The Best One Yet
👯‍♂️ “T-Pain & Mark Zuckerberg” — Zuck’s rap strategy. Amazon’s Temu dupe. NYC’s rent fee revolution.
Fri, 15 Nov 2024
The TBOY Holiday Merch Drop: Go to www.tboypod.com/shop to order the best fashion yet (hoodies, sweats, totes, hats, and a surprise...) 🛍️. Pre-order closes Wed, Nov 20th.Zuck dropped a rap track with T-Pain… Zuck’s new makeover is Meta’s new strategy.Amazon just launched “Haul” to compete with Temu and Shein… It’s a “plug-your-nose product.”NYC is reversing the broker fee: making landlords pay it… it’s a huge gift for renters.$META $AMZN $SPYWant more business storytelling from us? Check out the latest episode of our new weekly deepdive show: The untold origin story of Sriracha… From Refugee to Billionaire 🌶️. Subscribe to The Best Idea Yet: Wondery.fm/TheBestIdeaYetLinks to listen.FYI: Here’s the link to that T-Pain/Zuck song: https://open.spotify.com/album/4rjOpEV2WHrFU877MeGM42—-----------------------------------------------------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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is Mark Zuckerberg's new rap song about?
He was schvitzing through a bad suit while robotically answering questions from an angry congressman. But this year, Zuck went viral for good reasons. He went viral like all the D'Amelio sisters. First, it was his mixed martial arts like black belt. Then it was that video of him wakeboarding while chugging a beer and holding an American flag. And then Jack, it wasn't just his activities.
It was also his personal style too. Now he rocks a gold chain and he's got that curly hair fro situation. And he also bought a stretch limousine minivan for his family, which looked awesome. It's like Zuck's living the sequel to Clueless. He Heidi clumed himself, Jack. He Heidi clumed himself. For his 40th birthday, he also rocked a mob chic aesthetic, or as we call it, Zuckcore.
So add it all up and Zuck is going through the world's most expensive glow up. Now, Mark claims that there's a theme to all this. He says that he loves ancient Rome, so he's channeling the Roman Stoics in this new makeover.
The other things he's done, he just had a Roman statue designed and built for his wife, he named his kids after Roman emperors, and he's been wearing t-shirts with Marcus Aurelius quotes. So he says this is all just who he is. It is. But from covering Zuck for 10 years, we know that everything he does is strategic. And this is what we found fascinating about this story.
We think Zuck's fashion isn't just a distraction. We think it reflects his entire company's new philosophy. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Meta? Zuck's new fashion is Meta's new strategy. More vibes, less involvement. Follow us on this one, yetis. After the 2016 election, Meta became public enemy number one.
Liberals accused Zuck's news feeds of actually being fake news feeds. And then after the 2020 election, Meta became an enemy of conservatives. The right accused Zuck of censorship of conservative ideas on his platforms. And throughout all of this, Meta has faced antitrust legal threats from the whole U.S. government. And almost a year ago, Zuck even publicly apologized.
to the victims of online child abuse during a congressional testimony. So last year, Meta's stock, after all of that, fell to its lowest level in six years. But that's when something changed. Something changed. That's when Zuck stopped trying to fix Meta's image. Yeah, Zuck stopped focusing on politics, policy, or apologies, and instead just focused on good vibes.
Zuck's basically like, I'm done with this policy stuff. I don't care anymore. But interesting, we noticed that Meta did the same thing. Meta changed Facebook and Instagram's algorithm to have less political content and more personal content. And Meta launched threads, which Meta says isn't for news or politics. It's supposed to be a happy place. And what's happened to Meta stock in the meantime?
What happened, Jack? It's rocketed to new all-time highs. So besties, Meta traded involvement for vibes, responsibility for reverie, and we can see all of it in Zuck's fashion. Zuck's midlife rapper glow up isn't just a personal makeover, it's a corporate makeover. For our second story, Amazon just launched its cheapest thing ever, Amazon Haul.
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Chapter 5: How is NYC changing broker fees for renters?
For our third and final story before the weekend, New York City just delivered a gift to renters. New York just eliminated the broker fee. Actually, they didn't eliminate it. They just changed who has to pay it. From renters to landlords.
But Jack, if we're going to talk about New York City rent, I would be remiss if I did not discuss our four-bedroom palatially small loft on 14th Street off 2nd Avenue, man. We lived there for three years. Three of the bedrooms had windows. Yeah. The fourth one didn't. And I lived in that fourth one to save a couple hundred bucks. It was brutal.
I'll never forget the coil-top kitchen stove, which made sure everything was lukewarm at its hottest. But Yeti's Central Park, it is lovely this time of year. Renting is not. For several reasons Nick and I can attest to, renting in New York City is brutal. Yeah, reason number one, two, and three is the rent is too damn high.
The median asking price for a one-bedroom apartment in New York City is $3,400. In Manhattan, Jack, it's $5,000 for your average apartment. Oh, a cozy converted two-bedroom apartment? Yeah. It's a studio with temporary walls every six feet, slicing and dicing this tiny space into a bunch of rooms. Hey, where's the bathroom? Where is it, the bathroom? East Greenwich Village? Yeah.
This is Alphabet City. No, no, they're doing a little rounding on the map, Jared. But yet he's the worst part about renting in New York. It isn't the railroad floor plan. It's the broker fee. In New York City, the renter has to pay a two-month broker fee to the agent that showed you the apartment before you can move into the place.
Even if you never meet the agent and just do this all online, you still got to pay two months rent to the broker. Some context. New York is the only major U.S. city where the renter pays this fee, not the landlord. The But the result in New York City, it's pretty financially intense, isn't it, Jack? Moving into a new place requires at least $10,000 of upfront cash.
Sit down, stand up, and write the checks. Because if you're moving into a new apartment in New York City, you got to pay one month's rent, one month's security deposit, and two more months of rent just to pay the broker. Four months rent in a city where rent is $5,000? You see how that adds up. But not anymore. Here's the news.
The New York City Council just voted 42 to 8 to shift the broker fee from the renters to the landlords. Hallelujah. That's right. Our first reaction... We were shocked. We were actually shocked it was that easy. We thought this was never going to change. Why hasn't the city council done this before? Well, apparently there are two reasons why the city has not changed this painful rule before.
The first is lack of urgency. The city council said they passed this bill in the wake of the 2024 election to show New Yorkers that Democrats care about housing affordability. And the second reason is the huge, powerful New York City real estate lobby. The big landlord lobby of New York argued strenuously against the passage of this bill. Yeah, the landlords, they did not want to pay a broker fee.
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