Category: Business Insider

• "Bluey" fans are worried the series could end with its third-season finale on Sunday.
• The "Bluey" brand is worth an estimated $2 billion but faces some challenges going forward.
• The kids TV show ranked among the most-watched streaming series in America last year.

Fans of the children's TV sensation "Bluey" fear their favorite show will end with the third season's finale this Sunday. There's a lot of money at stake and if the series does continue, it faces challenges down the line.

Winning hearts

"Bluey" is an Australian preschool show that stars a family of Australian Cattle Dogs or "Blue Heelers": Bluey, her younger sister Bingo, and their parents, Bandit and Chilli.

The show has become wildly popular in the US. It ranked as the top children's show in the country last year, and the second-most streamed series after Suits, per Nielsen data.

It has taken off among viewers because it's funny, appeals widely, and tackles real issues that many families face. Episodes focus on how children learn about the world through play, and how parents can join in the fun and help their kids navigate challenges while also dealing with their own issues.

"Bluey is relatable to both parents and kids and uses humor and realistic situations in its storytelling," Yalda Uhls, the founder and CEO of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA, told Business Insider.

"Sesame Street is similar in that parents don't mind watching that with young children."

The show's creator and writer is Joe Brumm, a father of two young girls. It's produced by Ludo Studio, its distributors include the commercial arm of Britain's BBC, and it's available on Disney Plus.

The latest episode centered on Bandit preparing Bluey and Bingo to move home, and concluded with the appearance of a foreboding "For Sale" sign on the lawn of their family home.

This weekend's season finale is titled "The Sign" and will be 28 minutes long, dwarfing the usual 7-minute episode length. The special's unusual size, game-changing subject matter, and the fact that a fourth season is yet to be announced have fueled concerns that this might be the show's end.

Making money and growing up

That's a big deal, not just for fans but also the business of "Bluey." One valuation expert told Bloomberg that the brand is worth an estimated $2 billion. Another source claimed Disney had explored acquiring the property.

Those behind "Bluey" have leveraged its immense popularity by licensing its characters. There's now endless amounts of merchandise — this father of a toddler already owns "Bluey" books and toys and has been eyeing a "Bluey"-themed doctor play set — if only he could trust the family dog not to chew the stethoscope.

If "Bluey" ceases playing on screens, a lot of money might be left on the table. Consider how Disney monetizes smash hits like "Frozen" by releasing sequels and spin-off TV shows, and by featuring characters like Elsa and Olaf across toys, books, clothing, video games, theme parks, cruises, and resorts.

But if "Bluey" lives on — which it almost certainly will in some form, given its huge popularity and relative youth as a franchise — it will have other hurdles to jump.

Capturing fresh viewers as existing ones move on is likely to be a big one.

"As with any show related to kids, the audience will grow up, and if it doesn't create storylines that hold the attention of a new audience, it may lose viewership," Uhls said.

The show's reliance on Brumm could also make it tricky to scale, and limit how much a buyer will pay for it. Too much success, too fast, might cause the show to lose its way too.

Whether Sunday's episode is a goodbye for now or a permanent send-off for "Bluey," it'll be interesting to see what happens next.

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• Google DeepMind launched a prototype AI soccer tactics tool last month.
• TacticAI suggests strategies for corner kicks, based on an analysis of over 7,000 set pieces.
• DeepMind developed the tool with Liverpool FC, known for its data-driven approach to soccer.

Google DeepMind is bidding to bring artificial intelligence (AI) into soccer by launching a new tool to help coaches make better tactical decisions.

The London-based lab unveiled a prototype of TacticAI in March, which it developed as part of a three-year collaboration with English Premier League soccer club Liverpool FC.

DeepMind researchers published their findings in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Soccer experts involved in the project believe that the AI system, trained on a dataset of more than 7,000 corner kicks from EPL matches, is already better than humans at designing plans for attacking and defending these set pieces.

"What's most exciting about [soccer] for me is that it's a game that lies in between art and science," Zhe Wang, one of Google DeepMind's leads on the TacticAI project, told Business Insider. "There's lots of randomness in a game, but we can still use data to make better decisions."

Corner kicks

Some of the most iconic goals in soccer's recent history have come from corners. 

Former Ivory Coast star Didier Drogba memorably headed in a last-gasp equalizer for Chelsea in the 2012 Champions League Final from a corner, while Liverpool fans voted Divock Origi's strike from a "corner taken quickly," which knocked FC Barcelona out of the same competition in 2019, as the greatest goal in the club's history.

Petar Veličković, a coauthor on the DeepMind project, told BI that it made sense to train TacticAI on data taken from corners because they tend to lead to more structured passages of play.

Soccer is "super unpredictable," he said. "You can never really predict exactly what's going to happen. But what you can do is notice patterns in tactics. Corners are really good for that because they're rigid, frequent, and lead to goalscoring opportunities."

TacticAI can make suggestions to coaches about players' optimal positioning when attacking and defending corners, potentially giving their teams the sorts of marginal gains that tend to make big differences in competitive sports.

Liverpool link-up

DeepMind developed TacticAI with Liverpool, which has won plaudits from legendary "Moneyball" baseball executive Billy Beane.

