The Best One Yet - 👩‍🎤 “BTS plays Wall Street” — K-Pop’s stock pop. Amazon’s secret spy biz. Instagram’s new AI buddy.

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Amazon’s newest business is actually a secret spy business — And Amazon used it to infiltrate Walmart and other competitors.Korea’s K-Pop bands don’t just play songs, they play stocks — The Big 4 Korean music groups are publicly-traded on Wall Street because K-Pop’s biz is popping.Meta just put an AI Chatbot into the searchbar of all their apps, including Instagram — Mark Zuckerberg’s advantage in the AI battle? Free & Frictionless.Plus, Americans toss out $68M of pennies, nickels, and dimes every year… but one company is scooping them up.5 days until our NYC Live Show! Yetis, we can’t wait to see you in the city that never sleeps.$KPOP $AMZN $METASubscribe to the best newsletter yet: tboypod.com/newsletterWant merch, a shoutout, or got TheBestFactYet? Go to: www.tboypod.comFollow The Best One Yet on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok: @tboypodAnd now watch us on YouTube Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. Welcome back. It is Monday, April 22nd. And today's pod is the best one yet. It's a T-By. The top three pop business news stories you need to know today. Big week for the pod.

Jack, we got our New York live show and count them down like, what, 72 hours, man? Yeah. We have the New York City T-boy live show. It's this Wednesday, huge studio audience. I'm planning to dress up in pinstripes. Oh, my God. You're going to look fantastic. I can't wait until we can look out and be like,

Studio audience, how are you? We are flying from San Francisco to New York City. We've both just packed our bags. We got the hotel. I'm bringing my dog River, by the way. I should go to the show yetes. If you are in New York City this week, we can't wait to meet in person. We are really pumped to see you.

But Jack, what are the three stories for today's tea boy? For our first story, open up your Instagram and you'll notice something new. A.M.A.I. chat bot in the search bar. This is InstaGPT, and it could become the new leader in AI. For our second story, South Korea's KIAs. pop bands, I peop-ed themselves. They are publicly traded bands. But K-pop stocks are experiencing a K-pop drop.

And our third and final story. The Wall Street Journal just discovered that Amazon has a secret fake company to gather intel on its rivals. Amazon has gone full James Bond. It is infiltrated Walmart. But yeties, before we hit that wonderful mix. That is how you kick off the week to the live show, Jack. The biggest waste in America is change.

Change. Like pocket change. Pocket change. Not the other change. Pennies, Nichols, Times, quarters. Not the verb. We're talking the noun here. Americans love money, but they don't love the tiniest money, apparently. Get this. Americans throw away $68 million a pennies, a quarters, a dime every single year. 68 million dollars have changed. We just toss in the trash every year. Sit down, stand up and I've done some change on the couch, Jack. I guess Nichols have become a nuisance. I guess pennies have become more of a problem. No, we've all been there.

What am I going to do with these filthy metal coins? Is that like mold growing on Lincoln's head? What is this? They fall down on the floor? You don't even go back to pick them up. Oh, Jack, you go through a TSA checkpoint. You're just leaving that change in the bin. You really are.

The TSA actually collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in unclaimed change every year. Remove your shoes. Remove your liquids and leave your half dollars. But plot twist. Yes. Your lost change is actually somebody's business. This is shocking. But there is a startup called a Revenue.

world that is actually collecting unwanted change as a business. This sustainable trash company sifts through the cartons, the containers, and the crumbs to find those coins. And from 550,000 tons of trash, they've collected $10 million of lost change. Your lost dime is their new dime. Your lost penny is their profit. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for all our buddies who have simply lost and tossed their change?

One man's trash is another man's treasure. Your perspective on change is about to change. When I was a kid, finding change around the house was my primary source of income. I think you told me about that hobby? I kind of felt bad. Pro tip. Between the dryer machine and the dryer door. That little crease there is loaded with quarters.

George Washington, you are all mine. Couchions? Yes, 10 bucks. It's not a futon. It's a gold mine. Jack, let's hit our three stores. 15 years before this song, two boys from the Northeast met in the dorm. They had an idea to cause a cultural storm.

