The Hustle

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Plus: A fascinating commode heist, a movie puzzle game, and more.

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March 21, 2025 5:32am EDT

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👋 Good morning. Hope you have a happy Friday, though it might be easier if you live in Finland. The country kept its No. 1 ranking for the eighth year in the row as the world’s happiest country, while the US came in at No. 24 — its lowest ranking yet.

💡 Don’t forget: Our pitch competition is open till April 4. Submit your 60-second pitch, win $5k, and get your Big Break.

NEWS FLASH

Boston Celtics banners hanging at Boston’s TD Garden

🏀 Wow: An investor group led by Bill Chisholm — managing partner at PE firm Symphony Technology Group — purchased 18-time NBA champs the Boston Celtics for $6.1B. That’s now the highest price ever paid for a sports franchise in North America, besting the $6.05B Josh Harris’ investor group paid for the NFL’s Washington Commanders in 2023. The Celtics last sold for $360m in 2002 to an investor group led by Wyc Grousbeck and Steve Pagliuca, reflecting a ~1.6k% increase in value.

🏢 RTO sucks, unless you’re a landlord. Sales of US office buildings amounted to $64.3B last year, up ~21% from 2023, according to commercial property research firm MSCI Real Assets. Leases are also up, with 6.5m more square feet leased than vacated in 2024, the highest since 2019, per a CBRE report. You can’t be any old landlord to be reaping rewards, though: New offices in high-cost markets — like New York, Silicon Valley, and Austin, Texas — saw an average asking rate of $65 per square foot, up 17% from the year prior.

🤖 Yikes: AI hallucinations have been a big issue with the tech, but this one’s a doozy. Privacy rights advocacy group Noyb is representing a Norwegian man who found that ChatGPT returned information claiming he’d been convicted of killing two of his sons and trying to kill a third. Per the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Europeans have the right to fix inaccurate personal data, and data collectors must ensure data they produce is correct. OpenAI usually only blocks responses to prompts that yield incorrect info, but could face fines or be forced to make changes if it’s determined it breached the GDPR.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

AI chips and queso: Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, is partnering with Nvidia to roll out AI-powered order-taking and restaurant performance assessments. The partnership is the chipmaker’s first with a restaurant chain.
The Cheesecake Factory is making some edits to its novel-length menu. The restaurant chain is cutting 13 of its 250+ menu items and replacing them with ~20 new food and drink options. The chain is doing something right: Its stock is up 35%+ over the last year.
Director Carl Erik Rinsch (47 Ronin) is facing charges of federal fraud and money laundering. Netflix gave him $11m to complete a sci-fi series. He failed to complete a single episode and instead allegedly spent the money on cars, crypto, and “luxury bedding.”

FEEDBACK FRENZY

Research 100+ reviews within minutes

Ten years back, it might’ve cost you entire afternoons to analyze hundreds of reviews and execute changes.

Today, the right AI-powered tools can help you deliver everything in minutes. Here’s a proven five-step system for using reams of customer feedback to improve your product and presence.

Feast on feedback

THE BIG IDEA

A search bar with dollar bills falling out.

What’s a good search engine worth to you?

If you Google the phrase “Is Google getting worse,” you get an AI Overviews answer saying that “many users and studies suggest that Google search results have declined in quality.”

So, how do you find a search engine that’s worth your time?

Try opening your wallet

Kagi, a relatively new Google competitor, has an interesting hook: You have to pay for it. According to The Verge:

Kagi offers “better search results, no ads, no data collection, and lots of advanced features.”
Kagi’s founder compares it to YouTube Premium: It does what you want, but without the ads.
Naturally, that costs money — at least $10/month.

Kagi is apparently just as good as Google used to be, but the selling point (literally) is the control you have over results.

You can limit searches to a curated list of trustworthy websites, block results from sites you don’t want to see, and customize Kagi’s look — essentially shaping the way you want the internet to function.

Ten dollars is a lot of money…

… for something that’s traditionally “free” (depending on how much you value your personal privacy), but there are several other Google alternatives with their own gimmicks.

Ecosia puts 100% of its profits toward green initiatives, like planting trees.
DuckDuckGo is a big name in privacy, making its money from regular ads that don’t track everything you do.
Bing is the RC Cola of search.
Yahoo is still around, if you prefer your searches to have the warm crackle of a vinyl record.

But are any of those better than Google? Is a good, private search worth $10?

Or do we owe it to our technocratic capitalist society to allow our data to be bought and sold?

🔗

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Value of a solid gold toilet stolen from England’s Blenheim Palace in 2019. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan created the fully operational toilet, called “America,” for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, where it was installed in a bathroom — yep, people actually used it — in 2016.

“America” spent but two days on display at the palace before five men broke in, ripped out the fixture, and escaped in a stolen Volkswagen Golf — all in five minutes flat.

Now, three of those men have been convicted with charges related to the heist, which you can read about from the perspective of Blenheim’s staff in this exclusive interview with the BBC.

AROUND THE WEB

📆 On this day: In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. began leading 3.2k activists on a march from Selma to Montogmery, Alabama, to advocate for voting rights for Black Americans in the South.

🏀 Opportunity: The GIST is a women-led, inclusive media brand leveling the playing field in sports. With the NCAA basketball tournaments just around the corner, it’s hosting free-to-enter bracket challenges.

🍿 Game: Guess the movie using a pixelated poster.

✏️ Useful: A simple offline notepad.

🦌 Aww: A small visitor.

QUOTE OF NOTE

"Instead of accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he often claims to be, he has sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds."

Them’s some litigious fighting words: Universal Music Group is requesting the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit filed by Drake over Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” — the chart-topper that effectively settled the rappers’ highly publicized feud last year, and which UMG said “clearly conveys nonactionable opinion and rhetorical hyperbole” — according to a new legal filing that reads a bit like a diss track itself. UMG, which represents both artists, has called out the Canadian artist’s claims as “illogical,” “frivolous,” and a desperate effort to deny the fact that he “lost a rap battle that he provoked.” Mic. Drop.

SHOWER THOUGHT

In the future, the Middle Ages will probably get renamed. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman, with help from Sam Barsanti, Singdhi Sokpo, and Kaylee Jenzen.
Editing by: Ben “Moving to Finland” Berkley.

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