452 Zuckerberg Is Spending $600 Billion To Buy The One Thing That Was Never For Sale | The Pirate Street Journal

0:00Thanks for pressing play and welcome to this very special episode of the Pirate Street Journal. My name is Christopher Lochhead and yes, I am also the host of Follow Your Different. And what you're about to hear is something that I've been dreaming of for quite some time and we got a lot of feedback that people wanted us to do it, so we're doing it. And so what the it is, is a regular look at kind of relevant business news through the category design lens. it's predicated on the crazy idea that, you know, the Wall Street Journal doesn't know how business works. And as outrageous as that sounds, it's true in the context of most business press is focused on companies, maybe products and technologies, but almost never market categories.

0:49And so what the Pirate Street Journal is, is we take three important business topics of the day. And Eddie, Bree, and I look at those topics through the category design lens and share them with you and in and out in 30 minutes. It's the Pirate Street Journal. It's a very different look at business, and I sure hope you enjoy it. And we're going to be releasing PSJs on a regular basis for the foreseeable future and drop our regular follow your difference that are either one-on-one with me or a conversation with a legendary guest. So without any further ado, this is the Pirate Street Journal on Folly or Different.

1:25Hey-ho, let's go.

1:43Christopher Lochhead: Today's first topic, Mark Zuckerberg published 6 ,500 words about putting AI in everybody's hands. In the same year, Meta is spending$145 billion on data centers. Second topic, 41 % of long-form posts on LinkedIn are now entirely AI-generated, and LinkedIn just shipped a button so you can report your colleagues for it. And third topic, four weird data points from 30 ,000 feet in the airline industry, and every one of them runs backwards from what's happening on the ground. We are recording on Friday, August 14th. Hey ho, let's go. Topic one, Zuck's accidental AI manifesto. On Monday morning, Zuckerberg published a 6 ,500 word essay titled The Future is for Everyone.

2:26Christopher Lochhead: Meta is resuming open weight model releases, a new model called Muse Glimmer Now, an open version of its most advanced model, Muse Spark 1.2. In the coming weeks, he is defending distillation the practice of querying a competitor's model to copy what it knows. In his words, it is important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe. He is launching a$1 billion fund for the towns around Meta's data centers. He wants AI labs to hand the federal government intermediate training checkpoints instead of waiting for a finished model. And he is giving Meta's board authority over model safety criteria, writing that he should not be the sole decision maker on how superintelligence gets deployed.

3:06Christopher Lochhead: and he wants a fully private mode for personal agents that even Meta cannot see into. At the same time, Meta is spending up to$145 billion on capital this year,$600 billion by 2028. It is behind Anthropic and OpenAI, and New York just banned new large data centers statewide for up to a year. And investors dumped the stock in July when he couldn't explain how any of it makes money. So 6 ,500 words on philosophy sitting on top of$600 billion of concrete. Christopher, does a manifesto mean anything when you're the one playing catch up? Well, it can. And there's a lot good here. And I think so directionally, I think there's a lot positive in this.

3:52I actually read it. And if you don't want to read it, you can download it and ask your favorite AI to TLDR it for you. I don't know, maybe we'll put it in the show notes or something, TLDR. But so it's a very good vision. If you look at it just through the lens of category manifesto, it's a great job. He's framing the problem and then he's presenting a new and different vision for the future. This is exactly what he did when he launched the metaverse, which we now forget about. The reason he renamed the company Meta in large part was he was category designing a new market he called the metaverse, which of course didn't happen, which we could talk about.

4:27But his initial category design was great. So the vision he's presenting here in this manifesto is a compelling one for, I think, all the right reasons. Here's the problem. The problem is, it's Zuckerberg telling us that. And if you go back a little bit, in July 2019, at the Allen & Co. conference, Facebook was sort of all about the Cambridge Analytica problem, the scandal that had happened at that time with essentially how they were renting their data out and how much data they were renting and the specificity of that data about you and I who are on Facebook, et cetera. And Zuckerberg famously went on a long walk with Tim Cook, who, of course, at the time was the CEO of Apple.

