The Best One Yet - 👿 “Don’t Pick Duke” — March Madness investing advice. Google’s biggest acquisition. Corporate Nickname Curse.

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Duke is the #1 pick to win March Madness… but that’s a lesson in dumb investing.Google is buying Wiz for $33B… And every Wiz employee is getting $588,000.Corporate Nicknames are actually a curse… Chevy, Mickey D’s, & Bloomies are bad for biz.Plus, time-poor millennials are paying time-rich gig workers $27/hr to wait in line. $GOOG $JWN $MCD $GMWant more business storytelling from us? Check out the latest episode of our new weekly deepdive show: The untold origin story of… MTV 📺 “How Video Killed the Radio Star”  Subscribe to The Best Idea Yet: Wondery.fm/TheBestIdeaYetLinks to listen.“The Best Idea Yet”: The untold origin stories of the products you’re obsessed with — From the McDonald’s Happy Meal to Birkenstock’s sandal to Nintendo’s Susper Mario Brothers to Sriracha. New 45-minute episodes drop weekly.—-----------------------------------------------------Subscribe to our new (2nd) show… The Best Idea Yet: Wondery.fm/TheBestIdeaYetLinksEpisodes drop weekly. It’s The Best Idea Yet.GET ON THE POD: Submit a shoutout or fact: https://tboypod.com/shoutouts FOR MORE NICK & JACK: Newsletter: https://tboypod.com/newsletter Connect with Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-martell/ Connect with Jack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-crivici-kramer/ SOCIALS:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tboypod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tboypodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tboypod Anything else: https://tboypod.com/ Subscribe to our new (2nd) show… The Best Idea Yet: Wondery.fm/TheBestIdeaYetLinksEpisodes drop weekly. It’s The Best Idea Yet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. It's Wednesday, Wednesday, March 19th. And today's pod is the best one yet. This is a T-boy. The top three stories at the intersection of business and pop culture.

Jack, I'd love to share a couple things with you. Is that all right? Mm-hmm. Your Audi likes to whip up the takeaways. Hmm. Your Audi thinks that interest rates should go up. My Audi? Okay, please, no more questions.

Your Audi owns shares of Peloton. Where are you going with this? The session is concluded. Jack, three stories. What have we got on the pod? Okay, I have no idea. That must be something. I said the sessions concluded.

I said the sessions concluded. Three stories for today's show. What have we got on the pod, Jack? For our first story, Duke is the favorite in the men's NCAA basketball tournament. And it's number one most popular in our brackets, too. But we think you shouldn't pick Duke, and it holds a lesson on smart investing. For our second story, it's Google. Google just announced its biggest.

acquisition ever. It's buying WIS for $33 billion. And as part of the deal, every WIS employee is getting $58,000. And our third and final story, Chevy, Mickey D's, Bloomingy's, they're some of the most famous brand nicknames of all time. But a wild new study shows what happens when brands start using those nicknames in the first person. Spoiler, don't do it. It's the curse of the corporate nickname. But yeties, before we hit that wonderful mix of story, Fantastic mix of stories for an iny. I said just keep going, Jack. Just work with it.

Okay, Nick, the least techy thing that we human beings do is being taken over by tech. Waiting online. Get this, Yetty's line waiting apps are surging right now. Paying people to wait in a physical line on your behalf is at an all-time high. The restaurant in Brooklyn that doesn't do reservations, you can hire a dude to wait online. Those Broadway musical tickets that are first come first surf, you can hire a lady to wait online. The sneaker shop that's doing a limited edition drop at 5 a.m. this Tuesday. Someone will wait online for you. Here's the data. Task Rabbit says that line waiting requests are up 18% nationwide

in the last year. And the Wall Street Journal found an entire company dedicated to waiting online. It's called same old line dudes. They'll wait in line for any New Yorker. Because we millennials are time poor. And if time is money, then ipso facto, a line is your financial enemy. But if time is money, then paying someone to wait in line isn't cheap, is it? No, it's not, Jack. Taskrabbit charges $27 an hour for someone to wait online. Plus, there's a 20% weather fee. If it rains, you've got to pay more. And of course, there's the fundamental problem with any line waiting economy. If you hire someone to wait online for you, then aren't lines just going to get even longer? So, Jack, where do we draw the line on waiting in line?

