The Best One Yet - 💰 “Warren’s Biggest Trade” — Buffett’s cash crush. Tropicana’s carafe controversy. Bluesky’s alt-Twitter.

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Warren Buffett’s biggest trade of the year? Cash… The world’s top investor ain’t into stocks right now.Tropicana sales fell 20% because it changed its bottle… again.The #1-downloaded social media app right now is Bluesky… by copying the OG Twitter.Plus, would you buy canned Lake Como air from Italy for $11?... Because one business is selling it.$PEP $KO $BRK.B🧢 The TBOY holiday merch drop ends today Thursday 11/21: Shop now @ www.tboypod.com/shop🎙️ Check out the latest episode of our new weekly deepdive show The Best Idea Yet: The untold origin story of “Levi’s 501s… The World’s 1st Jeans” 👖Wondery.fm/TheBestIdeaYetLinks —-----------------------------------------------------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 Thursday, the new Friday, November 21st, and today's pod is the best one yet. This is a T-Boy. The top three pop business news stories you need to know today. Jack, I hate to say this, so I'm going to have to ask you to say it, man. It's the final day that you can pre-order your T-boy holiday merch. That's right. The store for this fantastic merch closes at 12 p.m. Pacific today. After that, the orders get sent to the elves up at the North Pole who will deliver it to you before Christmas. besties go to t-boypod.com slash shop to snag your tea boy merch. It looks wonderful. We put a link in the episode description to make it easy for you. And Jack and I have been wearing the same merch sweatsuits for four days straight. So you got to buy the stuff. A lot of people have been saying that we smell. They smell. But you know what? We do it for the pod. We do it for the show yet. Jack, three stories for today's show. What do we got on the pod, man? For our first story, the number one most downloaded social media app right now is Blue Sky. Because Blue Sky figured out how to make an app that is billionaire proof.

For our second story, it's Tropicana Orange Juice. Sales of Tropicana OJ plummeted 20% last month. Because Tropicana made the same mistake they made 15 years ago. I'll tell you what it is. And our third and final story. The stock market is near record highs as everyone keeps buying everything. Except for one person. And who is that, Jack?

Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett. Besties, Jack and I will tell you why the world's best investor is sitting on a record pile of cash. But Yeties, before we hit that wonderful mix of stories. Fantastic mix of stories. I love it. I don't think you smell. I don't think you smell for the record. I think we both smell great. Actually, I'm pretty sure this product is sweat wicking, right? It smells good. Yeties, we've covered a lot of wild companies, brands, and products on this show. Yeah, we've covered olive oil coffee, and we've covered meatballs made out of extinct

woolly mammoths. But we just found the most wild business because one company is selling canned Lake Como air. We repeat, they are selling fresh air from Lake Como, Italy, bottled in a can. It's not water from Lake Como. It's air. It's not Perrier. It is peri air, if you know, you know.

Now, to sprinkle on some context, Lake Como is a gorgeous place in northern Italy. Full disclosure, this is Nick, and we did our honeymoon there. It was lovely. Stunning cypress trees, magnificent mountains,

plenty of pastel all over the place. Jack, I noticed the whole region of Lake Como. It smells like George Clooney. Fact. Isn't that where 007 has his villa in Casino Royale? Yeah, because it smells like George Clooney. But apparently the air there is so nice and so fresh that people will pay for it. In fact, you will pay $11 for that canned Lake Como air.

Here's the story. A souvenir shop around Lake Como is selling cans of their famous air for $11 a can. So you can buy a six pack of air and bring it back. to your six jealous friends in the States. And then you can all pop open the air and pound Lake Como Air. That's what you do. You and your buddies can pound a six pack

of Lake Como Air. So Yetis, Jack and I saw this story, and we got to ask, what other air would you can? What other O2 would you bottle? Would you get a whiff of Chicago? Would you pay for the aroma of Austin? How about the essence of East Hampton, Jack?

Or the taste of Trenton. I'd pay for that. Yeah. I don't know how much I would pay for it, but yeah, I'd pay a little bit. Yeah, it is. Drop a comment on the air you would can. And Jack, let's hit our three storms.

