🐭 Disney’s $250m bummer

La-Z-Boy was just being cute with its marketing campaign to lean into laziness, but it may have stumbled upon the most useful AI usage yet: The furniture icon built a cozy recliner prototype called The Decliner, which generates AI-powered cancellation texts when you pull its handle.

In today’s email:

• “Regular rich”: Making $175k+/year yet identifying as “very poor.”
• Spilling the beans: Why the world’s best vanilla is so easy to steal.
• $250m disturbance in the Force: Disney’s big Star Wars loss.
• Around the Web: A clumsy elephant, a quick puzzle game, music theory lessons, and more.

👇 Listen: Why more objectively wealthy people feel like they’re poor.

The Big Idea

Until you’re submersible-on-a-yacht rich, you may never feel rich

When you’re little, $100 is the height of wealth. When you join the workforce, people with six-figure salaries are the ones living large. When you’re actually making $175k+/year… it stops feeling like a lot of money, apparently?

A Bloomberg survey of 1k+ of the top 10% of US earners turned heads this week — because a quarter of respondents, all making $175k+/year, identified as either “very poor,” “poor,” or “getting by but things are tight.”

Over half of those surveyed, dubbed the “regular rich,” said they worry about money.

Are you rich?

It’s such a simple question, but Bloomberg shows there’s no simple answer; every individual contemplation of wealth today comes with many qualifiers — about housing, local cost of living, retirement savings, etc.

The objectively wealthy grappling with being subjectively poor provides quite the snapshot of this moment in American history. It captures:

• How the increased cost of everything, from cars to tuition to groceries, makes it harder to build wealth.
• How rising generations are failing to attain their parents’ financial security.
• How social media impacts perception, fueling lifestyle comparisons while making the ultra-wealthy class more visible.

So, who feels good?

While some of the six-figure crowd feel like they’re struggling, the bulk of millionaires in Bloomberg’s survey acknowledged they’re “comfortable.”

• Among them? Many doctors, naturally. While the average US physician salary is now $350k, per The Washington Post, the top 10% of doctors command salaries of $1.3m+.

But even for the comfortable, the goal posts keep moving. There are always some Joneses to keep up with.

Take the latest trend on superyachts, for instance: Don’t have your own submersible on board? You’re practically a peasant.

BTW: Those subs don’t come cheap — think $2m-$7m, separate from installing a crane to move it and ~$15k/day in operating costs.

Former NFL player Michael Oher says his life story as depicted in the film The Blind Side, which grossed $300m+, is a lie. He’s now suing Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, alleging the couple never adopted him as a teen — something he only learned in February 2023 — but tricked him into a conservatorship to profit off of him. The Tuohys claim the arrangement was necessary to skirt NCAA rules.

SNIPPETS

Today in AI: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company will replace ~8k jobs with AI, largely in noncustomer-facing roles across departments like HR, finance, and accounting.

YouTube will remove health misinformation under three categories: prevention, treatment, and denial. This includes content that claims covid doesn’t exist or that “garlic cures cancer.”

D2C underwear brand Parade will be acquired by Fruit of the Loom licensee Ariela & Associates International. The price is unknown, but Parade was valued at $200m in August 2022.

Game on: Select users in Canada and the UK can now test cloud-streamed Netflix games, playable on TVs and the web.

Meanwhile… Broadcast and cable TV viewing fell below 50% of Americans’ TV usage in July for the first time. Where were you when linear TV died? Streaming “Jury Duty,” probably.

Yikes: ​​An AARP analysis found that the 25 most expensive drugs for Medicare Part D plans have, on average, more than tripled in price since entering the market. Sanofi’s Lantus, an insulin, has jumped 739% since 2000.

A Montana court sided with 16 plaintiffs, ages 5 to 22, who alleged the state’s ban on weighing greenhouse gas emissions violated their constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.”

