The Best One Yet - 🏠🚗 “Uber vs Airbnb” — The Sharing Showdown. Photoshop’s artificial reality. Lionel Messi’s soccer equity.

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Uber just launched an “airbnb for cars” feature in the app — because Uber may be the biggest threat to Airbnb (and vice versa). Adobe’s photoshop is letting AI create images out of thin air — because artificial intelligence can lead to an artificial reality. And Lionel Messi just turned down a reported $1B to play in Saudi Arabia — He’s playing in Miami instead, because upside beats stability. $UBER $ABNB $ADBE Want merch, a shoutout, or got TheBestFactYet? Go to: www.tboypod.com Follow The Best One Yet on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok: @tboypod And now watch us on Youtube Learn 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 Friday, the real Friday, June 9th, and today's pod is the best one yet. It is a T-boy, Jack. When you say Friday, the real Friday, it makes me just excited. It starts in the big toe and ends out of the mouth, Jack. That's how this works. It's what my meditation app says anywhere.

Hey, eddies, that's why we celebrate the wins. First story, what do we got for the show, Jack? Uber stock jumped 4% yesterday on their newest feature, car sharing. They're letting anyone rent out their car on Uber. Ladies, instead of being a landlord, we're going to now have car lords. For our second story, Adobe's Photoshop just revealed what the future of AI actually looks like. Artificial intelligence is actually artificial reality. Uh-oh.

And our third and final story is Lionel Messi. That Argentine just turned down a billion dollars of Saudi money to play from Miami instead. Because on the field of finance, equity beats salary. Is it Argentine or Argentinian? I said Argentina. It's Artyentine, Jack. It's Artyentine. We discussed this before the show.

But Yenis, before we had that wonderful mix. Honestly, it's whatever Lienel says it is at this point. True. Wonderful mix, by the way. Quick reminder, the baby's going to come any day now. Yeah. Like our due date is like a week away, Jack. And by the way, by the way, by the way, by the way, this is a big baby.

It is a pretty big baby we got coming. I know. What are the digits that the doctor told you? It's like 199th percentile. in the head. Like, it's a big head. I thought I had the huge head on this podcast. You do have a big head.

This baby, though, this is a big baby, and it's coming in like a week or so. Now, Yeties, when Nick's baby comes, we're all going to be very excited. And then we're going to take a week off in the pod so Nick can get to know that kid. So we don't know exactly when this will happen. But after the baby arrives, we're taking one week off the show. Could be happening right now. Could be having checked my phone. Nick might have to run during this episode.

I actually should probably check my phone. We're good. But a funny thing that Nick and I. I both noticed about getting ready for a baby. All the focus is on the physical prep. Yes, you're focused on setting up a nursery, on the diaper cake, on the swaddling, building a bassinet for crying out loud. But no one talks about the digital prep.

That's right. Like a Gmail address. Or an insta handle. Or a Twitter screen name. Or a baby's first website domain. Nick, how about a placeholder Pinterest account for the baby? What do I got to do to whip up a Reddit form for this guy, Jack? So question, ladies, if you have the name for the baby all sat in your head, shouldn't you snag that email address too?

Jack and I were talking before the pod, we're like, if you know the name of the newborn, do you snag the username for that newborn? This is a modern problem facing millennial parents. Yides, it's a new dilemma facing the daddies and the mamas. What we're talking about is digital real estate for your baby. Digital real estate. It's an investment in the future of their online identity. Sitting up digital accounts for your kid before they're born is like a will. In reverse.

Because if you don't snag that digital real estate, some other mama is going to squat on it. Actually, Jack, I already bought an email address with the kid's name and you know why? Why? When the baby comes, I'm not going to send the baby announcement. The baby's email is going to send the baby announcement. Is that so? Jack, this baby is going to make their own baby announcement. He's declaring his first birth.

It could be he, could be she either way. They're going to have a signature in that email. I guess when it comes to digital due diligence, I'm a deadbeat dad. I look bad in comparison to you right now. And that is why you snag the digital real estate. Yetis, let's in our three stories. 15 years before this song, two boys from the northeast met in the dawn.

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. For our first story, Uber, its stock just jumped after unveiling its newest feature. Here it is, here it is. Rent out your car to strangers.

And that new product has us thinking about one thing. Yes, it does, Jack. Airbnb. Airbnb. But Jack, before we kick this off, can we talk about the hero stat here? Let's just kick it off with the hero stat. Funny thing about cars, the average car sits unused, just sitting there doing nothing, 95% of the time. Cars are lazy.