Fifteen 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 best one yet, but the best is a 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 rare 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, the top downloaded social media apps this week, it's Blue Sky. So we dove deep into the new Twitter rival and discovered that it's billionaire proof. It is billionaire proof. But in order to explain that, Jack, let's go back in time.

Let's go back a year and a half to when Elon made an offer to acquire Twitter. In April of 2022, Elon said this. For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral. Well, what's happened in a year and a half since then, Jack? The opposite. X changed the algorithm to promote Elon's posts and to promote conservative voices. So yet, he said, if X is more conservative social media and threads is a political social media, then Blue Sky is your liberal-leaning social media.

And since the election, Blue Sky has been gaining one million users per day who've been fleeing X to find a new social media app. In fact, Blue Sky is now the fastest growing social media app, and we got the receipts and the numbers. Blue Sky just announced this week they have 20 million users now. And as of this recording, they're the number one app in the app store. Jack, could you sprinkle on a little more context of that 20 million number for Blue Sky, though? X enjoys 10 times the number of daily users as Blue Sky. And Threads is still twice as big as Blue Sky. But still, they're bigger than you might think.

Now, we've been following Blue Sky for a while. But now that so many people are asking, have you snagged a handle for Blue Sky yet? We decided to jump in T-Boy style. Now, the first thing you're going to see if you check out Blue Sky is its logo. Right. And that is a funny observation

because the Blue Sky logo is a butterfly that's the same color as the Twitter logo, Jack. Twitter had a light blue bird. Blue Sky has a light blue butterfly. And why are we noticing that brand similarity, Jack? Because Blue Sky was created by the co-founder of Twitter. Jack Dorsey. That's right. Jack Dorsey. He always seemed frustrated that Twitter, like, had to make money. He just wanted to run a social media company. He didn't want to make money.

He hated quarterly earnings reports. And he hated the pressure that Wall Street put on him to change the platform. All Jack Dorsey wanted to do was hang out of his house in San Francisco, write code, grow a beard, and not eat breakfast. So he created a Twitter clone that would be more free-spirited like you just described Nick. So in 2019, the creator of Twitter, created Blue Sky to be less subject to market forces. He actually created it to be owned by no one, and they only have 20 employees to this day. Blue Sky looks and feels a lot like the old Twitter did, but it's actually got the wildest business model we've ever seen in tech. First thing we noticed is that this company has no ads, no ads on Blue Sky. Blue Sky is totally unmonetized right now.

Eventually, they're going to have to make money to pay the bills, but right now they're not. Second thing we noticed, no artificial intelligence in this tech company. X and meta use all the user content to train their generative AI, but Blue Sky's not doing that. Maybe wildest of all, for a social media app, Blue Sky doesn't have an algorithm. That's a bit of an exaggeration. Rounding up, but it's pretty close, Jack. But instead of a 4-U page that's determined by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or TikTok, Blue Sky lets you pick

one of 50,000 feeds that have been created by the users themselves. So it's like arts, sports, fashion, The Bachelor, like you choose your own adventure, not the algorithm.

It's a highly decentralized platform that no one person at the top is in charge of. So when you look at Blue Sky, it kind of looks like the opposite of every other social media app we have ever covered.

Except if you log in, it feels like the old Twitter, just with no ads. So it's also the exact same as a social media app we have covered. Jack, what is the takeaway for our buddies over at Blue Sky? Blue Sky's biggest differentiator is that it's billionaire proof. Yet he's a wild thing, but when Jack Dorsey set up Blue Sky,

it's almost like he knew Elon Musk was eventually going to buy Twitter. Because he set up Blue Sky so that buying the technology was impossible. Okay, and how did he pull that off, Jack? Blue Sky's underlying technology is open-sourced and owned by nobody. In fact, according to the CEO of Blue Sky, Jay Graber, even if Elon bought Blue Sky, people could still run their own version of the site. Like, you could not control what the people see. So as the world is fracturing into news and information sites that suit their personal preferences, like X, threads, or Blue Sky. Blue Sky has managed to find its biggest differentiator in the subtlest way possible.