5:15And Zuck asked Cook how he would handle this crisis. And Cook told him straight up, Facebook needs to delete all of its user data collected from third-party apps. Now, why would somebody like Cook have said that to Zuckerberg in 2019? The seminal issue, the number one seminal issue going forward with AI is not how powerful is your model. it's do I trust you and when you look at Apple's strategy particularly under Cook although Jobs was huge on this as well they want to own trust and if you think about if you have an iPhone if you think about your iPhone your whole life is on this thing and if you use an Apple Watch and it's tracking your health then your health is on this thing where you are is on this thing it isn't what you could describe as the most intimate relationship you have with a piece of technology is with your smartphone.

6:17And I would go even a little further, Bree. The most intimate relationship that many people have with anything is the relationship they have with their smartphone. Okay, why is that possible? Well, at the highest level, the iPhone is a massive category solution to a million different categories, right? They're called the App Store. You can do everything from get food to order a car to learn the secrets of the world. So one device to do it all sort of thing. And if you remember when the iPhone came out, the slogan was when they launched the App Store, there's an app for that. And that's become truer and truer over time.

6:59So one is the functionality and the problems and the solutions that the iPhone provides. It's a category-defining platform for sure. However, that wouldn't be enough. You and I have to trust it. And here's an incredible lens on this. Apple is more important today than most countries' governments. So the CEO of Apple is more powerful and more important than most prime ministers in the world. So this is a trust issue. And the problem with Zuckerberg is we don't trust him. And the reason we don't trust him is we don't pay for the product. If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. And we're terrified about Zuckerberg knowing where we work, who our friends and who our family are, and what we're doing and where we're going.

7:46Now he's going to know everything else about us. This is going to be a big concern, and they do not have a great track record on trust. I'll absolutely double down on that. And when you think about the situation, I mean, Zuck's manifesto, there's a lot of good in it, as you said, Christopher. He's talking about abundance, which is right. I think all of that around AI abundance, building up data centers with communities, all that's great, that the idea that everyone will have access to these tools for free or very affordable, I think is also great and wonderful. That being said, as you said, there's a quote from the Italian job.

8:20Donald Sutherland's character says, I trust everyone. I don't trust the devil inside them, right? And I think with Zuck, you have to kind of wonder what's the motive behind it in that it all comes down to, you know, it's not so easy to just categorize people into a missionary mercenary bucket, although we're tempted to do that. There's a little bit of each in each person. So what I kind of look at is what's the give to get? And with Zuck, you give a lot and you get very little. That's the part that I think I feel very concerned about is that, yes, will we get some free, wonderful AI models from Zuck that we don't have to pay for, that you might pay for at Cloud or OpenAI or ChatGPT?

9:00Yes. But what are you giving up for that? You're giving up a lot of information and you're giving up a lot about yourself that they are not good stewards of and that you just have to look at, and it's not really about the individuals, it's about you follow the money. How do they make money? They make money on advertising. How do they make more money on advertising? By targeting you. How do they target better? By knowing more information about you and knowing the most intimate details about you and that people have long talked about like, I get these Facebook ads that, you know, were selling me prenatal vitamins before I knew I was pregnant and stuff.

9:33Like, there are things that are spooky and scary that the advertising companies do. You know, Google, on the other hand, does a bit of it, but the give to get is slightly different, right? In that when Zuck is doing all of this money into the metaverse, you know, that's primarily to benefit meta. I don't know what the consumer benefit is, but when Google has all of these kind of moonshots He never could articulate one, and that's why he never could articulate one, and that's why they lost well over a billion dollars in the metaphors. And you got Waymo on Google, like they have Google Ventures.

10:03You know, Waymo is, they're trying to introduce self-driving cars. They're much better at new category design than Meta has ever been. They have AlphaFold. They're trying to help you figure out DNA sequencing and protein folding. And there's all of these kind of moonshot benefits that Google has done. So I, you know, the give to get, it's still an advertising model, but they're giving you more for humanity and new categories than Duck has ever done. And then you have Tesla on the other hand. And they don't creep us out. Google doesn't creep us out. And so this is the interesting thing. The give to get feels much different with Google, even though we don't pay for it in the same way we don't pay for Facebook.

