The Best One Yet - 🥃 “An $816,748 gin-vestment” — Rare Whiskey’s record shot. Period Apps’ privacy power. TikTok’s new king.

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

The most expensive bottles of whiskey ever were just sold in an airport, because where there’s Inflation, there’s gin-vestment opportunities. After Roe v Wade was overturned last week, one part of the digital economy saw a surge: Period-tracking apps. And after 3 years on her throne, Charli D’Amelio was just replaced as Queen of TikTok… just as TikTok shared its internal numbers with us.$STZ $META $GOOGFollow The Best One Yet on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok: @tboypodAnd now watch us on YoutubeWant a Shoutout on the pod? Fill out this formGot the Best Fact Yet? We got a form for that tooLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's Thursday the new Friday or actually three, two. This is Nick. This is Jack. It's Thursday, Tucson, T-Bone Thursday, and today's show is the best one yet. June 30th. TV-O-I, it's a Tuscan T-Bone. No, we're out of it. By the way, Jack, I literally watched yesterday's show on Spotify to see one video of you.

You watched it, not listen. I didn't listen. I watched it. You know what that one thing was? What's that? Loser Pillsbury Dobley. Woo-hoo! Just when you thought you couldn't beat Cookie Crisp.

Yetis, you can watch this show every day on Spotify. Check it out. In the meantime, this is T-B-O-Y. Jack, what's our first story? TikTok has been ruled for the last three years by Charlie D'Milio, but someone else is now TikTok. Funny timing, because TikTok also just told us how much money they make. For our second story, the biggest app downloads this week, they're not social media or fintech. They're period app.

Period. Tracking apps are showing the premium power of privacy. Our third and final story is the most expensive bottle of whiskey ever sold, and it was sold at an airport. Where there's inflation, there are gin investments. But before we hit that wonderful mix, Nick. Honestly, I just love this mix today, Jack. This is the perfect mix. The trail of tricky trademarks continues. Yeah, the word the Barbie's pink, Darth Vader's breathing. All of them trademarked, so lawyer up.

But Jack and I were curious, so we jumped in further, T-boy style to the crazy world of copyrights. And the crazy world of copyrights and the tricky trademarks, they go deeper than just grammar, colors, and sounds. Case and point, LeBron James doesn't just own a whole bunch of championship rings. LeBron James owns a trademark for an entire phrase. Just a kid from Akron. That sentence, LeBron owns it. Yeah. Oh, Jack, by the way, Usain Bolt happens to be the fastest man on earth.

He owns a lot of gold medals and a lot of world records. But Jack, you know that lightning pose he does? The one like this? It's pretty cool that he has a pose for when he wins gold. It may be cooler that he owns that pose. You can't do it and sell it. He owns that lightning hand gesture gold medal winning motion. And yet he's get this, chef Guy Fierry.

Nick's favorite. Happens to be so into his frosted tips that he trademarked his own name. Guy Fierry sent his birth certificate to the U.S. patent and trademark office. Besties, you mess with Flavortown, you're going to get sued. Diner's, drive-ins in the district courthouse, Nick. But that's not all, because Jack and I tomorrow are going to reveal the most shocking,

the most tricky trademark of them all. The world's trickiest trademark. It's on you right now. Look in the mirror. That's a trademark. More on that tomorrow. Let's hit our three stars. Let's go, baby. Four years before this song, two boys

from the Northeast met in the dawn. They had an idea to cause a cultural storm. It's the best one. yet, but the best is an norm. That's it. I don't even think they need to practice. 50% that's a fat tip. Tea Boy City on your at list.

If you know, you know, because we're ready to go. We can't wait no more. So just start the show. Start the show. For our first story, TikTok just revealed there is a surprise new king of TikTok. But more importantly, TikTok's revenue numbers just got leaked for the first time. Okay, Game of Thrones over here. Jack, the last three years, Charlie Demelio, she has ruled TikTok like a young Danarius?

I guess she was the queen with 143 million followers. That's a lot. Yeah, just like our buddy Dave, Charlie grew up, suburban Connecticut, pioneered the dance videos that, you know, Jack and I would pull a hammy on. But last week, Charlie lost her crown. The most followed TikToker is now a man named Cabi Lame. Kabi Lame, who is just like the opposite of Charlie D'Meli. Born in Senegal, he's now an immigrant living in Italy. He lost his factory job, so he grabbed his phone and started making TikToks. Like, his dad literally was like, you need to get another job at a factory. And he was like, no, I'm going to be a digital creator.

His dad's like, what is that? Here's the wild thing. Kabi isn't doing dance videos. In fact, Kabi doesn't even speak in his videos. Zero words. It's like a silent film. He's the Charlie Chaplin of TikTok. Here's what he does.