LG will launch a $1k TV-in-a-suitcase in the US this month. The 27-inch portable screen with a built-in battery and speakers will thrill tailgaters, but we’re really just happy for campers, who finally have a way to pass all that boring nature time.

Get motivated: Helping your team to feel motivated, especially in tough economic times, can be challenging. But encouraging your employees and driving results is possible with the right tools.

Spice Vice

Inside Mexico’s underground vanilla economy

Riding in the back seat of a crew-cab pickup truck, 67-year-old vanilla farmer José Cortéz peers down a narrow dirt road amid jungle-covered mountains in eastern Mexico, one of the most corrupt regions of North America.

His vanilla farm, a 15-acre expanse just outside Papantla, Veracruz, is up ahead. He calls it his “edible forest.”

Papantla is the birthplace of vanilla, and Cortéz is part of a small community of farmers from the Totonaco indigenous group who have been cultivating and harvesting the majority of Mexico’s vanilla beans for hundreds of years — beans that some regard as the greatest in the world.

“The finest vanilla, the product with the best flavor… comes from Mexico,” the historian Henry Bruman wrote in 1948.

But the work, already cumbersome because of the difficulty of growing vanilla, now comes with added stress. Cortéz, who usually carries a machete when he visits his farmland, worries about jaguars, pumas, coyotes, and a local bird called the chachalaca destroying his crop. And then there’s the biggest threat of all: crime.

Read the whole story →    

Free Resource

An introduction to marketing psychology

Honestly, it’s all about feelings — since breaking them down behind the scenes is how you tell stories with stopping power.

This free ebook bundles up the basics of marketing psychology to explain some of the chief concepts that trigger people to purchase.

The art + science of persuasion:

• Building a “fanocracy” (like Microsoft and REI)
• Understanding basic human needs
• Using 14 principles of human behavior…

… like priming, anchoring, clustering, and other habit-based heuristics.

Marketing Psychology 101 →  

Star Blahs

Disney will lose $250m on its ‘Star Wars’ hotel… but it was really cool

Disney Parks made a surprising announcement in May: its Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser experience in Orlando, Florida, will close in September after just ~18 months.

During the Walt Disney Company’s Q3 earnings call, the company revealed that the closure would result in a $250m loss. (Don’t worry, it’s still worth $162B+.)

By all accounts…

… What Disney accomplished was amazing.

It not only looks like a starship inside, but it’s entirely immersive. We’re talking costumes, actors, themed food and drinks, and complex narratives in which guests play starring roles.

(Wanna hear some immersive theater aficionados geeking out about their experience in great detail? Look no further.)

What went wrong?

Disney hasn’t said officially. But it’s not easy to run a bespoke immersive experience of this caliber, and it wasn’t cheap to go — a minimum two-night stay for two started at $4.8k.

Disney ultimately struggled to fill the hotel despite only offering 100 rooms. Before closing, it had planned to reduce available check-in days, per CinemaBlend.

Also not helping:

• CEO Bob Iger wants to cut costs by $5.5B. To that end, Disney laid off ~7k people and removed a ton of content from Disney+.
• Consumers are cutting nonessential spending amid inflation woes.
• Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have been feuding for months.

What happens now?

It’s not clear what will become of the empty hotel, but there’s a lot of potential in those walls, perhaps for cheaper experiences or one-off events.

But hopefully it won’t become one of Disney’s creepy abandoned parks like, you know, these.

🎸 On this day: In 1974, punk band The Ramones played their first public gig at Manhattan’s CBGB.

🎼 How to: Learn music theory.

🎧 Podcast: The Science of Scaling host Mark Roberge is joined by Asana founding CRO Oliver Jay to discuss the inappropriate cut and paste of PLG practices.

🧠 Cure boredom: Rotate the tiles to complete the puzzle.

🐘 Aww: A baby elephant’s clumsy first steps.

Googles “Can I get a stress fracture from clicking ‘Add to cart’ too many times?” (Link)