10:40And with Tesla, they have your self-driving information and they use it to benefit the safety for robot taxis and everything else like that. So, you know, I think that part of it is, you know, what's the stance of the founder that each of them have in terms of their prior track record on privacy? What's the business model? How do they make money? How do they not make money? And that, in part, it's just hard to trust the Zuck manifesto until it's a different person than Zuck. Like he talks about the board has the ability to oversee these models. And yet he has super voting shares. He cannot be voted out.

11:12He can replace the board at any given time. Right. And so it's just like the board. By the way, you want to hear a funny story? So I was at this ding dong dinner in Silicon Valley a couple of years ago and seated next to me, I forget the guy's name, was the CTO of Facebook. He's got some nickname. He's some big burly guy. Anyway, comes up some of these scandals that Facebook has had, Cambridge Analytica and all this kind of stuff and all the bad PR that they've had. and um and so i'm talking about it this guy's sitting right next to me and i'm saying you know you guys got a ton of bad pr and remember they created that board to decide who gets thrown off and who doesn't get thrown off and all this sort of stuff they had the supreme court of facebook remember this thing and this guy next to me who reports to zuck he's trying to tell me that this board the supreme court of facebook content has control when in point of fact zuckerberg's got all the control.

12:10And he literally starts screaming at me that, wait, I get every morning, I get all the feedback. And I was like, I literally looked at him and I was at a dinner with, you know, 25 people. And I said, dude, you have your head up your ass. You just went through one of the most horrible spats of PR because you got caught doing bad shit. And you're here trying to tell all of us that you guys are a good company. I don't think so. And so my point is they are arrogant and they are ignorant about what we all think about them because they are ignorant and arrogant about some of their actions. Now, I'm not saying there's no value in Facebook.

12:44There is. I use Facebook. We all use Facebook. There is value or we wouldn't use it. However, we don't trust them the way we trust Apple and Google. Well, this is what I think Zuck could actually do that would be meaningful is diversify the business model in the same way that I think Google has tried to do with, you know, GCP. And it's going to be obvious that Zuck is going to launch ZWS, Zuckerberg Web Services, where they will become a neocloud in the same way, you know, as they build out AI and data centers that they're going to rent it out to the anthropics and open AIs of the world. And then they have to decide, is there an alternative way to make money that does not require them to target people and for advertising?

13:24Until they do, won't trust them. And we'll have to just, you know, as consumers, I would encourage us all to be vigilant about what we use, why we use it. I keep Facebook. I do not wish to have it. I have Instagram. I do not wish to have it. I try not to post on it for these particular reasons, but I'm not kind of able to just walk away. And as consumers, I think we all have the ability and right to vote with our feet and our time and in the eyeballs and that, you know, if you don't trust them, move off of it. Don't give them your attention and don't give them your data.

13:55Christopher Lochhead: Topic two, LinkedIn's new slot button. LinkedIn now has a button that says seems like AI slop. From April to June, 41 % of long-form posts and 30 % of all comments posted publicly on LinkedIn were entirely AI generated. That is Pangram Labs across nearly 57 ,000 items. On X, the number is 29%. On Reddit 13, a second firm, originality.ai looked at 5 ,000 public LinkedIn posts in July and found 81 % used AI, more than a moderate amount. LinkedIn disputes those numbers and declined to provide its own. It says more than 200 ,000 AI spam comments a day and catches 94 % of generic posts before they spread past your immediate network.

14:40Christopher Lochhead: It shut down its own enhance your post feature and it is building a nudge that tells you when other people think you sound like a bot. Now here's the problem. The detectors disagree with each other and they flag human writing constantly. Writers who have used zero AI have come back, scored a 60%, and one executive in the story said nobody knows the real number, including LinkedIn, and anyone claiming they do is selling a detection tool. A platform of a billion people built on performing professionalism now has to rule on whether the performance is human, using a tool that cannot tell. So Christopher, if the detectors are wrong this often, what's a writer to do.

15:19Okay, we'll get into the specifics of this because I think they matter. But before we do, I want to zoom up and out a little bit and ask the following question. What is the thinking? What is the context of the people who decided to do this? What is their intention? What is the lens through which they're looking? I want to challenge that lens. We can talk about the specifics, but I want to challenge the lens. So the people on the pro side for this kind of what I would call scarlet letter marking of AI content, their argument is often a good one. They'll say, hey, I want to get rid of deepfakes.

