The Best One Yet - 🧳 “Cancel the Carry-on” – American Airlines’ new fee. Liquid Death’s tiny billboard. Nvidia’s Hermès handbag chips.

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

American Airlines increased their checked bag fee by 33%, but economics shows they should do the opposite — Airlines should kill overhead compartments… kill the carryon.Liquid Death is selling the space on their boxes as an ad to Coinbase – It’s a “tiny billboard” and it’s the dumbest idea you can think of (and that’s the point).Nvidia just announced that revenues nearly quadrupled last quarter — Because they price their chips like Hermès prices their handbags.And Apple debunked the “rice will save my phone” theory — So we dug into the origin of the rice myth, and explain what to actually do if your phone gets wet.$NVDA $AAL $COINSubscribe to our newsletter: 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. It's Thursday, the new Friday, February 22nd, and today's pod is the best one yet. That's a T-Boy. The top three pop business news stories you need to know today. All right, Jack, am I wrong? Or did you just read the techiest tech, tech, tech, of tech headlines we've ever tech and seen, man? This is a real headline from yesterday.

Apple announces PQ3, a post-quantum cryptographic protocol for IMessage that uses the Khyber algorithm, and it launches an iOS 17.4. Jack, you need an engineering degree just to read that story. That's not the best one yet, but this is. Jack, first story for today's show. What do we got, man? For our first story, in the last month, NVIDIA has passed Amazon.

It's past Google and it's past meta. Invidia is now the third biggest company in America. So Jack and I jumped in T-boy style to NVIDIA's big earnings report. For our second story, American Airlines is increasing their checked bag fee for the first time in six years. But Jag and I think the solution is actually the opposite. Cancel the Carri-on. And our third and final story is Liquid Death.

Liquid-dead. The $1 billion water brand just pulled off the biggest ad innovation in years. Liquid Death just invented the tiny billboard. But yet he's, before we hit that wonderful mix of stories. Fantastic mix of stories. What are you doing? Why are you doing that voice? It's like a tiny billboard voice.

That's a tiny billboard voice. I see. I thought you just didn't have some helium. But Yetis, you know what you do if you drop your phone in the pool. You drop your phone in a cocktail in a tub. If you drop your phone in a toilet, what do you do, Jack? If your phone gets wet, you know what to do. You find some rice and you stick your phone in that rice. Brown rice, white rice, Jasmine rice, any rice.

Dip that phone in a big old bowl of Basmati if that's all you got. Throw it in the risotto and forget about it for an hour. Because rice is absorbent. So it sucks out the moisture from the deepest little corners of your phone. Rice. It's like the CPR for a dron. ground iPhone. But here's the news. Stop doing that. Stop doing that. Yet he's, get this, Apple just posted for the very first time that you should not stick your phone in rice under any circumstances. Apple officially debunked the rice for wet phone theory that we've all been following since we had phones. But here's

the wildest part. In fact, Apple says that the rice particles will actually damage your phone. What? Why have we been using rice to solve the wet phone problem? Apparently you put your phone in rice to help the phone. It's actually hurting the phone. So Nick and I got to ask, where did this myth begin? Who told us that rice saves wet phones? We got curious. Who is the first human being to tip their phone into rice?

Nick and I jumped in T-Boy style. It turns out this rice fable, yeah, it's a fable. It goes all the way back to 1946. The magazine popular photography wrote that you should put your camera in rice to keep it dry if it gets wet. So 78 years ago,

it worked for cameras. But Apple says it doesn't work for phones today. The rice myth have been busted. So if rice isn't the solution, what is the solution if your phone gets wet? You're supposed to go to Finland to bring your phone into a sauna, Jack? Well, Apple's official guidance is to tap it a few times against your hand to let the excess water come out of the port. And then Apple says you should wait. After 30 minutes, try plugging that phone back in.

Leave the rice in a peel off, not in your iPhone. Keep that phone dry, yaddies. Let's hit our three stories. song two boys from the northeast met in the dawn they had an idea to cause a cultural storm it's the best one 50% that's a fat tip tea boy city on your at list if you know you know cause we're ready to go we can't wait no more so just start to show our first story invidia has become the most exciting company of the year and they just announced epic earnings it reveals that invidia's computer chips are priced just like urme's handbags are yeties you want to know how jack and i think about NVIDIA. We think about NVIDIA like it's the fourth Kardashian. Aren't there five Kardashians though? I think those are generous, but we can round up on this, Jack. Well, whenever Kim, Chloe,

or Courtney do anything, it gets all the attention. And it's the same with NVIDIA. Wall Street is obsessed with whatever this computer chip company does. Invidia stock is the most traded stock on the stock market for nearly every single day of 2024 so far. Invidia stock is up 40% this year, 300% in the last 12 months and 1,500% in the last five years. It is a meteoric rise. And in just February, Nvidia has passed Amazon, Google, and meta in terms of valuation. Yeti's Nvidia is now worth $1.7 trillion, Jack. Could you sprinkle on some context for us, please?

