2️⃣ “Upvote” — Our Reddit Stock Pick. Shirley Temple’s surge. Trump’s Landlord Lockout.

0:28This is Nick. Really, grab your tickets now. We can't wait to see you live. But three fantastic stories for today's show. What do we got on the T-Boy? For our first story, the drink of dry January has already been crowned. It's the Shirley Temple. Jack and I will tell you why Gatorade, 7-Up, Olipop, Poppy, like every other beverage brand, are going gaga for grenadine. For our second story, President Trump said yesterday he's banning corporate home buying in America so that families can buy homes instead. We call it the landlord lockout. because when Wall Street stops buying, there is more for the rest of us.

1:01And our third and final story. For our second day in a row, we're doing our portfolio resolutions, our three stock picks for the new year. And our second stock pick for 2026, it just got upvoted on Reddit. But yet he's before we hit that wonderful mix of stories. Whoa, I mean, no one else is doing that mix. Love the mix of stories, Jack. The hottest show on TV right now is actually on ice. Heated Rivalry, HBO's gay hockey romance. You heard that right. Heated Rivalry, the rom-com series about two hockey players who hook up when they play each other. We're not talking Gretzky and Messier, but we could be talking Gretzky and Messier.

1:37Queer romance and crosschecks, that's what you get. Heated Romance is the number one streaming show in Canada, and has my wife suddenly claiming she's a hockey fan? She called five for fighting on that one. Perfect timing, by the way, Jack, because the Winter Olympics start in one month, and NHL players are involved in the game scan. It's going to be an exciting game, but it has Nick and me realizing hockey's biggest mainstream moments in American history, they tend to be linked to movies. We dove into the numbers. Get this, 1992, you got the Mighty Ducks trilogy, which drove a surge in ice skating programs.

2:08And that fictional team led to a real NHL team, the Anaheim Ducks. Worth a real multi-million dollars. In 2004, Disney hit the ice again with Miracle about Team USA. Disney also did Inside Out 1 and Inside Out 2, where the protagonist is a hockey player. I'm sorry, Jack, pause the pod. Walt Disney didn't drive a car, he drove a Zamboni. You also got Happy Gilmore, Mystery Alaska, and now Heated Rivalry. Basti is based on our research. No sport is more dependent on Hollywood for TV ratings than hockey. The only times in my life I've ever paid attention to hockey is movies. I'll pretend I didn't hear that.

2:43And according to Chad GVT, hockey movies actually made more at the box office than basketball movies have. So hockey is the winter sport of the day, not basketball. Add it all up and what the league needs isn't another Alex Ovechkin, is it, Jack? Hockey needs another Gordon Bombay. And Knucklepuck is a profit puppy. D4. Yeah. The Mighty Ducks. Six. That's a goal sound, Jack. That's a goal sound. Let's hit our three stories. Fifteen years before this song, two boys from the Northeast met in a dorm. They had an idea to cause a cultural storm. It's the best one yet, but the best is the norm. Jack Nick, that's it.

3:19I don't even think they need to practice. Fifty percent, that's a fat tip. T-Boy City on your at list. If you know, you know, cause we ready to go. We can't wait no more, so just start the show.

3:34Start the show. First, a quick word from our sponsor.

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4:37For our first story, Poppy and Olipop both launched a Shirley Temple in the same week. Oh, and 7-Up also has a Shirley Temple now. Oh, and even Gatorade? Yeah, they've got a Shirley Temple now. Shirley Temple became the flavor of the year last year because of something we call S &D. Oh, Yeti's happy dry January to all those who celebrate. Your local bar looks more like a high school dance. Yeah, bartenders aren't celebrating. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. A lot of chaperones at the bar, but no schnapps. Jack, just say no to the Pinot. Get this, one out of four Americans actually did dry January last year.

