The Best One Yet - 📺 “XXXL TV” — The 100-inch TV Boom. Calm’s election night win. Boeing’s return-on-union.

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

TVs are getting gigantic, but prices are falling… Huge-screen TVs illustrate the biggest law of innovation.Boeing’s epic airplane strike is over… so we calculated the ROU: Return on Union.Calm won election night… The meditation app turned Election Night into its Super Bowl.Plus, there’s no feeling like voting — It’s the greatest American tradition (even beats Thanksgiving)... And we hope you got to experience it too.Looking for a long-form listen? Check out our new episode on The Jeep — The car that saved the world. It’s our latest episode of The Best Idea Yet. Listen here: Wondery.fm/TheBestIdeaYetLinks Episodes 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, Cevice Wednesday, November 6th. 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. Now, Yetis, as of this recording Tuesday afternoon, we do not know who was elected president yet. As we mentioned yesterday, it could take days before all the votes are counted. So Jack and I spent the whole day preparing three fantastic stories for this show, including one on election night coverage. Jack, three stories for the T-boy. What do we got? For our first story, one winner of election night, it was Com, the meditation app. Calm turned election night into its Super Bowl. And you can do. For our second story, it's Boeing. Boeing's epic worker strike is finally over, but back to making airplanes again. So Jack and I found the data to calculate the ROI of worker unions.

And our third and final story, we're in the middle of a big TV boom. A huge TV boom. We don't mean stuff to watch. watch on TV. We mean the TV itself because the 100-inch television is surging while its price is dropping. Because big TVs capture the biggest law of innovation. But yet,ies, before we hit that wonderful mix of stories. Fantastic mix of stories. Incredible. Whipping this up on Election Day, Jack, by the way. Wonderful work. There was one line Nick and I heard yesterday that kind of bothered us. Hey, I heard someone say, we're stuck choosing between two terrible presidential options.

Look, Eddie's political candidates are never perfect, even when you really like one of them. The reality, it's that all candidates got flaws. All of them do. Now, Nick and I have only been old enough to vote for president five times in our lives. Jack and I did the math. We've been on earth for nearly 14,000 days, but on only five days could we actually vote for president. But you know what? Each one of those five times we can have. our presidential vote, each of those five times was special. It was so special that we can remember every detail from each of those times. Like, Jack, take me back. First memory, voting, what do you got? Well, before I voted, my parents used to take me into the voting booth, and I found that to be an

extremely special occasion. My dad would tell me which two lines to connect, and he would let me have the honors. And then they'd, like, move the curtain, and it was like a moment of calm probably while you're just in there or your family. Might technically be voter fraud, but let's overlook that, Okay, for a second. I remember the first time I voted walking into the public school gymnasium, and you could smell it. I can still smell what that sweat was like from that gymnasium floor. You could see light coming in, and it was just, it was a surreal experience.

During the pandemic, I voted from this random town where I was living in an Airbnb. It was like a really small town, and the whole administrative building was one room. Well, this time, Jack, I still remember the weight of the Sharpie pen I used for the mail-in. ballot. You remember the pen you use. I voted about a week ago. But yesterday on the way home from the studio, I stopped by a voting station just to experience the camaraderie. Because the people waiting online are voting for different people, but they're all fortunate to be there. What we all saw yesterday is the greatest American tradition. What we saw yesterday is a tradition that beats Thanksgiving turkey. There's no feeling like it. It's called self-determination. And we all have it

as Americans. And we hope that you got to experience it, too. Jack, let's hit our three in a cat. 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 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, who really won election day? We think it was Calm, the meditation app. Calm turned election night into their Super Bowl night.

Yes, they did. Now, yet, there's a lot of reasons why election night can be filled with some drama. Like, I don't know, you have five screens going on and three text messages at any given time. But the real surprise of last night was 30 seconds of silence as you were watching the TV. For a full half minute, you will be able to be. Your TV was quiet. Amid Wolf Blitzer's banter, that silence for 30 seconds? It was actually a commercial.

If you looked up at the TV, you would have noticed a logo for Calm, the meditation app. It's a true story. A $2 billion startup called Calm bought space on CNN and ABC to promote themselves with a commercial that said nothing. And that said everything. That 30-second silent ad, it ran all day and all night last night. It even sponsored key race alerts that were happening like every 15 minutes in Maricopa County. We should sprinkle on some context here.

Most ads are actually louder than your typical TV program. There's studies that show that. Really annoying. Herbal essence shampoo, they're screaming for your attention. You gotta have the urge for herbal jack. But calm with their ad last night, they showed that you don't need volume. You just need contrast to get people's attention. And what do we all need during this tense political moment?

