👋 Good morning. If autocorrect is working overtime in your emails, don’t feel too embarrassed. Americans are still Googling how to spell words like “business,” “schedule,” and “because,” according to search data and research conducted by Unscramblerer.com. But different states have different struggles: In Georgia, the most misspelled word is “chihuahua,” while Nebraska is battling with “congratulations” and Connecticut needs some help spelling “recommend.” Over here, we’re still sounding out “Wed-nes-day.”
NEWS FLASH
🧹 On the house cleaning: Want your New York City apartment cleaned for free? German startup MicroAGI is offering complimentary cleanings to NYC residents through its Shift app, provided they allow cleaners to film the process. The cleaners wear head-mounted cameras that record their actions — generating training data for AI — and are paid about $20 an hour to do so.
🪦 RIP, Rec Room: Yesterday, Rec Room shut down. Once worth $3.5B, the social gaming platform founded in 2016 saw 150m players who created their own games and items for the platform’s virtual college campus. Yet it failed to become profitable, largely due to the fact that it took just 30 cents of each dollar earned from player-made content. Rec Room allowed players to export their data and avatars before shutting down. Similar platforms, including Meta’s Horizon Worlds and AltspaceVR, have also shut down, while VRChat has stated it’s “not going anywhere,” per GeekWire.
🍿 From YouTube to Hollywood: Two horror movies directed by YouTubers are crushing it at the box office: Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms. Obsession, which cost ~$750k to make, is even beating Disney’s $165m The Mandalorian and Grogu. In January, YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, also found success with his horror/sci-fi video game adaptation, Iron Lung.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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Preparing for launch: South Korean startup Unastella raised $24m to develop its own small satellite launch operation after launching its own rocket from South Korean soil last year.
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Vacation ruined: A United flight from Newark to Palma de Mallorca had to turn around because someone wouldn’t turn off their Bluetooth and named it “a certain four-letter word,” presumably “bomb.”
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Seeing red: Biotech startup Phytolon raised $23.6m to commercialize its natural food dyes in the US, where its “beetroot red,” produced by fermenting baker’s yeast, received FDA approval earlier this year.
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This is fine again: Artist KC Green said he’s reached a settlement with Artisan, the AI startup accused of using his famous “This is fine” meme in its ads without permission. Artisan has removed the ads, and Green deleted his post encouraging people to vandalize them.
BE LESS COMFORTABLE
Why being uncomfortable is key
When covid struck Jay Schwedelson’s marketing agency, he had:
- No newsletter
- No podcast
- No plan
- A hate for posting on socials
- And 1.2k connections on LinkedIn
To keep all his people on payroll, he needed more business — so he started that newsletter, stepped to the feeds, and found ways to humanize his brand.
As AI looms over our heads, Jay’s lessons live from INBOUND are as relevant as ever. Learn about unlocking growth in an age when the bots don’t stop.
THE BIG IDEA
A new wave of grief retreats
Though loss is universal, grief is often treated as a solitary journey. But it doesn’t have to be, and for a growing number of mourners, it isn’t.
Grief retreats are on the rise, bringing mourners together to heal in places more idyllic than your therapist’s office.
Sad-cationing with strangers
Grief getaways have been around for decades — Camp Hope has catered to grieving kids for 30+ years and Miraval Resorts in Tucson, Arizona, created one of the first adult-focused retreats back in 2005 — typically combining therapist-prescribed activities like meditation and journaling with more modern wellness rituals, like nature walks, yoga, and massages.
But a wave of new options have sprung up at wellness resorts from California to Jamaica, and infused a sort of “choose-your-own-adventure” element to the grieving process, with new-age offerings ranging from surf therapy to alternative medicine. For example:
- Behold Retreats hosts small-group ayahuasca retreats in Portugal, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The weekend-long trip includes one-on-one guidance and costs $3.5k.
- Tears of Amber & Gold in Sweden, from where the proverb “shared sorrow is half a sorrow” originates, involves a six-day grief ritual centered on Norse mythology and cold-water plunges.
- Malibu Dream Resort’s three-night “Healing with Horses” program combines equine therapy with somatic practices and therapist-led workshops.
Behind the trend
Demand for grief getaways — which is expected to push the global grief-counseling market from $2.73B in 2022 to $4.52B by 2029 — has grown steadily over the years, alongside other wellness-related travel trends, like burnout retreats and sleepcations, and bolstered by the loneliness epidemic.
- One-third of US adults are expected to be grieving a recent loss at any given time, and ~17% feel isolated from friends and family as a result, per a 2019 WebMD study.
- Processing grief without community, psychologist Thea Gallagher told Bloomberg, can exacerbate that sense of isolation.
Conversely, leaning on strangers for emotional support (as counterintuitive as it might seem) can alleviate some of the heaviness by turning loss into shared experience — even more so, perhaps, when that camaraderie comes with a serene landscape.
BTW: Loved ones aren’t the only losses people are grieving — group rituals and retreats for “climate grief” are also a thing.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
It’s not luck… it’s knowing where to look. Here’s how a college student hit $50k in seven weeks by building an app for a niche trend.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
How much the average Interviewing.io user who’s landed a job at Anthropic or OpenAI spends on interview prep. Steep, but for pay packages of $250k+ salaries plus equity grants at some of the world’s more valuable pre-IPO companies, “that calculus makes sense,” Interviewing.io CEO Aline Lerner told Bloomberg.
Anthropic, in particular, has emerged as one of the industry’s most desirable employers — not just for the high salaries it advertises, but also its prized company culture, which makes coaching all the more necessary. The AI startup (the only one explicitly working to “serve humanity’s long-term well-being”) has a notoriously difficult interview process, with a culture-fit portion that some say can feel more like a therapy session.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1966, Nasa’s Surveyor 1 soft-landed (i.e., didn’t crash) on the moon, becoming the first US probe to land on an extraterrestrial body.
🧠 That’s interesting: The secret to winning “Jeopardy” is to know one thing about everything.
✏️ Game: Guess the drawing.
👀 Huh: Here’s what one googolplex would look like if you wrote it out.
🐕 Aww: Tough decision.
SHOWER THOUGHT
The first quiet minute after guests leave is its own kind of event. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Good grief" Friedman.
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