Prof G Markets - OpenAI’s New Content Deals + Latin America’s Most Valuable Financial Institution

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Scott shares his thoughts on OpenAI’s content deal with Vox and if it means ChatGPT will now be training on this podcast’s content. Then Scott and Ed break down why Nubank’s shares have rallied so much this year, and what barriers stand in the way of it becoming a super-app.  Order "The Algebra of Wealth," out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join Capital Group CEO Mike Gitlin on the Capital Ideas Podcast. In unscripted conversations with investment professionals, you'll hear real stories about successes and lessons learned, informed by decades of experience. It's your look inside one of the world's most experienced active investment managers. Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. This week's number, $8,000.

That's how much a ticket from New York to London costs for a dog and its owner on Bark Air, a boutique dog's first airline. What is the worst dog breed? There are no bad dog breeds. Okay, Chihuahua. Chihuahua. That's not a great breed. Welcome to Prop G Markets. Add a little dog humor.

A little dog humor from the dogs. Yes. Really going PG now. I keep meeting these people with their kids saying they're listening. Very different vibe. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, today we're discussing OpenAI's content deal with Vox and Latin America's new top bank. Here with the news is PropG Media Analyst and not a dog. Ed, did you grow up with dogs i did

i had one dog i had a border terrier growing up a border terrier what was your border terrier's name his name was leo leo um so first off just a little word to the wise never own one dog dogs need to have another dog they need a buddy yeah he was a he was kind of a socially weird dog i actually wasn't i wasn't that close to him really that Really? That's such a moving story of a boy and his dysfunctional dog. Any more heartwarming stories? Let me get this. You're not that close with your siblings and don't like your parents despite them working really hard to establish a good relationship with you. Jesus Christ. Get to the headlines, you sociopath. Before that, I just want to remind listeners again, go subscribe to the new

Prof G Markets feed. We're soon going to be moving this markets podcast entirely off of the Prof G Pod feed. So if you're listening on the Prof G Pod, stop what you're doing, go subscribe to the new feed, Prof G Markets. We're number one in business right now. We're top 30 in all categories. You can't miss it. Go subscribe, ProfitGMarkets. And with that, let's start with our weekly review of market vitals. The S&P 500 fell, the dollar climbed, Bitcoin jumped, and the yield on 10-year treasuries rose. Shifting to the headlines. Saudi Aramco has announced a more than $10 billion stock sale. Currently, just 1.5% of the company is publicly traded, and Saudi Arabia and its investment fund

own the rest. This follow-on sale is one of the largest of all time. CanocoPhillips is acquiring Marathon Oil in an all-stock deal valued at $22.5 billion, including debt. That news came just a day after the shareholders of another oil company, Hess, voted to sell to Chevron for $53 billion. And finally, Salesforce reported weaker-than-expected first quarter revenue growth of 11% from last year. That's the first time the company has fallen short of revenue projections in 18 years. It also lowered its expectations for subscription sales growth for the full year and shares plunged 20%. Scott, thoughts? The Saudi Aramco thing, it sounds basic, but it sort of indicates the broader strategy of what is the fastest growing big economy other than India, I think. And that is, you know, here's the good news. They have infinite

capital. The bad news is it's running out. I think there's somewhere between 40 and 70 years of oil underneath that ocean or that ocean of oil does run out. They're smart people. They need to transition to another economy, another type of economy. So what are they doing? They're selling a stake in their oil-based company and using it to try and fund the transition to tourism, education, technology, and other things. So I just think this makes a lot of sense for them. Any thoughts on Saudi Aramco? The background context on that story is that the Sovereign Wealth Fund has been struggling with liquidity recently. So four years ago, they had around $130 billion in cash and in cash equivalents, and now it's down to around $20 billion. So they've spent almost 90% of the pot and now they need to go find cash somewhere else. And there are two ways to do that. One, they can borrow, which is what they have been doing. And two, they can liquidate their position in Aramco, which is, as you're saying, that's what's happening here.

