🍵 Cannnabust?

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👋 Buongiorno, it’s a big day — hopefully for you, but definitely for perseverance. Italian officials greenlit the world’s longest suspension bridge, a ~2.2-mile-long, $15.5B colossus between Italy’s mainland and Sicily. It’s at least 7 years away. At least. The Strait of Messina Bridge, envisioned by Romans as far back as 23 AD, has been actively pursued since 1969 — and it’s been stuck in an on/off with reality ever since. Past reasons work has stopped: strong winds, strong currents, migratory bird impact, mafia interference, and some little wrinkle about it being built on an active fault line.

🎧 On the pod: Breaking down OpenAI's messy GPT-5 rollout and its promise to "never do this again."

NEWS FLASH

Sam Altman speaking in front of a screen that says OpenAI

🤖 When the beef is just the appetizer: Sam Altman is reportedly backing brain implant company Merge Labs via OpenAI's ventures arm and if you’re thinking “hey, that sounds like a direct rival to Neuralink, run by Altman’s direct AI rival Elon Musk,” yes, yes it does. The expanding duel between two of the world’s most powerful men will get a lot of interest and understandably so, but the better question may be: What’s Merge Labs’ deal? This excerpt from a 2017 blog from Altman talks about “the merge” of man and machine and it invites more questions than it answers: “We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario.”

☕ Extending the “coffee extender”: Prefer, a beanless coffee startup out of Singapore, will increase production of its alt-coffee, which blends into normal coffee (suggested at up to 40% Prefer, 60% coffee). Its founder says adding the bean-free product won’t impact flavor, but very much impacts coffee brands’ finances, helping them reduce costs and stretch out supply at a time when beans are pricey and hard to come by. The chocolate business is similarly fraught and Prefer’s at work there as well, producing an alt-cocoa, while also theorizing its tech could ease vanilla and hazelnut production.

✈️ Air Canada flies ~130k people every day and they may all be SOL: The airline plans to suspend service on Saturday due to an impending flight attendant strike. Almost 100% of members voted to strike after their union and the airline failed to reach a deal after eight months of negotiations. Attendants are seeking cost of living enhancements and full pay for all work. Often, attendants are paid at a reduced rate during boarding procedures before a flight begins.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Weird, an idea from a streamer that doesn’t involve upping monthly rates: Sling TV, with an eye toward football season, is offering a $4.99 Day Pass, allowing people to see their team without shelling out for a full month with a live streamer like YouTube TV ($83 per month).
Gamechanger at the Target clearance rack: Gildan Activewear will buy HanesBrands for $2.2B, assuming there are no antitrust concerns. The move would nearly double revenue for Gildan, which also owns American Apparel, Peds, Comfort Colors, and Goldtoe.
Some US Apple Watches got blood oxygen monitoring back, a feature Apple disabled after a patent infringement spat with medtech company Masimo. Now, any blood oxygen data Apple Watches collect will be measured and calculated on their associated iPhones, but unavailable on the watches.

CONTENT WITH CONTEXT

Make AI-powered content that doesn’t sound robotic

Anyone can ask a chatbot to forge some soulless content (and a ton of folks do).

But those who train it up on personalized context, with highly pointed prompts? They’re already at the next level, posting hit after hit. Save this authentic AI content playbook for:

How Charlie Hill gained 97k followers (and 30m impressions)
The RIF prompt for high-conversion viral content
5 classic copywriting frameworks
Tips for custom GPTs and projects

Make less blah content, and more branded bangers.

Proven content prompts

THE BIG IDEA

Three glasses bottles, each with a cannabis leaf on it.

Are cannabis drinks losing their buzz?

You’d think that between America’s love of weed and functional beverages, cannabis-infused drinks would be riding high right now.

So far, that hasn’t proven to be the case.

The budding category has been hyped up for years, predicted to give alcohol companies a run for their money. But while the market is certainly growing — sales are estimated to hit $571m this year and $756m by 2029 at a 33% growth rate — it has yet to take off, per Business Insider.

Why it’s fizzling

Largely, regulations. Cannabis-infused drinks started hitting shelves following the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized hemp (cannabis with 0.3% THC or less) on a federal level — but the legislation is subject to renewal every several years, which leaves the future of the cannabis industry uncertain.

Another issue is how widely state laws vary, regarding if and where the beverages can be sold, and how much THC it can contain.

Beverage company AMASS Brands Group launched Afterdream, a THC-infused drink, in 2021 but pulled it after nine months given regulatory hurdles.
In some weed-happy states like California and Colorado, their sales have been limited or banned, usually to protect the states’ licensed marijuana industries from competition, a Brightfield Group research analyst told BI.

There are also cultural barriers

A social stigma still exists, and one cannabis drink founder told BI that consumer awareness of the product is low.

People who’ve had bad experiences with edibles or those with little cannabis experience might be hesitant to try them, and marijuana enthusiasts might want something stronger.

Plus, they aren’t always the tastiest refreshments.

Why it could still make a splash

It’s still early days for the industry, and while widespread adoption still presents a challenge, the regulatory landscape has improved in recent years. Plus:

Functional beverages are trending, and low-dose THC drinks offer a hangover-free alternative to alcohol, which is falling out of favor.
Bigger retailers like DoorDash and Total Wine have started carrying them.
In Minnesota, THC sales have boosted liquor store profits.
Possibly the greatest indicator: alcohol companies are nervous. Some, in anticipation of the competition, are even pushing their own THC-infused offerings.

Drinkmakers like AMASS, which relaunched Afterdream in May, are hopeful the grass will be greener on the other side. But whether they should be might become clearer next month, when that darn Farm Bill is set to expire.

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Talk about a comeback story: Hayes Barnard is a billionaire, he’s been on the cover of Forbes, and… he flunked out of first grade? Make it make sense.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Monthly income earned by 24-year-old Kanoah Cunningham, a “clipper” whose work entails editing long videos into short clips for social media platforms.

Creators and companies hire clippers to post such videos everywhere they can, then pay them between 50 cents and $2 per 1k views, per The Wall Street Journal.

Content may include brief clips of podcasts, movies, product demos, and more, and the hope is that the bite-sized videos will go viral. And because viewers receive recommendations based on how often people interact with content, clips can rack up engagement even if posted by an account with little to no followers.

Cunningham says the real key is “building a narrative.”

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1947, India and Pakistan won their independence after two centuries of British rule.

⚒️ Useful: A suite of online tools (timers, world clocks, converters, etc.).

🏃 Join us: The Hustle will be at INBOUND in San Francisco Sept. 3-5. We’re doing a run club, a meetup, and apparently, never sleeping. We’d love to see you there; today’s the last day to get our discounted tickets (promo code: HUSTLE10).

🍳 Yum: A good scrambled eggs recipe.

🐦 Aww: Kiss!

QUOTE OF NOTE

I hate even the thought of it. It would be a hell of a shame after 30-plus years.

Steep prices ahead: Since 1997, and despite inflationary changes, a can of AriZona Iced Tea has always cost 99 cents — something that’s been foundational to the company’s identity and which founder and chairman Don Vultaggio has always insisted on maintaining.

But now faced with a 50% tariff on imported aluminum, AriZona might finally be forced to do the thing that Vultaggio told The New York Times pains him to even consider: raise its prices. The privately owned beverage company uses 100m+ pounds of the metal annually for its cans, 20% of which is imported from Canada.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Everything man-made began with one person daring to imagine something new. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Ben "Left dry, not high" Berkley.

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