and this is the hustle daily show kim banner the cmo of hubspot is witnessing the biggest shift in marketing in twenty years as ai fundamentally disrupts how people discover research and by products with sixty percent of google search is now ending in no clicks and l traffic converting four point four times better than traditional search kip is here to talk about how to successfully market in twenty twenty five we'll get to that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to produce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move fast like tumblr visit hubspot dot com so first up today google will not have to sell chrome a federal judge ruled in the department of justice antitrust base against the tech behemoth but it will have to share data with some competitors and won't be allowed to hold exclusive distribution contracts in a press release the doj accused google of using anti competitive tactics to maintain dominance in search and search advertising including agreements that made its products the default search engines across billions of devices and claimed that the ruling will quote pry open the market for general search services next up here researchers at southwest university in china say music may help those who suffer from motion sickness study participants sat in a driving simulator to induce motion sickness couldn't catch me there completed a driving task and then recovered for one minute those who listened to joyful music during recovery reported fifty seven point three percent reduction in symptoms compared to forty three point four percent for those who didn't listen to music so small margin there and into the ai world open will acquire seattle based product testing startup stat sig for one point one billion dollars pending approval to speed up product development open ai will take on stats six employees and its ceo as cto of applications and lastly here a long long time ago in the twenty twenties if you can remember that far every drink brand under the sun was rolling out a hard seltzer but those glory days are way behind us mega popular sparkling water brand spin drift didn't replicate its popularity in a hard seltzer and will discontinue its spiked line the hard seltzer times are over 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 and we'll have more for you tomorrow but in the interim we welcome kip wagner the cmo of hubspot to talk us through some new marketing tech mix let's do it alright kip pleasure to welcome you to the show today thanks for being here thanks for having me i'm pumped to be yeah no excited to have you here the source of it all i feel like because today you know we're talking about marketing how it's transforming right now shifting day to day it seems so kip first i wanna start with you said that inbound marketing is being disrupted it's fundamentally changing sure and i understand that you have a new solution for that but first what convinced you and hubspot that it was time to get in there and create an entirely new marketing playbook yeah so if you think about marketing and what are the big catalyst for change in marketing it's marketing has to change when consumer behavior changes right when the things that people do in day and day out change and that change is normally pre by a bunch of technology change and so there's a few things that happen one you had social media and email newsletters and all of the things that we take for granted now have grown significantly over the last few years that's why we bought the hustle it's why we did a bunch of the stuff that we've done then you had the chat gp moment you had chat gp come out and up in traditional search up end how people research get information find answers it used to be that answers were scarce chat gp comes along answers are plentiful and those are the things that have happened to say wow how people behave today is very different than people behave two three four five years ago and marketers and businesses need to adapt to that new world mh yeah no absolutely i i think you hit on something specifically important there about ai right mh i've been seeing tons of articles week week have been about oh seo is dead seo is ruined you know and now where we have to move towards an ai model for everything google is getting sixty percent less click throughs when you google something nowadays so how is that changing the traditional marketing funnel kind of on a more specific level what are you seeing marketers having to pivot yeah so i think the shape of the marketing funnel has changed dramatically if you look at the kind of traditional inbound marketing funnel what happened was awareness that very very tip top it was kinda okay but it wasn't the easiest thing to go out and help somebody be aware of your company or your product but what was really good was the visit stage getting people to come to your website because what you could do is create content for google for important topics that there wasn't great answers to out on the internet and people would find your answers and they'd come and they'd read your content and a percentage of those people would explore your services your products and become customers and that was a transformational moment in marketing and in business and what's happened now is that getting those visits is much harder you're sharing some of the stats that the clip through rates on google because of ai overview and ai mode have gone way down those click through rates are similarly a lot lower for things like chat gp or complexity people using those tools for search oh yeah what we've seen in our o data is the quality of the visits though coming from this new ai search is much higher for example like for us we've seen early visits from chat gp become customers at thirteen x wow higher of a conversion rate than traditional search agents because think about it you can have such a deep interaction and back and forth with ai that you can really get a more personalized recommendation versus just like going and reading an article and so that is really at the core of this ai search transformation is just the access to information has changed dramatically used to be that the company had all of the information and it would kinda leave bread breadcrumbs for a potential customer now a customer largely has all of the same information a company has and so that has up ended how people think of traditional marketing yeah yeah i mean it's really left customers i think with more power right completely they're able to get answers so quickly instead of i love the way you put it with instead of just following that bread crumb trail to the final destination instead they get immediately to the final destination and what's better for your day or your time than getting your answer immediately and getting what you need fast right yeah i think about it is once chat gp came along we entered into a new era of information symmetry when buying we've lived in this world of as where well you know the buyer in the seller didn't have the same information now the buyer and the seller has the same information and because of that it can be much more efficient and you can have a much more customized experience because all that information it also means that the companies who are very public with their information their pricing their products and kind of live work and operate in public are going to be more successful because their information is more gonna be more readily accessible to the buyer and to the ai agents who are helping and facilitating that buyer's research yeah absolutely and when we kind of expand this idea of you know marketing is changing can you tell me about the foundational idea behind loop marketing this new sort of phase that you're entering right now yeah so for folks who are not familiar at helps up we just launched a new marketing playbook that we call loop marketing and about fifteen years ago we created inbound marketing which is a whole different way to think about marketing kind of for the web two point o era and you know millions of businesses adopted inbound marketing and saw great success from it and now inbound marketing is necessary but it's no longer sufficient it's not enough to be successful to just do inbound marketing you need a new playbook for this post ai here we're calling it loop marketing and loop marketing is basically how you use ai to super charge your marketing the thing i will tell you john is that everybody i talked to everybody that i talked to you that does marketing it's the same conversation my ceo wants me to use ai and make our marketing better that's it like that that in some flavor that's the summary of every conversation i have with anybody doing marketing and then the follow on questions are what tools do i use what tactics toys use what props do i use what agent choice what i don't even know where to start right and so we put together loop marketing which is a simple like four step framework to take all of the confusion and uncertainty out of that problem and make it really easy for somebody who might not be an ai nerd like me to go and use ai every step of their marketing yeah and i've noticed with loop marketing i i what i really appreciate about it is that it's not only hammering home the use ai part of things which i obviously that's a big part of it where we are right now sure but i really appreciate it the kind of human aspect and how critical that is can you expand a little bit more upon that about the human aspect of marketing in an ai world now yeah the best marketing that's gonna get done today tomorrow next year over the next five to ten years is going to be done with humans and ai working really well together if you wanna just one shot and type some stuff into ai and do marketing that's gonna be ai swap it's gonna be bad the same thing if you are just going to not use ai at all you're not gonna be able to get feedback fast enough idea eight fast enough improve your conversion rates to personalization all the things that we're talking about loop marketing so if you look at loop marketing we have four simple stages mh the first is how do you express how do you go from an idea to like an asset or a campaign and ai is really good at that you can give you some ideas it can tell you what your customers or your prospects would think of those ideas and help you create first draft of those ideas and so you can go from an idea to like an asset or a campaign way faster than ever before you know minutes or hours versus days or weeks is the the kind shift that's happening there the next part that's happening here is what we call tailoring the big thing of artificial intelligence is that funnel change i was talking about wow it's a lot harder to get visits but it's easier to convert those visits into customers because you