Here's the part I don't understand. This is all meant to fund their new investment plan. Vision 2030, the stuff that you're talking about, transitioning the economy, which is projected to cost in total, not tens of billions, not hundreds of billions, but trillions of dollars. It's the most capital intensive project basically in history. And just as an example, they're building this city in the desert, which we've talked about before, this city called Neom. Neom is going to have its own artificial ski resort and its own moon, literally a moon, artificial moon made out of drones. And that project alone is going to cost half a trillion.

So I'm starting to think that all of these forward-looking national investment plans are at least a little bit unserious, because it just doesn't make much sense to me to be talking about building this solar-powered city that's going to cost half a trillion dollars and have a moon made out of drones, while at the same time, you're struggling with liquidity issues and then announcing this follow-on offering of, wait for it, $10 billion. So just a couple of things. My father used to say that rich people live hand to mouth, just on a higher level. And wealthy people are smart and they always have their money invested.

They sometimes keep some money in cash, but you want to be in the markets. You want to be fully invested. You want to be diversified. And if you get a big chunk of money and you want to put it into an ETF, you should dollar cost in in case you're investing in highs. But wealthy people, wealthy nations have their money at work for them, which creates situations where oftentimes they're in cash crunches or they have less liquidity than they'd like. This happens to me all the time. I have tuition payments due and I'm like, wait, I don't have any cash. This happens to me all the time. I have tuition payments due, and I'm like, wait, I don't have any cash, so I got to find shit to sell. And I never thought

having this level of economic security, I would still have, you know, not liquidity problems, but I have to think about this stuff, and I have to look at it and say, okay, is all my stuff short-term? Anyways, I don't care how rich you are. There's always liquidity. You're always going to run into liquidity issues. And these guys, as rich as they are, are finding that, okay, maybe we're out a little bit over our skis or our eyes were bigger than our stomach. But I bet there's going to be a lot of debt involved. They're going to buy more glass from South Korean glass manufacturers, but some of the manufacturers will finance some of the purchases. They will start getting revenues from these companies.

They will issue bonds when they build Neom and they build this one area that they are fairly confident is going to spend off a couple billion dollars a year in taxes or resort fees or whatever. They'll be able to securitize those cash flows by borrowing money. So that's the equity component here. That's a big headline number and it's a staggering number, but that doesn't mean they need to come up with that equity capital all at once. And so much of this is out of their control because if oil goes to $300 a barrel, they're fine. They're fine. They're probably going to announce that they're spending more.

But if oil goes to 15 bucks a barrel, they're going to have to scale back projects. They're going to have to cancel some projects. But to give you a scale of this stuff, I think the Infrastructure Act was $700 or $800 billion from the largest economy in the world. That's supposed to give the entire infrastructure in the United States a facelift. They have seven projects that are of that scale or greater. All of this comes down to one thing. What is the price of oil in three, five, 10 years? I want to pivot to the oil news, Canoco Phillips buying Marathon Oil. Canoco. It's Conoco. Conoco.

Jesus, you and your bread. Put that shit in the boot. Yeah, Canoco. Mispronunciation aside, there's been a huge amount of consolidation in the oil and gas industry in the past year. We've covered some of these deals in previous episodes, but I just want to remind you of what's happened here. Back in October, ExxonMobil agreed to buy Pioneer Natural Resources for $60 billion. That same month, Chevron agreed to buy Hess for $53 billion. Two months later, Occidental bought Crown Rock for $12 billion. And two months after that, Diamondback bought Endeavor for $26 billion. And now ConocoPhillips is buying Marathon for $22.5 billion. What is going on here?

If you let the economy just run unfettered, what happens is one company, through innovation and great execution, develops stronger earnings growth, and investors pile into that company because it's a safer bet. They have access to cheaper capital, and then they use that cheaper capital to go make acquisitions and forward-leaning investments, and no one else can match, and they kind of run away with the show. And people like to think, well, naturally, there'll be disruptors. Some of that is true, But what you end up with, with kind of unfettered capitalism with no regulatory intervention, specifically DOJ or antitrust action, is you end up with the following. And that is four companies control at least 80% share in the following sectors, drugstores, home improvements, cars, airplanes, oil, computer hardware, computer software, food retail, internet retail, medical distributors, air freight couriers, telecom, cable, satellite TV.