We need relaxation. Or as Com put it, we need calm. But it leads to the age old question. If an ad on TV says nothing and no one could hear it, did the ad even drive sales? Jack, I'm pretty sure I saw that at a pillow somewhere. The answer,

by the way, Yetis, is yes. And we know because four years ago, Calm did something similar on election night. They did a 30-second silent commercial. So we got the data from four years ago and basically, the 30 seconds of silence on election night?

Jack, what were the results? Twitter references of Calm quadrupled after that ad hit the TVs. Oh, and it wasn't just Twitter talking about Calm because the downloads of the app, they also got a boost from these blank ads. The Calm app rose 51 spots in the App Store rankings to hit number one in the fitness category right after election night. In fact, Com put that silent election ad from four years ago on YouTube,

and it's one of the biggest videos now on YouTube. It's got 58 million views. Keep calm and download com. That was the message. So while every other brand is avoiding election night, Calm double down, which leads to our takeaway. Serenity now, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Com? Find your Super Bowl.

Every year, big brands pour all their marketing budgets, their creativity, their efforts into one night, one Super Bowl. ad. But Calm turned election night into their Super Bowl. What they strategically did was find a less crowded but more relevant day for their brand to focus all their ad energy. What they did was the same strategy as a Super Bowl commercial, but for much lower cost and much higher attention. And we've seen other brands do this before. Like Jack, Chipotle, they found their Super Bowl with Halloween. They have a burrito campaign every Halloween that drives sales up 25%. They also got those And Krispy Cream, they found their Super Bowl with Graduation Day.

Free donuts for graduates drive sales in June. And a century ago, Nathan's hot dogs found their Super Bowl with the 4th of July. The biggest hot dog eating contest on Coney Island. So the way we see it, Com found their Super Bowl with Election Night. The most stressful day of the year for the least stressful app. You don't need to buy an ad in the Super Bowl. You need to find your Super Bowl instead. Yetis, find your Super Bowl.

For our second story, after two painful months, Boeing's workers voted to end their epic strike. America is back to making airplanes again. But was the strike worth it? We calculated the ROU, the return on unions. So, Yeties, we know you were all focused on one particular vote this week, but there is actually another vote that also happened this week. On Monday, Boeing workers voted to end their strike.

That's the news. The union representing 33,000 Boeing workers, has been on strike since September 13th. But on Monday, 59% of those workers voted to get back to work, back to making airplanes. And Jack, what's the main reason why they all voted to get back to making all those 747s to 757s? Because Boeing is giving them a raise. Boeing sweetened the offer and the union accepted it. This was a case study on striking. Their strike paid off literally.

But yetes, let's take you back to when the strike began. Because back then, workers and management were way apart on how much workers should get paid. Jack, I think you're talking about the Zopa there. You're talking about the Zopa, aren't you? What Zopa? Is that a business school term? It is the zone of potential agreement. It is like the two numbers far apart between two sides, but there's the potential for them to find something in the middle. The situation was this.

Boeing workers were mad that in the previous eight years, they had only received a 4% pay raise. I also just kind of like saying the word Zopa, because it rolls off the thumb. Adjusted for inflation, a 4% pay raise means Boeing workers were actually making less money every year. So here's what Boeing workers asked for. They wanted a 40% pay raise spread out over four years.

But Boeing would only offer them a 25% pay raise, so the workers went on strike. That was the Zopa. So the two sides seemed really far apart, But then something kind of funny started happening. A week into the strike, Boeing came back to the table and increased an offer to a 30% pay raise. But then three weeks later, Boeing came back to the table and said, Hey guys, what do you think about a 35% pay raise?

Boeing workers said no to both those increased offers. But then two weeks after that, Boeing returned to the table again and offered a 38% pay raise. They're basically like, hey workers, please let us say, and don't make us come all the way to 40%, which you asked for. We'll throw in free massage Fridays, kombucha on tap, and I don't know, you want free sugar in the coffee too? So the workers finally accepted the 38% pay raise. They're pretty much getting everything they asked for, minus the pension.

Oh, and did we mention the $12,000 ratification bonus that each Boeing worker is also walking away with? If you're single and you're working at Boeing, put that on your Tinder, because you're loaded right now. I feel like the Boeing workers just won the prices right, Jack. So now Boeing, the world's biggest airplane company, can return to making those 737, 747s, and fixing their damaged reputation. Because Bob Barker is signing their checks. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Boeing? Across the economy, unions are finally enjoying ROU.