can personalize really well with ai ai is really good at guessing and infer what somebody on a one to one basis may want so tailoring is like taking a marketing asset that might be for everybody and making it just for you or just for me with the help of ai it's like instead of buying a suit at a department store it's like you're going to a tailor and they're making a suit just for you there's a very big difference in what that suit looks like feels like fits like in that equation and that's what we're talking about to here the next stage of our playbook is all rep amplification and it's how do you take that personalized tailored asset and get it out into the world and we talked a little bit already about aa or ai engine optimization and that's like the biggest disruption for amplification but you also have influencer marketing becoming a more important channel than ever sure personalized email marketing and sms marketing becoming way more important like we could spend an hour just on all of the different channels but the way to think about it is there's very new ai playbook to get your message out and ae being one of the new primary channels to do that mh and then the last thing you do is what we call evolve you look you get that stuff live you get it out to people and you get data and you use ai to help you look at the data in real time to get insights of what you could have done better so that you can improve your campaign or your assets in real time and you can improve them for the next rail that you wanna do and that's what we're trying to do is help people have a very specific playbook that they can go and leverage in this new world 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 and kind of given that everything is shifting so fast i'm wondering for you how much time do you think is going to pass until you need to revise or update or change these things as well yeah so i think what's interesting if you look at marketing throughout the years whether it be traditional marketing a michael porter in the four p's whether it be mark whether it be sub aspects of marketing like social media or content marketing for example what happens is that i think playbook and frameworks are pretty durable so like i think this like loop marketing the stages and the framework for how to think about marketing in this new world very durable what's gonna change or kind of the tactics underneath each of them right like artificial intelligence engine optimization is gonna be vastly different in a year from now than it is today and there's gonna be a whole host of different things that companies have to do for example the ability to personalize and personalize not just text but video and audio and imagery is going get way better over the next twelve to twenty four months and so you're going to see the kind tactics change and it's our job at hubspot along with lots of other great thought leaders in the market to help people understand what that change looks like and how they need to evolve but i think the frameworks are pretty consistent they're pretty durable for the kind of like the ten plus year time horizon yeah and last thing i wanted to talk about real quick is just an applicable idea maybe you can help me out with please but personalization yeah like when you think of personalization what does that look like to you how have you seen maybe hubspot or other companies doing this already and being able to customize their messaging for people actively looking for them yeah have you ever watched the hot ones the the podcast that just okay that's it's fairly cool popular but you gotta go check the interesting thing about the hot ones right is he always has some questions in there that are like the how did you know that question right like oh you really know me you to be able to ask me that question right i spoke to your third grade element exactly and right she said this right and what you find in really good marketing is it's very similar to that it's can you look at can you gather the right data and the right information about your audience in your community and by the way the more you interact with them the more content you provide them the more data you're going to get around what they really like and then ai is gonna be able to use that very unique data to give them a very personalized message and so at it helps hubspot that's what we're doing like from an email marketing perspective we are taking insights about that person's job the problems they're trying to solve what's gonna help them and their business be more successful what's gonna help them in their career and we're able to create and write bespoke messages around that information that's kinda unique one to one and we've seen our conversion rates grow from like a hundred to four hundred percent because that message is just way more relevant than the like personalization token kinda flat can message that has kinda of been prominent over the last decade right yeah i know that totally checks out it's about making that strong connection with the consumer based on a specific personal message and i'm very excited to see a lot of brands continuing to do that selfish you know for brands that i like continuing to do that and considering to pull me in and pull in customers that way so yeah really exciting future we got ahead of us and kip thank you so much for joining me to chat about it and get into the weeds here thanks so much for having me this has been a lot of fun appreciate it of course of course alright and that'll do it for us today thanks everybody for tuning into the hustle daily show for a proud part of hubspot media our editor today is robert hart and our executive producer is dare and in clark we've got a lot more tech business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed to go get signed up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily we'll 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 or 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 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 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 yourself will thank you

good morning everybody today's wednesday september third i'm john w sipping in a ten dollar matcha latte and this is the hustle daily show the us just slap a fifteen percent tariff on japanese goods while simultaneously draining japan's matcha supply at maximum speed this all creates the perfect economic storm right in your tea cup today we're exploring how tiktok trends climate change and trade policy merge to turn a powdered leaf into a ten dollar luxury item that costs more than some people's lunch we'll get its to that and the biggest hits and headlines in business and tech right after this hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to produce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move fast like tumblr visit hubspot dot com starting off in the food industry food overload kraft heinz will split into two different companies just ten years after it merged itself into existence one company is going to focus on fast growing categories like condiments philadelphia cream cheese and kraft mac and cheese while the other is going to take the downward trending grocery items like oscar meyer hot dogs clearly somebody got the short of the stick at the top office next up silicon valley start up tensor told business insider that it intends to supply earth's first personal robo car in other words it'll be your personal autonomous way s car wholly owned and no driver necessary so while it offers freedom to sit in the backseat seat and do whatever it doesn't offer full freedom sensors cars will only work within the preset geo fence operational zones sensors debut will be in a specific part of dubai next year with plans to expand to europe and the us from there and keeping with silicon valley rest in peace to flip once a unicorn company the tiktok like video shopping app is now just as real as a unicorn before it ceased to exist though flip had sixteen point five million users and was worth one point zero five billion dollars as recently as last april how the money have fallen and finally tesla sales may collapsing in europe that's widely reported but one surprising country is still prop up elon musk's e dreams out there norway has almost completely shifted itself to e technology and one in five cars sold in august there this year were tesla with the sale of the vehicle surging twenty two percent year over year got some elon love norway i guess 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 podcasts and for more headlines like that you can subscribe to the show and we'll have more for you tomorrow but we are going to talk about ten dollar matcha latte yours may be less some may be more who knows but some of us have only heard of the legend some of us experienced it every single day the us has managed to both slap a fifteen percent tariff on japanese goods and completely drain japan's matcha supply at the same time it's kind of the economic equivalent of punching someone while stealing their lunch money here's what happened the trump administration decided to end the decades old d mini rule on august twenty ninth which previously let imports valued at under eight hundred dollars enter the us tariff free simultaneously they implemented a fifteen percent baseline tariff on most japanese goods meanwhile tiktok has turned matcha consumption into social media performance art and japan just suffered through a record warm growing season the result is a triple squeeze that's turned your green tea habit into an expensive lesson in international trade policy welcome to twenty twenty five folks where even your caffeine addiction has a geopolitical implications let's establish the scale of what we're dealing with here in the matcha industry the global macho market reached three point six five billion dollars in twenty twenty four and is projected to hit seven point eight three billion dollars by twenty thirty two growing at a ten percent annual rate that is radical explosive demand for what amounts to powder leaves and don't get me wrong i love sam mantra myself as well the us dominates this market in ways though that would make any trade negotiator pretty nervous in twenty twenty four america took the largest share of japan's powder tea exports by both value and volume japan's green tea export value hit an all time high of roughly three point two billion dollars in twenty twenty four which is about a quarter jump in a single year but here's a big problem japan can't just manufacture more matcha overnight this is an iphone production where you can add another assembly line matcha starts with potential shade grown tea leaves that require specific growing conditions and take years to mature he can't exactly speed up that