16:03We have a situation where somebody could create a deepfake video of a major world leader declaring nuclear war or some other horrible thing, or the CEO of a company announcing something horrible, manipulating the stock, whatever it is. So are deep fakes and are what you could call fake, illegal, misleading, nefarious content a problem? Absolutely. Are there things that need to get done to create guardrails? And in the case where people break laws, because a deep fake could very well, and I'm no lawyer, but could very well be the beginning of a fraud, okay? So all that stuff is very real and figuring out what the right ways to protect us against deep fakes and things that are along those lines is very important.

16:51Okay. However, or in addition, what I would say is this. There's this almost religious belief. You're either pro-AI or you're anti-AI. As we have extensively written about, the future of creating everything is vibe creating. So many people know the term vibe coding. That's the term you use for co-creating software code with AI. We wrote a piece two or three years ago now, can't remember, but quite a while ago called vibe creating. This is how PowerPoints are going to get done. This is how books are going to get written. This is how maths, aka spreadsheets, are going to get done. This is how, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

17:35And this is how work's going to get done. And of course, that has played out. So, back to LinkedIn. There's a very big difference between a donkey going to an AI and saying, write me a LinkedIn post about marketing. And they spew out a bunch of obvious content and put it out. By the way, I don't have any problem with that. As a consumer on LinkedIn, I don't want to consume that. But there's a button on LinkedIn called don't follow this person anymore. So if I think what you're putting out is slop, I don't care whether you generated your slop with AI or with your own sloppy brain. I don't want it in my feed.

18:12So here's the issue. The future of creating everything is going to be AI. why would we in a situation where in this case a piece of linkedin content is authentically vibe created that is to say a person showed up with an idea with a premise maybe connected some unusual dots created a prompt and started to go back and forth with ai on this idea on this concept and built it out and then co-authored something with the ai that's very different than a deep big. That's even very different than a one sentence prompt to produce a piece of sloppy content. So here's the issue. When the spreadsheet emerged, there was nobody at that time saying, oh, well, that's a synthetic math, right?

19:03They call these synthetic customers. They call these synthetic results, right? That's this term that they're slapping on this to create more of a scarlet letter, right? When somebody created PowerPoints, when you go, even to this day, you go in and present a PowerPoint or a Canva presentation to somebody. They don't say, oh, well, today we're going to watch Jimmy's synthetic presentation. No, it's the PowerPoint. It's the slides. And so part of this is the scarlet lettering of AI. And that's the real problem in my mind. And if you want to get rid of slop in your feed, hit unfollow. And here's what I don't want.

19:40Anthropic just did this and mark my words, they are going to pay the price. Anthropic now puts a watermark in every piece of content that hits them. Whether you completely vibe create it or whether you just ask it to check spelling and grammar, there is now a watermark on there that everybody who at the code level can see that it was created at least in part by AI in concert with AI. This is scarlet lettering. This is the big mistake. We want to encourage vibe creating with AI, not discourage it. And we want to be super thoughtful about deep fakes. But this synthetic, this making people feel bad that they're using AI is like making people feel bad that they use spreadsheets, slide rules, or calculators.

20:28Well, I think on the anthropic point, we wrote this about branding, if you actually go back to the actual definition of what branding is, that's a horrible idea that should be stricken from marketing. The idea of sticking a hot poker into an animal to designate that animal as your own. I don't know why Anthropic would do this, especially when they're claiming they're cattle rustlers. They're claiming and branding content that's not their own. That's terrible. So they should obviously stop it. And similarly, the AI police, you need to stop this as well too. Who are you to say that this is written by AI or not?

21:00You weren't there. The part that kind of gets me annoyed and upset about this is that you rewind the clock back, you know, 10, 20 years, that'd be like saying, hey, you use spellcheck. That shouldn't, that's not your writing. There's no spelling errors in it. And therefore, you have synthetic spelling in your document. It's so dumb. And so like, you know, to your point, if you don't like, if you think it's AI slap, don't read it. Don't follow it. Don't forward, don't do anything with it. But, you know, the whole kind of AI writing police, like, what's the point of that? Like, that's, you know, you have better things to do with your life.