5:15And the number one trending non-alcohol drink for dry January, it's the Shirley Temple. The Shirley Temple, the OG mocktail. Jack, could you sprinkle on some ingredient context, please? Well, the base is ginger ale, Sprite, or 7-Up. They all work. And then you add grenadine with some of those gorgeous cherries that are skinless and like shockingly red. I mean, you never forget your first Shirley. Remember your first Shirley, Jack? Oh, it sounds like you forgot your first Shirley. I was at Benny Hawn and the ship like threw a shrimp into my mouth. And then I was like, hey, three more for the birthday party.

5:44You washed it down with the Shirley Temple, huh? But Besties Jack and I jumped in T-boy style, and the Shirley was actually invented at Chasen's Restaurant in lovely Los Angeles 95 years ago. So that child actors could drink a beverage after the shoot with their adult co-stars. But here's the ironic twist we discovered. Shirley Temple hated Shirley Temple. You mean the actress Shirley Temple. Yeah, in fact, she did an interview in the 1980s where she said they were just too sweet. She even sued to stop brands from using her name until her death, which came in 2014. But it wasn't until 11 years later, 2025, that brands started using the Shirley Temple name once again.

6:21Besties, the Shirley Temple is, in our opinion and our research, the unofficial flavor of the year. Because we've never seen more companies launch the same thing at the same time as the Shirley Temple. Okay, let's whip out the whiteboard. Follow us on this one. Three days ago, Olipop, the soda biz, launched a Shirley Temple flavor. Funny timing, because earlier that week, on January 1st, Poppy launched a Shirley Temple. We noticed Olipop made seven separate Instagram posts to hype and launch their Shirley Temple, while Poppy did nine of them. Oh, and a couple months prior, Ben Stiller launched a new soda brand with Shirley Temple as the first flavor.

6:55Apparently, Ben Stiller, according to him, drinks three Shirley Temples at every dinner meal. And 7up also launched a Shirley Temple this fall. Sorry, pause the pause, Jack. Before that, Gatorade introduced a Shirley Temple with electrolytes last fall. 16 Handles created a Shirley Temple frozen yogurt, and there's even a Shirley Temple influencer, the Shirley Temple King, with 250 ,000 followers. The New York Times did a whole profile on this dude. He even signed with an agent. Now, we've talked about kidulting in the toy industry. Yeah, we have. Like, we covered Legos yesterday, Jack, and like, you know, adults playing with Legos, that's kidulting.

7:29But the Shirley Temple surge is kidulting in drinks. Yes, it is. It's also another concept we've noticed that we call new-stalgia. Remixing old concepts with new updates. You see, the pink pretty bubbles of a Shirley Temple are basically made for the Instagram era. This is their moment. So add it all up and Shirley Temple was a movie star, but the Shirley Temple drink is now a TikTok star. Which leads to our takeaway. Yes, it does. We'll actually make it four. We'll have four of them with extra cherries. Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies with the Shirley Temples? Companies used to do research and development.

8:02Now they do scrolling and development. Yetis, we actually traced this Shirley Temple boom all the way back to 2021 during the pandemic. We were born at home, so we mixed together those three ingredients and rediscovered our childhood treat. And as more Americans go dry and post about going dry, Shirley Temple demand has surged. That is why a dozen companies have recently launched and packaged their own Shirley Temple products. They saw your posts on social. You see, Besties, These brands used to do R &D, research and development. You do research in a lab, you test the new product with a focus group before finally bringing it to market.

8:37But now we notice some of them are doing S &D, scrolling and development. You scroll social media, figure out what's popular, bottle your own version, bring it to market. Now, S &D isn't patentable. Everyone can do it and you're basically just bottling up something that already exists. But S &D is also less risky. Since you know consumers already want this thing, you're just making it easy for them. Couldn't have said it better, Jack. The good companies, they do R &D, but the smart ones do S &D. For our second story, President Trump said he is banning Wall Street from buying homes. It's the landlord lockout, but there's a much bigger opportunity that Nick and I are dying to talk about.