agriculture right now the tiktok factor has created demand that traditional supply chain simply can't handle we've seen that before with tiktok the matcha hashtag has accumulated roughly thirty three billion views across platforms with creators turning powder whisk into performance art emily makes minimal kitchen demos that treat matcha preparation as lifestyle content morgan nec roth a barista champion with six point one million followers creates approachable recipes that get recreated thousands of times by her followers this isn't just social media buzz it's creating real world scarcity local coffee shops are already reporting shortages and implementing rationing in the bay area cafes have yank matcha from menus entirely as supplies have tightened and on the east coast philadelphia shop owners report customers being generally shocked the when their matcha is sold out by midday but the agricultural reality makes this even more complicated kyoto and fukushima producers endured a record warm growing season that bruce yields significantly average prices at auctions spiked to roughly one point seven times last year's levels at this spring so when your raw material costs nearly double before you can even factor in tariffs and shipping the economics get pretty brutal pretty quickly this wasn't just a gradual price increase though it was a shock to the system that it was already operating at capacity japanese matcha producers can't simply plant more fields and harvest more leaves the traditional cultivation methods require specific conditions and timing that can't be rushed or scaled arbitrarily meanwhile the policy changes are making everything more expensive and complicated the end of the d mini treatment means that every small package from japan now faces tariff collection even if it's just a tiny tin of matcha and they do get small previously those small shipments would slip through duty free now every single package gets hit with fees and paperwork several postal systems have been forced to pause or completely re tool their us services to cope with the new framework australia post temporarily suspended most us parcels japan post curtail certain us bound items while updating their systems swiss post stopped accepting postal goods meant for the us entirely the fifteen percent baseline tariff on japanese origin goods as another layer of cost that gets passed directly to consumers and we don't like that even if a cafe used to pay forty dollars for a one hundred gram ceremonial grade matcha ten that price can easily clear sixty five dollars after factoring in the tariff normal freight and customs brokerage at barista wages rent and trendy oatmeal suddenly nine dollars for an ice match becomes basic math rather than price gouging some cafes though have tried to dodge the japan specific tariffs by switching to china origin matcha only to run into the even more complex web of china tariffs that apply by product classification so there's no easy escape for the tariff maze you're just choosing which bureaucratic nightmare to navigate the broader market dynamics make this situation even more absurd though classic grade matcha dominated fifty seven percent of the global market in twenty twenty three while ceremonial grade the premium stuff that tiktok creators showcase is growing at eight percent annually but ceremonial grade requires the most labor intensive cultivation and making it the most vulnerable supply constraints major producers have been forced to implement dramatic price increases companies have doubled their prices in some markets hitting hardest in regions where purchasing power is already limited this creates a tier system where only affluent customers can access the premium product that social media keeps promoting the substitution game is revealing how artificial this entire market has become some cafes are quietly down the matcha grades in their latte and reserving the premium stuff for straight ceremonial service others are steering towards china origin alternatives that protect their price points but these aren't flavor neutral decisions the quality differences are pretty significant meanwhile starbucks has standardized its customization charges making the true cost of matcha additions unusually visible a scoop of matcha added to a non matcha drink runs one dollar creating what amounts to a retail tariff on top of the import tariff if your drink gets hit with fees at the border and fees at the counter what's particularly fascinating though is how this supply squeeze is happening despite record production in japan the country is producing more matcha than ever before but demand is out pacing supply by such massive margins that shortages persist when tiktok creators can generate billions of views for matcha content traditional agricultural timelines become completely inadequate to that china is still trying to fill the gap by ramping up production targeting five thousand tons of capacity by twenty twenty five but positioning this output in terms of quality remains challenging when compared to traditional japanese resources the mantra market is extremely quality sensitive and japanese producers have centuries of reputation that can't be replicated overnight the policy implications extend far beyond expensive latte the us behavior in the market will shape how supply scarcity resolves globally american consumers switching to cheaper alternatives trading down in quality or simply paying higher prices will determine whether this shortage eases or in the trump administration tied the end of the d mini to fentanyl enforcement and counterfeit making it unlikely to snap back anytime soon postal operators will adapt and carriers will offer new duty paid products but the underlying tariff architecture appears permanent this means import reliant consumer goods need to factor policy risk into their cost structures going forward the irony is that none of this is slowing down american matcha consumption the wellness positioning around matcha remains intact despite the price increases studies continue to suggest benefits for attention and cognition giving the premium pricing a health justification under all that especially compared to coffee in an intention economy matcha functions as both product and performance the ritual photographs well the colors scream health the green and the vocabulary around ceremonial preparation does the premium marketing automatically policy shocks can raise the price floor but culture keeps pushing the ceiling a little bit higher what we're witnessing is the collision of three major forces climate constraints on agricultural production social media driving unprecedented demand and trade policy adding artificial costs any one of these alone might be manageable but together they've created a sustainability crisis disguised as a beverage trend some cafes are getting creative with the constraints as noted previously a few are posting sourcing notes and turning the tariff burden into a marketing feature about paying for authenticity others are developing subscription models that bundle duties into predictable monthly fees the most entrepreneurial are bragging about customs expertise alongside their cultivation knowledge but the fundamental tension remains american demand is systematically draining japan's capacity to produce premium macho while simultaneously making it more expensive through trade policy it's economic colonialism with a wellness twist the matcha crisis reveals something important about how modern consumer culture interacts with traditional agriculture and global trade when social media can generate demand that exceeds centuries old production capacity and when trade poll see can arbitrarily add cost to cultural traditions we end up with markets that feel increasingly disconnected from reality your ten dollar mo latte isn't just expensive it's a symbol of how tariffs tiktok and climate change are colliding to create new forms of artificial scarcity the most expensive ingredient isn't the carefully cultivated japanese tea leaves anymore it's everything piled on top of them by policy and hype whether this kills the matcha moment remains to be seen the social media momentum shows no signs of slowing down and the health halo around matcha continues attracting new converts but for many consumers the romance and the cup is being overshadowed by receipts that read more like policy documents and all that to be said even your caffeine choices have become political statements whether you intend them to be or not but please if you can find it for a decent price enjoy that matcha 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 got a lot more tech business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go get sign up hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle daily we'll see 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 mcgill c cracked 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 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's tuesday september second hope you had a great labor day weekend i'm john w miguel here with the us manager of finder dot com zach ali and this is the hustle daily show as traditional seo gives way to what experts call generative engine optimization we are navigating a world where ai overview now appear in thirteen percent of google searches and chat has grown four hundred percent in market share while google dropped for the first time in a decade so today we brought in the us manager of finder dot com zach ali to give actionable ways to repair for the future of search looking get that to all that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right up to this hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to produce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move fast like tumblr visit hubspot dot com okay let's start up here with one that we've covered a lot recently but a new development for spirit airlines which emerged from chapter eleven bankruptcy in march has filed for bankruptcy again the budget carrier has struggled to recover from the pandemic amid competition from other airlines and it'll now reduce its network and fleet on top of previously planned fur next up london based startup man claims its ai systems can effectively predict the future the newly functioned tech firm specializes in judgmental forecasting they call it training its ai to combine data and reasoning and predict the complex world of human affairs man believes that they can accurately forecast events like geopolitical clashes and supply chain blip and that business leaders and politicians will wanna pay big money for access next over to some food news taco bell chief digital and technology officer dane matthews isn't very keen on the widespread use of the chain's ai assisted drive thru it's now