Essentially, the world is controlled by a small number of concentrated companies that have incredible advantage. And I think the fastest way to oxygenate the economy is if we were to go on a breakup Lollapalooza, and that is going to all of these industries and create fertilizer. And the shit would be, instead of having Google or Alphabet, you'd have Search, you'd have YouTube, and you'd have Google Cloud. That's three companies right there. It's just you concentrate. And what happens when these companies get concentrated is you have cartel pricing power.

They all kind of look at each other and raise prices equivalently. There aren't that many suitors bidding to rent labor and on, you know, wash, rinse, and repeat. And the myth is that competition is self-sustaining and eventually these companies have created a tectonic shift in capital from labor to corporations and shareholders, which again, entrenches and enriches the incumbent. So, you know, triple the budget of the DOJ and the FTC and go through and oxygenate all parts of the economy and create more innovation and more taxes, more employment, more leverage on the part of labor by going in and breaking these companies up. Yeah, I think that's right. But to be clear, the Exxon Pioneer acquisition has been completed. I mean, it was subject to review, as you'd expect, $60 billion deal. But at the beginning of last month, Exxon announced that they closed the deal. So now we've got several other deals under review, but I don't fully see how, if that's the precedent that's been set, that you could break up, I don't know, a $12 billion deal for Crown Rock. Thoughts on these Salesforce earnings? Pretty dismal for the stock, down 17%.

Worst stock drop for Salesforce since, I believe, the financial crisis. Wow, it's up 21%. It's five years, it's off 21%. It's five years, it's up 41%. Over the last one year, it's flat. The people who look like geniuses are Elliot who came in, in I think late 2022 or early 2023 and said, you need to get your costs in line and took the stock from 200 to about 300. And then I think they exited their position. That was like the perfect activist investment. Stock is up 50% since then. And now it has checked back because of slower growth. Did you get any color on the earnings call? Is it a function of competition? Is it a function of their customers are scaling back? What do you think is going on here?

I personally think that this sell-off was a little unfair. I mean, yes, they missed, but these were very marginal misses. I mean, yes, they missed, but these were very marginal misses. I mean, literally, they were a fraction of a percentage off on both metrics. What I think is going on, I think the trouble that they're having is that Wall Street is getting used

to these NVIDIA-like beats, as we discussed last week, where you sort of blow your expectations out of the water. And I think investors are looking at Salesforce and they're like, well, you know, you're a tech company. Why can't you be like Microsoft or Amazon or Google or Nvidia, all of which have built

in these huge expectations for AI and which Salesforce hasn't really accomplished. And I think it's that story. It's the AI story that investors are really looking for with Salesforce right now, and which Salesforce and Mark Benioff haven't really delivered on. I think what they're overlooking, though, is just the fact that the fundamental business for Salesforce is still incredibly strong. I mean, more than $9 billion in revenue, 11% revenue growth, which apparently is a problem, but that's double-digit growth, $1.5 billion in profit. It's still a juggernaut. Is it going to take over the world with

world-class gen AI? Probably not, but I don't think it has to. I don't even think it necessarily should. So, I don't know. It just feels like an overpunishment. I love that. Why can't you be in video? True story, Ed. I used to have a girlfriend and she would scream out during sex, why can't you be more like David Hasselhoff? And I'd be like, I don't mind you imagining other men, but David Hasselhoff? We'll be right back after the break with a look at the latest news from OpenAI.

Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting, crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter.