It's the 50%. That's a fat tip. T-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. First, a quick word from our sponsor. For our first story, Mark Zuckerberg just shocked the world,

not by launching a chat GPT competitor, but by immediately sticking that AI chat bot into your Instagram. That's right. Instagram just came after chat GPT. Yeties, we've said it before. Mark Zuckerberg's only original idea. His only one was Facebook, which he invented in 2004. And it was the Facebook back then.

Yeti since then, Zucks basically copied other ideas made by other companies. And what do we call it, Jack? A zucking. It's a zucking. And last Thursday, Jack and I got an alert in our T-Boy's studios about a stage five zucking. Meta copied the most powerful product of our era.

Open AIs chat GPD. Yet he's Zuckerberg's new chatbot. It's called Meta AI and it's based on a large language model called Lama 3. And the launch was so successful, it sent the stock of meta to a new record high last week. Forget this. Zucks meta is now worth a whopping $1.3 trillion. 2023 was Zuck's year of efficiency. 2024 is Zuck's year of AI efficiency.

Now, Yeties, the reason meta's AI chat bot is so powerful, isn't that it's as smart as chat GPT? Yeah, good point. It actually, it may never become as smart as chat TPT, right? But it still might be more powerful because Zuck's AI chatbot is more accessible than chat GPT. I think there is a Game of Thrones episode where like one of the Lannisters says something about this. Like power is accessibility, not strength. You know, like something like that? Sounds like a Tyrion line.

Yeah, it's a classic Tyrion. Because Yeties, if you go to the search bar of your Instagram app, your Facebook app or Messenger or WhatsApp, the first thing you're going to see is a new meta AI branding. And this is what Jack and I found fascinating. This isn't just a search bar anymore in Instagram for like, cupcake hashtags. The search bar on all of Meta's apps are now an AI chatbot. We repeat. Again, you go on Instagram. You're not just typing the name of the person you're trying to Facebook stock. Now it's about typing questions. I just opened Instagram and I went to the search bar. And I typed in

how long does it take to bake an entire chicken? And what ended up happening? Meta's AI chatbot told me that a four to five pound chicken takes an hour and a half at 425. If you would type that into Instagram like a week ago, you would have gotten some weird chicken profiles, dude. Yeah, weirdest Instagram account you've ever seen. So, Bessie's pause the pod. Instagram is now not just a threat to chat GPT. Instagram is now a threat to Google search. They just turned their search bar in the Instagram app into a web browser that has AI answering your question.

And that's not the only thing Zuck did, was it, Jack? He even created a standalone website called meta.a.i that will compete with Google.com. There's some drama going down in the Bay Area, man. So Jack, what's the takeaway for all our buddies over at Instagram? The two most powerful terms in tech are free and frictionless. Free and frictionless, like biceps. Yeti's when a tech product is free and frictionist, that's a freaky combo. And meta has both of those in a way that its AI competitors do not.

All right, here's how we see it. ChatGPT is trying to make money, and it does so by paywalling its best features for $20 bucks a month. Google's chatbot is doing the same thing. You have to pay 20 bucks a month to use it. But Zuck doesn't plan to charge a dollar for this new chatbot. Instead, he said his goal is just to keep this thing free for the whole world. Just like the rest of his apps are, free for the whole world. So Zuck will be making money with ads and use AI to keep you in the apps just longer.

He hopes that instead of using Google for your web browsing, you start using Instagram for your web browsing. But it's not just about being free. Since the whole world already downloaded Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, it's frictionless to try to. You can try it right now. You don't even have to update the app on your phone. So the way Jack and I see it, even if Zuck's new AI chatbot is inferior to all the others, it still may win the AI race. Because meta has the two most powerful terms in tech.

Free. Boom. And frictionless. Boom. For our second story. From South Korea to Coachella, K-pop bands are living their best lives right now. But the real surprise about K-pop bands is that, there are K-pop stocks.

