😖 Cringe is in

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👋 Happy Friday and congrats to all the world’s employees as you can maybe call your boss a “dickhead” with impunity? In England, a judge ruled in favor of an office manager fired on the spot for flinging that phallus foul diss at her bosses during a heated meeting. She was awarded ~$40k in damages and the so-called dickheads were dinged for not following their own policy, which requires an initial warning for abusive language before sacking an employee. But please, please check your own workplace policies before cursing at your boss.

🎧 On the pod: Apple's next Siri update, Mistral nears a $14B valuation, and all the latest in AI.

NEWS FLASH

Five white pillars, each containing an items including a pair of sneakers, a toy, a video game console, a trading card, in front of a sign that reads 'no bot shop.'

(Tools for Humanity)

👀 Would you let a company scan your eyeballs for hot drops? World — Sam Altman and Alex Blania’s ID startup — is opening the No Bot Shop, a one-day pop-up at LA World Space in West Hollywood, California, on Saturday. Here, customers can get verified — that means agreeing to an eye scan using World’s Orb — to spin a prize wheel and receive a coveted item, the likes of which are often scooped up by bad actors’ bots before real fans can buy them. Items include hard-to-get sneakers, concert tickets, dining reservations, toys, and more.

🚪 A surprise closure: NeueHouse, a members-only club for creatives with locations in New York and the Los Angeles area, will shut down on Friday due to undisclosed "legacy liabilities" and file for bankruptcy. The clubs have hosted a variety of events, including for Hollywood studios and Big Tech, but Hollywood has been struggling as the pandemic, strikes, wildfires, and other issues have slowed production.

🚨 Maybe Minority Report was a documentary all along? Flock Safety’s CEO Garrett Langley told Forbes he believes his surveillance tech company could curb most US crime in the next decade, which is… quite a statement. His $7.5B business is actually off to a strong start, though: eight years in, Flock has 80k+ cameras keeping watch over roads and parking lots nationwide. And now they’re upping their dystopian pursuits, rolling out their own drones — with their cameras mounted on them, naturally. For now, Flock is mostly reading license plates and detecting gunshots. For now.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Fizz, a social media app for college students, is teaming up with Gopuff to offer grocery delivery. Fizz is active across 620+ US campuses, where students already use its marketplace to coordinate group food deliveries, so CEO Teddy Solomon told TechCrunch that the partnership is a “great fit.”
San Francisco’s Brownstone Shared Housing, which rents sleep pods for $700/month, is apparently gaining a foothold despite its spare accommodations (curtained-off, 4-foot-tall boxes shared with a few dozen people). Fresh off its first 30-pod hovel, its CEO is building another and setting a big new goal:10k new beds in downtown SF.
The beer biz is in decline… but not for the Kelce brothers. Garage Beer, the upstart beer brand from the football players-turned-pop culture figures, is on track to at least triple last year’s revenue, per WSJ, and is raising at a $200m valuation.

COPY THIS

20 tips for brilliant copy

For that Midas-like touch for telling stories, why not steal from a literal copywriting legend?

Here are 20 proper copywriting principles, plus five books that shaped The Hustle’s voice, written by our founder Sam Parr.

We figured you’ll want some time alone with this one, to soak up his knack for making magic, or to print it out and tape it to your cubicle, whatever.

Be a better writer

THE BIG IDEA

A young Black woman in a pink sweater and glasses looks at her phone in disbelief as money flies out.

Cringe is cool now (or effective, anyway)

Forget everything you know about marketing — the days of perfectly polished content and overly curated ads are over.

For brands looking to capture the fleeting attention of today’s audiences, being cringey is a winning strategy, and one that a growing number of founders are embracing to scale their companies, per Inc.

Fiber supplements brand BelliWelli took a risk with its cringey TikToks, including deeply uncomfortable celebrity interactions, and it paid off. The approach netted the brand 1B+ views and grew revenue 405% between 2023 and 2024.
Food brand Natural Heaven promoted the launch of its products at NYC’s Fairway Markets by sending two employees dressed as boxes of pasta and rice prancing down the store’s aisles.
Blueland — a sustainable cleaning company whose CEO regularly films herself pulling stunts like cleaning toilets at Costco (one of the brand’s retailers) — did $200m+ in sales last year, up 40% year over year.

Why it works

Audiences, particularly younger ones, are over perfection and tired of ads that read as ads, which can be boring or easily drowned out. Cringiness, in contrast, can be relatable, interesting, and can humanize a brand.

“What makes cringe work is that it feels authentic, self-aware and low-stakes… It doesn’t take itself too seriously,” according to communications expert Leeron Walter via Forbes. “In an online landscape flooded with sales pitches, the honest awkwardness is disarming.”

Plus:

Gen Z’s aversion to vulnerability and fear of embarrassment makes cringe content a captivating spectacle on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
With digital advertising costs rising, the lo-fi strategy offers a budget-friendly solution that any business can take advantage of, so long as they do it right.

How to do it

There’s no formula for crafting cringey viral success (which would make for more boring ads), but Walter suggests a few key things to keep in mind:

Be authentic: Adapt the form to fit your brand.
Be intentional: Cringe content often features elements like rough cuts and awkward timing to feel raw and unfiltered, but they’re still staged marketing stunts.

Lastly, know your audience, keep your message clear — and test small, or you might actually humiliate yourself.

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Old ideas, newly profitable: Turns out there are millions to be made leaning into some old-school businesses like print newspapers and milk delivery.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Number of billionaires in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal. This includes tech stars like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, biz moguls like Walmart’s Walton family and Warren Buffett, as well as celebrities like Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez.

Among them, they own 3k+ homes and other properties, and are worth ~$5.7T combined — enough to easily buy every residential property in Chicago.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford survived an assassination attempt. Lynette Fromme, a former Manson Family member, attempted to shoot him in California. Secret Service agents were able to tackle her before she fired.

🗞️ Newsletter: The AI Report sends AI insights, tools, and strategies daily. Subscribe here.

🎶 That’s interesting: Benjamin Franklin’s weird instrument that looks like a “glass kebob.”

📚 That’s cool: Bibliome is a decentralized platform for creating and sharing reading lists.

🐻 Aww: Friday mood.

QUOTE OF NOTE

I've seen two guys threaten to shoot each other online. Over a children's hobby!

A criminal infestation: Widespread government staffing cuts have heavily impacted the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and it’s given rise to ant smuggling, per Wired.

Antkeeping, a hobby popular among minors, has seen growing interest in recent years. And while this brand of criminal activity might seem relatively harmless, experts say the environmental and public health consequences could be severe — plus, the current free-for-all market, one smuggler told Wired, has triggered a more aggressive trade as sellers race to make as much money as they can, while they can.

SHOWER THOUGHT

I would like to give thanks to the brave men and women who died a long time ago tasting which plants were edible and which plants were not. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Ben "Unintentionally following the cringe trend" Berkley.

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