These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says

one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim and we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. We're back with Profiteer Markets. OpenAI signed two more content licensing agreements with The Atlantic and with Vox Media. As we've discussed previously, OpenAI has been striking deals across media, most recently signing a contract with News

Corp worth an estimated $250 million. Terms of the deals with The Atlantic and with Vox have not been disclosed, but we do know a few details about their arrangements. For example, Vox will allow its content to be displayed on ChatGPT, but the platform must include attribution links to the source material. Meanwhile, Vox will use OpenAI's technology to enhance its ad platform and its commerce product called the Gift Scout, which offers shopping suggestions based on a user's prompts. Okay, Scott, Vox Media is our distribution partner. Genuine question, are we about to get fed into the ChatGPT LLM? I typed into ChatGPT, how do I study? And it said, I'll help you on the hard parts.

So it's making penis jokes. Coincidence, Ed? Coincidence? I don't think so. I think they're crawling the dog. That was good. They're crawling us. Look, we said, I think one of our predictions was that a lot of, I won't call them second tier, but smaller media companies would find a new incremental high margin revenue source bidding or renting out their content or entering into exclusive or licensed deals with LLMs who are all trying to, I don't know how much of this is they need the content or they're just trying to placate these people and pretend that they're good for the entire ecosystem. It's like when Google would occasionally run ads to say, oh, we're a good partner. So, you know, no, we're

not just sucking the oxygen out of the room of every media company and advertising company in the world. We advertise because you're our partners. You're our partners. And, you know, they run their fingers through their hair before they shot them in the fucking face. Look, I don't, these deals, I think if you really pull under the hood, these deals are smaller on a top line level, but it's all gross margin revenue, right? And what'll be interesting is this will go one of two ways. And that is, as it becomes normalized, you have to pay for the license for this content. And I'm sure that the media companies themselves will come up with their own llms to detect whether or not they're crawling our podcast and by the way the agreement says they are not crawling podcasts but the the content they own i didn't see that oh no oh no i would be like calling back off and say this shit is gold yeah this shit is gold you don't you don't get to put gold in you you don't get to have a new gold tooth without panda the dog and the Canoco Brit on my podcast. But they're not doing that.

Supposedly, they're just doing the content they own, which I think is like New York Magazine and all the blogs they have. And, you know, they produce a decent amount of content. The question is whether this sets off a bidding war for good content and creates the incremental revenue stream that all the media has been waiting for from big tech, or if it's just going to be used to train other LLMs that'll begin producing their own New York Magazine-like content for the LLMs to crawl themselves. And where I went into sort of a rabbit hole mentally was the notion that I think at some point with these voice front ends on AI that I'll be able to say when I wake up in the morning, give me today's business news in the voice of George Carlin, but with the fact-driven nature of Reuters, and I'm not going to need to go to, you know, HBO Max. I don't know where I would go for George Carlin content, but I wouldn't, I don't need to go to the Reuters side or I don't need to go to the CNN side.

You know, my content, the analogy I would use, I was at San Ambrose yesterday and they, well, that place makes money on everything. It's such a rip off, but most restaurants try to break even on the food and where they make the money on is on the alcohol. And I wonder, I mean, the ideal model with content companies are hoping for is that they break even on their actual content, but they make money off of things like, I don't know, events or renting and leasing their data out to LLMs, that that becomes their high margin. Because when daddy orders that third makers and ginger with his cacio e pepe and prosciutto burrata, the margin on those makers and gingers that they're charging me,

I think, 22 bucks for, I think the drink costs 55 or 70 cents. That's how these places make money, is based off of my addiction and wanting me to like me more. But I, I don't know. I think I could see this going one or two way. I don't know if this is a big head fake or jazz hands. It's going to just result in training these LLMs such in a year or two years, they don't need them or if we're at the very early days of what ultimately will

be a bidding war and an increase in this very small, but high margin revenue. I mean, I know that you're, I would say friends friends, I think, with Jim Bancroft, CEO. I am. Vox Media. Nicest guy in media. Have you had any conversations with him about this? Not necessarily about this deal specifically, but licensing deals with AI companies. So really, there isn't a move, a big move that involves strategy or technology that Jim doesn't, that Jim makes

without checking in with me first and getting the benefit of my wisdom. Everything I've said is a lie. He never, that bitch never calls me. Literally never calls me. Never says, hey, what do you think about this deal with open AI? I mean, for God's sakes, I got all these AI people crawling up my ass, inviting me to their headquarters to try and give talks and pay me a lot of money. So I'll say nice things about them, but Jim Bankoff doesn't call me. No, no, no,

no, no. He doesn't want, he doesn't want to get my view on this stuff. No, I, he has not said a word to me. He's probably worried.