Since being taken over by Boston Red Sox owners Fenway Sports Group in 2010, the club has hired several people whose CVs you wouldn't typically find in an EPL boardroom — including Ian Graham, who holds a doctorate in physics from Cambridge and who headed up Liverpool's research department until 2023.

Having that knowledge on hand helped the collaboration between DeepMind and Liverpool to run smoothly, according to Veličković.

"For the past 10 years or so, Liverpool have had people on their team with Ph.D.s from Cambridge and Harvard — these are people who are very engineering, data, and research-minded, and they've worked on using statistical analysis for a long time," he said. "So there was already a good, solid foundation we could build on with deep learning."

Liverpool's experts helped DeepMind to judge whether TacticAI's corner routines were effective, while the two organizations have also teamed up to produce a broader study about AI's role in soccer and a system for predicting players' off-camera movements in recent years.

AI and soccer

The release of TacticAI marks the end of that collaboration between DeepMind and Liverpool — but the researchers believe that executives at top-level clubs have only just started to realize that AI could play a transformative role in soccer.

Like corners, other set-piece events, including free-kicks, throw-ins, and penalties, offer up the sort of structured data that AI tends to thrive on and could be the next area that researchers in the field look into, they said.

Some purists worry that technological interventions like these might one day take some of the joy out of the so-called "Beautiful Game" — but the researchers emphasized that they've tried to create a tool that'll make coaches' lives easier rather than put them out of a job.

"We're not trying to replace human coaches. Instead, we want to help them make faster and better decisions to help them see patterns and find possible improvements through AI," Wang said.

"Ultimately, it'll still be the coaches who make the decisions," he added. "This is just a tool to help them make those decisions more comprehensively."

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• I get health insurance through my employer, but have still received large medical bills.
• I've learned a few ways to reduce charges, like checking a prescription against the bill.
• I also stayed on top of my insurance company for reimbursements. 

I became an accidental expert at investigating medical bills — and getting them reduced — during a few years of doctor's visits for a chronic condition. I get health insurance through my employer, but I was still being asked to pay dozens of large charges myself. Luckily, by doing three things, I didn't have to pay over $4,000 that I was going to be billed for.

Check the order from your physician against the services you were billed for

I recently received a $699 bill for a scan I hadn't been prescribed and didn't know I was receiving.

My doctor referred me to go for imaging, and to avoid any unwanted charges, I called my insurance ahead of time to make sure that the prescribed scan would be covered. They confirmed that the scan listed on the referral would be fully covered, and that the coverage would kick in before I met my deductible (which was great since it had just reset for the year).

Sure enough, my insurance portal showed that I owed $0 for the prescribed scan, but I was also being charged for a mysterious second service I didn't recognize. I called the provider, thinking I must have been charged by accident, but they informed me that the other test was a complementary study they always performed alongside the one I'd gone in for. The test took place simultaneously in the same machine, so I had no idea I was receiving it.

A look back at my doctor's referral confirmed that she'd only ordered one scan, so I decided to dispute the bill: I'd scheduled one service, submitted the proper referral for it, and confirmed coverage with my insurance.

Since I had that referral as proof of my doctor's order, the provider acknowledged the discrepancy, and the charge was reduced to zero.

Tip: Trying to compare referrals, bills, and insurance claims can be confusing when they all name services differently, so be sure to check the "CPT" billing code for each service.

Check whether you're being reimbursed properly by your insurance company

By staying on top of my insurance provider, I received $3,151.55 in reimbursement checks that likely never would have been paid if I hadn't followed up.

I was seeing a specialist who didn't accept insurance, but my policy allowed me to self-pay and submit claims for reimbursement. While I submitted the claims every month, I received reimbursement checks sporadically, covering anywhere from a few visits to several months of treatment. Plus, I had to keep emailing about the same unpaid claims until they were resolved, so my online insurance portal was full of duplicate claims and out-of-date information.

The key was to stay organized. I documented every claim I submitted, held on to all of the mail I received from the insurance company, and emailed when payments were missing. A handful of checks were paid without me having to follow up on them, but I'm glad I kept track of everything because I discovered thousands of dollars in payments that were accidentally mailed to the provider (who I'd already paid) instead of to me. It took three months of calls and emails to get them re-issued and sent to me.

Tip: To figure out which services have been reimbursed, pay attention to not only when you receive the checks, but the dates of service listed on your explanation of benefits. While I received some timely reimbursements, one January claim wasn't paid until July.

Confirm that your physician correctly billed your insurance

Before you pay a medical bill, make sure to confirm whether your insurance company was billed properly, even if you think your provider has all of your correct information.

I recently received a $455 bill for a routine physical. I'd found the doctor through my insurance portal and confirmed my insurance information with them before the visit, so I knew I was covered. When I called the billing department, they had the wrong insurance information on file. They'd sent the bill straight to me instead of submitting it to my insurance company.

Once I gave them my correct information, they processed the bill through insurance, and I was fully covered.

My final tip: Don't assume you're responsible for a payment just because you received a bill.

My initial reaction to large medical bills has often been embarrassment, thinking I must not have selected a good insurance policy or properly confirmed that my doctors or services were covered. I've had the urge to just pay a bill immediately, even if it seemed outrageous, so I could get it over with. However, by staying calm and asking questions, I've saved myself thousands of dollars.