He takes a viral video of like the perfect way to open a banana, which is trending on TikTok. He used a knife and you strip it and then you cut it and it's a perfect banana. And then he juxtaposes that with himself very ordinarily opening a banana. And him just very simply opening a banana has 144 million people liking him a lot on TikTok. That's how you make it big in the world today. But funny timing Jack and I notice. TikTok also happened to just be at the Cann Advertising Festival. And at that huge advertising event, one person familiar with the matter at TikTok

FWTA shared TikTok's revenue numbers with the Wall Street Journal. And get this, turns out TikTok's ad revenue tripled last year to a whopping $12 billion. That's a lot more than left. That $12 billion in annual advertising revenue is triple what Snapchat makes, for example. TikTok is literally three times as big on the revenue side than Snapchat is. And they have all this money because those hashtag challenges you might have seen on TikTok, they're adorable. They ain't free.

No, they are not. TikTok is charging brands to go viral. It costs a brand 500 grand to launch a hashtag challenge on TikTok. You want some virality? It's going to be about a half million dollars. But half a million dollars sounds like a lot. TikTok is still barely monetized, relatively speaking. Yeah.

The way Jack and I see this, we're talking about the biggest social media platform in the world. And yet TikTok is only bringing in what percentage of the global digital ad market, Jack? They're only bringing in 2% of the world's digital ad spending. And Jack, how much of the global digital ad market are Facebook and Google bringing in? Collectively, they bring in one of every $2 spent on digital ads in the entire world. So 2% for TikTok, 50% for Google and Facebook. TikTok tiny talk. That was great delivery.

I thought you might like that. That was good. So what's the takeaway for our buddies over at TikTok? When it comes to ads, we want amateurs, not pros. Yeah, Yetis. The biggest followings on Instagram are your untouchable celebrities. We're talking the rock, Beyonce, the polished of the polished. The biggest on TikTok, they're like girls and guys next door.

Cobby, Charlie, Addison, Ray, people you never heard of until they made TikTok. So here is the fascinating thing we're noticing. TikTok advertisers are channeling that average Joe amateur style and it's working. The early advertisers on TikTok, those brands are going low budget, low fidelity, low quality videos, but they're getting big results. Jack Chipotle just doubled it spending on TikTok, but it's shooting its guac videos with like a simple selfie style, no lighting situation. I said that pretty amateurishly. Yeah, you did. And Kind Bar, they approved because they're late.

latest TikTok campaign. It looks like the AV club put it together. Yeah, these Insta ads you see on the other hand, they're super pro. We're talking the kind of stuff that got like Spielberg involved. The airbrushes have been airbrushed on Instagram ads. Ticktops are raw. They're amateur. They're filmed on an iPhone and they're using TikTok's native text. TikTok's audience is pushing the amateur creators up to the top. And TikTok's advertisers are embracing that amateur style. And TikTok is tripling the revenues off that amateur ad advantage. For our second story, with Rovi Wade overturned, the spotlight is turning to fertility and period tracking apps. Because privacy has gone from a nice to have to a must have.

Okay, last week with the Supreme Court ruling, many states banned abortions immediately. So the focus last week was on clinics. Well, this week, the focus isn't physical. The focus this week is on the digital. Since the ruling by the Supreme Court, we have seen a surge in downloads for period tracking apps. You now have over 50 million women worldwide using these period tracking apps. Flow is one of them. Last year they raised $50 million. They're worth nearly a billion dollars.

It's the kind of startup we could cover in this pot. And what these apps are doing is they're tracking your periods. They're tracking your ovulation. They're helping you avoid becoming pregnant or they're helping you become pregnant. One of them is worth nearly a billion. It's flow. It's the type of startup we might cover on this path. It is.

And what the startups like Flow are doing is they're helping you track your periods or tracking your ovulation, helping you avoid becoming pregnant. or helping you become pregnant. And thanks to technology like this, women today, they can understand and know their body, perhaps better than any previous generation of women. They definitely know their bodies more than Jack or I know our bodies. But while data on your cycle is extremely medical, it's not HIPAA protected like other personal health data is.

And that is the fundamental issue in this situation. One of these period tracking apps last week saw the biggest growth of them all. it's the Clue app, and it's because of this line. When it was clear a few months ago what the Supreme Court ruling would be, Clues app said they would not share private health data with any authority that could use it against you. On that line, download surged by 2,000% this past weekend, and the Clue app hit number 15 on the App Store charts.

But here is the really uncomfortable question that comes next. Could an attorney general demand info in a criminal prosecutor, against a woman who is suspected of having an abortion? Right. Jack, what if states subpoena those period apps and could force them to share info on your fertility? Okay, so based on that scary scenario, period tracking apps flow and natural cycle, they took things one step further than Clue did. Yeah, they're switching their apps to be anonymous.