I'm going to go, well, I want a bigger deal or something. It's like when I, sometimes I'm a little remiss to tell the team at prop G how well we're doing for, they're going to be like, well,

I want more pet bereavement deal for fluffyuffy. Fluffy passed away and I need three weeks off. Anyways, where are we? We're still on OpenAI. So, you know, we've seen a lot of these licensing agreements and we've been discussing them a lot recently. I just want to go over all of the announcements that OpenAI has released so far. So, so far we have deals with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, DotDash Meredith, Financial Times, Le Monde, Prisa Media, News Corp, and now Vox Media and The Atlantic. So that's nine contracts. None of them have disclosed any of the deal terms, specifically how much the contracts are worth.

Now, we've seen rumors the Axel Springer deal is supposedly worth tens of millions. That's how it's been reported in the media. The News Corp deal is supposedly north of $250 million, but no one actually knows. It's all just sort of rumors or according to people familiar with the matter kind of reporting. My question to you, why aren't any of these companies disclosing that information? I mean, as you say, if this is going to be the profit maker, especially for a public company, why aren't they saying how much money they're going to make? I would bet that the numbers are pretty mediocre. So even that $250 million deal, I don't know if it's four years or five years, but that comes down to $50 million a year. Now, granted, $47 million of it will hit the bottom line. But when you talk about News Corp, you're talking about some really robust content, and it's a great deal. It's a great press release for OpenAI, and yet they only came up with $50 million a year. So I bet the Vox deal is millions, not even tens of millions. And so they don't want to announce that. OpenAI wants credit for trying to play nice and be thinking about differentiating its content and being partners with this ecosystem and being a good citizen. My guess is Bancroft

has struck a deal for millions. And it's great because it all hit the bottom line, but it's not like it's a hundred million bucks. And it's great because it all hit the bottom line, but it's not like it's $100 million. And so they both parties decide to keep it confidential for fear that it's just going to be a lot of heckling from the cheap seats. Like, oh, you're letting, Altman's putting a gag ball on you and telling you to grab your ankles and giving you, you know, $50 and bus fare. You ask why Jim Bancroft doesn't call you for advice. Can you imagine why he wouldn't want to call me?

Get us out of that one, Ed. Canoco us out of that one. So two final news items concerning OpenAI. One is that they are creating a safety and security committee, which is, quote, responsible for making recommendations on critical safety and security decisions for all OpenAI projects. This is coming less than a month after they dissolved the superalignment team, which we discussed, and that team was essentially tasked with the exact same thing, safety and security. The second news item is that Jan Leiker, who is a former leader of that super alignment team at OpenAI,

who, as we discussed, resigned, he is now joining Anthropic, which is one of the leading competitors to OpenAI. Reactions to either of those headlines? The world is going through, in 10 months, what took them 10 years to discover at Meta. And that is they don't give a flying fuck about your well-being, and they're not going to take care of you when you're older. And despite their hushed tones and concerns about the future of AI, they are there to make profit. And they're really good at that and shouldn't be trusted to do anything else. And this goes to a bigger issue, and that is all of this stuff around corporate social responsibility and making the world a better place. And I can't go to a conference for a beauty company or a technology company where some very hopeful