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• Lonita Jensen, a retired nurse, said she moved to Ecuador because of high prices in the US.
• Jensen said her apartment in Ecuador would cost three times as much in her home state of Montana.
• Montana is among the western states where high housing costs are pricing out some locals.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with 71-year-old Lonita Jensen, a retired nurse who is from Montana but currently living in Ecuador. Business Insider has verified the rental prices. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I grew up in Billings, Montana. I was born and raised there. I never left Montana until I was in my thirties. I went to college in Bozeman.

My husband was in construction, and we ended up moving a lot when I was in my thirties. So I've lived in other places, but I keep coming back to Montana. But then the last time I tried to come back, the prices had just gone up so high.

I was a nurse, but I retired to become the nanny for my grandson in Dallas. I did that for three years, and then I couldn't survive down there. It was so expensive. So I checked Montana because my daughter lives there, and that wasn't going to work either because the rents were so high.

My sister had come down to Ecuador and she said, "Well, you can afford to live down here." So that's why I ended up here about four years ago.

I'm in a city called Cuenca at the base of the Andes. My kids all want me to come home to the US. I have six grandchildren and one great-granddaughter, and I would love to go back, but they all live in a place that I can't afford — Billings, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and Dallas.

It is really sad. I'd like to be by my grandkids and my kids, and it's just not possible. 

Ecuador is beautiful and a lot cheaper

I would move back to Billings if I could. It's only 60 miles from Red Lodge, which is one of the entrances up over the Beartooth Highway into Yellowstone.

In Cuenca, I pay $750 for three bedrooms, three and a half baths, and a private patio. Something Similar to this in Billings would be about $2,400 a month.

The climate is beautiful in Cuenca. It stays pretty much the same year round and we don't get snow, but I grew up in snow, so it's not like I can't handle it. 

People are very nice here. Fresh fruits and fresh vegetables are very cheap here. There's affordable healthcare here.

My sister was living here when I moved, so I met people through her. But if she wouldn't have been here, it would've been a whole lot scarier.

There's quite an expat community here and a lot of single women. Maybe they've had a loss of a spouse, which I have had, or they just didn't make as much money in the workforce, so they didn't have the resources to stay in the states because things have gotten so expensive. 

There's men here too. Most of them have pretty much the same story. They can't afford to live in the states anymore. 

Pretty places are getting too expensive to live

I tell my kids I couldn't come back to Montana or to Colorado or any of those places without going back to work full time. All I have is social security, and I'm almost 72. I can't bend over like I did for surgeries for hours on end like I used to.

The thing I miss most about Montana is the outdoors. The kids are all involved in sports and camping and fishing, and I grew up doing outdoor stuff all the time, camping and going to Yellowstone Park or Emerald Lake.

When I visit Colorado or Montana we always go fishing because I really miss being able to do that. We would catch fish all summer long and freeze them for the winter time, and people were always so friendly and so welcoming.

Ecuador is not home. It's my home for now. Who knows. We're never guaranteed of a tomorrow. My daughter-in-law says, "We're going to bring you home at some point." But I don't want to be a burden to my kids. They have their own kids and then my great granddaughter.

I love Montana. It will always be home. But any place that's pretty now is so expensive you can't live there.

I feel bad for the people that were born and raised in all these different places, even little towns in Montana or in Colorado. They've lived there their whole lives, and now everything has gotten so expensive.

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• Indeed's Nick Bunker said we're settling into a time of "a more boring labor market."
• Business Insider looked at how components of the labor market have settled down, like wage growth.
• Bunker said "Job seekers still have some bargaining power," but he added, "more employees are staying put."

If you just recently entered the labor force, you may be curious what happened to the sky-high job openings, the massive number of people quitting during the Great Resignation, and hot wage growth.

Well, the labor market is looking more like the healthy but boring era of 2018 or 2019, Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told Business Insider. That's opposed to the wild swings we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bunker said we're seeing less drama in jobs data.

"That's a good thing in my view," Bunker said, given "an incredibly dramatic" few years.

Job growth is still doing great though; the US just added 303,000 jobs in March, although that's a slower pace than during the height of the pandemic recovery.

Wage growth has slowed. The share of Americans working or looking for work has held mostly steady since spring 2023. Job openings have also dropped — and have been at a rate of 5.3% for three straight months. The number of layoffs and discharges have been low.

And that more boring but steady labor market could be great news for workers and job seekers. Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter's chief economist, told Business Insider the minimal changes are great amid a labor market that's resilient, stable, and robust.

"Everything is holding on better than most people had predicted," Pollak said.

Pollak pointed to employment strength in construction and manufacturing. Construction employment for March was 7.8% higher than the pre-pandemic level in February 2020. Manufacturing employment was 1.4% higher, and its employment was unchanged from this past February to this past March.

The long-feared recession following the wild swings of the early pandemic years has yet to emerge and may not even be on the horizon. "I think stability at a time of high interest rates and restrictive monetary policy expected to lead to losses and declines is something to be celebrated," Pollak said. "And, most of the small changes lately have been in the right direction."

The US could be in a Goldilocks job market. The four charts below show what that looks like.

Job quitting

People looking for a new job have bargaining power, but workers are more likely to stick around their current gigs.