Blue Sky was engineered to be billionaire proof. For our second story, the biggest drama. in business right now, it's Tropicana orange juice. Tropicana just messed up its rebrand for the second time in a row because Tropicana asked the wrong question. Now, yet, he's Jack and I should point out when we were in middle school, that's actually, statistically speaking, when orange juice consumption peaked in America. The year 2000 was peak orange juice.

Your well-balanced complete breakfast was milk, cereal, a glass of orange juice, and a piece of And that orange juice better be calcium fortified so it tastes like chalk. Well, Yeti's, odds are you drank Tropicana because Tropicana was the number one orange juice in the category since forever. Choppacan is basically the invidia of Florida. Yeah, it is. It was founded by Sicilian immigrants in Florida in the 1950s. Tropicanna actually IPOed in 1969. They should use the ticker symbol Pulp. Yettis, this was the first ever pure play pulp-free orange juice stock. In 1998, Pepsi acquired for $3 billion, which was the biggest deal in fruits since Eve ate that apple. But yet, he's Tropicana's real competitive advantage to get to number one.

It wasn't what was on the inside. It was what was on the outside. Because orange juice is orange juice. It's a commodity. The package is what differentiated Tropicana. Ah, the package. And Tropicana sold their orange juice in a carafe, not a bottle, a clear carafe that stood out in the shelves. The Tropicana cara.

You can probably picture it right now. It's tall. It's curved. It's got a big hefty green top that looked like a crown or something. Yeah, it is the caraf. It looked like a Corinthian column. It was a work of art by Tropicana. But here's the news.

Tropicana switched to a more conventional bottle. Yeah, Tropicana just pivoted. The carafe is gone. The bigger news? Customers are furious about that pivot. Oh, they're not just furious. They're having an existential crisis. Sales at Tropicana are down.

19% in October. That's according to CNN. And the reason is the change in packaging. Plus, some shrinkflation. There are some nice things about this new bottle, I guess. The cap uses less plastic, which is good. The bottle fits easier in the fridge, apparently. And there's no second peel you need to peel off after opening the top.

Yeah, the bottle kind of looks like it's on Ozzympic. It's a lot slimmer, but it's a lot more boring. It is slimmer, actually. The size of the bottle shrank for 52 ounces to 46 ounces, but the price has not not shrink. Now, Yeti's shrinkflation aside, what's so fascinating about this story is that Tropicana's bottle crisis sounds eerily familiar. Actually, the same exact thing happened to Tropicana 15 years ago. Get this. Tropicana's logo? You know, the one with the red striped straw that's stuck in the orange? Remember that one, Jack? I love that logo. That logo was famous, but they got rid of it

in 2009. And the same thing happened. Sales fell by 20% because customers, customers were furious, their beloved logo was gone. Like literally, orange drinkers were going to their therapist and complaining that their favorite logo was gone. It was an existential crisis again. So 15 years ago, Tropicana canceled the rebrand and brought back that straw impaled orange that we all love as its logo. Today's Tropicana is going through the same thing. Tropicana is pulling a Brittany. Oops, I did it again. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Tropicana? When it comes to customer research, actions speak louder than answers. Yaddies, do you want to know the real reason consumers loved the old

Tropicana craft? What was it, Jack? They liked leaving it out on the table. It looked that good. It looked that good. Like Jack said, it was like a Michelangelo sculpture, so they wanted to leave it out. Other orange juices come in normal plastic bottles or paper cardboard cartons. In that case, you'd have to pour the orange juice into a glass caraft if you wanted to display it on the table. But the Tropicana bottle, it was the shape that you felt comfortable showing off, a lovely carafe. That's the insight that Tropicana missed in their focus group testing. It wasn't just the look. It was the use.