21:29Now, if I go back to the core of what LinkedIn is doing, the crisis is not about AI impacting the writing or not. It's about LinkedIn, I think, has an opportunity to really hone in on why do people use LinkedIn and how do they actually help people solve the problem that they're trying to get to, which is that, you know, when I think about LinkedIn, it's kind of at least three things, you know, hiring people, trying to find a job, find people to get hired for those jobs, hustling people in marketing and selling their own stuff, some of which is annoying. and this and that, right? And in those two use cases, like, go ahead and use AI.

22:03That's great. You know, if you need to polish your resume because you know that the HR recruiters are using AI to scan your resume on LinkedIn anyway, then that's probably smart to do. You know, look for the keywords. Don't, you know, don't, don't use, don't not use AI out of a principle that gets you not hired. Like, you know, if hiring use case, AI can certainly make that better. And I would say on the hiring use case, what LinkedIn should do is what I've long advocated. I wrote an HBR article about this years ago. LinkedIn should have a feature that is not your degree and not your title. It should be your outcomes.

22:37And those outcomes should be verifiable by other people, right? And it should be, you know, Bree has her title at Category Parts. It should be, you know, Bree is able to list an outcome that said, I vibe created and vibe coded in AICRM. And there should be a feature that says, you know, Bree puts it out there and Christopher and I, and maybe even Bean, if Bean had a LinkedIn profile, just say, yay verily, that's true. And it's awesome, right? And that Bree, like to me, like if you tell me, like if you had that as the primary lead, you know, we'd probably be at risk of losing because it's like, I would like somebody to vibe create that.

23:15Like no one's going to say like, I would like somebody who has this particular resume or pedigree. It's what outcomes did you deliver? Are they verifiable? And can that outcome be relevant for me? that would be amazing and awesome there. I don't know if you would agree with that, Brie. The AI CRM seems like a very logical thing. What else would you put up there at the top of the list for you?

23:35Christopher Lochhead: Oh, I'm sure there's loads of other things. Creating websites, vibe creating websites, all sorts of stuff these days. I mean, I would put your rant of, who was that guy that you ranted about on the website that you got him to respond back to? Chris Burkhardt. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like when I think of Brie, when people ask me - Would somebody break into the academy? Is that him? No, no, it's, Brie, tell the story. When I first started my business years ago, the way that I kicked it off and how it had success is I started going on Instagram and roasting some of my heroes over time about what I thought they were doing wrong in the digital world.

24:11Christopher Lochhead: And it got some traction. Chris Burkhardt being one of the humans who saw it, reposted it to its over a million followers. And that was how I got my first big batch of networking and people in my business. So I would call that a digital lightning strike, right? Right. So, you know, AI vibe creating, vibe coding, an AI CRM, you know, a digital lightning strike. There are many, many other things. But like that to me, LinkedIn, are you paying attention? Should be the way that you structure LinkedIn to help the hiring process. It should be how you optimize the hustling process. Like I don't want to be cold DM'd or, you know, spammed about like, oh, I'm selling this thing.

24:49But if you tell me the outcomes that people get from buying your product or service, now I'm intrigued. Now I say, maybe I want that outcome and maybe I should look at buying that. And then the third thing is really about helping. And this is the part that I really, really think LinkedIn should lean into, which is, you know, helping can be a lot of things. It can be, I'm going to help promote somebody else's, you know, product or thought leadership, or I think this person is awesome. Helping is oftentimes sharing and teaching thought leadership. And this is where I get annoyed, is that the, again, the AI police, when you say this was written by AI or not, All I have to do is look past 2022 or before that and say, did you write anything of substance anywhere on any publication that was helping people?

25:33And if you don't have that track record of doing that, then I'm going to look a little stance at you about like, maybe you're not the one to judge content because if you haven't written stuff, then I'm not sure you're the person to judge. It's like a non-singer judging American Idol. Here's the thing I want LinkedIn to get rid of, okay? I posted about this yesterday. Obvious lie marketing. I don't know who taught an entire generation of marketers to start their outbound lead gen with a lie. I posted one that I got yesterday. It starts like this. Congratulations on your work anniversary. Your dedication and success are truly commendable.

