The Best One Yet - 🪳“Twitter has termites” — Elon’s $44B excuse. Truff’s hot sauce $trategy. Uber’s secret files.

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Elon Musk is canceling his deal with Twitter and here’s how we’re visualizing it: A house with termites. Truff created the most expensive hot sauce on earth, and it’s because Truff created an Instagram handle before it created a sauce. And 124,000 pages of secret Uber files just leaked that reveal just how dirty Uber’s “Move Fast & Break Things” Playbook got: “We’re illegal.” $UBER $KHC $TWTR $TSLAFollow 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.

This is Nick. This is Jack. It's Tuesday, T-Boy Tuesday, July 12th. And today's pod is the best one yet, Jack. T-B-O-I. And we need to announce that last month, the U.S. economy added over 300,000 jobs. Jack, I'm no chef-boy R-D. But that doesn't taste like a recession.

We repeat. The U.S. economy added 300,000 net jobs last month. Your lunch salad, yeah, it costs $20 these days. But, hey, jobs are up. And today's pod is a T-B-O-I. For our first story. So Elon terminated his deal to buy Twitter. And now Twitter is suing Elon.

Jack and I can explain it all with a house, a pool, and termites. For our second story, Truff, Truff makes the most expensive hot sauce on earth. 18 bucks for a tiny little bottle. And Truff's secret sauce is that it began as an Instagram handle, not a sauce. For our third and final story, 124,000 pages of Uber files got leaked. It's a secret trove. And Jack, what was our favorite quote from an Uber exec? An Uber exec said, we are illegal.

That's a wild quote. But before we hit that wonderful mix. Just a fantastic mix. Honestly, I love this mix. It's that strange time of year, though, Nick. Fake Christmas in July. Fake Christmas in July. Because Yeties, it is Amazon Prime Day today and tomorrow.

The annual holiday that's so dedicated to excessive, they made it two days. Yeah, they did. Amazon is going to drop the price on a whole bunch of T-Wos. Jack, what is it? A teawoo again? A thing I won't use. Exactly. So, yeah, besties, you could buy an Echo or an e-reader or some reusable coffee filters on Amazon today for 50% off. Yay, but those T-Woos are boring and obvious. So instead, Jack and I found the strangest weirdest things that Amazon has ever sold on a prime day. You can buy a mop today for like 80% off. Or you could buy a bikini for your

kitty cat. That's a real thing. Or Jack and I discovered you could buy a dog doorbell, which is a doorbell for puppies that have to pee. Perfectly practical. You train Maple to ding-dong when she's got to go. Or you could buy a hat that turns into an umbrella. That's a real thing. Makes sense. Why hold an umbrella when you can wear an umbrella?

And finally, here's our favorite. You can get 50% off. A sequent pillow shaped like the face of actor Nicholas Cage. Must have if you're planning to steal the Declaration of Independence. Hey, Alexa, if you know a stupid or Prime Day deal than those, let us know. Prime Day. our annual reminder that you don't need that thing. Tree yourself, let's hit our three stories.

You don't need that thing. But maybe you should do. I already click by. 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 a 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 Elon Musk is trying to pull out of his

agreement to buy Twitter. It's billion-dollar buyer's remorse and we have the analogy to understand the whole thing. All right, Yetis, spring on a little more context here. Literally the story broke like we told you yesterday as we were recording yesterday's pop. It was frustrating.

It was frustrating. Jack and I approach each story like it's a dish, like it's a soup, like it's got to marinate and we want to find the story to tell you. Find the right takeaway, right, Jack? We've had a couple days to think about it. And to understand Elon's drama trying to pull out of Twitter, picture Elon was trying

to buy a house. In April, Elon signed a purchase agreement to buy a very nice five-bedroom Twitter, the house, for $54.20 and $20 a share. Now, this Twitter, it's not an eight-bedroom Ocean View condo with the tennis court and infinity pool. That's a good point, Jackie. It's a fixer-upper this Twitter is. What do I got to do to get you into this? Not a condo in Tribeca. But Elon was so smitten with the opportunity of owning this Twitter. He waived his rights to inspection and made a bona fide offer. He was already talking renovations. He's like, I'm putting the hot tub here.

Pizza oven over here. This was back in April. Elon said, here's my offer. $54.20 a share. I don't need to check if anything's wrong with the pipes or the foundation. I'm ready to pay today. I'm waiving my inspection contingency. This is my final offer.

Let's sign this thing. Let me move in, man. But then a problem came for Elon. The housing market tanked right after he made his offer to buy the Twitter. Which means that Elon is already overpaying for Twitter just days after he'd made the offer. If Elon hadn't agreed to pay 5420 for this Twitter, he could have bought it for less than half the price today. Also, that's not even the worst part. Because since this theoretical housing market has crashed, Elon's wealth has fallen too.