in play at over five hundred locations and he told the wall street journal that he has both positive and negative experiences with it says that some customers have taken a social media to complain about it while others have decided to prank it attempting to place preposterous orders like eighteen thousand cups of water so he says with the wall street journal that if there's a long line of people you're better off going with humans and finally some rough news for the international coconut community or icc which is a real thing global demand for coconut oil has soared but global production has flat lined the icc has reported all time high prices in the last two years topping out at nearly three thousand dollars per ton compared to twenty twenty three's a thousand dollars per ton average what happened here the oil is increasingly popular not only as a kitchen staple but in beauty and wellness products while heat waves pests and aging trees have curb output yikes 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 podcasts and for more stories like that you can subscribe to the show we'll have more headlines for you tomorrow but today we are diving into our conversation with zach ali the us manager of finder dot com and we're gonna be talking about the future of search let's dive in hey zach how are you doing welcome to the show today thank you thank you nice to be on so i wanted to start off our conversation today talking a bit about the transition period we're in right now from this traditional seo route to now an ai driven search reality that we're in so as somebody like you who manages search strategy for like a major comparison side like finder how dramatically has ai search changed your day to day so quite significantly i think it is top of mind for anyone who works in seo we're constantly seeing this seo is dead narrative and when you've built your business largely on seo it definitely takes center stage in your brain but i i don't think seo is dead right i think the total volume of traffic is definitely less there's less available for everyone and like purely informational top of funnel content is a hundred percent at risk i think a lot of people are getting what they need from the ai it was the ai reviews or from check and not needing to actually go to the website but there is silver lining in this i think there's a bit of a resetting of the playing field you know the search landscape wasn't exactly super fair before this all started happening anyways you know i i had done a internal study recently to just sort of examine like top hundred queries commercial queries right because we work in finance and providers accounted thirty one percent of the results and content sites were only like twenty three percent but when i removed the very recognizable brand sites that result dropped down to four percent so there really wasn't a lot of availability to begin with an ai is now sort of opening that up again so there's silver lining for some but for others like i can see how it's been a pretty you know gloomy day overall right this transition seems scary at first like anything but do you think that we'll get to a pretty even playing field kinda like we did with seo because as you said seo is like not fair for some fair for others how do you see this kinda ai driven search engine format do you think that's it's gonna be more fair for businesses and companies or do you think they just have to completely alter their strategy and you know the first to do it is gonna be the one in front of the race i think it will be more fair because the things with ll is it's kind of like a snake eating its tail so it's going to probably reward most likely the sites that are able to add new value to the models right so it stops becoming a sort of game of copying each other and everyone sort trying to match and exceed other's content but more like can we get original data can we demonstrate we're more human can we have an actual take on this stuff and the companies who are able to get gritty enough and creative enough i do think they have a a real shot and actually winning in this and and hopefully there's no more mono monopoly in search how do you find that these companies can optimize more for the ai overview and to be featured in those is it about just being a ton more specific with what you're talking about or is there anything else to it i think so i mean i think there's like the basic stuff which is like just regular good seo i know there's kind of going through a re brand right now without having to learn any new skills but there are some things i think like you know making sure your structured data is really in place you know only introducing like one idea per paragraph make it very readable and scan i think oftentimes we can forget that search content is really for the more skim audience like they really just want the information they need to get in and get out they're not necessarily looking for like a novel and i think if you're constructing your content like that you yet does optimize your chances but i also think your reputation isn't gonna play a big role in that as well i think you know links obviously play a huge role in seo in the past in in today as well but now brand mentions are becoming more important and mh a lot of these models work off of consensus so if everyone is mentioning the iphone when you're talking about mobile phone comparison then chances are the iphone's is gonna show up and and so i think a lot of companies right now are scrambling to see how they can get their reputation up mh yeah know that makes a lot of sense to try to get in there first and get your reputation to the point where people can find you more often some you said that resonated really with me was just that people aren't really looking to like dick around on the internet or like half an hour for the answer that they were looking for they wanna kinda get in and get out so i think the more effectively like a business can tailor to that answer the better they can do and in the landscape generally of the ai search where do you think you stand what's your favorite engine to use what do you think is the most effective for what your needs are and your business i've really been loving chat i mean that's the one i first started on and so it's been hard for me to move over i know a lot of the folks at finder love claw and or claude or whatever they're calling at these days but now mike moving like playing with like mc stuff and ada and that transfer i feel a little bit overwhelmed at times because so much is coming out all at once and google just launched op which is another nada and sort of type software and so i'm just trying to use it all but i don't know it is overwhelming but chat has been they full to me a little bit psychopathic at times but it's the tracking and true i think it's really doing very well in the search space like the results in chat the search results only overlap about twelve percent though with google's traditional results so they definitely work differently how are you using or going towards this model of ai search in your day to day versus what you used to do or still do a little bit with seo so what i love about ai search is that it's sort of killing the keyword which was never right fully sufficient to meet an intent like if he really wanted to type you know best brokerage apps for people who live in brooklyn who make ninety thousand dollars a year who have twenty k in their savings already like if you put that into google in the past the result was gonna be absolutely terrible so you would just search best brokerage accounts but now you can be as specific as you need to capture exactly the intent after and i think that's where this sort of long tail approach is starting to reward publishers as they're truly thinking about the user in a way that they weren't before and where as much as seo as you say don't right for google that's what everyone was doing and i think now you actually have to take step back and and write for the user and understand the nuances and what their pain points might actually be and and hopefully solve for that yeah i think another pain point that people individuals creators and companies are just experiencing generally that there are just so many platforms now young people love to search on tiktok for example and reddit it is is huge even though like a lot of people are getting a path through google nowadays and ai chatbot bots obviously as we've been talking about have you been forced to like rethink any content strategy of your own from all of these platforms like all the people searching on all of them oh totally i mean love the phrase ran fish can came up with with the search everywhere optimization where you sort of have to be on every platform so we're on youtube but we're doing really well on youtube we're trying to get more on tiktok and instagram and just expand it's it's really about being where your users are you know they may see you on youtube and then that gives you the brand preference for them to click on you when they see you in the ai or what have you and so you kinda have to be everywhere and and ai is actually making that more accessible than ever if you're using it to assist you with the content creation mh totally and last thing i wanted to hit on today is that up top you mentioned that you don't think seo exactly dead yet right in two to three years or so where do you see the search going is it gonna be completely dead or is it gonna go all the way over to ai optimization and search and ai overview how do you think like the pipeline gonna change in the next few years now so i think it's possible that in five years fifty percent of website traffic is coming from agents and not actually people themselves and so i think publishers and websites are gonna have to build their sites in ways that make it very easy for the agent to use and the agent might be converting on that user's behalf you know the future might be just saying sign me up for this bank account and it and then it goes off and does that for you and so i think that's sort of where we're headed as we get more to like the her i don't know if you seen the movie her that sort of reality oh yeah yeah i i i think that is where we're going yeah yeah i think it's a prerequisite for living in brooklyn actually watch her that's definitely stealing that well zach thank you so much for joining me today it's been really fun and insightful to chat with you and doug good luck with everything you're doing at finder i hope everything goes well and hope you're enjoying this ai boom yeah that we're currently experiencing bye likewise thanks john thank you 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 today 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 subscribe go sign up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on instagram at the hustle dale we'll catch you tomorrow here's what blows my mind most people are sitting around waiting for their boss to give them raise 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