According to the Flow app, when you put it in anonymous mode, it will remove all your personal identifying information from your account. Your name won't be there. Your email address won't be there. So if an authority asks Flo for information on one woman's account, Flo can't even identify whose account is whose. It's your classic incognito mode. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in the period tracking app space?

Privacy has gone from a nice to have to a must have. Yet he's in 1973, when the Supreme Court protected women's right to choose, it was based on privacy. While privacy, that word, privacy was never mentioned explicitly in the Constitution. The Supreme Court said back then, it was implied in five separate constitutional amendments. Well, today's Supreme Court disagrees pointing out in its majority opinion that privacy isn't mentioned in the Constitution.

With less legal protection for privacy today, consumers may want to start protecting themselves more. Well, the way Jack and I have seen this, Apple has made a huge bet on privacy. And their end-to-end encryption is like the gold standard. Google's incognito mode, that could experience a huge jump in use now. But an app that sells your data so they can make money targeting you with ads, that feels off today. The Supreme Court basically weakened privacy rights, so consumers may start demanding it from their apps. For many, privacy has gone from nice to have to must have.

And now, a word about our sponsor, Robin Hood. So for the last three and a half years, Jack and I were running a startup within a startup, basically. We turned our company market snacks into Robin Hood Snacks, the news arm of Robin Hood. And at Robin Hood, we co-hosted the Snacks Daily Pod that you got to know and love. At Robin Hood, we also got to hire an awesome team of news people who run the Robin Hood Snacks newsletter. Wild fact here. The biggest newsletter in America, Robin Hood Snacks. A key detail, though, not many are aware of is the editorial independence. So Jack and I set it up so that we could independently cover the most interesting and most important news stories of the day. Robin Hood's commitment to free, digestible news snack

style was an awesome differentiator. Yeah, if you're not investing in Robin Hood yet to get started, go to Robinhood.com slash T-boy and choose a free stock. That's Robin Hood. internet.com slash tbo y certain limitations apply all investments involve risk robin hood financial LLC member sipc by the way robin hood is no longer affiliated with us or the podcast for our third and final story for the new friday a bottle of whiskey just sold for a record price actually in fact a whole bunch of whiskeys are sold for a whole bunch of record prices jack because if your cash ain't moving it's losing yet he's summer travel is back baby jack we actually just literally booked our flights for the Italy trip in August. Like, flights booked, done.

I booked my ferry reservation for Block Island like eight months ago. As early as you possibly could, it was very German-American of me. Basically, no more seats on anything left. But a strange phenomenon, Jack and I have noticed, people are traveling to airports just to buy whiskey. Not just any old whiskey, Nick. This isn't your Jim Beam. This is the McKellen Six Pillars, also known as a very expensive fireball.

Also, no, you can't have a sip. Uh-huh. Well, this is like glass blown in Venice by probably a team of 60 human beings. You don't put this on your top shelf? You put this in your safe. Is this a malt whiskey or is this a piece at MoMA? In Dubai at the airport, it just set a record for highest price paid ever for a whiskey. Che-ching. The six bottle collection sold for $816,000.

Jack, can we talk about a return on this thing? What kind of a jump is that from the previous? record? That's 68% higher than the most recently sold set of this whiskey. Get this. If you happen to be the one bestie out there who owns a McKellen set of whiskey, it has appreciated 35% in value in just the last year. Now, Forbes dove in a bit further. They did. And they noticed during the pandemic, rare whiskey has been a top-performing financial asset. Jack auction house. Sotheby's just sold a Karazawa, 52-year-old Zodiac Rat Cask. whiskey for a record price of what?

Can't pronounce it, but I can calculate it. $445,000. Over the Istanbul airport, they sold a Yamazaki 55-year whiskey at a record price of what? When you're dropping over half a million, Nick, the 5% you save at the duty-free shop, it's worth the Uber to the airport. The high west whiskey for my bachelor party jack. Haven't really seen much appreciation there. Forget the tasting notes.

Here's the bottom line when it comes to top shelf, scotch. Single malt is beating the stock market. Yeah, yaddies, these alternative assets like luxury whiskey are gaining attention because some people have a whole lot of cash since the pandemic and they got nowhere to put it. During the pandemic, vintage car prices are up 50%. A Rolex prices, they're up 30%. Those burkin bags we keep hearing about, they're up big too. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies waft in those big cube whiskey ice cubes?

During inflation, if your cash isn't moving, it's probably losing. Inflation, it drives up prices of, you know, everything that you've been buying, we've been buying, everyone's been buying. $100 bill today is worth 8% less than it did last year because it buys 8% less than it did last year. So the problem with inflation is that it hurts the money you spend, but it also hurts the money you don't spend. Yet is right now, it is tough to find a place to move your cash where it won't erode 8% in value every year.