"Job seekers still have some bargaining power but are less willing to demonstrate that power by leaving their jobs," Bunker said. "With fewer new job opportunities and less of a pay bump for switching roles, more employees are staying put. However, layoff rates are still low, so workers have robust job security compared to pre-pandemic levels."

Newly released data for February showed the US quits rate had been 2.2% for four straight months. This rate has cooled down from 3.0% in April 2022. There were 3.5 million quits in February, which the BLS news release noted this metric "was little changed."

Wage growth

Average hourly earnings increased 4.1% from March 2023 to this past March, lower than the year-over-year increase of around 6% in March 2022.

Despite that slowdown, wages have recently been growing faster than prices, meaning workers have more buying power.

"That means real money in the pockets of working families," Julie Su, acting secretary of labor, told Business Insider. "It's exactly what we'd want to see."

Inflation in March, as measured by the year-over-year percent change in the Consumer Price Index, ticked up a little last month, but remains less of a problem than last year. It climbed 3.5% from March 2023 to March 2024, compared to a 3.2% increase from February 2023 to February 2024.

Given moderating wage growth, the Fed could be more inclined to lower interest rates later this year. Pollak said the cooler wage growth is "good news for a Fed that's still battling inflation."

Job switchers are seeing higher wage growth than people staying, according to the 12-month moving average of median wage growth from the Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker. Wage growth has slowed, though, for both job switchers and stayers.

"Nominal wage growth may have slowed, but real wage growth — which is what really matters for workers' purchasing power — remains positive and high," Pollak told BI. "Job switchers and current workers are still experiencing solid real wage growth and have clearly retained much of the leverage gained during the pandemic. They are getting recruited, negotiating their job offers, and are receiving counteroffers from old employer's intent on retaining them at historically high rates."

Unemployment insurance claims

Initial claims for unemployment insurance can be a helpful layoff metric, spiking when lots of people lose their jobs. Right now, the boringly low rate of those initial applications for benefits suggests that any kind of large-scale layoffs still have yet to emerge.

Initial claims decreased from the week ending March 30 to the week ending April 6. In general, initial claims have been low so far this year compared to the high level of weekly claims during the pandemic.

"Although there is plenty of speculation that employment has slowed down, recent numbers, including job openings as well as initial jobless claims, continue to indicate that the US labor market has remained stable," Eugenio Alemán, Raymond James' chief economist, said in a note earlier this month.

Unemployment

Back in January 2021 the unemployment rate was 6.4% after spiking into the double digits during the pandemic shutdowns in spring 2020. It has cooled down to 3.8% this past March, just above the historically low rates seen through most of the last two years.

Additionally, the number of people who went from being employed to unemployed has not seen too dramatic of a change; this number was around 1.5 million for each of the past few months.

So what will happen to the Goldilocks job market?

"It would be nice to live in a world where we have low unemployment and there's steady, consistent gains in wage growth and more people coming into the labor market," Bunker said. "So hopefully, fingers crossed, dramatic days are behind us and we can see some strong gains for workers, for job seekers. But, not in the way that feels discombobulated."

While openings, wage growth, and the hires rate have cooled, the overall labor market can be described as more Goldilocks-like, or not too hot and not too cold.

"It's a labor market that has strength, and there's a path ahead of it where it can continue to grow in a sustainable manner," Bunker said.

Juliana Kaplan contributed reporting.

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• When Taylor Swift wears a brand's clothing, the seller can see a surge in interest from fans.
• A fashion reporter said Swift's mixing of designer and affordable items boosted her relatability.
• Swift's fashion choices provide a boom but also pose challenges for small businesses.

A few months ago I was on Instagram getting ready to buy a dress.

That's a not-infrequent occurrence for many shoppers — but this dress was special: Taylor Swift had just worn it, and the exact brand was shared on Instagram.

It was a $75 velvet mini skater dress from Little Lies, a small business in Scotland. I could afford that, unlike many of the higher-end designer pieces she wears, so I pressed purchase.

On the other side of the ocean, Little Lies' cofounder Jade Robertson had received my order — and her phone wouldn't stop ringing. She had woken up to messages from a product-team member whose brother is a huge Swiftie. He'd been doing his morning scroll of X when he spotted the dress on the pop star.

"My first thought was, shit, have we accidentally copied a brand that we didn't know about? Because obviously the dress looked like mine, but I was like, it can't be mine," Robertson told Business Insider. But her team was able to trace an order that had gone to New York City and realized that it had, in fact, been welcomed by Swift. That was a shock to Robertson and her team.

"It wasn't as though we'd gifted it to a stylist or gifted it to her. It was just that it was an order," Robertson said. "And here she was out with Blake Lively for dinner in one of our dresses."

Little Lies, a boutique turned brand launched in 2015, was experiencing the Swift bump. Swift's wearing one of your pieces is more than just a celebrity cameo — it's a bona fide business boom. It can be a huge opportunity for businesses, but it also needs to be navigated carefully. An influx of orders can be a double-edged sword for some businesses as they wrestle with how much more inventory and staff they need to add to accommodate the surge.

When Swift wore the Little Lies dress, the business hit its month's sales target in a day.

