👋 Hey there. Hope your week is off to a good start, and that you’re not fed up with everyone quite yet. If you’re feeling particularly peeved, there might be a good reason: 47% of US adults say people are behaving more rudely in public than before the pandemic, according to a new study from Pew Research Center. Of all the social crimes, smoking around other people and taking a photo or video of someone without their permission were voted the most abhorrent. Careful with those TikToks.
🎧 On the pod:Can Milkadamia scale its 2D-printed oat milk into sales?
NEWS FLASH
🥤 The healthy-soda wars heat up: PepsiCo is buying prebiotic soda brand Poppi in a $1.65B deal. Poppi, which first appeared on “Shark Tank” in 2018 under the brand name Mother Beverage, is a major player in the functional beverage sector, which is expected to generate $2B in sales by 2029. Olipop, the brand’s biggest competitor, was valued at $1.85B last month after closing a $50m funding round. Coca-Cola has also gotten in on the action, launching its own line of prebiotic sodas, Simply Pop, last month. Now we sit back, crack open a cold one (of prebiotic bubbles), and watch this all play out.
🎥 Another case for physical media: Warner Bros. pulled every classic “Looney Tunes”short, dating from the 1930s through the late ‘60s, from Max, despite saying it wouldn’t in 2023, per Gizmodo. Warner Bros. previously closed Boomerang, its classic animation streaming platform; removed numerous animated series and games when it replaced Cartoon Network’s website; and shelved the completed Coyote vs. Acme film for a $70m tax write-off. What is up, Doc, indeed?
🎮 Wanna make a game? Roblox is releasing Cube 3D, an AI model that allows creators to make 3D objects and scenes using text prompts (e.g., “a unicorn with a rainbow mane and tail”). The tool will be open-source, meaning anyone can use it on or off Roblox, perGamesBeat. The tool significantly cuts down the time it takes to create Roblox experiences, which could be a boon for Roblox creators, who made $923m in 2024, up 25% YoY. In Q4, Roblox saw 85.3m daily active users spend an average of 2.4 hours per day on the platform.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Not so forever: Forever 21 is permanently closing all of its US stores after filing for bankruptcy for the second time. While the retailer might be going out of fashion, it had $4B+ in sales and 43k+ employees at its peak.
Even chatbots get stressed: ChatGPT showed signs of anxiety after fielding “traumatic narratives” about crime, war, and car accidents from users, according to a new study. But its anxiety levels came down after completing mindfulness exercises — the same ones proven to work on humans.
Alphabet is spinning off Taara, its Starlink competitor that uses light beams to provide internet and phone services, into its own company. It’s currently operational in 12 countries and has supplied services to events including Coachella.
MASTER YOUR TASKS
Shooting for peak productivity? (Us, too)
Before you go and experiment with dozens of AI apps by yourself, just know we test-drove all the top tools and published some razor-sharp summaries.
Golf has been around for centuries, but it’s massively contributing to — and suffering from — the ongoing climate crisis.
Now, there may be a way to keep golf alive and make it more fun than it has been for all these centuries.
PGA meets WWE
TGL is a new indoor golf league hosted at Florida’s SoFi Center, where professional players (including co-founder Tiger Woods) hit golf balls at a ~3.4k-square-foot screen, per The Verge.
TGL is the next evolution of indoor golf, pairing its simulated play with the overblown theatrics of professional wrestling.
Courses are 15 holes, scoring is simpler, golfers have a shot clock, and they’re all mic’d, so you can hear them talk trash.
The green is a physical space transformed into different layouts by tiny actuators.
It’s a more efficient and entertaining version of the classic “good walk spoiled.” You don’t even need to walk!
Purists might argue that this isn’t real golf, but the TGL team doesn’t care.
The many high-tech sensors tracking a ball’s trajectory can get things wrong (and have).
But the point is to make an entertaining show, not to faithfully recreate golf.
And it seems to be working, because TGL’s ratings on ESPN are apparently pretty good (though, to be fair, matches happen on Mondays and Tuesdays when there’s not much sports competition).
Golf makes the most sense…
… to infuse with some fun tech, since it has that nightmarish environmental impact and is (arguably) just so boring — but generally speaking, digitally enhanced sports are definitely the future.
Fans already fill arenas to watch esports, and several companies are making supergame-ysimulators for other sports.
At a certain point, why spend money on a soccer stadium when you can use tech to make an easier, more fun version of the real thing?
You don’t want to waste time — especially in sales. See eight common time drains that undermine your ability to sell as effectively as possible.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
How much per-capita consumption of ice cream has declined in the US since 1975.
Shocking — we know. But Univeler, the company responsible for ~20% of the global ice cream market, is spinning off its $8.7B ice cream business, perSherwood News.
While ice cream accounts for 13%-14% of Unilever’s revenue, it has posted the lowest or second-lowest underlying operating margin of all the company’s segments since 2019.
Plus, it’s a heavy lift. Or scoop. The company operates 3m+ freezers in 60 countries, but only makes its money back during a few months out of the year.
Weirdly, the solution might be less ice cream. Bite-sized snacks grew 14% YoY in Europe in 2023, according to Nielsen, and market research firm Mintel found 62% of US consumers would rather eat “a small amount of indulgent ice cream” than a larger quantity of something low-cal.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1852, Wells Fargo was founded in NYC as a shipping and banking company.
📱 Haha: An exercise about being on your phone and also not being on your phone. (The game only works, perhaps obviously, on mobile.)
🚀 Don’t miss this: We teamed up with Indie Hackers to give you a chance at your Big Break. Pitch us your idea for a chance at $5k.
🗞️ Newsletter: Historical data is dead. The new Crunchbase introduces live, predictive intelligence, helping you to be the first to find and act on opportunities.
🐕 Aww: May we all be this excited over simple things.
QUOTE OF NOTE
A good reminder from Rob Haworth, a senior investment strategist at US Bank Wealth Management, for us normies with everyday expenses to maybe not give into the current bullion buying frenzy.
The spot price for the precious metal briefly surpassed $3k for the first time ever on Friday, a ~10x increase since 2000, largely fueled by economic uncertainty and market volatility. But while gold may seem like a safe investment, Haworth told Fortune that it’s a riskier bet for small investors who, unlike large institutions, could find it harder to convert the metal into liquid, usable cash — for things like, say, pizza.
SHOWER THOUGHT
It’s probably much less common for friends to share the same first name in fiction than in real life.SOURCE
Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman, with help from Singdhi Sokpo, Sam Barsanti, and Kaylee Jenzen. Editing by: Ben “Here fore a good time” Berkley.