And is hiring a line waiter cross said line? And should we take this discussion off line? Yeah, these let us know what you think of the line waiting economy in the comments. We want to get your thoughts. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't eager to hear your thoughts. I think you took it too far on that one, Jack, but we'll blame your Audi for it. Let's sit our three stories. Fifteen years before this song, two boys from the Northeast met in the dorm.

They had an idea that caused a cultural storm. It's the best one yet, but the best is an norm. Jack Nick, 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.

First, a quick word from our sponsor. For our first story, the best way to win your March Madness Bracket, don't pick Duke. We'll tell you why not picking Duke is actually the same advice? as our favorite investing advice. Full disclosure, we did not go to UNC. But Yeti's quick update for your calendars, the deadline to fill out your bracket is tomorrow morning.

The men's games begin Thursday at noon Eastern time. 68% of Americans will fill out a March Madness bracket, even though 100% of Americans have an opinion on said brackets. Who's in your final four? Will NC State upset Texas Tech? Can a number 12 seed finally? lose to the number five seed like they're supposed to? No one knows the answers.

So Frank from finance organized an office pool, your buddy Timmy sent your reminder. Even Warren Buffett filled out a March Madness bracket this year. And with 68 teams playing, there's actually 9.2 quintillion different ways to fill out your March Madness bracket. But there is one pick that is the most popular out of all those 9.2 quintillion ways.

It's Duke. Duke. Statistically speaking, the Duke Blue Devils are most likely to win this year's tournament. There's actually a 22.9% chance that Duke gets the national title, according to the stats guru Ken Pomeroy. But America thinks Duke is even more likely than that to win it all. Apparently 28% of brackets on Yahoo already have Duke winning it all.

Now, everyone knows a kid who's from a Duke family. Their car is blue, their house is blue, their ego's inflated, they have a little bit of a southern twang accent, And they're already celebrating the win they don't have yet. But Nick, let's dive even deeper into these March Madness numbers. Yeah, Jack, because I believe we said earlier that picking Duke is mathematically the least efficient move you can make, besties. Let's look at the statistics. First of all, Duke had an epic year.

They went 31 and 3. They beat fellow number one seed Auburn earlier in the regular season. Duke's basically winning on the SAT scores and they're winning on the scoreboards. And their freshman, Cooper Flag, known as the main. Menace, he's leading the Blue Devils in every statistical category. Yet he's Duke is simply considered the strongest men's basketball team in 25 years. Sorry, Coach Kay, but it's true. But Jack, let's talk about the numbers here. In the last decade, the top-ranked team overall has only won the championship twice. Yukon in 2024 and UVA in 2019. In fact, Jack and I went even

deeper. Since 1985, the statistically number one pick in all of March Madness won the tournament only six times. That's right. Just 17% of the time does the number one favorite actually win it all? So, Jack, are the Duke Blue Devils going to make it all the way to the elite eight? Probably. But will they win it all? Probably not. But besties, that's not the reason we think you shouldn't pick Duke to win it all. The reason you shouldn't pick Duke is because everyone is picking Duke. And in both March Madness and in stock investing, if everyone's doing it, you probably shouldn't do it. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in March Madness? Don't join the crowd. Run away from it. Yeties, there's a concept in tech and business called

wisdom of the crowds. Basically, large groups lead to more accurate decisions. If you're not sure what to do, let a thousand people go before you. That crowd will show you what's the right thing to do. Investing, we believe running away from the crowd makes the most sense. Like, avoid what the majority does. Because in investing, if a stock is popular, that means it has a high price. Everyone is bidding up the same stock. If you follow the crowd, you're going to buy a stock that's really expensive. All right. It's better to buy the stock. The crowd is not focused on. The value stock, the one that's worth more than what people think. In March Madness, if you pick the popular team to win it all, even if you're right, you'll have to share the pot with the rest of the people that also picked. In fact, Duke's 28% popularity versus 22% chance of winning show that Duke is overvalued by the whole market. Just like some believe