top of the morning everybody today is friday august twenty ninth i'm john w here with maria hud and this is the hustle daily show meta is dropping ten billion dollars on a massive ai data center in rural louisiana covering four million square feet bigger than disneyland meanwhile google is staring down a twenty six billion dollar loss in search deals from its antitrust case which might just free up some cash to throw at ai we'll talk about all that and more in today's ai update and we'll get to all that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to produce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move fast like tumblr visit hubspot dot com okay starting our headlines off new jersey american dream mall has everything it has an indoor ski resort water park and really silly legal troubles the mall owner was sued by a neighboring town for violating an archaic country law banning clothing sales on sundays so they're gonna have to fight that in court next company australian makes ai voice assistance that help chronically under staff nine one one call centers by transferring emergencies to dispatcher while writing reports on non emergency calls which are noise complaints parking violations and etcetera or transferring them to police departments the start tech is already in use in us cities including ka zoo michigan great name and chattanooga another great name in tennessee and it just raised a fourteen million dollar series a funding per tech crunch to start seeing this pop up all around the us probably speaking of around the us atlanta software automation raised twenty million dollars to grow so robot which is exactly what it sounds like it's autonomous sewing robot which uses machine vision ai and machine learning like everything else these days this time in service of just making clothes software the company is software like wearing clothes says so bought costs apparel about the same as importing clothes from low wage countries while also helping them dodge ethical labor land mine so we're gonna probably art seeing fleets of robots making clothes and finally if you're super strapped for cash and can't get out to venice this summer there's a better way to get a taste of it which is actually tasting it at this place called canal cafe which is a pop up project by design from dill sk video and ren are that brew espresso get this with purified water straight from venice famous and very polluted canals so you could actually have some venice canal water i don't know if you were gonna go there if you were gonna drink it anyways but at least have some of it this summer why not and for more headlines like that you can subscribe to the show and we'll have more for you tomorrow but right now we're getting to our ai update of the week with maria from the mainstream newsletter let's dive on in maria welcome back to the show this week we got another ai update come so thank you so much for being here thank you for having me of course and as we do every week can you talk to me about something that really stood out to you this week in the world of ai yeah but i did write about something very very cool google's ai powered language lessons that is straight into google translate so one of the coolest things i came across this week honestly and i'm a foreigner in another country so it comes in handy for a lot of people when cups of students or people that are relocating from one thing to another google is like sliding ai powered language lessons straight into google translate and it's wow still in beta up but basically it is gemini which is google's ai model now can create personalized lessons based on your skill level and while you're learning the language which is you know awesome if you let's say are brushing up pure spanish here because you wanna study abroad etcetera are like you've got accepted into another job and you have to travel to spain it actually builds scenarios for you like talking to your host family about real times or like if you wanna get an apartment you we can talk to your landlord etcetera and that lets you practice those conversations in real time wow wild my favorite part is that there's also a live translation okay which is a back at forth kind of thing mh and it's seventy plus languages so you can talk with others on so many levels and with so many languages and it's not giving duo our energy yet u understandable because duo is a bit you know it's fans but it's a huge step yes of course my opinion huge competitor for yeah that's a big step i'm glad you mentioned duo oli because the first thought that came across my mind is when you have a trip coming up or when you need to learn a little bit of a language the go to is generally duo download this yeah start taking lessons but this i guess presents kind of an alternative in a way that's ai powered and i guess people aren't necessarily mad about it being ai powered because it's starting that way versus duo that kind of developed that identity yeah it it seems like an interesting competitor eventually for duo and i i think you said that you could see it competing in the future yeah in my opinion a lot of people have google as their default kind of whether it was an app or whether it was like a browser so it could be a competitor because we always default back to the original yeah right it's a possibility to you who knows yeah and google translate is used by a ton of people as well yeah so having that functionality in there is a smart idea actually i don't know why they haven't done it sooner me neither that's what i was asking and i saw this like it should have been something in like twenty ten yeah that would have been nice also let's stick with google a little bit here because we talked ton about seo google search is getting upheaval right now it's all ai search it's all like ai o a now google is reportedly gonna lose maybe twenty six billion dollars in search deals for this antitrust case they're going through and we're still waiting for a verdict on that but people have reported that this actually might be a good thing for google because they could direct that twenty six billion dollars that they've gotten from search deals and take that money out of search and put it into ai what do you make of that do you think that they're really gonna be dialing in their ai game if this goes that way well i think the keyword right here is might do mh twenty six billion dollars it is not definite honestly it's google or talking about a huge conglomerate so yes if these default search deals get shut down it could happen but in my opinion it's less of like a crisis more of a strategy shift the money isn't disappearing it's likely getting redirected straight into google's ai game right especially gemini and ai mode right now per complexity is handling about fifteen million daily queries which sounds pretty good but you have to remember google is still sitting on ten billion so yeah you know it's still the og redirecting that hash into gemini i could make google's ai powered search faster smarter and way more personalized potentially widening the gap not closing yet mh and this is where it gets interesting if google ramps up german it's also stepping directly into the same competitive lane as players like and others the real race isn't just who owns search anymore it's who builds the ai layer everyone relies on yeah you rely on something you're gonna start using it over and over again and it's gonna be here default as we've said before so google has always been the default for a lot of people it could be a redirection rather than you know a shutdown as people saying yeah totally and it's also interesting because i remember a few weeks ago we talked about the per complexity google yeah kind of thing where per complexities is trying to acquire google chrome i think that deal is not gonna happen but they did offer to acquire google chrome for that antitrust case as well so you know we'll see how google like if they have to offload any of these kind of things they'll see how they do it and kinda redirect to the ai of it all but let's talk about chrome a little bit because another update came up this week complexity is not involved in chrome but ant philanthropic is ant philanthropic is instill in claude into chrome as an ai agent as an attachment there what are your thoughts on the agents coming directly into the browser without you even having to look for them know and dropping the just launched call for chrome as we said it's basically an ai agent that lives bite inside your browser so it's part of your browser right now and it's in a small research preview but the whole idea of it is absolutely wild you can chat with claude in a side panel and if you give it like a permission can actually take actions for you while you're doing the browser so you know because we live on our phones and on our laptops twenty four seven it's kind of ideal yeah it's part of this bigger land grab happening around browsers and complexity has its own ham browser google's you know gemini is already built into chrome and i think the open ai is rumored i'm not gonna say they are doing it but it's rumored that they're working on their own mh whoever wins the browser wins the user because you're using browsers every single day it's the front door to everything online exactly and the probably taking a careful approach into this especially around security because they've added protection against prompt injection attacks prompt injection attacks are the new p in my opinion so basically these are sneaky hacks hidden on websites and they're keeping claude locked away from you know of the financial and sensitive data by default right it's in its early days but this is where it's heading your browser won't just show you the internet about to start doing things for you and love that for us if it's more automated then yeah please thank you that be awesome yeah we'll take it right i'll do all the help i can get thank you and last thing i wanted talk about today you mentioned a bit of a land grab in the ai space i definitely wanna talk about that in like a physical sense because meta seems to have spent a lot shocker on ai but this most recent ten billion dollars was spent on actual physical locations a rural louisiana ai center with four million square feet for ai data centers but you can see the plans online it looks pretty evil it looks cool do you think a ton of rural land can expect to see this change as the ai ecosystem grows because we've kind of seen this story happen before with like all these random places