It's Sept. 13, and boy, does it have a rap sheet.

Law & Order debuted 36 years ago (!!!), which means somewhere in America, a woman is watching her 11th consecutive episode of a show she has already seen… in the dark… at 1 a.m. That woman is me. 

20 seasons and 6 spinoffs off a formula that never once flinched. Crime, arrest, courtroom, that noise. Now, that’s a brand TV show so disciplined it makes my quarterly messaging refresh look like a personal crisis.

Same date, 1996, we lost Tupac at 25 in Las Vegas. Same date, 2004, Oprah handed 276 people the keys to a $28,500 Pontiac and every last one of them opened a $6,000 tax bill a few months later.

So the day gives us 3 lessons: pick a format and never break it, leave behind more than you finished, and read what's attached to the free thing before you take the keys.

I have never once read what was attached to the free thing. Which brings us to my stack, and to the men in it.

My therapist asked me to describe my type. I said, “expensive, difficult to reach, and impossible to cancel.” She wrote something down, and I'm 90% sure it was a note to cancel her ChatGPT subscription.

Anyway. I've spent many years in marketing and standup, which means I've been ghosted by men in 2 industries and by software in all of them.

At some point, the categories collapsed. Every tool in the stack is preeeetttyyy much a guy I've dated, and every guy I've dated should’ve had a pricing page:

• Salesforce is the rich older man with a boat he never takes out. Powerful, unknowable, 60 years old and still "figuring some things out." You cannot understand his feelings without hiring a certified consultant, and the consultant charges $200 an hour to tell you he's fine.
  

• HubSpot is the golden retriever who's been tracking your movements the entire time. Sweet. Eager. Sends a "just checking in!" the exact hour you thought about leaving. He has a spreadsheet about you, and he made it colorful so you'd feel OK about it.
  

• Notion is the one who journals. Gorgeous, empty, will build you a beautiful system for your entire life within 48 hours of meeting you. Neither of you will open it again. You'll tell your friends he "really gets organization" while your actual to-do list stays in your Notes app, where it has lived since 2019 next to a grocery list and a joke about a pelican.
  

• Slack stopped being a boyfriend and became a roommate you're afraid of. He's in your house. He's in your pocket. At 11:40 on a Sunday night, he types a single word, then "(1/4)."
  

• Adobe is the ex who still has all your photos. You could leave. He knows you won't, because everything you've ever made lives in a format only he can read, and he brings this up in a calm voice roughly once a year when the price goes up.
  

• Mailchimp was so fun in 2016. Weird little monkey energy, made you laugh at a rooftop party, wore a vintage jacket. Then Intuit bought him, and now he works in finance and talks about "the platform." You ran into him last spring and it was very sad for both of you.
  

• Zoom is the pandemic situationship. What you had was intense and specific to a moment in history. You see him now and feel nothing, which is its own kind of grief.
  

• Figma is the cool one everybody is secretly in love with, including people who don't design anything. He got acquired for an amount of money that made the rest of us reevaluate our entire lives, and he's still nice to you at parties, which somehow makes it worse.
  

• Jira is the marriage you stayed in for the kids. There was love here once. Now, there's a ticket.
  

• Clay found your personal email, your dog's name, the year you graduated, and a podcast you appeared on in 2021, and he opened with all 4.
  

• And that leaves us with beehiiv... the tool that lets you host a newsletter, website, podcast, and community (aka the business that can't make up its mind about what it wants to solve for you). So, naturally, they’re the type of boyfriend who doesn't capitalize his own name and put an extra "i" in it. And honestly, the name is the SANEST thing about him. This is a man who refers to himself in the third person at brunch: "beehiiv doesn't do drama." His friends are all named things like Kit and Arlo, and they all "left something" to "make something."
  
  Dinner at his place is a tasting menu of items with provenance: the honey has a story, the water has a story, the CBD cocktail has a sommelier. He served me toast and told me the bees that made the spread were "compensated fairly," and I nodded, because his house is beautiful and his platform sponsors our launch party (Sept. 17, by the way!). Oh, and he'd tell you the whole spiel, again, in third person. From the cold plunge. With water sourced from Antarctica.

I've been on the other side of this, obviously. I know exactly which one I am. I'm Airtable. Everyone's genuinely impressed for about a week, nobody can explain to their boss exactly what I do or why I’m needed, and I get replaced by a new Google Doc in Q3.

— Sarah Suzuki Harvard

Liquid Death x Jason Kelce filmed a pee-SA

Liquid Death and Garage Beer opened their new spot with Jason Kelce (aka Taylor Swift’s husband’s brother) filling a mason jar over a toilet, explaining that AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water. His fix to AI guzzling the planet dry so somebody can generate a picture of a golden retriever making a matcha latte: “turn America into one giant bladder-based cooling system.” “We want your pee to cool these data centers,” he says. Then, a full musical number. A crowd with jars. An eagle pees. They all march to the post office to mail their urine to the nearest data center, over a disclaimer that reads: "The suits want us to tell you to please don't actually send your pee."

That's the whole campaign, a singalong about mailing urine to Sam Altman, and it's better than anything I've written this quarter, including this sentence.

Liquid Death keeps annihilating the competition because they’d rather get sued than chase trends. They follow you, sit on the public's pulse, and show up the second the resentment ripens. 7 in 10 Americans now hate data centers, and these guys turned that into a singalong while our tweets stay waiting on day 19 of legal review.

And the cherry on this yellow sundae: TechCrunch checked, and recycled wastewater (pee included) already cools data centers. Loudoun County, Virginia runs 200M gallons of the stuff through its server farms every single day. This bit stumbled into municipal policy. 10/10. Would mail.

Alright, that’s my time. I’m the crevice on the front side of your elbow. See you next week. 

— sarah suzuki harvard 🫡

Chat, are we cooked? This newsletter has a launch party now, which means the thing I made to complain about marketing has been turned into a brand activation with a venue partner, sponsors, and campaign. Whatever, it’s worth it!

Mark your calendars: Sept. 17, Air HQ, 3 Howard St, 6:30 p.m., free drinks, 6 comedians, a live roast of Linkedin profiles and CEOs. I have become the exact thing I catalogued in issue #3. RSVP at the link and watch it happen in person.