Return on unions. Now, yeties, remember during the pandemic there was a worker shortage? so non-union workers could demand raises. Maybe you were one of them. And you know what? You probably got that raise. Here's the thing. Unionized workers couldn't negotiate raises back then

because they were stuck in multi-year labor contracts. But now these unions are making up for lost time and we're seeing results in their negotiating numbers. In September, the average unionized worker in America enjoyed pay that was 6.4% higher than the year before. On the other hand, non-unionized workers, pay only went up half as much during that same time. And those gains for unions, they're going to continue for years to come because these are multi-year contracts. Good point, Jack. Because for bone

workers, they're going to get an 8% pay raise every year for the next four years. And this is why people unionize in the first place to gain leverage in pay negotiations with the boss. It doesn't always work out, but right now, it looks like it's working out. So we just got the numbers. And right now, unions are enjoying high ROU. A return on. unions. Now a quick word from our sponsor. For our third and final story, we're in the era of the double XL TV. The number of 100 inch TVs sold in America has grown by a thousand percent. This isn't a big screen TV. It's a huge screen TV. And it explains the most fundamental law of innovation. So Jack, I remember my first HD high definition TV. It was on a playdate at the

Sony Innovation Center on 55th Street. Really? What about you? What was your first HD? My first one was bought by my brother, Tuck, but he borrowed my money to purchase it. It was kind of messed up. I was like 13 years old. Oh, it sounds like Tuck Jack. Oh, and Nick, it was so heavy this TV. We needed to lift it with oven mitts. Otherwise, your hands would have like massive painful lines from the corners of the TV. I don't understand why, but I'll discuss it with you after the pod.

Yeties, today. They're now selling TV. that are five times bigger than what Jack just mentioned with eight times the resolution. And somehow for half the price. If you're watching HD TV of football on Sunday, the TVs are so good, so big, so high-depth, you can see the protons in the player's bodies. And again, those TVs are half the price, what they used to be. Now, besties, maybe you're a no-TV, Tina. You don't got any big screens in your little home.

You've been streaming Netflix from your trusty Macbook for years, and you have no plans of changing that. But most Americans are more like TV tuckers. Like my brother, the average household has almost two and a half TVs in America. But those Americans, with all those TVs, are about to discover that their TVs are pretty tiny. Because there's a new type of TV that has grown 10 times more popular in the past year. Yeties, this is a new type of TV that isn't a big screen TV. This is a huge screen TV.

They're selling TVs now that are 100. inches. Get this, Best Buy. They just announced they're writing 100-inch TVs to more of their stores for the holiday season. Now, Jack, could you please sprinkle on some context to how big 100-inch TVs are? 100 inches is 8 feet. And that's the distance of the diagonal from one corner to the opposite corner. I mean, that's not a TV. That's a wall, Jack. It's so much bigger than the 32-inch TV. My brother bought with my money. Okay, Jack, it's not just kind of bigger. It is 17 times large. in surface area than that 32-inch TV. Don't believe us?

Check the Pythagorean theorem. Check Pythagoras. But just why is this huge TV trend happening in America? Nick and I found two reasons. The first is the direct-to-living-room streaming revolution that started during the pandemic. Thanks to new TV technology, people are recreating movie theaters in their living rooms. The second reason we're getting these giant TVs is that the price of them have fallen in half in just the past year. Half price on huge TVs.

And what's the result of that change, Jack? The number of XXL TVs, like 100 inches large, has 10xed in just the past year. So Jack and I got curious. How are TVs getting so much bigger and the prices getting so much smaller at the same time? I feel like we got to pinch ourselves. As a TV watching guy that I am, this is the best of both worlds. By the way, Yeties, before this show, Jack told me his dream is. to have his kids and his kids' cousins all watching a giant TV in their living room with Nicole Kidman.

I said I want a movie theater in my house so that while they're in all his cousins, yeah. With Nicole Kidman though, right? No. I don't know why you said Nicole Kidman. Anyway, Yetis, we've got an answer for you for that big question, and it's our takeaway. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies buying huge TVs? Moore's Law. It's incredible and it's incredibly true.

Yeties, if the tech community had a list of 10 commandments, then the number one commandment would be Moore's law. It was named after the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore. And here's the law from Gordon Moore. It's that a computer circuit gets twice as powerful or falls in price by half every single year. That computers get twice as powerful or fall in price by half every year. Now, he came up with this concept in 1965. And yet, this law is still remarkably true today. For basically all kinds of technology, they get twice as fast and half as expensive each year, thanks to innovation.