Tropicana asked questions to the focus group about the bottle's look. But you need to see how people actually use it in its natural habitat. The breakfast nook. Where it happened to be a decorative ornament for that said breakfast nook. So the focus group said that the new bottle looked fine, but that's not what was important. What's important is that actions speak louder than answers. Now a quick word from our sponsor. For our third and final story in our T-Boy holiday hoodies,

Warren Buffett is not buying stocks right now. Warren Buffett is selling. At a moment of stock market euphoria, we're looking at the one investor who is waiting for a dip. Warren Buffett, the dip diva. But yet he's, Jack and I jumped into the number. T-boy style, and we can quantitatively say that Warren Buffett is the best investor of all time. Yes, we can, because for 58 years, he has been managing money at Berkshire Hathaway.

And Jack, what is Warren's return every year on average over those 58 years? 20% per year. That's how much he grows the money he controls. Not too shabby. That is twice as good as the S&P 500, the basket of the 500 biggest stocks on the stock market. We repeat, over 58 years, Warren Buffett has done twice as well as the rest of the state. stock market. And that is why Warren's fund, Berkshire Hathaway, is now the largest non-tech company in America. So when he speaks, we listen. We'll have what he's having. And all year, he's been having selling. Yeah, he's been selling. He's been selling. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has sold $133 billion worth of stock this year. On the other hand, he's bought almost

no stock this year. He's basically bought zero stocks. Right now, everyone is buying stocks, right, Jack? Stocks and crypto are both out record highs, but Warren Buffett is selling. He's not buying. In fact, Warren Buffett right now is sitting on a pile of cash that is bigger than any pile in his life history. He's got $325 billion of cash that's not in the stock market. Jack, I'm going to have to ask you to sprinkle on some fantastic context to $325 billion in cash. That's enough money to buy Disney easily, to buy two McDonald's. actually. Berkshire Hathaway could purchase Nike three times with that cash. Okay, Jack, I wanted to surprise you, so get these numbers. Berkshire Hathaway has enough cash to buy all the fast food stocks

in America, each and every one of them. And I actually think he loves fast food, so he might actually do that. At this point, Warren Buffett has enough cash to buy Denmark, no joke. But yet, before we talk about why Warren Buffett is holding so much cash, we should talk about what he's actually doing with it. Because that $325 billion, it's not doing nothing in a bank account. It's actually generating interest. A lot of interest. Because Berkshire Hathaway bought $300 billion of U.S. government bonds this year. That's his version of a high-yield savings account. And assuming Warren is getting 4.5% interest on those bonds, then Berkshire Hathaway made $13 billion on interest on those accounts. Just on interest on his cash, he's brought in $13 billion. year. Now, we should point out the stock market, it's returned a lot more than 4.5% this year, right, man? The stock market's up four times as much, so it would seem like Berkshire has been missing out all year. It would seem like Warren would be part of the FOMO party these days. $300 billion has not been taken part in the stock market party of 2024. But this is actually

a tried and true Berkshire strategy, isn't it, Jack? It's all part of the plan. As Tom Cruise says in every Mission Impossible movie, it's all part of the plan. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddy Warren Buffett? Warren Buffett does what a typical investor shouldn't. He waits for a dip. He's a dip diva. Yet he's Warren Buffett, he's an Uber menship investing. He's got a track record of timing the market and timing it up well. For example, in 2008, no one had money except Warren Buffett. So he bought the financial crisis dip, investing in Goldman, Bank of America, and GE, when it was cheaper than ever to do so. And after Warren bought that financial crisis dip,

he came away with $10 billion in profit. In 2020, during the pandemic, he pulled a similar move. He had cash when stocks fell, and then he bought those stocks. So, Basties, if a downturn happens now, Warren would be prepared to again buy the dip, like a dip diva. But here's the thing, Warren, he could be wrong. The dip might not come. He might simply be missing out.

And that's why Jack and I don't do what, Warren's doing. And that's why financial advisors also tell you to not do what Warren's doing, buying the dip, timing the market. It's better to just stay invested because it's really hard to time markets. It's so hard to predict a dip. But no matter what, Warren Buffett's cash pile is good perspective during this moment of stock market euphoria. Markets are at record highs, but Warren is holding record cash. Jack, could you whip up the takeaways for us for the new Friday? Blue Sky is adding a million users per day. X is conservative, threads is a political.