Nvidia is overvalued by the whole market. So besties added up and your best chance of profit, it's investing in undervalued assets, stocks or teams. That's why, whether you're picking brackets or picking portfolios, don't go with the crowd. Go away from the crowd. For our second, Google just announced its biggest acquisition ever. Google is buying cybersecurity whiz for $33 billion. But the wildest part, every employee is getting a check for almost 600 grand as part of this deal. We'll explain. But first, Jack, how about we sprinkle on some chronological context, please?

20 years ago, the four co-founders of Wiz met as teenagers while serving in the Israeli army. In 2012, they founded a tech company, and they then sold it to Microsoft three years later for 300 million bucks. Celebrate the wins on an epic sale. Then in 2020, those same four guys co-founded another company, which does the same thing. It does pretty much the same thing. And those four guys just sold that second company, Wizz, to Google, for $33 billion. Celebrate even more epic wins, apparently.

Our prediction, these same guys are going to launch the same company a third time, probably sell it to Amazon for $100 million. Yetis, Wiz does cybersecurity for the cloud. They're basically going to take all your company's data that you have saved on the cloud and assess it for vulnerabilities. Like the way you move stuff into the cloud every week, hackers could intercept that. Their software stops that. That's the kind of thing that WIS will tell you if you become one of their clients. But we shouldn't let you know how big a deal this is, Yeti's, because it is literally a big deal. Buying WIS for $33 billion is a bigger acquisition then Google's next eight largest acquisitions combined.

It is literally their biggest deal ever in the history of Google. Side note, Google must love hummus. True. Because this is the ninth Israeli company Google has acquired. Not too shabby. But the real story here is not the billions that are going to the co-founders. No. It's two other surprise winners of this acquisition.

Yet is there's one wild detail, Jack, and I notice in the deal terms of the biggest deal in Google history. One billion dollars at the acquisition is being set aside for retention bonuses to keep all of WIS employees employed at Google. So we did a little math here. Divide the $1 billion retention bonus by WIS's 1,700 employees. And what do you get, Jack? It means each employee is getting a $58,000 check if they agree to keep working for Google. Treat yourself. Jack, I heard the interns over Wiz bought yachts. I doubt that. But maybe that's because I'm in any. It'll all be clear with Cold Harbor.

But yet this is not just a win for the random employees at WIS. It's also a win for New York City. Because although WIS has Israeli roots, it calls New York City its headquarters and its home now. And this happens to be the biggest exit for a New York City-based tech company since AOL Time Warner. Plus, it's a big win for the VCs that invested in WIS. Yeah, it's a big win for those venture capitalists

because the price was a surprise. Just one year ago, we actually covered it on this pod. Google tried to acquire WIS then for $23 billion. So investors waited one year and got a 50% higher exit because of they waited. Basically, every month the investors waited for WIS to sell, the company gained a billion dollars and more value. Exactly. But yet is the one big question we still have about this deal, we haven't shared with you yet. Will it actually happen?

Yeah, kind of a big question. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at The Wiz? The biggest tech deal of the year is a test for the next four years. Yeties, last year, Wiz walked away from that offer from Google because they thought regulators would probably block it. After all, Google has already been sued for antitrust. Regulators think it's too big. And now they're trying to get even bigger.

But with the Trump administration, both sides now must think that regulators won't block the deal. So in the next year, we'll see if Trump's historic dislike of big tech blocks the deal. Or if Trump's embrace of free market capitalism lets the deal go through. And don't be surprised if Google Sundar Pichai donates another million dollars to Trump's whatever fund to increase his chances. Because Google is already being sued for antitrust. And now it's trying to get even bigger. So whether this deal gets approved or not is a test for how the next four years of M&A will go. The biggest tech deal of the year is a test for the next four years.