That is the third most valuable company in America behind just Apple and Microsoft. Let me sprinkle on a little more context for us, please. Invidia is worth 340 lifts. And why is NVIDIA up so much? Just check out their latest earnings they announced yesterday. Boom, yesterday. NVIDIA announced earnings and the revenues in the fourth quarter for NVIDIA quadrupled from last year. Profits?

Sex tappled from last year. What exactly is that number, Jack? I mean, six times higher than last year. Their profits were six times higher than last year. And now yet is when it comes to NVIDIA's a freakish success recently, there's really just one reason for it. It's the AI gold rush. And they happen to be selling shovels to all those. those AI gold diggers.

Because here's the thing, Yetis, not all computer chips are equal. Invita has the only computer chip that can handle high-level artificial intelligence computing. So like if Chat Chepti is the brains of AI, then invidious chips are the brain cells of AI. Chat ChilpT can't answer your random question without being powered by NVIDIA's chips. If you want to ask Chat Chepti about some taco recipe, it's not going to spit out those details unless invidious chips are powering it. does not compute without Nvidia. But yet is Nvidia's big quarter. And Nvidia's huge surge so far this year, it's also telling us something else about

invidious chips. And it has nothing to do with the Kardashians. Although it kind of does. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Nvidia? Invidia is using the same strategy as Hermes Handbags. Armée's handbags. Armaze, it is the French fashion company that doesn't just sell handbags. They sell $10,000 handbags and they've never put them on sale.

Because Hermes controls the supply and they take time to handmake each handbag. And all they ever do is increase the price of that handbag. Because Aramaze knows that their handbags are a scarce resource and they know that their clientele are the richest people on Earth. Similarly, Invidia knows their AI chips are a scarce resource right now. And their clientele are the richest companies on Earth. So Invidia has done exactly what Armeis has done with its rare arms. partisan craft reaching an extremely luxury audience.

It's jacked up the price. The price for Nvidia's AI chips are sky high right now. It's jacking that price up on Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and Google who are willing to pay for those chips because they are super luxury buyers. And AI is all those tech companies can think about right now. So besties, Nvidia sales nearly quintupled, not because they sold more computer chips, but because they sold those chips at a higher price. That's what we saw on Nvidia's earn.

Its computer chips are priced just like Armei's handbags. For our second story, American Airlines just jacked up their fee for checked bags by 33%. But honestly, American Airlines made a mistake. They shouldn't be charging for checked bags. They should charge for carry-on bags. Let's talk about the fees, the late fee, the change fee, the fee, the fee fee and the checked bag fee. They are all hated fees. Well, American Airlines just jacked up that last one.

Yeah, it's now going to be 40 bucks if you check a bag at the airport. 35 bucks on American Airlines if you prepaid a check a bag online. And as is always the case with airlines raising fees, when one airline raises a fee, all the other airlines do the same thing. They're like, me too. What are we expecting to see, Jack? We expect Delta United, every airline except Southwest to gladly follow American Airlines's lead by raising their own check bag fees as well.

There's nothing CEOs like more than when a competitor raises prices so they can suck that idea and raise prices too. In 2022, U.S. Airlines brought in a record $7 billion in checked bag fees, and that number's only going to go up now. Yeti's here's what Jack and I found fascinating about this story. Ironically, raising checked bag fees makes more people want to carry on. It's a yin and a yang situation. It's a yin and a yank situation. That's a big reason why less than half of air travelers check luggage today. But people don't just carry on because of the fees of checked baggage. Right. Carrying on means you save time and you don't wait at baggage claim.

And carrying on means there's no concerns that the airline is going to lose your luggage. And carrying on means you're going to read that book that you put in your carry on, but you're probably not going to end up reading it even though you brought that book in your carry on. But the abundance of carry on luggage has caused a huge problem that we all face every time we take a plane. We're carrying on more than ever, so there's less room to carry on more than ever. The abundance of carry-on luggage has caused what economists call the tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons, acting in our own self-interest, we have depleted the shared resource of overhead space that hath been so holy in the skies.