26:11How do you balance your health, well-being and mindset with this current role? Do you have any special practices or routines that keep you at your best? Best regards, right? And so what's happening? Some donkey trained an entire generation of marketers to start with some bullshit compliment and then get to the sales pitch. They want to start off a long-term relationship. They want to create long-term lifetime value with customers by starting off with a lie. Hey, LinkedIn, you want to do something positive? Stop the obvious lie marketing. But they should post the analytics of like when you do the obvious lie marketing, does it convert, does it not convert?

26:45Like there are a lot of things that LinkedIn can do. I mean, how stupid do they think people are? To help people with the hiring, hustling, and helping people and stuff. And that in particular, the whole kind of writing part, this is the part I want to emphasize because like you get a lot of people on the AI police around this is that when you write something, here's the category of hards formula for it. What problem are you solving in your writing? What's your POV? Is it different at all, right? Plan. How are you telling the story? What's the structure of it? And polish. You know, are you looking for the typos and the weirdos and the grammar things and everything else like that?

27:15You would be stupid not to use AI on the policy side, which is exactly what we do. You would be stupid not to ask it to check your plan and your flow. Is topic one, topic one, or topic three, topic two? That stuff makes a lot of sense. Now, if you outsource the problem in POV to AI, that's where the problem is. And then that's the kind of thing that you don't want to get a reversion to the mean. But using AI to hone, I have a POV, what's the problem I'm trying to solve for? That's useful. Or I have a problem, how do I solve it with the POV? That's useful. or how do I niche it down to the right super consumer so that I have the right prospect ahead of it?

27:50There's all of these things that can be used for AI and that, you know, again, as stupid as saying, you used spellcheck, didn't you? Ha ha, this whole thing is invalid.

27:58Christopher Lochhead: Topic three, four weird data points from the airline industry. First one, wine. California wineries shipped 203 million cases last year, down 11 % with vineyards ripping out prized grapes they can't sell. In the air, it's the opposite. United is on track to pour 9.5 million glasses this year in Polaris and has put$35 million into its wine program in two years. American went through 3.5 million bottles of Italian sparkling wine in 12 months. A winery can move 4 ,000 to 6 ,000 cases a quarter to one airline. Getting on a restaurant list moves about 1 ,000. Second data point, weight. Jeffries says if average passenger weight drops 10 % on GLP-1s, planes get 2 % lighter.

28:44Christopher Lochhead: Fuel burn drops 1.5 % and earnings per share rise 2.8 % at Delta, 3.5 % at United and 4.2 % at Southwest, and 11.7 % at American. Fuel is 19 % of these airlines operating expenses,$39 billion a year. And our third data point, Wi-Fi. More than 1 ,100 aircraft worldwide have Starlink installed, 7 ,500 equipped or under contract across 46 airlines. 200 grand per plane to install and spacex says at least one airline is now watching passengers book a connecting flight over a direct flight on purpose to be on a starlink aircraft and finally for doordash just cleared faa certification and is building its own delivery drones american made meanwhile drone delivery has been routine in china for years on the ground people are drinking less eating less, and losing their attention span.

29:40Christopher Lochhead: 30 ,000 feet up, every one of those numbers runs the opposite way. So Eddie, is the cabin the last place in America where consumer behavior inverts? Well, this is a great time to be alive. You know, airline travel, you know, we've all done a lot of it. You know, I think, Christopher, you've always said, you know, you're an American's airline number more than your social security number and the like. I don't know my social security number and my, I know it right now. I could say it off the tip of my tongue, my American number. Yes. Airlines love-hate relationship. We don't want to spend too much time on them, but they were great enablers for our careers and everything else.

30:13And so here's the part that is a bit of a love letter to the airline industry. And I've known some executives at United and this and that with it. You have the greatest opportunity on pricing power than you've ever had before. Don't screw this up because your margins are thin. They've always been thin. The business model is broken. There's a reason why the frequent flyer programs are worth much, much more on enterprise value than the actual core business. And so don't screw this up. In the sense that wine, Christopher loves wine. When we had a category of Pirates Retreat in Hawaii, I made a point to go look for, I forget the wines that you were looking for in the like.

30:50Brinellos. Brinellos, that's right, that's right. So you look for those things. And during the summer, you know, some Pinot Grigio, maybe some Sauvignon Blanc. So not that hard on the frequent flyer program to ask, do you have special wines that you prefer? Not that hard to find that out. And there are the kind of lead handing that people do for frequent flyers like Christopher, myself or whatever. Like, oh, Mr. Lockett, good to see you, this and that. That's all nice and well and good. What's even better is, oh, and we bought a special Brunello for you on the plane. I bet you Christopher would pick that airline even at a less convenient time than not.