9:20Oh, but before we get to that opportunity, Jack, let's start with some trivia. Guess who bought nearly one out of five homes sold in America in the first quarter of 2024? It's not the Jeffersons. No. It's not the lovely dink couple that moved in down the road. They're great. It's not even Bravo to film season 16 of Summer House. Oh, the answer? One out of five homes sold in America in Q1 2024 was bought by Wall Street. Wall Street. According to Redfin, 19 % of homes were bought by investment firms. I mean, Jack, what kind of a housewarming gift are we going to give Goldman Sachs? I don't know.

9:51Like a dividend? Jamie, you did a great job with the sconces in the kitchen. These Wall Street investment firms didn't buy the house to live in them. They bought the house to become a corporate landlord or to flip the house for a higher price down the road. And those corporate landlords often rent out those houses at prices determined by an algorithm. And those prices, yeah, they're higher than the rest of the market. Want to talk about Atlanta, Jack? Oh, Atlanta, it's particularly chronic. 30 % of single-family homes there available for rent are owned by Wall Street investment firms. If you live in Atlanta, you know that this competition always leads to all cash offers, which raises rents, and that makes it even harder for actual families to buy and move in.

10:31Which leads to the news from yesterday. Eager to show action on the affordability issue, President Trump posted that he was taking action to outlaw this kind of corporate buying of homes. So big, positive news for all the dinks out there looking to potentially buy into a home. But really bad news for private equity firms, REITs, companies like Fundrise, or real estate companies that flip houses like Opendoor. Opendoor, because Opendoor is a corporation that buys and sells houses, and they fell 11 % yesterday. Opendoor's door got shut. Or Jack, how about Blackstone, which famously bought Stytown, the real estate development in New York City, back in 2015?

11:08Blackstone, the PE firm, spent$5 billion to buy those 11 ,000 apartments. But never again will a Wall Street home purchase like that happen, according to Trump's post yesterday. Which is why Blackstone stock fell 5 % yesterday. Now, important context that we need to sprinkle on. This isn't political context. This is just context we have all noticed over the last year. Trump saying something is not the same as that something actually happening. For example, President Trump said he would tariff foreign films last year, but nothing has happened to make that actually happen. There's lots of examples of tweets coming out about a policy, and then that policy getting zero action.

11:45But on this, President Trump said he's taking immediate steps, and will be calling on Congress to codify it. This landlord lockout, as we call it, it's populist red meat. But lobbyists are going to fight it tooth and nail. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies, whether they rent or they own? We need Operation Warp Speed, but for homes. Yeah, there are a whole bunch of reasons why housing is too expensive. Wall Street landlords is one of them, but it's actually not the biggest. The biggest driver of housing unaffordability is simply that there aren't enough homes in this country. Enough homes.

12:16In our opinion, housing is the number one source of economic anxiety and unhappiness in our country. It's a core reason for the vibe session. So why doesn't housing, this fundamental issue that literally everyone in this country has to deal with, It's a roof over your head. Why can't housing get the same attention from Washington as COVID did during the pandemic, or as AI is getting right now? Sure, a landlord lockout would be nice, but what we really need is a nationwide effort to build millions of more homes fast and affordably. That's what will actually make a dent and actually bring down the insanely high cost of living that pretty much everyone in this country is suffering from.

12:50What we also need is Operation Warp Speed, but this time for homes. Now, a quick word from our sponsor. Top hats, baseball hats, Von Dutch hats. We wear so many hats on this podcast. Honestly, we're not great at all of them. No, we've been avoiding hiring someone to wear those hats instead of us, especially the Von Dutch one, because hiring and training can take forever. Well, proud to say that we are hiring right now at T-Boy, and this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Because sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95 % more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. So besties spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes, less stress, less time, more results.