I cannot remember the last flight I took when there was enough overhead space for all the suitcases. Can we have some volunteers to leave their luggage here? No, you can't have long. No one wants to volunteer. Economists call this the tragedy of the commons. We call it Hunger Games of the Sky, because passengers are fighting each other for that space. We all hate checking bags.

I once saw Jack bite someone to avoid checking a bag to his final destination. You said you wouldn't tell anyone, Nick. Now, yet he's, Jack and I don't want to just talk about the problem of checked bags. We also want to talk about the solution. We've got a wild solution that you gotta hear. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for? for all our buddies heading to the airport. It's time to cancel the carry-on.

Yet he's Ian Boggist is a writer over at the Atlantic, and he wrote an article called The Carry-On Baggage Bubble is about to pop. In that article, he observes how there's not enough space for carry-on luggage, and that causes huge stress for the passengers, huge stress for the crew, and big delays for everyone. Ironically, the airline industry incentivizes carry-ons, but carry-ons are what creates the most problems. It's time to stop the madness.

We're waiting for an airline to forbid carry-on luggage. Now, besties, before you panic, envision the efficiency of an airport experience without carry-on. No more pain of lugging your bags through the terminal and down that aisle in the airplane. No more waiting in the aisle for 48 rows of passengers of grabbing their bags to the plane. And no more animal-like behavior of one passenger biting another to grab that six inches of bin space. That's the last six inches left on the plane. The time lost waiting at baggage claim it would be made up for by the time saved,

planing and deplanning. Besties, airline delays are the number one frustration of customers. Overhead luggage anxiety is the number two frustration of customers. So banning carry-on bags, that would solve one of them and alleviate the other. As much as we hate checking our suitcases, they're simply the more economically efficient way to do it. That's why it's time to cancel the carry-on. Let us know what you think, besties.

We know this is a controversial idea. Hit us up at Teaboy Pod. We got a poll going. We want to hear what you think. For our third and final story, this is a wild one. Liquid Death already revolutionized water. Now it's revolutionized advertising. Because Liquid Death just invented the tiniest billboard of all time.

If you haven't had a liquid dead, it's like it's the only water that screams at you. To be clear, it's just water. But the can really screams at you. like water, but it looks like Metallica. Liquid Death is the most controversial water brand because it's the most ironic water brand. Most water brands, they sound like a spa. De Sani Pariena. The liquid death, it is the opposite of a spa, isn't it jack? Liquid death. They sell 19 ounce tawboid cans with a raging, dripping skull of like blood. But there's just water in there. It's not like some heavy IPA or an energy drink. It's like if Black Sabbath was controlling the taps in your house. That

That's what Liquid Death Water is. Liquid Death is a marketing stunt, but it's a marketing stunt that sells. Get these numbers. Liquid Death's Water has sold $300 million in revenues last year and is now worth $700 million. They've even hired bankers to prepare for an IPO. And again, it's just water inside that can't. H2O. But yet is, here's why Jack and I wanted to cover this story. The latest stunt from Liquid Death is actually a bold new marketing innovation. We're calling it the tiny billboard. Get this. Liquid Death is selling ads on its own boxes by auctioning off those ads on eBay. We repeat, you could bid on eBay to get your brand's logo on the boxes of 500,000 Liquid Death eight packs. So yet here's how this looks if you're the consumer. If you go into the store looking for a box of Liquid Death water, that box has Liquid Death's logo on one side.

And an ad for some random company. that paid for it on the other side. Each box of Liquid Death is basically a tiny billboard. That's what we're saying. Because wherever there are eyeballs, there could be ads. Which leads to the big question, Jack, who won the auction to be the advertiser on the liquid death boxes? Coinbase did.

Coinbase paid $500,000 to win this very unique side of the box advertising opportunity. So like a half a million packs of Liquid Death are going to have Liquid Death branding on one side of the box. and they'll now have Coinbase's logo on the other. The way Nick and I see it, Liquid Death is double dipping here. Liquid Death is making money when you buy that box of water and it makes money when it sells an ad on that box of water. They're actually triple dipping up because this is such a creative idea.

Everyone's been talking about Liquid Death's side of the box ad. Their tiny Billboard. This tiny Billboard, it gets us every time. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Liquid Death? the dumbest thing you can think of. There are lots of reasons why this tiny billboard idea doesn't make sense. Frankly, it's a dumb idea. It creates a lot of brand confusion.