Right, because Tesla stock is down 20%. So it'll cost him even more to buy this Twitter that he agreed to buy in April. And that is why Jack and I whipped up an HGTV style takeaway back in May. In May, we said that Elon has billion-dollar buyers remorse. Well, fast forward a couple months. Now he has announced he's terminating the deal. But then here's the other problem. Elon needs an excuse.

He needs cover to terminate the deal. And his excuse? It's termites. It's termites. Okay. In reality, it's bot. But he's complaining about bots as if they are termites in the house. Elon's already made a buying offer to buy this house,

but he's claiming there are more termites than that Twitter and that real estate agent had previously disclosed. But then that Twitter reminded Elon about a little funny thing about his contract. You waived your right to inspection. You got to buy it. You can't complain about termites now. Doesn't matter the floorboards are rotten. You got to buy the house.

We've been honest about the termites, but that doesn't even matter. You waived your rights. So that's where everything stands now. And besties here is what's going to happen next. Twitter plans to sue Elon Musk in a Delaware courthouse. And we know that because they hired the big shot law firm Wachtel, Lippton, Rosen, and cats. They call it the big guns. And Elon, he's going to make this legal path forward for Twitter unbearable.

And the reason he's going to do that is because of our takeaway. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Twitter? Elon's enemy is the court. Twitter's enemy is time. Yeties, legal experts believe that the law is extremely clear here. Elon has got to pay Twitter $54.20 a share like he first promised. He signed a contract to buy, and this misunderstanding and argument about the termites, that's not enough to overturn the deal.

No, so that's Elon's problem. But Twitter's problem is that months of delay and damage and distraction that have already been caused already because of this whole housing debacle. Twitter is losing talent. The teams are distracted. it's become a political punching bag, and it can't innovate while it's stuck in this month's or maybe years-long legal drama. So Elon, we think, will try to settle outside of court or appeal because the court is his enemy. While Twitter may feel more pressure to settle. Because time is

Twitter's enemy. Jack and I should point out, we don't know how this will end. Nobody does. But we are pretty confident about this. Elon's enemy is the law. Twitter's enemy is time. For our second story, Truff is successfully selling the most expensive hot sauce in the United States, possibly the world. Because it didn't start a hot sauce. It started an Instagram handle. So what are you into these? Are you off the saracha? Are you more Frank Fred hot? Are you chalululing? What's going on? Well, I don't have a bottle because there's a shortage of saracha. So I replaced it with Frank's red for the summer. Okay. I'm trying some alternatives. I've tried the Momofuku chili sauce. I've tried the boon sauce.

Going with stuff that kind of hurts me. I am making my own homemade buffalo sauce with maple syrup, butter, and a little Worcester Shire sauce. TVD on pronunciation, but I like the direction you're going in, Jack. Yeties, the average price of a hot sauce at any store that you're going to see, Jack, what is that average price? A tiny little six-ounce bottle goes for 284 nationwide average. The average price of a bottle of trough hot sauce, that's going to cost you what? A tiny little six-ounce bottle, $19. We repeat, Yetis, a bottle of truffe, $3.00.

Truff hot sauce is the same price as a 64 ounce giant bottle of Cholula on Amazon. Truff is 10 times more expensive than competing hot sauce brands. And Jack, what is the single reason why the Truff hot sauce is so much more expensive than your average retail hot sauce? Truffle. The rare potent fungi that's infused into all of Truff's products. Because Truffle, unlike mushrooms, are only found naturally occurring in the wild. You got to forage for this stuff. You can't grow these things out of it.

farm. And that's why they cost hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars per pound. You got to send your hounds around Tuscany to just dig up this stuff. It's not cheap. So Truff calls their product luxury condiment. Yeah, like hot sauce was never a gift. Now hot sauce is a gift you could give someone who's graduating college. Jimmy, congrats on graduating law school. Here's a bottle of hot sauce. And here's what the truff founders discovered. That hot sauce is a category. It's commoditized and you tend to try a bunch of different ones. The differentiator here is the truffles.

Oh, I'm sorry, Jack. You want the white truffle, not the black truffle truff hot sauce? That's going to cost you $40 for a tiny little six ounce bottle of sauce. Sit down, stand up, and sit back down again. But yet here is what Jack and I found fascinating about this story. The math tells us that truff truff truffled hot sauce is actually a really small company. But the extra math tells us it's huge. Because according to Nielsen, this is the number one highest ranked hot sauce brand,

even though they are number 15 in the United States for sales, they're pretty far down there. Truff is tiny. I've never tried it. They only make up 1% of the entire U.S. hot sauce market right now. But if you jump in T-Boy style, you'll notice another statistic called the sales velocity. Sales velocity is total sales compared to the number of stores where it's sold. And if we look at the sales velocity of Truff Hot Sauce, it turns out it's, It's by far the highest sales velocity hot sauce in all of hot sauce. So Truff is hard to find. They're sold at a small number of places.