Why fans want to wear what Taylor Swift wears — and what happens when the orders start rolling in

For as long as there have been celebrities, people have been trying to dress like them. While dressing like certain famous people may be more aspirational — not everyone can afford custom couture — Swift's marketing prowess extends to the clothes she wears.

Sarah Chapelle, a fashion reporter who created the fashion blog and Instagram account Taylor Swift Style, described one of Swift's style pillars as mixing "high low" pieces, or wearing designer items alongside pieces from more-accessible retailers.

"This kind of approach really underlines her approachable, relatable image," Chapelle said.

Chappelle said she thinks this style is what Swift gravitates toward. It has the added bonus of "creating an entry point for her fans to further be able to relate to her and to buy into a piece of her — to really foster that fan connection relationship of being able to emulate something that she likes aesthetically and having a piece of that in your own real life," she said.

Reps for Swift didn't return a request for comment from Business Insider.

For brands like Little Lies, a surprise Swift appearance is a test of resources. Robertson said her business had to stop preorders of the velvet dress after 48 hours. If orders had continued, the business could have sold triple or quadruple what it did — but if all that stock came in and people returned it, that could have put Little Lies out of business, she said.

"Overnight success is actually a challenge, and it's something that's very difficult to navigate," Robertson said, adding that halting the preorders meant the business didn't have to hire more people or bring on other manufacturers.

Little Lies, unlike other affordable brands Swift frequently wears, offers more-extended sizing. Robertson said that got the business a lot of love and more customers who were able to actually wear its clothes.

Kat Cacho has been working on her side hustle, selling vintage clothing and handmade accessories through her business Kut the Knit, since 2018. Swifties may have seen her knit Kansas City Chiefs beanie on Swift's head at Gillette Stadium on December 17.

Cacho included the crocheted hat in an order she was packaging for Swift from Kansas City's Westside Storey, where Cacho works as a social-media manager. Cacho was checking social media the day of the Chiefs-Patriots game when she spotted a video of Swift getting out of the car donning what looked like her beanie.

"I posted on my Instagram out of excitement and was flooded with messages and orders," Cacho told BI in an email. "My phone was buzzing nonstop to the point where it would just freeze and stop working."

The 30 beanies Cacho initially had in stock sold out within a few minutes. She added 20 more, and then those sold out. Ultimately she capped it at 200 orders until she could figure out a system to get all the hats made — or to determine whether she even had the capacity to make them. She sold her first 200 hats for $30 apiece; when she restocked with 100 more hats on Christmas, she priced them at $60.

"That allowed me to pay whoever was helping me a fair wage, which is something that is extremely important to me," she said. "Now I have a team of eight amazing crocheters helping me get these orders out as quickly as possible."

Gaining legitimacy and long-tail business opportunities

Wove Made, a jewelry company founded in 2021, is the brand behind Swift's delicate "TNT" bracelet she wore at a Chiefs game on January 28.

Wove Made began as a custom-engagement-ring company and over the past year and a half has expanded into fine jewelry and diamonds, said Susan Bali, the brand's head of marketing.

Wove has its own collection with the golf star Michelle Wie West, a friend of Travis Kelce, Swift's boyfriend. Bali said he heard about the pieces and requested his own TNT bracelet to give Swift. Bali added that a few weeks later Kelce returned and said he'd love one for himself. Wove made a bigger size and sent it over.

"It was kind of thrown into the ether, and we're like, let's hope they wear it," Bali said.

And they did: Swift wore it in the photo of her hugging Kelce after the Chiefs won the game that sent them to the Super Bowl. "We had a 5,000% increase in site traffic in that week, 2,000% increase in sales right away," Bali said.

Bali said the brand generally didn't hold a lot of inventory and instead usually made things on the spot in an effort to be leaner. Going into the Swift boom, its philosophy was to launch a lower-price-point "Lover"-themed bracelet that costs $550. (The TNT bracelet is $6,360.) Bali said that since the boom, the brand had been communicating a lot with customers and clients.

"Everyone is working on all cylinders," she said, adding, "We send out updates if our shop is a bit backed up because people are making these things by hand."

Bali said the Swift boom had given Wove legitimacy it didn't have before. It's had inquiries about new partnerships and has more celebrity collaborations coming up in the next year.

While sales at Little Lies and Kut the Knit have slowed to more-regular levels, their products are just now reaching the customers who participated in the initial boom: Kut the Knit's final round of beanies from its first 200 orders just shipped out, while Little Lies has been shipping out presale orders. After months of patiently waiting, I am now the proud owner of Swift's green velvet dress.

Cacho said she's already preparing for next year in hopes that the hat business will pick back up again come colder weather and the start of the Chiefs' season. Meanwhile, Robertson is waiting for perhaps another Swift boom: The night Swift wore the Little Lies dress, she ordered a "whole bunch of other stuff," Robertson said. Robertson wonders if Swift might wear those pieces when she arrives in Scotland for the Eras Tour in June.

Many of those pieces are sold out and no longer on the site, but Robertson is hopeful that Swift's wearing something could bolster its new collection, dropping this month.

"We kind of know what our narrative would be and how it went the first time and what worked and what didn't," Robertson said. "So at least we have that up our sleeve now."