Yeah, cars are pretty lonely, too. It's the loneliest product on earth, isn't it, Jack? They're like football players. They do a lot of sprinting, but a lot of not doing anything in between. A lot of just sitting there. It's kind of inefficient. They're only used 5%. at the time. Well, Uber stock jumped 4%

yesterday on a new feature that they call Uber CarShay. Yadis, are you away for the weekend? Your Honda's just hanging out at home? You can get paid by renting it out to somebody else. That's right. Uber is now letting you add your car to your Uber account, set a rate and then say when that car is

available for anyone to use. So let's say your range rover is not roving this weekend. Well, you can let some random named Ronnie ride this thing around for a cool 20 bucks an hour. Or 30 bucks an hour. Or 50 bucks an hour. You could set the rate. Exactly.

Now, Uber's peer-to-peer car sharing program. This starts in Boston and Toronto in July, it looks like. And the rate that you set, it's going to include insurance provided by Uber and the gas is included too. Now, Yeti's, here's what fascinated Jack and me about this story. We all know about landlords. Landlords own a home and then rent it out to somebody. But the way we see it, this is a car lord. This is a car lord.

It's someone who owns a car and can rent it out. So just like a landlord gets passed. passive income to rent out their condo, a car lord gets passive income to rent out their facade. And here's why Uber stock jumped 4% on the news. The car lord market could be bigger than the landlord market is. The car lord could become the ultimate side hustle. I thought you're going to say the car lord could become the landlord. Oh, well, and that is, that is for another pod. We don't want to self-destruct. And here's why we think that yeties. There's a little over 200 million homes in the United States, right? Right. But Jack, how many cars are there in the

United States? More than there are homes. There's 300 million cars to 200 million homes. Here's what we're saying, Yetis. A car is available 95% of the time. Theoretically, you could make money by renting out your car 95% of the time. But a home is used 95% of the time. So 95% of the time, you can't make money by renting out your home because you're in it. Exactly. Which is why we said what we just said. Car lords could become bigger than landlords. Now, Uber's not the first company to do this, product. Right. Good point, Jack. Like startups get around and Turro, they pioneered car sharing. They've been doing this for years. And before them, Boston-based Zipcar was kind of doing this tip. Good point. I think

you still have my Zipcar, Zipcar, Jack. But Uber's advantage to all those three is its size. Right. It's got the large installed user base. You already have the app and you already trust the brand. It's just a few taps to add your car to Uber and let somebody rent it out. Tap, tap, tap, arouse. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Uber? biggest threat to Airbnb is Uber and vice versa. I love this takeaway. Jack's been whipping up and working on that vice versa all day. Okay, besties, who is Uber's biggest competitor?

Everyone says it's Lyft. And Jack, who is Airbnb's biggest competitor? Everyone says it's hotels. But here's what Jack and I are thinking. Long term, Airbnb's greatest competitor could actually be Uber. We could be in the verge of a future conflict. Like getting into car sharing, which Uber just did, they're kind of stepping into Airbnb's territory. Because like if you ran out your car with Uber, then why not run out your home with Uber one day?

It's the same technology. It would not be hard for Uber to add that to the product. Now, of course, Airbnb could just do the same thing. Right. When you're renting out your home on Airbnb, you could bundle in your car for the weekend too. But either way, we now think that Uber and Airbnb will ultimately collide. For Uber and Airbnb, their biggest competition isn't necessarily the direct competition. For our second story, Adobe just launched Firefly to turn your imagination into an image. It's artificial intelligence, but it can create an artificial reality too. We are going to talk about Adobe, the $200 billion software company.

We got to talk about the PDF. Adobe invented the PDF, which is just behind dot DOC, and dot jpeg as the most popular image files in the world, I think. But frankly, Adobe's really best known, not for the PDF, but for Photoshop. The Silicon Valley-based software giant Adobe is the go-to software suite for every graphic designer to do their job. Yeah, like what Excel is to the Princeton grad, Adobe's creative suite is to the RISD grad. And Adobe just launched Firefly, which is their text to image generative AI product.

Yeties, this is like the visual future of artificial intelligence. And let's repeat that. Text to image generative AI. Hey, Jack, and you'll whip up a translation for us over there. You type in text and it generates an image. Easy as that. No, yet he's Jack and I were thinking about this. We're talking about an extremely visual product.