Now a quick word from our sponsor. For our third and final story. A fascinating new study shows that when a company starts adopting the nickname that you gave it, the business suffers. It's the curse of the corporate nickname, and we'll tell you how to avoid that curse. But first, McDonald's is Mickey D's. BMW, they've got Beamer. Natural light beer.

it's really natty light. I always called the Olive Garden the OG Lounge. And for some reason, that just works for you. I love it. Nicknames, they're not just for humans. We give them to companies too. Pick me up in your V-dub. We'll hit up Starves and we'll go right by the Tarjeet afterwards. Now, nickname should be authentic and natural. Yes, 80% of us believe that a brand nickname actually originates organically from the customers themselves. Because nobody likes a self-proclaimed nickname. Remember sophomore year when you asked us to call you Jackalanard? No, I have never done that. Okay, okay.

You're going to back me up on this. Yeties, there was like three months in the fall. Jack was like, call me Jackalater. No, I'm afraid this is one of those ones where if I deny it, people will think it's more true. I'm not going to not deny it, Jack. It may just be a story for another pod. Well, here's an update, Yeties. Nobody likes when the person starts referring to themselves as their nickname either,

especially when brands do it. Get this. If a CEO uses the company. company's nickname publicly, the stock will fall. That's the conclusion from a wild new study from Ontario's Western University. Jack, let's talk a couple examples here. First, we got Bloomingdale's, which is affectionately called Bloomingies, and Nordstrom, which is affectionately called Nordies, by their biggest fans. Well, in 2021, Bloomingdale's opened a concept store called Bloomingies, and in 2018, Nordstrom launched a club called Nordys. And Jack, what happened after both those announcements?

After the companies used their own nicknames themselves, their stocks fell by 4% and 5% in the following week. Jack, I'm thinking back to business school, and I believe the technical term for that is ick. Financial ick. Next, Western University did an experiment. Instead of looking at the stock market, they measured social media engagement. In this case, we'll look at the examples Chevrolet, which has Chevy, and Target, which has Tarje. When Chevrolet official tweets included their nickname Chevy, those tweets have, had one-third as many likes.

And when target ads use the word targei, those target ads got one-third as many clicks. Here's a third example that's wildest of all. It's even true in luxury. Jack, let's look at Lou Bitton, the maker of $1,000 high-heel pumps that you wear out for a fun night out. In an experiment, Western University

changed the website so that half of customers saw the nickname Lubey and the other half saw the official name, Lou Bouton. The result, they sold one-third. fewer shoes when they use the nickname, Luby, not Lubiton.

As Genzi would say, it's giving cringe when you use your own nickname. And I'm looking at it now, Jack. Kind of reminds me that Steve Buscemi meme. How do you do, fellow kids? Try to not be that guy. Well done, Jack, Lantern. Well done. So, Jack, what's the takeaway

for our buddies over in branding? Appreciate the party. Don't crash. Yet he's one of the biggest challenges for any business leader, having the discipline to not do something. And one of the biggest mistakes is when you cave and don't be disciplined on that. Yeah, when you ignore the discipline.

If your customers are having fun with some element of your brand, let them have fun with it. They can run with it. Because the data now shows, as soon as you get involved with that fun, the fun loses its authenticity. Yeah, it's like kids having a party in a parent's house. Like, yeah, they're having a blast in the basement when no one's there.

But as soon as the adult shows up, the fun is over. When brands use their own nicknames, It's the marketing equivalent of showing up like a chaperone. We think it applies to both people and brands. If you're blessed with an endearing nickname, have the discipline to not use it yourself. Appreciate the party. Don't crash it.