31:25And so like, one, it'll drive preference. Two, there's absolutely a world where, you know, whether you're in first or coach, you say I want to be part of the special wine Costco program here's 200 bucks a year here are my wine preferences please have these when you possibly can in stock so that I get to enjoy you know my favorite wines when I'm at 30 ,000 feet so like that's absolutely a pricing opportunity they are giving it away as part of the class system and this is the part that they need to get ahead of is like you cannot price discriminate only on class of the airline you can absolutely charge incrementally for this because certainly easy now on the weight part You don't want to weight shame people.

32:04That's not good, right? That's obviously going to be an interesting one. You can take a page from Progressive. Progressive gives you the option to have them monitor your driving, right? Are you speeding? Do you brake hard? Do you turn fast? And for the privilege of that, and if you are a safer driver, they lower your insurance premiums. Now, here's the idea of how to do this. And you know where it stems from? This idea came from, you know, as Christopher has been there, right? Is I tried to get the pet food companies. He's very frisky right now, Bean. to come up with a solution of solving pet obesity, which is very, very hard.

32:38Human obesity is very hard. Pet obesity is even harder because it's usually the owners that are feeding the pet scraps and treats and this and that with it. And the pets, they cry, they want the treats, and it's really hard to do. Now, the way that you solve for pet obesity is in front of, you have an automatic pet feeder, so you disassociate the pet owner for the food. Wait, I hate to interrupt you, Eddie. Why don't we just get GPL ones for pets? Well, that's coming too. Is it coming? It's got to be coming, right? It's got to be coming. And then, but you have in front of the automatic pet feeder, a little scale so that when the pet comes and eats, it weighs the pet and you can automatically tweak, you know, the amount of food that you get.

33:12Now, the same kind of... Category design for the win again. Category design for the win. The same thing. You check in at the airline. Don't make people, you know, you're not going to get, hey, step on the scale like you do at the doctor's office. But what you could do is step on the scale with your bags. so you know because what does the airline care if it's your weight or they care about the total weight right so your carry-on your briefcase or whatever step on the whole thing it's a little masky masky and it you make it voluntary step on the scale and it just gives us information so that we can better plan for how much fuel and anticipate our cost structure and guess what you know i the way that i travel will probably be the same in terms of carry-ons and this and that and you get a baseline, you get more data and you can more accurately plan for fuel and optimize your cost structure that way.

33:59And if you gave people a pricing Scooby snack, not for being lighter, but being transparent. These are all things that you can do to help out with from an airline perspective. And then, you know, again, the Starlink thing, if you've ever been on a plane with Starlink, it is amazing. It is like night and day, like you can watch Netflix, you could probably stream a video game and play real time if you wanted to. The telling data point that I saw was consultants who are notorious for travel and wanted to get from point A to point B were taking connection routes just to be on Starlink because they are so much more productive on planes with it.

34:35Here's the irony is that what United has backwards and all the other airlines is they charge you$8 per session for crappy Wi-Fi. And when there's Starlink, it's free. Makes no sense to me. Like if you just had one super premium ding-dong bundle of a Costco membership that gave you the free wine that was premium. You put your preferences on there. And in exchange, you got Starling. And in return, please step on the scale with all of your bags and this and that. We're not going to da-da-da-da-da with you. These are all things that you can do to help optimize the airline experience. The give-to-get is the key solution here, just like it was with the privacy thing with Mark Zuckerberg.

35:11The last four or five times, maybe six times, I've been on United, no Wi-Fi, none, nothing. And look, maybe I sound like, you know, an ingrateful bastard. Fair enough. But we're now used to this. And I'm somebody that writes every day. I mean, I have two partners right here who are on my ass because I'm always late. And so I'm trying to write every day. And so as somebody who now relies on this, because I do work, work that I love, but work nonetheless. Here's the other interesting thing. I was on a Delta flight not long ago. and I'm very persnickety about my wine, not because I try to be an asshole, but I just like what I like.