And those K-pop stocks have popped and dropped. Yeah, he's... Every time we cover K-pop on the show, a huge section of our audience goes nuts. We love it. It's fantastic. Jack, do these words mean anything to you, by the way? A guy whose heart bursts when the night comes, a sexy lady, a sexy lady,

Wop a Gangnam style. The last bit does. Yeah, that's the translation of gangning style, which is for nearly five years the most watched YouTube song of all time. Baby Shark Dance took the crown. And it's also a prime example of K-pop. which is South Korean pop music.

K-pop is South Korea's top export after cars, smartphones, and cosmetics. Get this. K-pop music is 2% of South Korea's GDP. But it's also taken on the U.S. music charts. Oh, yeah. Can we interest you in some black pink, some red velvet? They've been selling out in the United States. At Chicago's Lollapalooza, New Jeans was the number one performer. Oh, and BTS was so popular, McDonald's made their first huge meal named after them. But here's the big surprise.

South Korea actually has four. publicly traded K-pop stocks. We repeat, there are four publicly traded K-pop band stocks in South Korea with a competitive advantage that's that they're handsome. And Wall Street is so bullish on the Bantam boys

that the label that owns BTS went public. Just to sprinkle on some context here, this is like a Taylor Swift, Inc. was traded on NASDAQ, if all of Taylor Swift's business was publicly tradable, and the ticker symbol would be errors.

What's in your portfolio? Oh, I got a wee little. ETS. This was literally our ask of Taylor Swift last year, by the way. Now, yet he's here's what Jack and I found fascinating about this story. Jack, what's the best way to understand K-pop stock? Go to a concert. Go to a BTS concert.

Get a junk cook poster and you're going to understand what we're talking about. But Jack, what's the second best way to understand K-pop stocks? Jump in T-boy style to the earnings report of Hib. Hib. It's a $7 billion entertainment company that owns all the rights to the mega-popular our K-pop band, BTS. Now, lately, if you follow BTS, you know, their band members have been going solo, so that has helped them scale the number of albums they're selling.

All the members are also under the label of Hybe. Now, Jack, when we checked out the financial... Oh, they're looking fantastic. Oh, what are we seeing, man. Revenues jumped 23% last quarter from the year before. Profits are up 20% and concert revenue is up 40%. Oh, plus, the growth strategy for Hybe is spreading their K-pop stars abroad. Coachella's first weekend, Las Sarah Fem open.

And yet, despite those fantastic numbers that just took the stage, which, by the way, your voice would be K-pop good band. It would be very K-pop. I don't know about that. Despite those Billboard wins, K-pop stocks have not been popping. All four K-pop stocks are down so far this year. One of them by 40%. But Besties hears the news.

Goldman Sachs, the American Investment Bank, thinks that K-pop stocks deserve more star attention. Goldman Sachs, we need to treat these K-pop stocks more like the talent. Goldman Sachs just put a buy rating on the K-pop stocks of South Korea. So Jack and I whipped up the takeaway. Jack, what's the takeaway for all our buddies who are K-pop band stocks? Music is about the notes. Investing is about the metrics.

Yeties, here's the interesting thing. Goldman thinks that the problem isn't K-pop's business? It's K-pop's analysts. We've been looking at the wrong metrics. Because investors have evaluated music traditionally by looking at album sales. Because historically, album sales are what reflect the number of fans. So that should reflect the sales potential of like a band. But Goldman thinks the better metric is concerts, merch sales, and meetups with fans.

Like offline audience interaction. Right. That's what they think we should be focusing on. Not the albums. They think offline meetups reflect intensity of engagement from fans. And that's the real indicator of profit. Well, remember what Jack and I said. K-pop concert audiences grew 40% last year, and they doubled the number of bands that they're taken on tour. So, yes, K-pop stocks are down, but Goldman thinks they should pop up. Goldman thinks that we've been listening to the wrong metrics.

Now a quick word from our sponsor. For our third and final story, this one's wild. Amazon's newest product, it's a secret spy business. Amazon created a fake company just to spy on the competition. story. And they managed to infiltrate Walmart, eBay, and Shopify. Jack, we've got an interesting assignment for you. Have you ever heard of the name Big River? Does Big River mean anything to you? No. Yadies, Big River is actually an online store for stuff. I just checked it out. Big River sells beach chairs, sneakers, pajamas with Spider-Man on.