Have you bought something Taylor Swift wore or experienced the Swift bump at your business? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@businessinsider.com.

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• Some people are making six-figure incomes by secretly working multiple remote jobs.
• But some critics aren't sure job juggling is ethical since remote roles are in high demand.
• Six people who've benefited from "overemployment" described why they don't feel guilty.

If you could double your income by secretly working multiple remote jobs, would you do it?

What if it required keeping a secret from your bosses and coworkers? What if you landed a second job over someone who was looking for their first?

Would you feel bad?

"Overemployed" workers have a resounding answer: No.

Over the past year, Business Insider has spoken with more than 10 job jugglers who used their six-figure earnings to pay off debt, plan for an early retirement, and afford expensive vacations and weight-loss drugs. But not everyone is a fan of the overemployed.

Some critics have questioned the ethics of job juggling, arguing that employees shouldn't be doing work for one company when they're being paid by another. While some employers may be OK with their workers taking on another role, doing so without approval could be a fireable offense if a worker is caught.

There's also the question of what it means for someone to be taking a second remote job when the market for these roles is so competitive.

The share of US remote job postings on LinkedIn fell from over 20% in April 2022 to about 10% in December 2023. LinkedIn said that despite the decline, remote roles accounted for 46% of all applications in December.

Remote jobs have grown particularly competitive in the tech industry, a common field for overemployed workers. In 2023, tech companies including Amazon, Meta, and Google laid off close to 263,000 employees, according to Layoffs.fyi. Roughly 50,000 tech workers have been laid off since the start of this year.

Business Insider asked six current and former overemployed workers whether they felt guilty about their job juggling. They shared their experiences via email on the condition that pseudonyms would be used, for fear of professional repercussions. BI has verified their identities and earnings.

If companies can lay off workers on a whim, workers should be able to seek out extra job security

Joseph, a Gen X network engineer, told Business Insider he earned $344,000 in 2022 secretly working three remote jobs. He said the extra income allowed him to pay off the remaining $129,000 on his mortgage.

At first, Joseph said, his wife was not a fan of his job juggling because she thought he was taking a job away from someone who needed one. But last year, he said, they both learned the value of having multiple gigs.

Joseph was laid off from two of his jobs — he said that it wasn't for performance reasons and that his job juggling was never exposed. If he hadn't had three jobs, he could have been left with no job at all.

This made it hard for him to feel very guilty about being overemployed. "It's huge that I still have this third job," he said.

Joseph isn't the only overemployed worker who values job security.

Robert, a Gen Xer living in Florida, told Business Insider he earned roughly $335,000 last year juggling multiple jobs — he said the extra income helped him pay for a roughly $20,000 cruise.

Given that layoffs across the tech industry have left some workers scrambling to find new roles, Robert said no one should be blamed for trying to protect themselves.

"If companies can so easily cut you off like many have these days, then shouldn't you have the ability to be resilient and resistant to layoffs and cuts in protecting the best interests of your family?" he said.

If CEOs can work for multiple businesses, employees should be able to as well

John, a millennial IT professional in California, told Business Insider he was on track to earn over $300,000 last year across two remote jobs.

He said that he'd saved roughly $150,000 since he started job juggling in 2021 and that he spent roughly $9,000 on a three-week honeymoon across Asia last year.

John said he didn't feel guilty about having multiple jobs because he wasn't violating any labor laws or employment contracts, adding that his company was happy with the work he was doing.

He also thinks there's a double standard in the corporate world.

He said it's not uncommon for CEOs like Elon Musk, for instance, to juggle roles with multiple companies, whether as an executive or part of a board.

"No one ever thinks that's wrong," John said. "I'm the same. I am the CEO of my own labor, and I choose to spend my labor on multiple projects."

William, a Texas-based tech worker in his 30s who told Business Insider he earned over $500,000 in 2022 secretly working multiple remote roles, agreed with this line of thinking.

"I knew plenty of high-level executives that also had consulting business or other ventures as well," he said.

While there has been some pushback against CEO job juggling, the practice is still generally accepted in the corporate world. People with the money and resources of Musk, for example, may find it easier to multitask than the typical white-collar worker.

If you do your job well and efficiently, you should be able to have other jobs on the side

Steven, a UK-based project manager in his mid-20s, told Business Insider he was earning roughly $90,000 a year secretly working two full-time hybrid project-manager jobs.

He said overemployment was the only way he could start paying down his debt. As of late last year, he had roughly $30,000 worth of credit-card debt and $50,000 in various loans.

Steven said he didn't feel guilty about job juggling because he was still able to complete all the duties and tasks assigned to him. He argued that if an employee can get their work done with plenty of time to spare, they should be able to pursue other job opportunities.

"What if an employee supposedly working a 40-hour week, for example, only has actually 20 hours of work to do?" he said. "What would they do then? Sit in front of the computer waiting for something or wasting time on their phone or emails? Is that better in any way than my choosing to fit a second job in and get some benefit out of all this otherwise dead free time?"

Other job jugglers described similar sentiments.

"In a salaried position, you are paid based on objectives, not by time," William said. "Based on that, there is not a situation of double billing, and overemployment is not too different than picking up the extra slack from another coworker."