35:53It's just what my palate is tuned to. And so I, anyway, I get on the plane. The meal I've chosen is a pasta with a red sauce, tomato sauce, and I kind of really feel like some red wine to go with it, but I'm like, oh, this red wine's going to fucking suck. It's going to be super sweet and shitty and, you know, whatever. And I'm like, oh, fuck it. I really feel like some red wine with this pasta. So I order some. Well, guess what? it was fucking great it wasn't exactly what i like fine i'm on a plane but it was really good wine and i thought wow good wine wi-fi food guess who's a lot happier on the plane this is a radical differentiation strategy and listen if you give me starlink and burnello I'm with you.

36:44Well, and this is where super of one is a super of nine. And that's why I love this one topic three, Brie, that you pulled together. So if you know that Christopher loves Brunello and you offer him a ding-dong program that says, this is Christopher's wine preferences. If you have the opportunity, grab that bottle and put it on the plane. Guess what? Hey, Christopher, would you like to receive? Charge me an extra hundred bucks if you want, an extra 50 bucks if you want, whatever it is. You could charge that. But here's the thing. He's a super Brunello's. He's willing to do a give to get on money and information.

37:15Because if United or Delta or Alaska came to Christopher and said, by the way, thank you for telling us that you love Brunello's. Would you be open to receiving marketing offers from the next generation of great Brunello makers and this and that, maybe ones that you've never heard of? What does Pirate Christopher say? Absolutely. Oh, and by the way, if they were truly committed to the whole thing, it's funny that we're talking about this, on a recent flight. So I love Italians, married to one in a relationship with lots of them, because generally if you marry one, you get a whole bunch more, which is the case in my case.

37:51And it turns out I love Italy. I love the food. I love the wine for all the obvious reasons. So on a recent flight, I was paging through all the entertainment options because there was no Wi-Fi. And what did I find? I found Stanley Tucci does Italy or whatever the show is called. And I got to sit there on the plane drinking red Italian wine, watching Stanley Tucci take me to Italy. Now, if you're really smart, you'd know all that shit and you'd serve it up to me immediately. Well, the last one I'll hit on is the DoorDash drone delivery, which is one of those. thank you we've been waiting for this China has us all over the place right where you can get your Starbucks and deliver to you via drone Domino's has been experimenting with pizzas from that I just wanted to make sure that as Bree as somebody who flies in the air that you know how do you think about all of this stuff with drones and this and that like on the one hand I think drones are great it's going to make our lives convenient and you know I don't get in the air unless I'm flying but what say you about the upcoming air traffic as somebody who jumps off of cliffs with a parachute and generally makes Pirate Eddie very nervous about all that.

39:05Christopher Lochhead: Oh, this would be a disaster for any. And you know, I live in Alaska and so everyone here flies small planes. And within that, I have little Cessnas go over every single day, super low to the ground. So if you were to bring DoorDash to Alaska and I have these small planes, that's going to be a huge problem with FAA, paragliders, anybody within the free fight world. It's just not going to fly. You know, the other thing I was thinking about that's super interesting is Alaska, I believe, is about 60 % owners of firearms. Well, what's somebody in Alaska going to do as soon as they see a drone? So it's just not going to fly in Alaska where it could be a really great solution for remote places.

39:49The thing about shooting at drones, if you assume that many people in Alaska could not just have guns, but they have shotguns. And anybody who knows anything about shotguns know that they explode. There are a bunch of BBs inside. And so what's my point? It would be hard to shoot down a drone with a handgun or maybe even with a rifle because they're moving just like a bird. Shotguns are made to shoot down birds.

40:17Christopher Lochhead: Exactly. So it's going to be really hard and remote places and places like Alaska where that could be the drone element could be a really big benefit for remote operations and also probably be very unliked in the same regard. Now, I have a question for you, Brie. Yes. Have you ever been, I believe the past tense of shit is shat. Have you ever been shat on by a bird? That has not yet happened. Wow. I have. Have you ever had your car shat on by a bird? Yeah, yep. Yeah, okay. So now imagine the following scenario. All of a sudden, Starbucks and Pizza Hut and McDonald's and shit are falling from the sky on your head and on your car when the drone screws up.

41:06I don't know. We could have a lot of french fry incidents.

41:12Christopher Lochhead: And with that, pirates, we'll see you next week.