It might annoy customers who are confused. And just generally speaking, people prefer not to look at ads. Here's the funny thing, Bessie's. Dumb is exactly the reason why Liquid Death did it in the first place. In fact, dumb is the reason that a water company called Liquid Death even exists. Because great quote from the founder. of Liquid Death. The reason he started the company is because he asked, what is the dumbest possible business idea he could think of? And then he did that with Liquid Death. Doing what's dumb has

actually been Liquid Death's guiding principle the whole time. Because doing what's dumb is also doing something that's never been done. You know what I mean? Oh, I know what you mean? Yeah, it's not always the case. And in marketing, it may work better than in other business field. So proceed with caution. But what Nick and I try to say is, sometimes the smartest move in business is doing the dumb thing. Do the dumbest idea you can think of. Or at least consider it. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us for the new Friday? Invita's revenue is nearly quadrupled as every tech company is buying their AI chips. So, Nvidia, prices its chips just like Armeys prices its handbags, really high for a luxury customer. For our second story,

it's American Airlines. They increase their check bag fee by 33%, which is going to make the carry-on problem even worse. That's why we hate to say it, but it is time to cancel the carry-on. Hit us up at T-Boy pod. Let us know what you think, Yaddies. And our third and final story is liquid death. They're in the conversation again because they sold their box space as an ad to Coinbase on eBay. It's the tiny billboard. Yetis, the dumbest idea you can think of probably hasn't been done. which means you should at least consider it. At the very least, propose it at the next meeting. But yet, is this pod's not over yet?

Here's what else you need to know today. First, President Biden just forgave $1.2 billion in student debt for $150,000 borrowers. If you're eligible, you'll get an email from the Department of Education today. And second, KFC has created a new type of food. It's called the Cheetah. It's a chicken-based pizza. What is it, Cheetah exactly? It's a chicken-based pizza.

Yeah, but is it the crust that's chicken? It's a dumb idea, Jack. And finally, Beyonce is the first black woman to top the billboard chart for country music songs. Beyonce reached number one for her single that we told you about last week, Texas Holden. Because country music is a growth industry. Now, time for the best fact yet this one sent in by a couple of Yetis. Hey, besties. Hey, yeties.

This is Justin Cramm from Fort Lauderdale. Florida. And Katie Droppick from Brooklyn, New York. And we have a Florida fact of the day for you. What is it? The Florida Everglades is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles live together. Wow. Amazing. Cool. Awesome. What? Two wonderful animals living in harmony in the swamps of Florida. That's fantastic, Jack. Who says they're living in harmony, Nick? That's a good point. But also, which one's the apex predator? Or do they kind of like stay off each other's turf? I think it's like a co-CEO kind of thing like Google used to have her. Netflix. Perfect pivot to a business takeaway. Nice, make.

Yet is you are looking fantastic today. And if you want to get a shout out on this show, by the way, all you got to do is fill out the form in our episode description. We got an easy Google form for you to send in best facts yet, just like Justin and Katie just did. We'd love to get your facts and shoutouts on the pod, and then you can throw your phone in a bottle of water and not stick it in rice. Don't stick it in rice. That would be a dumb idea. But not a dumb idea that you should do. Now Jack's processing if that should be a good idea because it's a dumb idea. At least consider it. At least consider the dumb idea.

Jack and I will see you tomorrow. And before we go, a happy birthday to Yeti Rafael Fernandez Zubietta, who's turning 35 years old down in Monterey, Mexico. Happy birthday to Julia Gagas, a marketing badass down in Nashville, Tennessee. And Zohab Ralph has got a birthday in Seattle, legendary husband, fantastic cat. And happy 35th birthday to Chan the Naha Rehmout in San Jose, California.

And Mr. Kardashian, happy birthday down in lovely Los Angeles. Happy birthday to the dad of all five Kardashians. And Lauren Hyde is getting a T-Boy shout-out for her birthday down in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Celebrate the wins, Lauren. Happy birthday to Dinga Punal, who's going on an olive oil tour for her big birthday. And a happy birthday to little Alexandra Tunney over in Greenwich, Connecticut. And happy birthday to Kaisen Sanchez. who's turning eight down in Los Angeles.

He's playing some Roblox and then he's heading to school. Not a bad birthday. And to anyone else, celebrate something today, make it a T-Bor. Celebrate the wins. This is Jack. I own stock of Amazon, Netflix, and Roblox, and Nick and I both on stock of Apple. Dude, that was really funny.

Jack bit someone. I love how you amped up. Like my comment that I would, too, I did. You did. I think I saw it. Anyone else see that?