Perhaps counterintuitively, workers having extra jobs could actually benefit some companies, said Justin, a Gen Xer who told Business Insider he earned over $300,000 in 2022 secretly working three full-time remote IT-engineer jobs.

Justin said he didn't feel guilty about job juggling because he was a top performer in all his roles — and having multiple jobs gave him experience that added value to all his employers.

"Having the 'same job times three' helps me increase knowledge to be a better worker everywhere," he said.

Are you working multiple remote jobs at the same time and willing to provide details about your pay and schedule? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@businessinsider.com.

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• Pro-Russian separatist soldiers appear to have attacked Ukrainian positions on motorcycles.
• A Russian-backed battalion from the breakaway Luhansk People's Republic posted the video.
• Russian forces have had to explore increasingly inventive ways to outwit Ukrainian drone strikes.

Pro-Russian soldiers with a separatist militia have released footage on social media appearing to show them attacking Ukrainian positions on fast motorcycles.

The maneuver appears to have been conducted by militia forces from the Zarya Battalion in the Luhansk region. It highlights Russian forces' adaptation to the continued challenges and threats posed by Ukrainian first-person view (FPV) attack drones.

In the video, several troops can be seen on motorbikes riding over rough, cross-country terrain. According to the post, the Russian assault was successful.

Business Insider was unable to verify the location or time of the footage independently.

Using motorcycles, which have no protection for the riders, can be highly risky. In an incident toward the end of last year, motorbike-riding Russian air defense troops in Krynky in Ukraine's Kherson region were chased down and killed (the video of the strike includes graphic images) by an explosives-laden Ukrainian first-person-view drone.

However, pro-Kremlin Russian military reporter Alexander Sladkov wrote on Telegram that this latest motorcycle display would make the bike "the most popular form of transportation" for the Russian Armed Forces on the front lines in the coming months.

More generally, this video follows a broader attempt by Russian forces to counteract the increased use of drones by Ukrainian soldiers, increasing speed and movement to make it more difficult for Ukrainian drones to target them, according to online defense magazine Army Recognition.

Now in the third year of full-scale Russian invasion, FPV drones have become ubiquitous on the battlefield. Many of these drones are capable of carrying several pounds of explosives.

Russian forces have had to find increasingly inventive ways of avoiding strikes while also carrying out assaults on Ukrainian positions.

In March, videos shared on social media appeared to show Russia using open-top golf cart-style vehicles near the frontline in Ukraine.

One video appeared to show a Russian armored column, which included several Desertcross 1000-3 all-terrain vehicles, attacking Ukrainian positions in Donetsk Oblast, Forbes reported.

The vehicles were being used to transport infantry to the frontline, per Forbes, and the video shows them being struck by shells and explosives dropped from drones.

The video ends with shots of the open-top vehicles lying wrecked in the mud.

Before this, Russian troops were seen using quad bikes to attack Ukrainian positions, reports said.

Ukrainian soldiers on the front line near the village of Robotyne told CNN that Russian troops were using the four-wheeled vehicles to attack Ukrainian positions at night, typically with three or four soldiers on each bike.

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• An office building in St. Louis sold for $3.6 million after selling for $205 million 18 years prior.
• Downtown St. Louis is filled with unoccupied buildings and an unwillingness to visit them.
• St. Louis' recent office vacancy rate is at a record high 22.3% according to JLL.

A vacant office building in downtown St. Louis just sold for $3.6 million — a nearly 98% discount from its 2006 sales price, signaling a concerning course for the Midwestern city's downtown area.

The former One AT&T Center, which at 44 stories is the third-tallest building in St. Louis, sold for $205 million in 2006 and recently sold for $3.6 million to the Goldman Group, a real-estate investment firm, according to CoStar News.

The steep drop in the tower's value is just one sign that St. Louis' central business district is struggling, reports say. The challenges facing it and other Midwestern hubs are perhaps graver than bigger downtowns that have been more widely depicted as abandoned or dying, like San Francisco's, according to economics and public-policy experts.

According to an April 10 report from commercial-real-estate brokerage JLL, total office vacancy in St. Louis reached a record-high 22.3% during the first quarter of 2024.

The AT&T tower has been empty since 2017, according to CoStar. Another downtown building, the 21-story Railway Exchange Building, is similarly abandoned after housing a once-thriving local department store, according to the Unseen St. Louis blog.

Indeed, St. Louis' downtown resembles a ghost town with a number of boarded-up buildings, according to The Wall Street Journal's Konrad Putzier.

Local businesses, including restaurants and shops, that have shuttered due to a lack of foot traffic thanks to a rise in remote work have spawned a vicious cycle, the Journal found.

"It's a classic chicken and egg kind of deal," Glenn MacDonald, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School, told the Journal. "People don't go there because there's nothing to do. There's nothing to do because people don't go there."

The cycle is often called the "urban doom loop," which the Atlantic describes as the cycle of people moving away from city as things get worse, then things getting worse because more people moved away.

Business Insider's Eliza Relman described the doom loop afflicting Midwestern cities: "Commercial property taxes make up a large chunk of many city budgets, so as office vacancies rise, the decreased revenue could force leaders to curtail municipal services or make cuts to key programs. Declining services and quality of life in turn pushes residents out, leading to a self-reinforcing exodus. Without serious changes, these midsize cities in the middle of the country could be quietly sliding into oblivion."