you would never expect tech to get into they're starting to creep into yeah zach if you're hearing this i want a new iphone you're spending money on like a lot of stuff so like get me and y i iphone thank you so much perhaps he could do meta ray band glasses for you i maybe that could be his contribution i don't like them i don't like ray band if they can part up with like prada that would be awesome i'm a prada girly chanel girly just alright right we're we're we're going locks over here with our specs this is bigger than disneyland huge you know like disneyland huge mh so we're talking ten billion dollars in ai data center in rural louisiana and it's called hyper crazy name and it's giving sci a bit like which is s and it's meta so it's gonna do sci eventually it's four million square feet of server designed to power the next generation of meta ai models why louisiana you ask because it makes the most sense it's affordable man has access to energy and it's giving them room to scale yeah so yeah honestly this feels like a start a bigger trend we're basically going to see a lot more rural areas becoming ai super clusters as the industry grows mh for the locals it means more jobs more investments which is awesome for them this why we wanna see we wanna see more job openings for especially for people in like these rural areas for meta it's like a play for super intelligence dominance and i think they are about to win it in terms of super intelligence in my opinion it's giving small town meets big tech energy i love small town stuff it makes me so happy and i'll see it's kind of like a fascinating thing to watch yeah so yeah i really hope that it grows it makes any small town grow and prosper this is what we wanna see yeah that's really exciting i mean you'd have to think about the jobs here maybe they'll have some people locally but also i'm sure they'll like outsource a lot of people like ai engineers people of all kinds to start living in these like rural communities to make it maybe more decentralized from like these big tech hubs of like san francisco seattle all these different places a hundred percent that is interesting as for like the locals like what jobs they could do here get some stuff who knows yeah this giant ai center needs upkeep so i'm i'm sure there's a good incentive also for the louisiana government or whatever state government that these places are in to take in these places because they are huge huge help for the state for the funding so makes lot sense a hundred percent a hundred percent yeah anyways thank you so much maria for being a part of the ai update once again this week thank you for having me and we'll catch you next time see you next time alright and that's gonna do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show everybody 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 at 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 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 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 yourself will thank you

alright good morning everybody today is thursday august twenty eighth i'm john w with juliet at bennett r and this is the hustle daily show crowds are lining up at botanical gardens to smell corpse flowers that wreak while malaysia dorian bib has turned the world's stick fruit into a ten million dollar tourism empire complete with theme parks and dessert shops so let's break down the business of dorian and other smelly things what gets all that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to produce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move fast like tumblr visit hubspot dot com okay starting off today i may have done a whole story about this yesterday but cracker barrel has now decided after much criticism to change back its logo once again to feature the old timer uncle hers that was a bit short lived over there next mark zuckerberg gave his palo alto neighbors noise canceling headphones because the construction on his eleven homes apparently never stops juliet you looked into this can you give me more information on mark zuckerberg handed out some headphones to his neighbors yeah apparently mark has something of a winchester mystery compound going on if you're familiar with the winchester mystery house you know it is a house that the woman who owned it supposedly never stopped a building was probably really irritated to her neighbors too if they were close enough to hear it mark's got eleven houses at least in palo alto that he just kind of saw and he's been adding to them he had at one point of private school for his children and some other children he has a pickle ball court a you know a big nice fancy pool he put in seven thousand square feet of basement which apparently his neighbors think it's some sort of like underground bunker but yeah the construction just never stops so it's construction there's parties there's a security because this is mark zuckerberg so there's you know patrol cars there's surveillance cameras it's just kind of like what the hell like the worst neighbor of all time has moved in and i guess he gave them noise canceling headphones in the past he's given them you know kris k donuts and i'm just saying mark zuckerberg one of the richest men in the world that's not enough just not enough mark the noise cancelling headphones might be fine but only kris k donuts come on man i live across the street from seismic retrofit because i live california and that's important here u and yeah it's loud and i have noise canceling headphones and here is what is irritating about it is having to always wear them yeah the whole not being able to sleep thing might be a problem you know there are zoning regulations so they can't do it at night they don't get it on the weekends the weekend is when the leaf blower guy comes and chases the solitary leaf around in the parking lot behind my house for four hours and the thing about the headphones is like it doesn't matter how nice they are it is annoying to have to wear them literally all day or listen to jack hammers so i'm just i don't think it's enough i think he needs to like give them money you could give them money and knowing him could construct a giant sound proof bubble around his eleven homes oh yeah put it in a dome put it a dome own biosphere ceos love domes just build a dome be his own personal meta in realize exactly from there we move to china china's ro introduced a new contender for we mentioned them just a second ago meta ray band a r eyewear crown it's latest smart glasses called ro glasses have a powerful display in each eye that can be used for navigation real time translation recording and one particularly exciting feature is the tele prompt function that scrolls text and can save you from ever having to relay another un scripted thought in your entire life the specs are expected to retail at five hundred and ninety nine dollars not bad price but expected is the operative word there from there we go to more ai and t reached a preliminary settlement on a class action lawsuit from several authors who alleged trained its models on their work this is a problem that prop complexities is also facing right now with a couple editorial companies in japan while a judge ruled that ant philanthropic use of the books fell under fair use it may have acquired them via pi potentially amount to over a trillion dollars in penalties let's see what happens there and finally here in some car news hyundai is partnering with a startup up un cage innovations on a plant based leather for its vehicles per protect crunch the materials are made from grains and can look feel and even smell like the real thing un cage has also partnered with jaguar and land rover and its faux leather are already in use and handbags and watch bands and for more updates like that you can subscribe to the show we'll have more for you tomorrow but right now we're talking about the business of smelly things julia can you expand on this business of sm that we're seeing right now yes i was really excited to see an article and cnn business about dorian fruit being a very popular tourist draw which reminded me of something that happens here where i live every year i live in pasadena california and that means i live close to san marino where the huntington is the huntington is a library in art museum botanical garden and i know two things about the huntington one it's beautiful it is a beautiful place to go hang out it's a great date spot the second thing is it is never more popular than when it's corpse flower blooms it is like an annual event now a corpse flower if you are not familiar with them they're really weird looking they are very large they kind of look like like you know how sometimes if you if you go to like disneyland you go to the star wars part and they've like picked out all these plants to sort of oh we're were in an alien world now a corpse right like space plants yeah shorts yeah corp fit right in and they only bloom once every few years and they only bloom for one day at a time during that cycle and when they bloom they smell so bad apparently they smell like decay wow which in the animal world is is fine because that attracts you know i i guess the poll and it needs or whatever the huntington has managed to acquire over forty of them so they always got a bloom in the works there's always something bloom they've been able to poll them and every year on social media on the huntington's instagram it's like a countdown to when there's tin flower is gonna bloom and people like sit and wait and they're like oh i gotta go see the corpse flower on the day that envelopes and it's since like a big annual event wow that i always miss for some reason like i'm always at work and it's such a short window and then it's over mh it's real unfortunate notice health though best place to bury a body if i'm looking to get rid of one in the la area because the smell just match it's that's exciting yeah i mean for one day and then they're gonna be like oh this is this is a little weird this is is continuing but that's crazy and of course the point of the corpse flour smell is that it attracts insects that eat carry or you know things that are decaying and then once the blue was done then then those insects are gonna go find the body barrier and then then it's it's all over for you yeah yes but this is an interesting trend of this smelly flower i like where this thought process started with dorian cast dorian a very popular fruit in asia most notably southeast asia had it a couple times mh over there it smells just awful but it tastes pretty good in a lot of ways talk to me about this company durian bib in kuala lumpur malaysia that's doing something with durian yeah i love this story so durian of course is a very polarizing fruit it smells