🐕 Air buds

Plus: The company that evacuated its vowels, great Excel hacks, shower thoughts, and more. View Online Today's your last day to bid on Muhammad Ali's autographed boxing trunks from his legendary 1975 "Thrilla in Manila" bout against Joe Frazier. The current number to beat is $3.8m, but Sotheby's projects the final sale price will climb closer to $6m. If only that was the going rate for all pairs of old shorts with pen marks on them, we'd be rolling in cash. In today's email: Dogs on a plane: Here comes an all-canine airline (the planes are still flown by humans). Weird week: Banned songs, fancy felines, a galactic misunderstanding, and more. Around the web: A trove of McDonald's memorabilia, secret Excel hacks, bogus words, and more. 👇 Listen: Yesterday, boxes made of bark. Today, BarkBox takes off. The Big Idea Bark Air is luxury travel… for dogs A new luxury air service puts dogs — not humans — first. 2024-04-12T00:00:00Z Juliet Bennett Rylah The problem with planes these days — aside from falling apart midair — is that they don't cater to dogs. Enter Bark Air, a new way to travel that considers the needs of its furst-class passengers. Launching May 23 in the Los Angeles, New York City, and London areas, Bark Air comes via Bark, the company behind BarkBox subscriptions. Why do dogs need this? We can't exactly ask them, but the idea is that travel can be uncomfortable for dogs — whether they're stuck in a pet carrier under a seat or flying in cargo — and stressful for their humans. Bark Air is a private charter, so there's a separate check-in process — no TSA checkpoints — where dogs meet one another and go to the bathroom in a designated area before boarding. Plus: Dogs get calming music, pheromones, jackets, ear muffs, and more to chill out. Dogs receive in-flight snacks and beverages. Dogs can sit on laps, seats, or beds without being crated, unless they prefer a carrier, and must be leashed only when humans wear seatbelts. Human passengers must be at least 18. It's worth noting… … that this luxury service is for the most pampered pooches. Each one-way flight only sells 10 tickets (one dog, one human per) for $6k-$8k each, with additional human tickets available for an extra cost. That's way more than a standard flight, but seemingly par for the course. A similar air service, K9 Jets, is similarly priced, per The Washington Post. It's unclear how high demand will be at that price, but spending on pets is up — and that includes luxury items. In 2022, Americans dropped $136.8B on their pets, up 11% YoY. A surge in pandemic-era pet ownership led to a greater appreciation for, and spending on, furry friends. As people delay or forgo having children, they dote on their animals. But what we need to know is: How much to fly on a plane full of dogs even if we don't have one? Free Resource The Next Wave just entered the chat Great news: You now have two personal chief AI officers named Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lands. They specialize in surfacing knowledge typically reserved for high-clearance experts in corporate boardrooms, secret Discord cults, and HubSpot Slack channels. The Next Wave is your new source for the top ways to leverage new tech. Learn how AI is enabling us to build businesses more efficiently than ever before. We begin with the future of search, and the origin story of a smart startup taking on Google. Open Perplexity AI on a Chrome tab, and listen in. Ride The Next Wave → TRENDING Srry: Fund manager Standard Life Aberdeen's 2021 rebrand to Abrdn was panned hard at the time, but it's apparently still a nuisance — earlier this week, one Abrdn exec decried the media's "corporate bullying" over its name as "childish." Counterpoint: The Observer's old joke about the company having "irritable vowel syndrome" is still very funny. SNIPPETS Costco now sells $100m-$200m in silver and gold per month, thanks to consumers lured by online chatter and rising inflation. Meta is testing new Instagram safety features to shield younger users from cyberflashing and sextortion scams, including auto-blurring images with detected nudity and a pop-up warning before sending sensitive images. The Humane AI Pin, wearable tech meant to do what your phone can minus the screen, is now available for $699. Despite its potential, reviewers were not impressed. Great timing: An internal Boeing probe found outgoing CEO David Calhoun and other execs took $500k+ in personal trips on the company's dime, falsely recording them as business travel. That's bad, but still remains the least of Boeing's problems. Margot Robbie's LuckyChap Entertainment and Lionsgate will produce a Monopoly movie, making it a great time to remind you that it was originally a game against monopolistic landlords. Several Taylor Swift songs are back on TikTok despite a dispute between TikTok and Universal Music Group. As she owns her masters, it's likely she reached a deal with TikTok ahead of her upcoming album drop. Substack announced a new feature that allows its podcasters to sync and distribute their episodes to Spotfiy. Rent the Runway is bouncing back from a rough year — revenue and subscribers were down — by doing the exact opposite of their whole thing: selling clothes. The rental service saw improved quarterly results after setting up its own resale operation. Isn't CNN's 5 Things newsletter great? Probably, yeah, but we'd still rather have you vote for The Hustle as the most trophy-worthy newsletter for this year's Webby Awards. Don't miss this... When AI companies are asked about what they train their models on, they often dance around the question, mumbling something about "publicly available data." Now we have some insight why. That was odd Weird Week: Running across a whole continent and other wild stories Another week, another parade of the strange. 