Blue Sky is liberal. But only Blue Sky is billionaire proof. It can never be owned by a billionaire. For our second story, Tropicana sales are down since killing their famous carafe. They're using a regular bottle now. Here was Tropicana's mistake. In customer research, actions are louder than answers.

And our third and final story. As stock markets are at record highs, Berkshire Hathaway is holding more cash than it ever has. They own enough cash to buy every fast food company in America. Because Warren Buffett does what a typical investor shouldn't. He waits for a dip. He's a dip diva. But Yeties, this pod's not over yet. Here's what else you need to know today. First, Nvidia earnings. The number one most valuable company on Earth owns 80% of the AI chip market and they just gave us their earnings report. And for the first time in six quarters,

Nvidia did not double their revenues. They grew merely 94% from last year. Which is insane. Like, these companies grow at an insanely high rate, but like Wall Street investors, they're tough to impress sometimes with expectations. So the stock dipped a tad because they actually wanted even more growth than that. Apparently 94% wasn't good enough. Second, Target stock fell 20% yesterday. It's a bad start to their holiday season. Target sales were like flat last quarter, which is interesting compared to Walmart sales, which were up 5% last quarter. It looks like Walmart's gains came at Target's expense. And finally, American Airlines has a new technology to shame people who board earlier than they should with a loud bleep.

Bleep. It's a beep or a bleep. I'm uncertain on the exacts, Jack. Basically, if you scan your boarding pass, but it's not your group yet, there's going to be a loud beep, and everyone is going to know that you're cutting the line. They're using public shaming at American Airlines in order to keep people in line. But seriously, group eight? Why do you have that many groups? Attention customers, now boarding section one, and all those in section three bold enough to try. Now, time for the best fact yet. This one whipped up by Darsh the car and George Melukaran over in New York City and Chicago.

We're just about one week from Black Friday. The annual day that you don't spend time with your family and scroll shopping websites instead. All right, Jack, another thing for you to bring up in therapy, but it's also when you end up wrapping things because you're buying gifts for people on Black Friday. Get this. America buys enough wrapping paper to cover 45,000 football fields. In fact, America buys enough wrapping paper to wrap the island of Manhattan four times over the holidays. That's like 50 lifts check. Fun wrapping paper alternative, by the way, newspaper. My mom, we always get gifts. You know, it's like page six of the times, page three of the journal, and those are our gifts. It's newspapers. Is that her tradition? It's what she does. Yeah. That's amazing. So you get a gift,

and you get the sports section, Jack. Does she use rubber bands from the produce aisle instead of ribbons? Is that a yo mama joke, Jack? Is that what you're throwing out on the pot these days? Yetis, you look fantastic for the new Friday. Jack, you look fantastic because you and I have been wearing four days of our T-Boy sweatsuit merch. We haven't taken this off, besties. I actually bought a pair for your mama.

And you can buy a pair for your mama yeties at www. at t-boypod.com slash shop. We dropped a link in the episode description. Sales end tomorrow at noon, Pacific Time. You're going to love this under the Christmas tree. No joke. Go to YouTube right now. You can see what we're wearing. It looks and feels wonderful.

Nick and I, we'll see you tomorrow. Can't wait. And before we go, congratulations. Deetti, Eduardo Yidee, celebrating a bar mitzvah party this weekend in Coronado, California. Eduardo is a fan of our shows. Eduardo, we're a fan of you. And Andin and Caroline down in Austin, Texas are celebrating their fantastic three-year

day-diversary. Happy 31st birthday to a die-hard Yeti, Sheika Thomas in San Francisco, California. She's celebrating with pizza. Hope it's an A-16 pizza, Sheka. And congratulations to Sarah and David, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who just had a beautiful baby, Mason P. We hope your parents are teaching you about index matches and pitch decks, if you know, you know. And to anyone else, celebrate something today. Make it a T-Block.

celebrate the wins. This is Jack. Island Stock of Berkshire Hathaway and Nick and I both own ETFs of the S&P 500.