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14:54Spoiler, we're renaming Reddit. Besties, this stock pick, it was actually full disclosure, Jack's idea. Jack, you want to share the context here, sprinkle it on? Well, when I mentioned it to Jim Cramer in our interview with him, the Mad Money host on CNBC started hitting me. Yeah, he started hitting Jack. I didn't know if it was hitting me for like love, excitement, or anger. Hey, Trey, why don't we play the clip? For example, Jack and I - Give me some, give me some. All right, so Jack and I - Reddit. Oh my God, okay. Oh, Jesus. No, stop, stop, stop. No, this is bad. My dog does that. You stop, stop.

15:24No, Reddit is unbelievable great. Reddit's unbelievable great. Now I know Jack and I can tell you he has not showered since Jim Cramer hit that leg. That was a high point in our careers right there. I laminated my thigh actually to make sure that his germs remain on me. Now let's get into why this is our stock pit. Besties, Reddit was the rogue social media site. The only one back in the day without profile pics. Anonymous everything. You don't tell anyone your Reddit handled. Maybe your best friend from the street you grew up on, but not even your therapist. And for 20 years, that's what Reddit was.

15:59Basically, the comment section fight club. But in 2024, Reddit buttoned up a bit and prepared for an IPO. Got a little more corporate without alienating its power users. And since it's IPO, Reddit stock is up nearly 6x. And yet Reddit stock is still worth just 49 billion bucks. Jack, that's not much. $49 billion sounds like a really valuable company, but compare that to Meta. Meta is worth 30 times as much as Reddit. Sit down, stand up, and upvote that one again. That's one reason why we think Reddit is undervalued. True. The other reason we think Reddit stock is undervalued is that it's uniquely positioned to be an island of realness in the flood of artificial intelligence.

16:42Basically, as AI floods the zone, Reddit is Noah's Ark. Now, we interviewed the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, last year. We did. And one casual but profound thing that he said, we can't stop thinking about. He said it almost in passing, but here's the quote. Reddit is for real people to talk about stuff. For real people to talk about stuff. I mean, sounds simple, Jack, right? But actually, it's increasingly rare. You might have seen the CEO of Instagram's post last week. According to Adam Mosseri, your feed will soon be full of fake people. And according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, you'll stop reading human-ridden articles and start reading AI-ridden summaries instead.

17:23As we become overwhelmed by a world that's just artificial, AI slop, more and more people will seek out realness. And that is why this year Reddit is launching a brand new homepage with a new search bar. It thinks it can become the starting point of your internet journey because everywhere else is just artificial. For those who don't want AI results, they want human results. that is a growth narrative that we just can't stop thinking about. Now, there is business model risk here. Reddit is not a video platform, so they may never earn the advertising dollars that YouTube demands. And Reddit is full of anonymous users, so they can't target ads as well as Zuck can.

18:01So our stock pick could be wrong. It could be wrong. But we think Reddit's realness ironically makes it a hidden artificial intelligence winner. And Steve Huffman, if you're listening, let us know what you think in the comments. And Steve Huffman, if you're listening, thanks for giving me possibly the coolest thing about me. This is so cool. My Reddit handle is Jack. So Jack wants to take away from our buddies over at Reddit. Reddit should change its ticker symbol to real. R-E-A-L. Guess who else wants human results these days? AI. AI wants human results. Reddit is the number one site that OpenAI and Google need access to to keep their large language models up to date with what's actually happening in the world.

18:42In fact, Wall Street expects Reddit's licensing contract with Google to 4x in price this year. So add it all up, on one side, you got more people coming to Reddit, and that means more advertising revenue. And Jack, on the other side, you got more AI models training on Reddit, which means more licensing dollars. You didn't read it on Reddit yet, Ease. You heard it right here on The Best One Yet. Yes, you did. Reddit is our stock pick of 2026. Jack, could you whip up the takeaways for us for the new Friday? Poppy and Ollipop, arch-rival soda disruptors, launched Shirley Temples four days apart from each other.