Yeah, there's some classic stuff. Big River. They got a warehouse. They got a website. They sell things on online platforms. Last year, they made a million dollars in revenue, $125,000 of which was sold through Walmart. When you jump in T-boy style like we didn't go to their website, it says, we at Big River are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers, and creators. Big River is actually a real business that sells stuff through Walmart and others. But funny thing, it's also a fake business. Get this, Yety's, Big River is actually secretly owned and operated and founded by Amazon. Thanks to some fantastic investigative journalism from the Wall Street Journal.

This is wild. We know that over the last 10 years, Amazon created a secret separate company just to spy on rivals. Big River. Amazon staff used Big River to go undercover and then they would sell things on Walmart and eBay to learn how their rivals worked. They'd pretend to be an unaffiliated company and try to sell products through Walmart stores. This is corporate espionage. This is capitalist spying. Jack. The name's Bezos. Jeff Bezos.

How do you like your packages, Jeff? Darn it. Don't. Shake and not stare. Exactly. That's what I was hoping you would say that. Yeah, it is. This all began back in 2015 at Amazon when their codename project curiosity became an internal plan to study competition. From that secret internal project, they launched a real company called Big River. And they filled that company with Amazon employees, but erased Amazon from their identity. They scrubbed it CIA style. Like no mention of Amazon in their email addresses, in the legal registration,

not even on the website, no signs of Amazon. They went full Jason Bourne. Totally. Big River would go to e-commerce conferences and introduce themselves as employees of Big River. They even trained their employees on how to respond if word got out about an Amazon connection. Like the CIA does the same thing. Oh, and then Amazon, they even took this spy concept international. Because to understand Japanese e-commerce companies, they did the same thing.

created a brand called Not So Ape. It's like a real brand. Yeah, it's a streetware brand in Tokyo that sells like sneakers, hats, and skateboards, but it's owned secretly by Amazon. It's a front used to understand logistics. So Jack, if that even is your real name, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Amazon? Is this ethically wrong or is this innovatively right?

All right, ladies, what Amazon is doing here is actually a real common thing. It's called benchmarking, researching competition to make sure your own company is staying ahead. Plenty of companies, for example, they buy the new car of the competition and then dissect it to understand how it works. But what Amazon's doing, creating a fake company with real factories, real employees, and like really a million dollars in revenues, that seems like benchmarking to the extreme. We've never seen that. But is Amazon's secret spy business ethical?

We're not sure. Yeah, because like, it feels ethically wrong to do business under false pretenses. Yeah, and the omission of truth to Walmart that we're actually owned by Amazon, that's kind of the same as a lie. Or on the other hand, was Amazon's secret spying business innovatively right? Yeah, after all, Amazon could have found out the same information by hiring former Walmart employees or paying market research providers. Instead, they cut out the middleman and did it themselves.

Yeah, maybe this was just a creative level of research with wildly innovative approaches. Either way, this is benchmarking to the extreme. We need to understand where you draw the line. Yeah, like if a chef, Jack, goes to a rival restaurant and, like, orders the chicken cordon blue and then asks the waiter for some intel and brings it home with them and studies it. That's probably fine. Yeah. Unless they go in as disguised as someone else.

So yet, this is what Jack and I have been wondering all day. Like Amazon's fake, real multi-million dollar business, that's a spy business, it brings up a new business debate. We want to know from you. corporate espionage is legal, but is it ethical? Hit us up at Teaboypot. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us to kick off the New York Live Week? Zuck just put a powerful AI chat bot into the search bar of all of Meta's apps, including Instagram. I got two of the most powerful strengths in tech, free and frictionless.

For our second story, it's K-pop, a booming export of South Korea, but a dropping part of the stock market. But Goldman Sachs thinks that investors, are just listening to the wrong BTS metric. And our third and final start, Amazon has been operating a front company to infiltrate Walmart and other competitors. $107. This is corporate espionage.