And yet Jack and I are an extremely audio podcast, aren't we? So to help you visualize this, we're going to go to your Instagram page. Yes, we are. Right now on Instagram, you can exaggerate a bit about the pictures you post. Jack, let's say you took a trip to. Bali. It wasn't as sunny as you hoped. You weren't as tan as you hoped. Maybe you, uh, you change the filter and you give yourself a tan and you make it brighter. The classic Instagram filters are basically Photoshop cropping. You add a little razzle dazzle. You had a little sprinkle dinkle. You can exaggerate

how things actually were a little bit today on Instagram. But here's the shocker with Firefly. With Firefly, you can post photos of you in Bali without ever having traveled to Bali. You can exaggerate the entire thing. Yeah. It's like the exaggeration. but then you rounded up a lot. From your basement, without having gone to Bali, you can type into a product like Firefly, a picture of me with 12-pack abs looking really tan on a beach in Bali. So all it needs is a picture of you, and then it did it. It handled the rest.

That picture is there even though you never went to Bali. It looks like you did. Okay, so Jack, let's say you want to make that picture kind of epic. So you want to have you in Bali but ride in a few of those dolphins you've been talking about. All you got to do is type it in and Firefly will make those pictures. Boom. You got a whole slide show of picture. picks from your trip to Bali that you never even took.

Firefly is actually a B2B product. It's not going to be used like this Instagram thing we're talking about. It's going to be used by businesses to create content for their brand, like maybe an entire advertising campaign typed in from scratch. But AI like this can be used by anyone already for anything. So Jack, what's the takeaway for all our buddies using visual AI? Artificial intelligence can create an artificial reality. All right, yeties, remember the Balenciagia.

a pope? Like the pope in the big jacket, he was looking pretty cool. It was a fake picture and articles immediately debunked and showed us it was fake. But here's the thing. Soon we could be flooded with synthetic images. Adobe's Firefly sounds like an exciting AI tool, but it could also create an artificial reality. And with AI generated images, it could be impossible for Normies like us to decipher the real from the fake. That's why politicians are scrambling to get ahead of AI right now. Because artificial intelligence can create an artificial reality. For our third and final story, Lino Messey is coming to America instead of Saudi Arabia.

Instead of taking a big paycheck from Saudi Arabia. Really big paycheck. Lino Messie is betting on himself. Jack and I are going to get a little existential with you here. We all have feet. We all have feet. But none of us have Lianol Messe's feet, except Lianol Messe. Those are just some fantastic feet.

The quickest feet in the world. And for 17 years, he played incredible soccer at FC Barcelona. FC Barcelona. The past two years, Lino Messy was over a Paris-St. Germain. And the World Cup winning 35-year-old is now taking his talents to South Beach. Lino Messi is coming across the pond to join MLS Major League. He will reportedly play this season, starting in July for Inter Miami on July 21st. Which did you see? They've got like slam and salmon sweaters, Jack. They got slamming salmon jerseys.

Yes. I didn't realize that. It's pretty cool. That's a nice touch. Now, Lino Messey hasn't made it Instagram official yet. But there are 469 million followers waiting for him to make it official. Now, Yeti's, the reported deal terms here are not standard. And that is why we wanted to do this story. This deal is about as non-standard as any sports deal we've ever seen. Because Yeties, Lien-Lemess, he's not just getting a salary.

He's getting some very particular extras, isn't he, Jack? He's getting streaming extras, jersey extras, and ownership extras. Jack, shall we kick things off with our buddies over at Apple? Apple last year paid $2.5 billion for the 10-year exclusive streaming rights to Major League Soccer. So it seems like Apple would have a pretty good incentive to get Leonel Messi to play in the MLS, Jack. The MLS is not the biggest league in America. But if they get Lienel Messi, that could be a huge boost to the league's popularity. That could drive subscribers to Apple's TV Plus, which is going to be showing the MLS games.

So, according to the Wall Street Journal, Apple agreed to give Lienel Messi a cut of every new subscriber who signs up to their season pass on Apple TV. And Apple is going to make a four-episode documentary series about this prolific soccer player on the pitch. Also, according to the Wall Street Journal, Adidas is going to

chip in to get Lino Messi to join the MLS. Not too shabby, because Adidas just happens to be the official uniform and ball provider of Major League Soccer. So they are going to pay Messi directly. Oh, and one more thing. David Beckham is the owner of this team that he's reportedly joining.