Yeah, cash is losing 8% because of the 8% inflation. stocks have lost 20% crypto is like lost even more. With this inflation, you need to make 8% just to keep your money at the same purchasing value as before. Well, the super wealthy are moving their cash into rare alternative assets like a very nice McEllan scotch. Must be nice. Everyone else can move their cash into, honestly, Jack, we like really could only come up

with a few options here. Real estate, but like, it's tough to buy a house. Some like obscure savings account, maybe one of those? There's no obvious answer on how to protect your money right. What is obvious, Yetis, is that during inflation, if cash isn't moving, it's losing. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us over there? TikTok has a new king, Cabi Lane. Yeah, TikTok, their ads are amateur not pro.

It's the amateur advantage. For our second story, period tracking apps are reprogramming to protect their user's privacy. Privacy has gone from a nice to have to a must have. For our third and final story, rare whiskey is selling at record prices. Because during inflation, if your money ain't moving, it's less. losing. Now time for the best fact yet. This one is actually a correction sent in by Troy Larson, longtime Yeti, from lovely South Dakota. This week, we told you how Mars Candy Company has been pumping out M&Ms for a century. Cook and Coco since before the root canal existed.

Well, Troy actually, uh, ha ha ha ha. A good point. Troy happens to have gone to dental school, Nick, so he wasn't letting this one slide. Yeah, it turns out the M&Ms, Reese's and Twix bars are not older than the classic root canal tooth operation. We looked into it. The first root canal procedure was performed on an American tooth in 1838. By an American dentist, Edwin Maynard, who pulled it off, saving that infected tooth without removing the core part of the tooth. It's a painful operation today with painkillers.

Yeah, it really was. It was really painful 184 years ago. I've had two, not a fan. I've had none. I'm not a fan either. But Yeties, you've looked fan. Fantastic all week. And Jack and I are fans of when we get best facts yet, yet you send in with your voice, a voicemail. There's a link to a Google form in this episode description. You could upload your voice to this pod.

Yeah, Jack and I will get you on the pod. Meantime, we'll see you tomorrow. Can't wait. And before we go, Mika Jester from Bentonville, Arkansas is turned in 33 and a half. We're giving her the half birthday shout out because Nick and I are always on vacation in late. December when she has her full birthdays. Well, Trevor Jackson is turning a real full, rounded 21 over in Grapevine, Texas. Found up. And happy birthday to Christina Helm, turning 29 in Cambridge Mass.

And a happy birthday to Jess Larkin over in South Boston, just outside Boston. And congrats to Emily Pears, down at Medical School at Duke. And Dougie Warren of Richmond, Virginia is retiring after 30 years in sales. Time to serve some squirrels. And Joe Moroni can congratulate. Congrats on the new job in investment banking down in Denver. And congrats to Austin Waiting with a sweet new job at J.M. Smucker. Send us some jam and some Mier Law.

Congrats on the new job in crypto over New York City. And happy 10 years to the arena. Our old apartment buddies in the East Village of NYC. Our buddy Timmy, our buddy Dave, over on 231, East 14th Street, right above the beauty bar. Biggest map? Yes. In all of New York City on our wall. We'll never forget when someone stole our.

couch. If anyone knows, hit us up that T-boy pot. Story for another pie. This is Jack. Nick and I both own stock of Apple and Robin Hood. And now word about our exclusive sponsor, Robin Hood. Look, we're not tech guys. We're not engineers. Nick, I'm no product manager. You look great, but we're not technically. When our computer's not working, Jack and I turn it off and then we turn it back on again. But when we moved to California to join Robin Hood, we were in tech's mecca. So we were soaking up as much about the tech industry as we could. One thing we saw about the tech industry at Robin Hood was insane customer focus. Every product launched, every tweak made to the app was a laser-focused move on customers. Robin Hood would be interviewing hundreds of users to figure out if one tweak of one

button in the app would improve the experience. Inside of Robin Hood, we saw that everything the company did was focused on the best outcome for you, the customer. If you're not investing on Robin Hood yet, to get started, go to robinood.com slash T-boy and choose a stock. That's Robin Hood. dot com slash tbohy certain limitations apply all investments involve risk robin hood financial llc member sipc by the way robin hood is no longer affiliated with us or this podcast we hear lots of bird by you oh yeah i keep opening the door in the i'm not concerned about the birds dude and there's no way that's like picking up so it's so funny you can hear yeah but i it gets hot in here

keep it open i think you're fine as long as you're fine with the world here I'm getting hot. This is Nick.