horrible but it tastes in my opinion great i love durian and cakes and ice cream and good i've had it before i think it's a real fun fruit durian bib is a farm and as i think we all know farmers are having kind of a tough time right now there's you know competing operations but then there's also just a lot of factors that are beyond their control like the weather we've talked a lot about coffee and chocolate and all of these industries were inclement weather and tariffs and all of these different things are impacting how they can make money what the size of their crop yield is with durian b they are turning what could essentially just be a durian business into like a whole immersive theme park world based around this fruit which i think has a broad appeal because i think people are really curious about it because it smells so bad and yet taste so good mh during bib has couple operations going this during b park where you can sample the various idol that they grow apparently employees have to wear gloves on their hands otherwise they will go home smelling like duran which no one likes yes during b world has a dessert shop where you can play games and take classes and then during bb academy is sort of in a soft launch but it's a thirty acre farm that also has games and classes and the classes are for adults and children so like there's just a lot that people can do if they wanna go to one of these parks and according to adrian c who of course is the chief dream you couldn't have a a title like ceo you have to be chief dream it's a way to diversify revenue and i guess they see about four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand visitors per year and apparently made ten million in revenue in twenty twenty four a lot of that being souvenir so they've got you know during merchandise during if you've never seen it it's like a spiky on the outside and soft in the inside so they have like these these cute little toys you can buy and you know i guess there's apparently a a broad spectrum of places you can go if you're du curious across malaysia tourism in malaysia released a twenty twenty four or twenty twenty five publication with sixty two different during experiences across twelve states simple tasting all the way to multi day tours where you gl on a farm and everything during and it estimated it would bring in about four hundred twenty thousand dollars during that period wow yeah i mean it's really a craze i think it's a great way though for farms as you mentioned to kind of expand their business mh and since this fruit is really blowing up on social media why not attract people to it for what it is you mentioned in your article that it's similar to like the pumpkin patch here in the us where like people go to the pumpkin patch and you know there's like an apple cider place where you like some apple cider mh there's like a corn maze you have all the stuff already for you and i think they've just really leaned into that with the durian and just making these theme parks yeah for sure and you know at the hustle we did a big story on the economics of pumpkin patches in twenty twenty one and the people i talked to you for that story had you know a lot of the same concerns it's like you know everybody's doing the pumpkin thing at that exact same time of year and then of course it can be hard to grow pumpkin if it's too wet that's a big problem it's too dry that's problem apparently it can rain so much that all your pumpkin can sweep away and what is known as a pumpkin flood which is probably really cool to see but horrible for farmers there's a lot that goes into growing pumping and getting a good yield but another revenue stream is to have these terminal experiences that every influencer loves where you've got your cider in your pumpkin latte and your photo ops and your corn maze and your you know whatever and that was like a huge revenue stream for them was just being this family friendly or couples activity that people love to do year after year after year so mh it's not so dissimilar it's just so interesting i think because the durian is such a curious fruit it just has the quality about it where it's like it smells so bad it's been compared to vomit to gym socks to a sewer and yet is popular when you put it in a cake or a custard or all sorts of other dishes yeah i think companies are investing more in these personalized experiences for deeply polarizing but niche things like a the durian and it makes sense because the people that love it are really really passionate about it and the people that don't love it are very very passionate about not liking it so you definitely have your audience kind of already baked in i actually watch a museum that was a little controversial but i did enjoy it for the most part it was called the disgusting food museum oh it was a pop up here in los angeles but it's been shown around the world so it originated in sweden and it showcased all these foods from around the world that other cultures would find disgusting and so you might have a really stinky cheese from france or something that other people were be like oh this is too much classic i sample a lot of things durian was one of them i actually like the way tastes some of the things that i ate there that i did not enjoy did not enjoy fermented shark from iceland yeah interesting i would not try that again i did not like the salty black licorice which was sort of like a an an nordic thing i did not like that at all but i did kind of enjoy some of the cheeses even though they were very smelly and i like durian and as i said what was interesting to me about it was it did receive a lot of backlash because people were like well isn't it racist to call another cultures food disgusting and you know it was a big debate over whether or not that was okay although i will say that it did represent a lot of different cultures it wasn't just like oh we've were really nailing this one part of the world it was every culture and what was interesting to me and i would fully agree with this is there were some foods from the united states that other people thought were absolutely repulsive and they included things like pop tart oh my god there's are so many us foods that are absolutely gross like i remember this like jello cake oh yeah thing that was like a big thing in like the nineteen fifties or sixties of that just absolutely disgusting like there is nothing good about oh yeah my friends had a themed party because they found a jello mold in the shape of a fish oh my yeah and everybody had to bring something and some of the foods were surprisingly edible but then one was like a tuna gel thing that like after fifteen minutes out of the fridge and it started to melt it was like put this back in the like vanish this my friend made a thanksgiving dinner he suspended in gel like an ass pick which was not the worst thing i've ever eaten but also not the best but it was just so interesting to me that for americans it's like oh stinky cheese or like you know there's a lot of foods that involve bugs that we typically don't eat here but then another culture would be like a pop tart is so sugary and so over processed it's not even food this is repulsive which yeah as son grew with like family where they gave me pap for breakfast i look back and i'm like why why would you do that to me that was terrible crap so durian isn't that bad comparatively baby i would take a durian every morning for breakfast over a pop tart any day the week crack that thing right over happy breakfast to you hundred percent and the thing about a durian is it may smell gross like it's rotting but what is more disturbing is a pop tart that no matter how long you have it it never seems to rot why that's it's not food it's a not food that's not food that's the problem yes alright and 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 got a lot more business and tech 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 catch you later 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 is wednesday august twenty seventh i'm john w here with a big black of cheddar and this is the hustle daily show cracker barrel managed to lose ninety four million dollars in market value by simply removing uncle hers commercial in a barrel from their forty eight year old logo sparking an outrage from customers and politicians who somehow turned a graphic design decision into the late culture war battlefield so today we're exploring how a struggling restaurant chains attempted modernization became a corporate disaster we'll get it's all that and the biggest headlines in business and tech right after this hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem they needed to move fast to produce trending content but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagement and double the content creation wanna move fast like tumble visit hubspot dot com okay starting us off today with our headlines first up spotify is rolling out dms to select markets allowing users age sixteen and up to share music podcasts and audiobooks with users with whom they share a plan or have interacted with before now users can accept or reject messages and block anyone who fails to recommend anything but the absolute best bang on the platform spotify once again trying to get into social media app territory they were trying to conquer youtube previously and now it seems like they're cutting the middleman man between them and instagram next frontier airlines is adding twenty new routes many in key markets for their rival spirit airlines in a bid to position frontier as the us's biggest budget carrier per frontier ceo barry bi spirit has been struggling on the other hand as we talked about last week losing two hundred and forty five point eight million dollars since twenty twenty two frontier has made several failed attempts to merge with spirit but it seems that right now frontier is striking out on its own now let's take that frontier private jet over to japan two japanese media companies financial times owner nik k and ass xi are suing ai company per complexity for allegedly copying their articles without consent or compensation and attributing false information to them which could quote undermine the foundation of journalism which is committed to conveying facts accurately they want fifteen million dollars each and any stored content removed from per complexity and finally here in some chocolate news rocky mountain chocolate factory has set up a quarterly dynamic pricing plan adjusting prices up or down every three months based on the fluctuating cost of cocoa per wall street journal life in chocolate as kinda sucked recently in recent quarters with consumption falling as cocoa prices rise choco royalty nestle hershey and mon have all or will jack up prices what do you say