2024-04-12T00:00:00Z Ben Berkley In Chechnya, losing yourself at the club is about to become a balancing act. The Russian republic's new Goldilocks law bans musical compositions deemed too slow or too fast, which it defines as falling outside of a tempo of 80-116 beats per minute (e.g., "Hotel California" by Eagles: too fast, "Hello" by Adele: too slow). According to the Chechen Ministry of Culture, anything outside of that range doesn't "conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm." It essentially criminalizes most pop songs, the top 20 of which averaged 122 BPM in 2020. Their enforcement strategy is unclear, but artists reportedly have until June 1 to update their music to fit the bill. "I'm a little bit tired," says man after running 10k+ miles across Africa (also us after 3pm.) Russ Cook, who set off from South Africa last April to run the length of the continent, accomplished the feat over the weekend in Tunisia — running 10.1k miles across 16 countries in 352 days, and raising $870k+ for charity. But the 27-year-old Englishman endured more than throbbing feet along the way — in addition to health and visa complications, he was robbed at gunpoint, held up by machete-wielding men, and skirting war zones. Meet Mexico's new feline officials: Bowie, Nube, Coco, Zeus, and more. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared 19 feral cats "living fixed assets" of Mexico City's National Palace, a title typically reserved for historic buildings. According to staff, feral cats have lived among the palace's gardens and its grounds for decades, sometimes wandering into meetings and even making cameos in press briefings. The country's Treasury will now provide the newly appointed bureau-cats with food and care in (please forgive us) purr-petuity. "Armed man" ends up being a Star Wars fan dressed as a stormtrooper. The force was with him — the police force, that is. A Scottish man, who goes by the name "Grampian Stormtrooper" on Facebook, was traveling to a convention in Dundee, Scotland, in his $1.25k costume when he was escorted off a train by law enforcement officers who received reports of an armed man. The "arms" in question? His "blaster," a costume prop that police asked him to conceal anyway. The man, who says he's been doing this for 10 years without trouble, responded: "Crazy world we live in." We'd say as much. FIT THE BILL There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today's billion-dollar brand? Clue 1: This company, founded along the Rhine River in 1865, turned its back on H2O in 1951. That's when it invented Styropor, a material known for being impervious to water. Clue 2: The brand became better known after this memorable line in its 1990s ad campaign: "We don't make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better." Clue 3: The second half of its acronymized name stands for "soda factory"; the first half is suggestive of a Germany-based chemical company. It's not just any chemical company, though — it's the world's biggest. 👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇 AROUND THE WEB 🚀 On this day: In 1981, Columbia became the first reusable manned spacecraft to go to space, launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and touching down at Edwards Air Force Base in California two days later. 🍔 That's interesting: A Malaysian mall contains 70k+ McDonald's toys, costumes, containers, and other memorabilia. 🧠 Free Excel class: Discover Miss Excel's secret hacks to unleash the full power of Microsoft Excel, including how to optimize spreadsheets with pivot tables and data visualization. 🤖 Haha: None of these words are real. 🍪 Aww: It's cookie time. SHOWER THOUGHTS The price of everything is going up — except TVs. They keep getting bigger and cheaper. SOURCE SOURCE The reason we don't have flying cars yet isn't because of technology, it's because people can barely handle driving cars. SOURCE SOURCE Solar eclipses must have blinded a ton of random unsuspecting humans throughout history. SOURCE SOURCE Somewhere on Earth there is a person who has taken more steps than any other person alive. Maybe it's just some random guy who uses the treadmill a lot and doesn't even realize he's in the lead. SOURCE SOURCE A free boat is incredibly expensive. SOURCE SOURCE via Reddit SHARE THE HUSTLE Hey. Don't keep us a secret. Refer just 3 people and we'll send Hustle essentials as a thank you. Share this custom referral link: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Your referral count: 0 Today's Fit the Bill answer is BASF (Market cap: $50.58B) Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Singdhi Sokpo. Editing by: Ben "Cockpit spaniel" Berkley. Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. PODCAST JOBS CONTACT US The Hustle, 2 Canal Park, Cambridge, MA 02141, US. Never want to hear from us again? Break our hearts and unsubscribe.