But at those places, it's the biggest seller. This is a hot sauce. So Jack wants the takeaway for our buddies over at Truff. Truff's secret sauce was building a community before it built the sauce. Yeah, Yiddis, the wildest part about Truff isn't even the math we just mentioned. It's that Truff started out as a social media account before they ever ever. were a sauce. Every company launches and then hires and then eventually gets around to adding an Instagram handle. Right. Classic moves. Truff did it in the opposite order. Right, because the two

co-founders, who happened to both be named Nick, launched an Instagram handle called Sauce because they thought that was a cool name. In pop culture, sauce is a good thing. In food, sauce is a good thing. And then they would just post photos of like all types of food, like food porn, dripping this, sizzling that. they were looking for signals of what was connecting with the audience. And they found signals that hot flavors connected. Because Saracha was taking off around this time. And they also found that exotic combinations of food were connecting. Yeah, Truff was pretty unique taste.

People were getting kind of into it. The more extreme the flavor and exotic the combination, the more the potential for virality on Instagram. So they were basically crowdsourcing their product before they'd even created the product. And by creating the community before the product, truff had a ready-to-go customer base. Yeah, the Instagram followers of their sauce account. Truff's secret sauce was building a sauce-loving community before it built the sauce.

That is hot sauce. And now worried about our sponsor, Robin Hood. We see ads all the time. All over the place, 10 bucks off this $5 promo code for that jack. You can buy three suits. You can get one free. But something we always thought was cool about Robin Hood, the free stock promo. Yeah, this was wild.

The promo isn't like some X amount of dollars. It's one stock. for Robin Hood, they'd thank you with a single share in a publicly traded company on the house. And that free stock promo, it actually helped drive Robin Hood's growth and got new users in the stock market right away. One of the most creative moves in promotional history. So when Robin Hood became our sponsor, naturally Jack and I said, we got to do the free stock giveaway. If you're not on Robin Hood yet, you want to get started, go to robin hood.com slash T-boy and get cash to select your free stock.

That's robin hood.com slash TBOY. Certain limitations apply. All investments involve risk. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member SIPC, Robin Hood is no longer affiliated with us of the podcast. For our third and final story, the secret Uber files were just published. And they show just how dirty Uber was willing to be. Okay, Jack, you've been waiting 14 minutes for an actor to pull up. What is worse than that driver canceling a minute before they're about to arrive? 124,000 pages of leaked Uber internal documents, messages, and text messages getting published by The Guardian yesterday. Now, yet, he's honestly, most of those findings were generally old news, what you'd expect.

But the specificity and the details of how Uber operated were incredibly new. Okay, it turns out Uber had a playbook for breaking things. And that Break Things Playbook focused on three words. focused on violence, it focused on killing, and it focused on sleeping. Three pretty aggressive words for a company playbook. Chapter one in Uber's Break Things Playbook is that founder Travis Kalanik said, Violence guarantees success. It's kind of an evil Batman character thing to say.

He was referring to a situation in 2016 when taxi drivers in Europe were getting violent with Uber drivers in Europe. Because their careers were threatened by Uber. But Travis welcomed the violence against Uber drivers. he thought it would build sympathy for Uber's cause. So he instructed the team to let Uber drivers get attacked for a few days, let the TV news shows show it, and then only then strike a deal with the Uber drivers and taxi drivers.

Okay, so Travis Kalanick found upside in his workers getting beaten. What's Chapter 2 in the Break Things Playbook? Jack, I'm so glad he asked. Chapter 2 in the playbook is the Kill Switch. Uber entered a bunch of countries without license, and without the permits they needed to operate legally. Yeah, one executive at Uber literally said these words, we have problems because we are illegal.