And that's why when Jack and I went to Best Buy, we noticed they're selling 100-inch double-xel TVs for just $1,700, which is half the price of last year. There's no better place to see Moore's law than in televisions. In fact, for 40 straight years, the average price of a television in America has fallen, even as those TVs, have gotten bigger and better and higher definition. For 40 straight years, the average TV has fallen in price. So, Jack, how did the 100-inch double-xel TV fall in price by 50% in one year? Moore's Law. It's incredible and it's incredibly true.

Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us for Saviche Wednesday? Calm won election night with their attention grabbing 30 seconds of silence. Instead of buying a Super Bowl commercial, comfound their own Super Bowl, and you can too. For our second story, it's Boeing. Their workers' union accepted a 38% pay raise over four years, so they're getting back to work. With all these strikes and record labor deals,

we're finally seeing ROU, a return on union. And our third and final story. Someone you know is getting a hundred-inch TV this Christmas because it's 50% cheaper than last year. And it's all thanks to Moore's Law. Technology gets freakishly fast, freakishly cheaper at the same exact time. And it's been happening since 1965. But Yetis, this pod's not over yet. Here's what else you need to know today. First, Marky Mark Zuckerberg

announced a funny situation with his company's new. Well, Jack, why don't you explain what's going on? He's trying to build a nuclear-powered data center to power meta's AI initiatives. But here's the problem, yetis. Rare bees were discovered on the land that they're going to build on. So like, they can't build because of the bees. Does anyone know a good apiary? Zuck's data center is on hold until someone figures out what to do with the bees. Second, Coinbase, Andresen Horowitz, and other crypto finance people are already thinking about 2026. That's right. This group of crypto enthusiasts has already poured 78 million bucks into a pro-crypto pack for the 2026 election. Hey, A16Z. Can you chill out for A16 minutes? We're still

counting the ballots from 2024 over here. And finally, Japan has a wild new plan to deliver packages to everyone in the country. A giant conveyor belt. That's right. Japan is planning an autonomous cargo transport system that'll go between Tokyo and Osaka. A giant conveyor belt stretching 300 miles. Anyone can drop something on it and it'll go. So like instead of that product or that mail getting on a truck, the package will go on a giant conveyor belt and then go over 3rd. 300 miles. This is the closest real-life thing to the flu network. I mean, Jack, forget packages. I want to get on this thing. Now, time for the best fact yet. This one whipped up by Jack and me, because we had a little trivia for you. What car had a starring role in Band of Brothers,

saving private ride, mean girls, Jurassic Park, and Clueless? Hit number two, what car brand has been ranked the number one most patriotic brand in America for over 20 Years. Hint number three, what car model is actually named after a character from Popeye the Sailor Man? All right, Jack, why don't you whip up the, not a takeaway? I guess whip up the answer for us over there. The Jeep. The Jeep! The Jeep is all of those things at once. And yet is, if you're looking for a great American story today, a break from politics, check out our episode that is all about the Jeep. That's right, because on our new show, the best idea yet, we just dropped a new episode on the Untold Origin Story, of the Jeep car.

The car that saved the world. Literally, the Jeep saved the world. We put a link in the episode description if you want to listen. In the meantime, Yetis, keep looking fantastic out there. Hope you can have a calm and relaxing day. And Jack and I, we'll see it tomorrow. And before we go, a congratulations to Sonia, the legendary Yeti, who visited the handshake speakeasy down in Mexico City.

Last week, we said it was voted Best Bar in the World, so she went and got the peanut butter and jelly cocktail. Looks delicious. By the way, you got to share that Mexico City Story Jack on another pod. And Colin Lay is a young 45 years old, celebrating the best birthday yet in Portland, Oregon. Happy 10-year anniversary to David and Rachel Doria in Hall of Fame City, Canton, Ohio. Amazing side story. Rachel delivered mono-mono twins in 2020, which are twins who share the same umbilical cord,

legendary family, and they're all doing fantastic. Happy 30th birthday to Carmen S. in Tyson's Virginia. She is 30, she is flirty, and she is thriving. And Valesca L'Orio in Syracuse, New York, is listening to T-Boy every day with the kids on the morning drive to school. By the way, all the Lurios, you look fantastic right now. And happy fourth birthday to Watson. Watson is four years old looking fantastic in upstate New York.

Listening since birth. And we should point out that yesterday, Jack and I mentioned the biggest movie event of the year is going to be wiki-gladawanna, right, Jack? Yeah, but Travis commented on YouTube that we should call this movie phenomenon with glamo. Okay, but then Jack, Jeremy Langlitz commented on Spotify,

we should call this movie phenomenon Moana the Wicked Gladiator. I think those are both improvements. Two different directions, two different realms of creativity. We're down with both.