to that willy won and for more headlines like that you can subscribe to the show will have more for you tomorrow on the hot and ready but today we're talking all about cracker barrel the country restaurant chain that managed to lose almost a hundred million dollars in market value just by changing their logo i've heard this story before a logo change not a data breach not a food poisoning scandal not a major lawsuit a visual redesign that removed a cartoon character from their branding has sent their stock plummeting and created what might be one of the most pointless culture war battles of twenty twenty five when a restaurant chain loses ninety four million dollars in a single day because they made uncle hers herself which is the character on the cracker barrel logo disappear you know we've entered peak internet outrage but this story goes deeper than just angry tweets and failing stock prices it reveals something troubling about corporate decision making and brand identity in modern america so grab those biscuits grab that tea and grab that block of cheddar chomp because we're about to unpack how a simple design change became a corporate disaster let's start out with what actually happened because the facts are almost too ridiculous to believe here on august nineteenth cracker barrel unveiled a new logo as part of what they're calling a modern re brand the old logo featured this guy you know uncle hers a cartoon character in overalls leaning against a barrel surrounded by text cracker barrel old country store okay the new logo just has the words cracker barrel against a simple yellow barrel shape uncle hers commercial he's gone he's left old country store text also gone what remains though is something that we all know corporate minimalism shares of cracker barrel as a result fell four dollars twenty two cents or seven point two percent to fifty four dollars and eighty cents in thursday trading shedding ninety four million dollars in market value by thursday afternoon the stock had plummeted about ten percent proving that sometimes the market really does care about cartoon characters the backlash was immediate and brutal social media exploded with customers demanding the change be reversed colin rug c owner of the trending politics website described the logo as depressing in a post viewed on x over nine million times even larry the cable guy you remember him from the two thousands weighed in begging the company not to change the iconic design but here's where it gets really weird byron daniels a republican representative for florida wrote on x in a post viewed over three million times quote no one asked for this woke re brand it's time to make cracker barrel great again okay can somebody just please explain to be first how removing a cartoon character from a logo is woke the word officially has lost all its meaning when it can be applied to corporate graphic design choices however the political reaction reached peak absurdity when the official ex account for the democrats responded we think the cracker barrel re brand sucks too end quote so we've reached bipartisan agreement that this new logo is terrible but somehow it's still an issue make it makes sense even more bizarre here chris d jackson a political strategist who worked on the biden campaign blamed donald trump quote for everyone whining about cracker barrel remember this when joe biden left office the old logo was still there it was trump's weakness that let the change happen end quote apparently we're now holding president's responsible for corporate rebranding decisions this is where we're at right now as a society the company's defense has been equally tone deaf ceo julie phelps casino told good morning america that the feedback was quote overwhelmingly positive which either means that she's living in an alternate reality or has a very creative definition of positive the company later admitted quote we could have done a better job sharing who we are and who will always be which is corporate speak i think for we completely misread our customer base and now our stock is tanking but let's talk about what this controversy really reveals cracker barrel has been struggling for years with relevance and growth for twenty twenty four the company reported revenue of roughly three point five billion dollars up point eight percent from three point four billion dollars the previous year while net income fell forty point nine million dollars down from ninety nine million dollars in twenty twenty three that's quite a jump that's not the trajectory of a thriving business in may ceo admitted to investors something that should have been obvious that they're not as relevant as they once were over at cracker barrel so the logo change wasn't happening in isolation it was part of a broader attempt to modernize a brand that had been losing ground to competitors the problem is that they fundamentally misunderstood what their customers actually valued about the brand eric russell a former cracker barrel employee who now works as a brand designer said the company committed one of the cardinal branding sins when changing its logo he explained that customers develop emotional attachments to iconic symbols and removing them can feel personal this gets to something pretty important about brand psychology uncle hers wasn't just a logo he represented the entire identity of cracker barrel that they had built for forty eight years he embodied the folks see nostalgic quote old country aesthetic that differentiated the chain from generic family restaurants the irony is that uncle hers commercial wasn't even part of the original branding the original nineteen sixty nine logo was text only uncle hers and his barrel were only added in a nineteen seventy seven re rebranding so this traditional character that people are defending was actually a marketing creation from the disco era but that doesn't matter to customers who grew up seeing the logo for them uncle hers represents childhood road trips family meals and a sense of authentic american even if that authenticity was manufactured by a corporate marketing the broader context here is telling cracker barrel has been working to refresh image through new menu items and red stores that move away from the rustic country aesthetic the company has also faced criticism for its d initiatives with conservative group america first legal filing a complaint with the equal opportunity employment commission in july alleging employment discrimination so the logo controversy isn't just about design it's about a company caught between trying to modernize for new customers while not alien their traditional base a problem as old as time what makes his controversy particularly revealing is how it demonstrates the power of brand loyalty in an era of corporate consolidation when everything starts to look the same when every logo becomes a minimalist word mark when every restaurant has the same modern rustic aesthetic customers cling even more desperately to brands that feel authentic and distinctive cracker barrel mistake wasn't just changing the logo it was abandoning the visual identity that made them recognizable in a sea of generic fan family restaurants they join the ranks of companies that have erased their personality in favor of modern design that appears to know one in particular you ever seen an image of mcdonald's from the early two thousands and one now yeah it just looks like it lost its soul completely i don't care how clean it looks the timing couldn't be worse either for this at a moment when many americans are feeling nostalgic for simpler times and authentic experiences cracker barrel decides to make their brand more generic and corporate looking they read the room wrong marketing expert kevin dahl described cracker barrels re brand as a fiasco writing quote the holy grail of marketing is to create a brand that customers give a damn about and feel some ownership of it's exceedingly rare and when you have that as cracker barrel did you never ever abandoned the company's response has been damage control in real time they've assured customers that uncle hers will remain on menus and road signs but that kinda misses the point the logo is often the first thing a customer sees it's how they identify the brand from a distance how they recognize it in advertising and how they connect emotionally with the company saying uncle hers will stay on the menu while removing him from the logo is essentially saying we'll keep the character but abandoned the identity it's a half measure that satisfies just nobody what's particularly frustrating here is that this was entirely predictable any competent marketing team could have anticipated that removing of beloved forty eight year old character would upset long time customers the fact that they seem surprised by the backlash suggests either incompetence or complete disconnection from the customer base the controversy also highlights how brand decisions have become political battleground whether companies want them to be or not when representative byron donald can turn a logo changed into a culture war issue every corporate decision becomes a potential political statement the cracker barrel logo controversy is ultimately a story about corporate leadership that doesn't understand its own brand value they had something rare in business a logo at a character that customers genuinely cared about and they threw it away in pursuit of generic modernization whether they can recover from this self inflicted wound remains to be seen the company has essentially admitted that they misha the situation but trust once broken is difficult to rebuild uncle hers may still be on menus but the damage to customer confidence might be permanent this should serve as a warning to other companies considering similar re rebranding when your customers love something about your brand sometimes you just shouldn't fix what's not broken and if you gotta make changes maybe test them with actual customers instead of focus groups and design agencies because sometimes the most expensive mistake a company can make is forgetting what made them special in the first place goodbye uncle hers herself alright that'll 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 got a lot more tech and business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go get up the hustle dot c slash email and follow us on and instagram at the hustle daily we'll see you tomorrow here's what blows my mind most people are sitting around waiting for their boss to give them raise while millionaires are building income streams in their spare time entrepreneur and creator marina mcgill 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 at you're doing right now and grab it in the show notes six months from now and you'll be glad you did