But Uber wasn't worried about their illegality. They were ready for those problems. In fact, each country had a game plan for what the local Uber office should do when police raided the office. Yeah, besties, here's how this would go down. So if authorities would raid a local Uber office in a foreign country, they would initiate the kill switch. Jason Bourne style. When someone slacked Kill Switch to like headquarters, all computers in the local

office would go black. Silent. So all the authorities, they couldn't get any evidence on the computers for their investigation about what Uber was doing. And they used this Kill Switch not once, not twice, 12 times in six different countries. That's how Uber was able to grow into countries where they were not legally allowed to do so. Oh, and get this. It was such a detailed plan, this Operation kill switch, that Uber executives were even instructed to act confused when authorities would show up. They actually advised executives to say as an excuse that all the engineers are back in San Francisco, which is eight time zones away, and that they're sleeping. They're sleeping. Nothing we can do about it. Sorry, they can't fix the black computer

screen. Yeah, come back in a week. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Uber? Uber has managed to rebrand without actually rebrand. How Yeties, Jack and I should point out that Travis Kowlinik, the Uber founder, was dishonorably discharged from the company for all of that dirty stuff. He was out in 2017. And that's when Uber brought in Darro Kosashahi, who's the CEO ever since. And Uber did acknowledge this week in a statement that Travis's behavior was wrong and was in defense. The statement went on to say, that's why we hired Dara. You focused on the BD era before Dara.

In the after Dara era, they rebranded Uber. It is now softer, more collaborative. Uber is more caring today than before. Yeah, they slightly altered the logo in 2020, but it really looks the same. It is the same color, the same style, the same pattern. It looks like the same Uber. And the product is pretty much the same too. You hail stuff with your phone.

But Uber's brand perception has changed because it got rid of its CEO. That's how Uber rebranded without rebranding. Jack, can you in that almost recovered foot, which we all want to get an update on very, very soon, can you whip up the takeaways for us? Elon is using termites as an. excuse to not buy Twitter, but he waived his right to inspection. That's why Elon's enemy is the law, Twitter's enemy is done. For our second story, Truff, they did sauce on Instagram first, then they did real sauce. They built the community before they built the product, and now they

have the most expensive hot sauce on earth. The third and final story is a ton of dirty details about Uber's early disrupting deeds. They just got published. Yeah, but Uber, they managed to rebrand without actually rebranding. Now, time for the best fact yet, this one sent in by Trisha from lovely Lindenhurst, Illinois. Your liver, like your organ, it doesn't just process wine and beer. Liver has a special trick in the human body. Besties, your liver is actually just one of a few organs that can regenerate itself. So if you happen to ever donate your liver to someone, unlike a kidney, your liver will regenerate

inside your body. In fact, if you do lose a liver, you must consume 6,000 calories a day to help regrow your liver, like doctor's orders. You know what that means? Yeah, talk to me, Jack. If you donate your liver, not only will you help someone else in need, but you are medically required. It's the prescription to eat lots of ice cream. And Trisha knows it because her husband was just a liver donor for her sister and loves vanilla ice cream. And congrats to Trisha, her husband, and her sister. Yeties, you look fantastic for Tea Boy Tuesday. And remember, if you see an Amazon product today, that's 80% off and is absolutely absurd. Send it our way.

Get yourself a T-Wip. A thing I won't use. A thing I won't use. If you know, yeah. And before we go, congrats to Hamza Azon, who's been listening to our pod for two years and just got a new job over in Lahore, Pakistan. And Suleyamon from Tajikistan, he's been listening to us for all four years plus that we've been potter.

Yeah. From market snacks to Robin Hood snacks to the best one yet. Oh, thank. And congrats to Kelsey Black, who's opening her own bookstore, the Book Borough, this week in Austin, Texas. And a happy birthday to Catherine Joshu, turn in 28 in Great Falls, Montana. And happy 29 to Max Salong in Kailua, Hawaii. And Aaron the boss, Kenny, happy birthday in Ackwarth, Georgia. And Henry Parko is turning two in Phoenix, Arizona.

Happy birthday. This is Jack. I own stock of Amazon, and Nick and I both on stock of Twitter and Robin Hood. And now a word from our sponsor, Robin Hood. The first time we swiped up to buy a stock on Robin Hood, whoa. Yeah, Jack, you get like that. Like little vibration, boom, you've done a trade. It wasn't just an incredible app.

Robin Hood added incredible resources, too. It started with the Help Center. Everyone has that. Then came Robin Hood snacks, digestible financial news. Then came the news feed, providing free third-party news from trusted sources. And then came Robin Hood Learn. A huge trove of articles explaining what the heck in ETF is. Yeah, spoiler.

It's like a stock smoothie. Jack and I actually wrote. the article in that one. If you're not on Robin Hood yet, want to get started, go to robinode.com slash T-Boy and choose a free stock. It's Robinhood.com slash T-B-O-Y. Certain limitations apply. All investments involve risk. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member SIPC. And by the way, Robin Hood is no longer affiliated with us or the podcast. So, dude, do I have to like dress L.A. for this trip? Can I, can I go with that? Let me tell you, that yellow shirt's not going to fly. I think you go with like a dark pant and maybe ripped the side of it before you get on the flight.

It all serious to this now. I have to pack right after this. I'm a little nervous here. You got to leave the cargo shorts at home. I don't know how many times I got to tell you, Jack.