Inter-Miam. And David Beckham said he's going to give Messi the option to become a part-owner of the team once he retires. So, Messi's compensation is going to include a salary, streaming revenue, merchandise revenue, and the option to buy a professional MLS team. Lino Messi may have the most diversified revenue portfolio of any business in sports right now. Definitely of any striker. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddy? Lienel Messi. Salaries are stable. Equity. is exciting. Okay, Yetis, you know what this news also means? It means that Saudi Arabia failed to sign Messi. Earlier this week, we told you that Saudi Arabia basically bought America's PGA tour. Well, Saudi Arabia also offered Lino Messey a reported $1 billion to play soccer over there,

but Lino Messey said no. Lino Messey turned down the biggest salary offer in sports history. Biggest salary. Because it didn't offer any upside. That's a lot. The key Yetis. With Inter-Miamy, Messi's betting on himself. His compensation will grow depending on his own success. If he brings a surge of popularity to Major League Soccer, then the money he gets from Apple, from Adidas, and the value of his potential team ownership, they all grow. Saudi offered cash, America offered upside, and Lino went with the upside. Yeti's salaries are stable, and stable salaries are pretty darn great. But equity is exciting. And Lino wants exciting.

Jack, and you'll whip up the takeaways for us for the real Friday. Uber is letting people rent out their car on their app. It's Airbnb, but for your car. Eddie's the biggest threat to Airbnb is Uber. And vice versa. I was hoping you were going to say it. I was hoping. For our second story, Adobe just launched their B2B text-to-image AI generator called Firefly.

But artificial intelligence like this can create an artificial reality. And our third and final story is Leonie. messy. He was reportedly offered the biggest salary ever, sports or otherwise. He turned it down because salaries are stable. Equity is exciting. Now, time for the best fact yet. This one sent into us by Josh Graham from lovely Winter Park, Florida. This fact is about saliva glands. It's saliva. We actually, we produce a lot of saliva on this show, Jack. There's a lot of drinking. On average, we humans produce 720 milliliters of saliva per day. Now, we'll whip out the whiteboard here, Yetis. That's 260 liters a year or 70 gallons a year. You want some more contacts? If you live

until 80 years old, you will have produced 5,500 gallons of saliva in your lifetime. Oh, Jack, we're going to have to make this visual, can we? That's enough saliva to fill over 10 full jacuzis. We repeat, over an 80 year lifetime, you'll fill up 10 jacuzis with saliva. Well, I'm not going to enjoy my next hot tub. Thanks a lot. Josh Graham. from Winter Park, Florida. Enjoy the pool. Yeties, you looked fantastic all week. Jack, you're looking fantastic over there.

Thank you for all of the baby advice along the way, by the way. That was really great. You showed me the diaper in Los Angeles. My man, I'm so excited for you to have a kid. This is incredibly exciting. Which could happen this weekend or it could happen. We have no idea. But it's probably going to happen within the next week.

Yeah, probably well. By the way, Yeties, if you haven't yet, you should absolutely play our weekly T-Boy quiz. You can find it at T-boypod.com, the one-minute pop-biz pop quiz. The one-minute pop-biz pop quiz. Jack and I will see you there. Have a fantastic weekend. Celebrate the wins.

And before we go, congratulations to Yeti's Winnie and Justin, who met 10 years ago in college but are getting married this weekend in Seoul, South Korea. And congratulations to Barroso's Barbershop, which is celebrating three years of business in Tempe, Arizona. Sunny, we know you're getting that haircut right now. break that haircut win. You'll look great. Congratulations to Teia Frye, who just submitted her thesis in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Enjoy a Banefi pie. And Rudy Stelzer, happy early Father's Day in Vienna, Austria.

Congratulations to Luis Giron, Yuja, who just got his master's degree. And legendary Yetta, Ava Perez, enjoy that last day of high school in Verona, Wisconsin. Happy 46th birthday to Adam Klaus in Detroit, Michigan. And Nicole Washington, happy 30th down in Las Vegas. Happy birthday to Deepham Jane from Delhi, now living in San Francisco. And Mr. Sazar Garcia is turning 34 and celebrating 10 years of teaching at Diego Rivera High School in South Central Los Angeles. Happy 31st birthday to Paola Pudo Aloha in Florida. And Sahithi Tapuri is turning 26 over in Charlotte.

Happy birthday to Bobby Stein, who's also loving Pride Month in Flemington, New Jersey. And Ryan Hartung, happy 28th birthday over in Minneapolis. Happy birthday to coach Sarah Goody Goodman up at Big Green in Dartmouth. And Hanna Castle is on a coffee run, but is still going to celebrate that birthday over in Boston. Just as that Boston. This is Jack, Nick and I both own stock of Airbnb and Apple. I love this takeaway.