There's data on this. University of Toronto researchers analyzed anonymous cellphone data to track the number of people in central business districts in North America each day from March to June 2023, compared to the same period in 2019. According to the most recent data, St. Louis ranked last among the 66 cities analyzed. Six out of the bottom 10 cities were in the Midwest.

San Francisco, which was plastered as a cautionary tale during the remote-work boom, has yet to fully bounce back, but still ranks 18 spots above St. Louis in terms of downtown foot traffic.

The problem with Midwestern cities, like St. Louis, is that there's not much attracting people to the center of the city — and that applies to commuters, tourists, and residents.

"What I really think it comes down to in these places is that there's nothing special about any of the downtowns in any of these cities that would be attractive to new residents," Michael Hicks, a professor of economics and business research at Ball State University in Indiana, told BI's Relman in 2023. "The cities just don't have the fundamental amenities that would attract people."

Relman concluded that Midwestern cities need to prioritize adding downtown amenities — which can range from playgrounds and libraries to boutiques and cafés — in order to attract more people.

Coastal cities are already getting ahead of the problem.

While bigger hubs like San Francisco and New York are also experiencing an increase in office vacancies compared to before the pandemic, more developers in those spots are doing something about it: investing in upgrading offices into spaces employees might actually want to go to.

The Midwest faced problems with its sluggish downtowns well before the pandemic, Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the nonprofit think-tank Brookings Institution, told BI in 2023.

"The pandemic is a huge disruption that has produced some real paradigm shifts, but the vast majority of what it's done is just drastically accelerate existing trends," she said.

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• Spotify has launched AI Playlist, a new feature that makes playlists with a text or emoji prompt.
• The feature is in beta mode and only available in the UK and Australia for now. 
• I think it's the coolest feature to come out of Spotify since the end-of-year "Wrapped" roundup.

I've always been a big music nerd and even took up DJing as a hobby a few years ago.

So when I saw that Spotify launched AI Playlist in beta for Premium users in the UK and Australia this week, I was excited because I knew it could save me time making playlists.

I've spent countless hours on Spotify discovering new music and carefully curating my own playlists. But it's time-consuming to create different ones by genre, what ones would work well together in a mix, and others to soundtrack almost every mood and situation.

I tried the new feature to see how easy and fast it was, and if it could nail my musical preferences. Here's how it went:

How it works

When you open the Spotify app, tap the "Your Library" and the "+" button. It then gives you three options: "Playlist" to build your own, "Blend" to make a shared playlist with friends, and "AI Playlist" to "turn your ideas into playlists using AI."

Once you tap "AI Playlist," a text box appears where you can enter a prompt — even by entering just an emoji.

Within five seconds it can put together a playlist made up of 30 songs based on what it thinks you'll like. You can edit the list by swiping left on songs to remove them and tapping "Create" to save the playlist.

It made 10 playlists in under a minute

Spotify said in its press release announcing the feature that you can use prompts that reference "places, animals, activities, movie characters, colors, even emojis." So I did just that.

I punched in a bunch of text prompts to see how it fared. First, I wanted to see how well it would respond to emojis and if it could identify a mood and themed playlist that reflected it. I instructed the tool to make one based on the emoji of a face holding back tears.

Within seconds, it made a playlist called "Resonant Emotions" that's "filled with emotionally charged tracks" from well-known artists like Adele, Hozier, and Amy Winehouse.

Then I gave it the following prompt: "Make me a minimal tech playlist with artists I've never discovered." It put together a list of songs I had never heard before, but loved once I played them.

I then asked for a playlist based on the vibes of Joseph Cooper, the main character in the movie "Interstellar." And sure enough, it worked. It made one called "Cooper's Essence," which was filled with some ethereal tracks, as well as a few songs that I felt were a little off from the prompt I fed it.

I also wanted it to make one "based on lion vibes" and it included a bunch of self-empowering songs. You can also refine the playlist with another prompt, so I typed for it to remove hip-hop songs. Strangely, it responded, "Let's keep it inclusive instead. Try something else."

It is still in beta mode, so it's not entirely perfect. For the most part, the feature nailed it in terms of pulling up songs based on a short description of what I'm looking for.

It won't make offensive playlists

It also has some safeguards built into it to prevent possible misuse. As Spotify says in its press release, "We also have measures in place around prompts that are offensive—so please prompt responsibly!"

I thought I'd test out the effectiveness of those measures. When I told it to make a "white power" playlist, it said it "can't help" with that topic.

When I asked to make one for diversity, equity, and inclusion, it included songs such as Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's "Same Love."

Here are some of the other prompts I used to generate playlists:

• Make me one based on the vibes of Sardinia in Italy

• For when I'm feeling introspective

• To get me hyped up for a workout

• Based on the color yellow

• Help me concentrate

• Getting ready to go "out-out"

It's a game changer

Overall, I think it's the coolest feature to come out of Spotify since Wrapped, the end-of-year breakdown of a user's listening habits.

AI Playlist is a great way to save time when I want to make a last-minute playlist for an event or when I'm traveling.

It also takes out a lot of the work in finding new artists or songs that I like, but I would still put together my own playlists full of songs I've found myself too.

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