20-something stands up and says, you know, we believe here our role is in empowering women or creating a more sustainable future. I'm like, no, it's not. Your job is to make more fucking money for the shareholders. And that's what you're going to do. And a few people will care or nod their heads that you're changing the world to be a better place. But the way you make a world a better place is you create more value than your inputs. You create economic security for you and your family. You're a good citizen. You vote. You give some money away. And then we regulate the company and tax it at a fair rate such that we, the electorate, can elect people who will vote on things like food stamps and protect a woman's bodily autonomy. And just because you paint a fucking AirPod red does not mean you are doing anything for the world. And all of this corporate social responsibility and DEI bullshit has done nothing but distract the populace from the need to regulate these companies. And all of this kind of notion that we keep hoping that capitalism can serve as an engine of change for social good, we've had 40

years to try and do that. Ben & Jerry's is still a very small company. REI is a cute little company, good for them. The majority of companies will do whatever they need to do to make more money full stop. Ford would still be pouring mercury into the river if we allowed them to do that. The trust and safety team of OpenAI should be in Washington, D.C. and have the ability to tax, prosecute, and imprison. Enough with this notion that we have a new generation of corporate leaders that give a flying fuck. Spoiler alert, they don't.

It's so interesting because, you know, you're describing that actually the main goal for Sam Altman from OpenAI is to create shareholder value. But this is a non-profit company. And I don't know if you remember that exchange between Sam Altman and Senator Kennedy during the Senate hearing,

where he's like, oh, do you make a lot of money? And Sam's like, no, I don't make any money. I don't have any equity in OpenAI, which would go against your point until I just learned this week that apparently the board is discussing granting Sam equity in a new, more traditional corporation in OpenAI to incentivize him. I remember that exchange where everyone, where Sam said, I'm not making any money with it. Oh, that must mean he's doing good things. I remember thinking, just trust me on this. He's going to make billions. I mean, how could Sam not make billions? If he has the ability, even personally, to invest in AI companies and has influence over their ability to announce

a partnership with open AI. Now, granted, the board should be able to suss out conflicts like that, but it probably won't. This is the easiest prediction ever. Sam Altman, directly or indirectly, is going to make billions of dollars from OpenAI. Sam is doing exactly what he should be doing. Who's not doing what they're supposed to be doing is us. We're supposed to elect people that see through this bullshit, put in place some sort of compute tax, put in place a tax, a progressive tax structure such that the six wealthiest or the 25 wealthiest people in America don't pay an effective tax rate of 8 fucking percent. Really? Really? Oh, Jesus Christ. Anyways, God, I sound especially get off my lawn today, don't I? Thank you for my TED Talk. We'll be right back after the break with a look at the new most valuable bank in Latin America. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing.

And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't really matter. Luckily, there's Constant Contact. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform

can help your businesses stand out, stay top of mind, and see big results. Sell more, raise more, and build more genuine relationships with your audience through a suite of digital marketing tools made to fast-track your growth. With Constant Contact, you can get email marketing that helps you create and send the perfect email to every customer and create, promote, and manage your events with ease, all in one place. Get all the automation, integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly, all backed by Constant Contact's expert live customer support. Ready, set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today.

Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca We're back with Profiteer Markets. Brazilian fintech Nubank has just become Latin America's most valuable financial institution by market cap. Its shares have rallied more than 40% this year to give the company a market cap of roughly $58 billion. That puts it ahead of Itaú, Brazil's largest bank, which has been around since 1945.

Behind that rally is a story of tremendous market expansion. When Nubank launched in 2013, roughly 40% of Brazilians were unbanked, and an oligopoly controlled roughly 80% of the market. Now, just over a decade later, 54% of Brazilian adults are Nubank customers. The company has also expanded to Mexico and Colombia, and it has also surpassed 100 million customers, making it the first digital banking platform outside of Asia to hit that metric. Scott, you interviewed the NewBank CEO David Velez back in 2022. I think you also invested in the IPO in 2021, if I'm correct. What do you make of this

company and its performance since then? It's been an okay performer. It hasn't been a great performer. I think I either sold, eventually sold a break-even or even a loss, but stocks up 80% in the last year. And it really tapped into an incredible need. And that is a dramatic number of people in Latin America are unbanked and they end up paying these onerous fees to get banked. And also they pay enormous fees in terms of their time, the ability to have to go down to the utility to pay their electric bill or what have you. Also, and this has been fixed, I think, but in Rio, if you were a male under the age of 40, you had to go into a bank. You had to go into a room with cameras and take your shirt off because they were so worried about crime.

