January 28, 2024 • 3 min read

with Matt Turner

Welcome back to our Sunday edition, a roundup of some of our top stories.

On the agenda today:

• Inside one founder’s “Shark Tank for athletes.”
• A $21 billion hedge fund is building the AI equivalent of a senior analyst.
• Workplace loyalty is dead.
• Jon Stewart is back (kind of).

But first: The latest status symbol for young Americans is … a 40-ounce water bottle?

Courtesy of Stanley

Dispatch

Collectible cup

Are you in on the Stanley Cup craze?

The 111-year-old drinkware brand was a social media phenomenon in 2023, finishing the year with a ubiquitous presence in “Christmas haul” TikToks posted by young women.

A Valentine’s Day special edition sold at Target was so popular that customers stood in line for hours earlier this month to grab one. It later emerged that some Target employees had been fired for buying the special-edition bottle.

Meanwhile, police are posting photos of recovered Stanley Cups as though they were weapons or packages of illegal substances.

It’s all slightly bizarre. At least America’s youngest generations are staying hydrated.

Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

Treating athletes like startups

In 2016, Michael Schwimer, a former pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, started Big League Advantage, a sort of venture fund that invests in the future of minor-league baseball players. In exchange for an up-front payment, young athletes sell a percentage of their future earnings to investors.

Schwimer has called the idea “Shark Tank for athletes.” Critics, on the other hand, have compared his business model to predatory loans — or even indentured servitude.

Take a look inside “Moneyball-plus.”

Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Save the grunt work for AI

Balyasny Asset Management is combining different artificial intelligence tools in the hopes of creating AI-based bots that can do the work of a senior analyst.

According to the hedge fund’s head of applied AI, the bots are designed to help teams work more efficiently — and the $21 billion fund is hoping to boost productivity and analyze data like never before.

See how it works.

Also read:

• Ken Griffin is on top of the hedge fund world. Read his memo to the Citadel team.

Kiersten Essenpreis for BI

Workplace loyalty is disappearing

In the decades after World War II, loyalty between companies and workers seemed unbreakable. Both agreed on a “psychological contract,” or the things employees and employers believed they owed each other and were owed in return.

With the onset of globalization, companies began to “treat people transactionally” a professor at  Carnegie Mellon University said. Incentives for employees to remain loyal have fallen by the wayside, and the psychological contract has been broken — sending employees in search of new jobs.

How we can fix the loyalty problem.

Brad Barket/Getty Images

Welcome back, Jon Stewart

Stewart, the longtime host of “The Daily Show,” is returning to the program as Trevor Noah’s replacement. But there’s a bit of a catch: He’ll be around in a limited capacity, only hosting on Mondays through the 2024 election.

When the gig kicks off in February, Stewart will also face some new challenges. The TV landscape has changed drastically since he left the show in 2015, and it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to woo the kind of audience that he used to.

Inside Stewart’s return to the screen.

Also read:

• Holy crap, look how small and old ‘The Daily Show’s’ audience has gotten
• Will Jon Stewart’s TV audience come back? Here’s why it may not matter.

This week’s quote

“I never think: ‘I did it.’ I think: ‘I’m doing it.’”

— Famed makeup entrepreneur Bobbi Brown on weathering the ever-changing beauty industry.

More of this weeks top reads

• Read the explosive resignation letter sent by the chairman of Sports Illustrated’s publisher.
• Some Amazon employees discuss unionizing over the company’s RTO mandate.
• Cheap rent is getting harder to find in the US.
• Six surprising things about living and working in Finland.
• Japan has millions of abandoned houses that people are renovating into dream homes.
• A market veteran says the US could be headed towards another “Roaring ‘20s.”
• Why this reporter regrets trying to roll over her 401(k).
• Three people diagnosed with colorectal cancer shared their first symptoms.