It's legal, but is it ethical? I'm going to ask money penny. I think that's why they're doing this, Jack, for the money and the pennies. Actually, Amazon owns James Bond. They are money penny. But yeties, this pod's not over yet. Here's what else you need to know today.

First, it is Earth Day. And according to a new study published in nature, climate change will badly hurt the economy and they shared some interesting numbers out. Global GDP will decline by 19% by 2050 due to warmer climates and more extreme weather. It's like we all know that this is happening, but it's helpful when you get the numbers around us. Yeah, plus, we're also worried about the cost of clean energy. The cost of the status quo is so much worse. And second, on Saturday, the House of Representatives passed sweeping.

foreign policy bills. It included aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, plus a new TikTok bill. Next, the Senate is expected to pass each one of these, and then President Biden is expected to sign each one of them to right into law. Including the TikTok bill, which would force China to sell TikTok in one year or face a ban. And finally, this sounds like the plot of frankly a James Bond movie, but this is actually a real-life thing. There was a gold heist on an airplane. Isn't that how Batman, the Dark night begins with Bain. Also, gold and I. Yet these air Canada employees are suspected in a gold heist of 6,600 gold bars. Because a Swiss bank shipped a bunch of gold to Canada. And the flight

attendants are like, did you see what's down in the cargo bag? Yeah, these gold prices are record highs over 2,000 bucks an ounce. The flight attendants wanted that gold. It was actually the bag handler guys, but I'm feeling everyone got in on that action, Jack. Oh, I'll have more peanuts. Now, time for the best fact yet. This one sent in by Mariana Munoz Niembra from lovely Vancouver Canada. We're doubling down on Earth Day. Oh, yeah, literally. Actually, this one's literally just about the Earth.

It turns out the Earth is spinning too fast. Yeah, it's actually spinning so fast that the world's timekeepers are considering subtracting a second from our clocks to keep time kosher right now. Now, we've added time to the calendar with leap here. Right. That's when the Earth is going around the sun and so we need to adjust. things. Yeah, we have to adjust things because it's not exactly 365 around the sun. But in this case, it's that the earth is spinning around itself a little too fast. It's rotating and it's not

exactly 24 hours. Yeah, it's called the negative second loop yeties. And here's the thing. The earth, it takes about 24 hours to rotate. Key word? About. So we might have to subtract the second. Yetties, you'll look fantastic. Jack, you got your toothbrush ready for New York, man? You got that thing packed up? Back up travel toothbrush? Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I do have it. I always get a job of the backup. We're staying at the standard hotel. It's going to be great. Me, Pat, we're running along the high line. This is going to be great in the morning. It's a dog-friendly hotel. We can't wait to play New York live

this week. And remember, we always want to add more yetis to the crew, so tell your buddies, H-Y-H-T-B-O-Y. Have you had the best one yet? That is how we grow the show. It really is. If you know, you know. And before we go, a happy birthday. I'm sorry, a happy quarter

birthday to me, which you didn't mention earlier, Jack. I missed your 16th birthday. I missed your one fifth birthday. I wasn't expecting a gift. You're expecting one fourth of a gift. I was. Yeties and happy birthday to Judy Slivens in Fort Lewis, Washington,

an Army service member and Cobra Commander. Thanks for your service, Judy. And Kalin Cunot in Antioch, Illinois. He's got a birthday and a residency acceptance to Columbia University. You're going to have a blast. Columbia is just amazing. Really good mufongo in the neighborhood around Columbia med school. Get that mufongo.

And Max and Alana and Asheville, North Carolina are moving. in together, not too shabby. Congratulations. And happy birthday to Ava Perez from Verona, Wisconsin. Legendary Yeti on Wisconsin. And happy second anniversary to Angela and Joseph in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And Mike Wong has got a new job down in San Mateo, California. Congratulations to Mike. And congrats to Alex Chang, starting a new job in Torrance, California. And to everyone else whose one-quarter birthday is, ha. Oh, yeah, I said you did that. This is Jack. I own stock of Amazon.

on to Netflix and Nick and I both on stock of Shopify.