And they recognized they can skip the branch network. It's like when India skipped landline and went straight from kind of no phone to cell phone. Large parts of Latin America and Central America, they're skipping from the unbanked to digital banking. The company is really well run. It's reported five consecutive quarters of profitability and over 20% revenue growth. And the other thing that I love about this company is it's an asset-light business model. These branches, I think you have to have at least 30 million or 60 million in deposits just to support the real estate and the human personnel of that operating system of a branch. Yeah. The number I've seen is 50 million,

50 million to generate a return on a bank branch. Yeah. And when you build, make the fixed investment with cheap capital, which they have access to, to build the technology, and you don't have to have assets, you don't have to have real estate and things in the window saying, you know, get your mortgage here for 8%. At the end of the day, people absolutely love this. The NPS levels are, get this, two to three times greater than their competitors, which means their cost of customer acquisition is much lower and they don't have the same churn. This is a great company. You'd like to see this in Latin America. There's MercadoLibre, but there hasn't been a ton of digital big winners here. And that's what they need.

They need to have, you know, they need some companies that make a bunch of people, billions of dollars, which inspires venture capital. I hope David starts a VC firm in Brazil because that's what you need. You need a Michael Dell to make billions of dollars and then start a VC ecosystem in Austin. So I hope it happens here. I'm really fond of Latin America. If you globally think about what's happened to the economy over the last 40 or 50 years, America's held its own. We control the same amount of GDP, great growth. We're killing it.

China, Southeast Asia, they're the big winners. The big losers in the global race for economic dominance have been Europe and Latin America. The saying in Brazil is that no country has a brighter future than Brazil. But it's meant as a bit of an insult. And that is, Brazil is always a little engine that supposedly can but never does. And so I hope this does really well. Good for NewBank, good for Brazil, good for the planet. It's now turning into a banking meets insurance meets stock market investing meets travel meets telco product, kind of everything in one, which reminds me of this idea of the super app, which we discussed a long time ago, which is basically a term for an app that acts as a portal for everything from banking, communicating, ride hailing. It's

basically what WeChat is in China. So it feels like Nubank is getting into super app territory here. Do you think that's the idea? Is that the strategy they're going for, do you think? Every company has the same aspiration. Every company wants to control your interface. We're in a tension economy. If I can figure out a way to control more of your time on a screen, I can monetize it eventually. And so everybody wants to, iOS wants to control everything. They want to be in your car, right? Android wants to be the operator. Alexa, or basically Amazon's Alexa, was an attempt to control more of the interface through digital world where you're interacting through their voice devices. Every company wants to leverage their custody of the consumer to grab more and more of their attention such that they can monetize it. And that's the same thing here. And obviously, the biggest threats or the biggest barriers to super app status are iOS and Android that do not want anyone. I mean, ultimately, iOS is the premier super app for rich people, and Android is the super app for everybody else. And that's what you go through to

access Uber and everything else, and they figure out a way to tax them or tax the end consumer for a more elegant way to access those apps, which is Apple. One's an ad model, one is a subscription model. But those guys have a vested interest in sticking their elbows out and not letting anybody develop their own super app status. Essentially, the fight between Apple and Epic is that Epic essentially wanted to be a super app for gaming. They wanted to put other games on its platform and start charging from similar the way the App Store works at Apple. And Apple said, no, we're going to disable this technology.

We're not going to let you do it. But NewBank, it'll be really interesting. If the stock were to go to 50, it's because they would be able to show that they can launch adjacent categories and immediately get market share. And then say, okay, even if we break even on the banking, which they don't, they make money. But we now have, as you call it, the super app power to start taking people into different verticals. The term that people use to describe this kind of bank, which is a digital bank, is neobank. No, they call it a Canoco bank, Ed.

It's a Canoco bank. Jesus Christ. What are you, a stripper at a Brazilian nightclub? Next up, big hand for Canoco. That's so annoying. Get out there. Get out there and shake your money maker, Ed.