Jack, could you whip up the takeaways for us for Saviche Wednesday? The most popular pick to win in March Madness is Duke. But don't pick Duke. Because with March Madness, just like investing, if the crowd is going in one direction, go away from the crowd. For our second story, Google is acquiring whiz for $33 billion. It's a win for the co-founders, the 1,700 employees, and New York City Tech.

But whether the deal actually gets approved or not is a test of the next four years. And our third and final story is the curse of the corporate nickname. If fans give your company a nickname, that's great. Just don't use that nickname yourself. Appreciate the party. Don't crash the party. But Yeties, this pod's not over yet. Here's what else you need to know today. First, that big Putin-Trump phone call on Ukraine happened yesterday.

Vladimir Putin agreed to stop attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure, but he would not agree to the broader ceasefire that the U.S. helped negotiate. It is something, it is some progress, but it's not what the White House was hoping for. Putin is demanding much more to stop the war that he started. And second, Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, presented his latest computer chip at the company's AI Super Bowl. He's trying to restore investor confidence in AI and in Nvidia's chips driving that trend. So what did he say exactly?

Well, he said that AI computing needs to grow 100-fold just to meet the crazy demand. But Nvidia stock is still down 20% from its all-time high. And finally, get this, Ferrari's CEO just said that 40% of new car buyers for Ferrari are under 40 years old. That's a huge jump from a few years ago when it was basically only retired people buying Ferraris. down in Belle, Volco Vista, but they're still staying exclusive over at Ferrari. In fact, it reminds us of this really cool quote from the founder, Enzo Ferrari. We will always deliver one last car than the market demands. Even if you're 38.

Now, time for the best fact yet. This one sent in from Jack. You hear that? I think this is coming in from the International Space Station. Houston? We've got a best fact yet, baby. The astronauts stranded in the ISS just landed back safely on planet Earth. Their visit to space was supposed to be one week, ended up lasting nine months, but now they're safe back on Earth.

The Boeing shuttle that brought them up to space wasn't safe to return, but the SpaceX shuttle brought them home safely yesterday. But here's the fact you may not know. Up in space, you're actually taller. This is wild. But because there's no gravity up there, the average person grows in height by 3% up in space. If you're up in space, you are on average 2 inches taller than you would be back down here on Earth. What does this mean? Like, your spine, your vertebrae are just like further apart from each other? I think it means, Jack, on your Tinder profile, you're supposed to say, I'm 5'10 on Earth, but I'm 6 foot up in space. That's true. And if the other person swiping is a science nerd, they'll be very turned on by that remark. I think we just made a few happy

couples, Jack. Yiddies, you look fantastic over there. Jackal lantern. You're looking great over there, man. Please don't make this a big. If you are waiting on a line right now, leave us a comment about the line weight economy. Should we be paying people to wait on line? I've never done it. I'm actually thinking about getting paid to wait in line. As long as we know where to draw the line, Jack. And as long as you remember to bring a book.

Leave a comment and remember to give us five stars a rating and review. That helps grow the show. And Jack and I will see you tomorrow. And before we go, a happy birthday to Yeti Allie Harrington in Smyrna, Georgia. And a happy national athletic training month to all the wonderful hard work in athletic trainers out there. Thank you, Alex. And a shout-out to the boring business owner, Kevin Erickson, who runs a blanket business, a wool blanket business, called Arcturus. And Ashley Day has also got a boring business to share. She's running a bookkeeping company, and she's crushing it. And Kyle

McQueen's sisters, they got a boring business that sounds amazing. They send packages, care packages, to the military. And a special shout out to Dylan Steinfeld, a Yeti who picked Duke in his bracket to win it all. And if you want to get a shout out on the show for your or anyone else, just fill out the form. We've got a link in this episode description. And you can get your voice on the pot. Celebrate the wins. Nick and I, we'll see you tomorrow.

Can't wait. This is Jack. I own stock of Amazon. And neither of us pick Duke in our brackets. Don't know what the reality stuff is, which is fine. I'm fine to be like the ignorant doofus. Occasionally.