19:18That is not R &D. That is S &D. Scroll to see what's trending and then develop it. For our second story, President Trump said he's going to end corporate home buying so families can buy the homes instead. It's the landlord lockout, but even more helpful, Operation Warp Speed, but for homes. And our third and final story is our second of our three stock picks for 2026, Reddit. Reddit. It's an island of realness in the flood of AI. We think Reddit should change their ticker symbol to R-E-A-L, real. But besties, this pod's not over yet. Here's what else you need to know today. First, we got ourselves a McLaw suit.

19:56McDonald's just got sued over the McRib sandwich. which apparently ain't no rib in that thing. Class action lawsuit. The pork in the McRib is heart, tripe, and scalded pig stomach. Wow, that's appetizing. Technical terms. Shocker, by the way. Those are all lower grade meats, which are then chafed into a rib-sized format. Reminds us of the Subway fake tuna fiasco. McRib is a McPhib. Yeah, the McFuna. McPhib. Allegedly. And second, wild week over at DoorDash. Get this, they're dealing with an epic AI trolling scam right now. With the help of AI, someone pretended to be a DoorDash employee and reveal online deep, dark secrets about the company.

20:35Apparently, this dude used AI to create a deepfake badge and then post it to make it look like he was a real employee saying DoorDash had desperation ratings on its drivers. But all of the secrets that he purportedly leaked, they were all fake. As was the badge, it's a deepfake situation happening randomly at DoorDash. And finally, we forgot to tell you the best stock market of 2025. You know what it was? We'll give you a pause. South Korea. South Korea's benchmark stock market index rose 75 % last year, which is the best performance of any global stock market on earth. Now that was driven by chipmaker stocks, which are based in Korea, but also interestingly by a range of consumer brands.

21:17Korean noodle stocks, Korean beauty stocks, K-pop demon hunter. Yes, talk to me, Jack. Korea is very in. It's probably season five of the White Lotus. Because season four is France. You know that, right? Spoiler! Now time for the best fact yet. This one ripped up by Frankie Bush over in Southern California. The college football playoff semifinals happen tonight, Thursday, and tomorrow, Friday. Yeah, we got Indiana, Ole Miss, Oregon, and Miami still in it. But only one of those four teams has two specific records. Get this, one of those four remaining teams has the most uniform combinations that the players get to wear.

21:55And that same team has the loudest stadium per capita. And that team is Oregon. Oregon, which is the Nike school, Phil Knight's their biggest donor, has 12 different helmets they wear, much less jerseys and pants. And Oregon also has the sixth loudest stadium of all the teams with only 54 ,000 seats. Loudest stadium per capita. That's a statistic I didn't know existed, but Oregon is best of the best. As a Nike shareholder, I can tell you, I hope that was a write-off, Jack. Yetis, you look fantastic for the new Friday. And if you haven't yet, remember to drop down and give us five stars, rate, and review the show.

22:36We love seeing them to kick off the year. Guys, we have 9.9 thousand reviews on Spotify. I think like a month ago, I asked you to get us to 10 ,000. We didn't get there. And now it's our New Year's resolution for this year. Oh, and by the way, if you're listening, Steve Huffman, I would love to get the Reddit handle, Nick. We should talk. Sure, somebody else might have it, but we could talk to some people who know some people. If you know, you know.

23:04And before we go, a happy birthday to Yeti Clay Green down in Sneedville, Tennessee, doing a life reset this year. Congrats and good luck, Clay. And happy birthday to Kara Fuller in Hobie Sound, Florida. Your bestie can't wait to reunite with you soon. And Tammy Conquerant in Alpine, Utah, is an OG snacker turned Yeti. Happy birthday, the legendary Tammy. And a big shout out to Luis Vasquez, who got a reservation at Sushi's on Mai to try that most expensive tuna fish, the Black Diamond. Luis, send us a DM or drop a comment. We can't wait to hear that tuna taste. And a big thank you to Brian Quinn for featuring T-Boy on his YouTube channel and for listening to the show every day.

23:42Brian, thanks for being a legendary Yeti. Fantastic to have you with us. This is Jack. I own stock of Reddit and Disney and Nick own stock of Nike.

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