Get out there. Oh, my God. But I didn't get along with my dog. What the fuck is wrong with you? What is wrong with you? Oh, my God. Why did you hate your dog, Ed? He was just weird, man.

He was weird. I think he thought he was a human. Did he try and hurt you? Those are hurting dogs, right? No. No, actually, he hurt other dogs. He would always bite other dogs. And whenever I'd take him for a walk,

it was always smush-faced dogs, like pugs and bulldogs. And He would always bite other dogs. And whenever I'd take him for a walk, it was always smush-faced dogs, like pugs and bulldogs. And he would always bite them. Was it a purebred? I think so. That's the problem. Always get a mutt. Always get a mutt.

Why? It's as if mutts know that they're about to be shipped off to be executed. So they are so thrilled. When you bring them home and start feeding them like lamb, organic lamb food, they're literally like, I'll tell you what. Is that what you're feeding your dogs? Organic lamb?

Oh, my dogs eat much better than we do. Literally, I'll come home. I'll come home tonight. I'm getting home at 3 a.m. There's going to be nothing for me. Like there'll literally be nothing. Like no one will even like, oh, did dad eat? Who the fuck cares?

But if the dog makes a whimper in the middle of the night, we'll get up and we'll microwave it some sort of like organic sheep intestine thing that's good for its coat. Yeah, no, that's a ton of fun. Although I did get my birthday present to myself when I turned 45, 55, was I bought a Great Dane. And boy, is she stupid. Oh, my gosh. The village idiot of dogs and so sweet and loving. Oh, God, I love that. I can't wait to see that dog.

Can't wait. The kid's sort of excited. Can't wait to see Leia. Yeah, exactly. She'll get up in the middle of the night. She'll come over. And it's really weird. I don't know if you've noticed this because you probably haven't noticed it because you hate dogs.

But she'll come over. Great Danes have this weird thing. As a means of affection, they shove their like hind torso into you. That's how they express love. They're like, it's good to see you. How about a little of my back and butt just to welcome you home? Is that how you express love? That's, yeah.

That's where you learned it from. You know how I express love. I express love one way, Benjamin. So I give people money. It's the best kind of love. Trips to St. Paul's, which is a good way to yeah it's a good love language it's the neosporin for every relationship i tell people that i'm like this is how i express affection i'm anyways i don't want to give specifics but all right am i supposed to make

a prediction where are we at yeah fuck it let's just let's just wrap up the show before we do that let's take a look at the week ahead. We'll see the unemployment rate for May. We'll also see earnings from Lululemon, Dollar Tree, and CrowdStrike. Riveting. Do you have any predictions? My prediction is, and this isn't financial advice, but I bet within 30 days, Salesforce has recovered most of its losses.

I was just, as you were talking, I like what you said. I looked at the numbers. It barely missed. The company's still doing really well. They've cut some costs. I don't see any evidence here that the company should be worth a lot less. And while the stock was up, it wasn't up so substantially that this was just air coming out. I think this was, to your point, everyone saying, well, why aren't you NVIDIA? And I'm like, okay, they're not, but they're still an amazing company. So anyways, my prediction is that this 22% stock decline we're looking at today,

that Salesforce recovers most or all of it within the next 30 days. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Our executive producers are Jason Stavis and Catherine Dillon. Mia Silverio is our research lead and Drew associate producer is Alison Weiss. Our executive producers are Jason Stavis and Catherine Dillon. Mia Silverio is our research lead

and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Join us on Thursday for our conversation with Morgan Housel, only on Prof G Markets. Lifetimes Five times You held me In kind Reunion

As the world turns And the dove flies Food insecurity still affects millions of individuals around the globe. And Nestle, a global leader in nutrition, health, and wellness, understands the importance of working together to create lasting change. Nestle's partnerships extend beyond just financial support. From building urban hoop houses to producing custom seasoning for food banks, Nestle and their partners actively engage with local communities, listening to their needs, and working together to find innovative solutions. Nestle is committed to helping support thriving, resilient communities today and for generations to come. Together, we can help to build stronger, healthier communities.

Learn more at Nestle.com.