Ranking the Top 10 Worst Rebrands of All Time | Ep. 026 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Welcome back to the Cracker Stand.

The Cracker Stand.

We've rebranded.

Wait a second.

And we are thinking that actually Cracker Barrel themselves has done an excellent rebrand today.

In the wake of the Cracker Barrel rebrand and the incredible amount of backlash that has been shown, is it woke?

I mean, is it woke?

Is it woke?

This is the question.

Genuinely, I'm asking has Cracker Barrel gone woke.

We are going to answer that question.

We're going to get a little overview of exactly what's going on with Cracker Barrel, but also we're going to ask what are the worst rebrands of all time?

This one has gotten a crazy amount amount of attention.

So we've each brought three of what we think are the absolute worst rebrands.

We're going to post them up on this board, and then we're going to see at the end, where do we feel Cracker Barrel's rebrands falls on the board?

In the all-time list.

In the all-time list.

Is Cracker Barrel better or worse than,

I don't know.

I'm curious what you guys brought.

And we don't know what each other brought.

Calling this show the Cracker Stand would be the worst.

I don't know if you need a ranking.

You'd hate to have a slur in the title.

The show would make it very tall.

Hold on.

I saw a tweet about this.

Somebody Somebody was saying it was rebranded because of the slur.

We're talking about soda crackers.

That's what it's referring to.

They didn't get rid of the word cracker, to be clear.

They didn't?

Oh, that's a point.

Oh, that's just a terrible rebrand, then.

That's what a cracker barrel is.

It's a barrel of soda crackers, just so people are aware, okay?

We bring up this presentation, Barry.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the old cracker barrel logo.

Got the

sweet old man by the barrel.

He could be the eponymous cracker of the time.

I don't know, but okay, there it is.

Old country store evokes nostalgia, okay?

A time gone past.

This is the new cracker barrel logo seen here.

So they didn't get rid of cracker, they just made it a little more modern, millennial, and bland.

Similar examples from recent history: Burberry went from this to this.

Cool-ass night to this

horse.

Burberry was a sick-ass night on a horse, okay?

It's awesome.

And now it's a

word Burberry in plain Ariel font.

Burger King went from the logo that I remember growing up with to this.

Not too much of a change, to be honest, but a little more simplified, a little more modern.

PayPal dropped their logo.

Everyone's dropping their logos.

They're going to

text

easy to, yeah.

And so while none of these caused much problem, something about Cracker Barrel really evoked a certain heartwarming nostalgia that got everyone up in arms and it became a political Rorschach test.

Conservatives blamed wokeness for the sleek redesign.

It also came with a change of the

storefront.

So this is what Cracker Barrel looks like in my mind.

The last time I've been.

I've never been.

I've never been to a Cracker Barrel.

I've never lived in a place with Cracker Barrel.

And if I'm on a road trip, which is my understanding where most people go to Cracker Barrel, what they do is, like a normal human being, I eat it in-and-out.

I don't go to Cracker Barrel.

And so this looks like an old timey like lodge in the Midwest.

Well, once you leave California, you know, you don't have the in-and-out option anymore.

That's true.

I've only done road trips on the West Coast.

Wait, is this actually tied to road tripping?

Is that a stereotype?

Cracker Barrel?

Yeah, I don't know.

I've been in a Cracker Barrel literally once.

You guys are both woke.

I didn't know that.

Cracker Barrel is awesome.

I mean, there's a lot of them in Arizona.

Listen, the average age is like 65 plus for a Cracker Ball resident, so I'm probably...

dating myself, but you go with your family and they have good old-timey breakfasts and food and they have this little ping game you can play while you're waiting.

So, their whole thing is like, we're an old-time lodge Americana, right?

That's the whole vibe.

That's the whole vibe.

And it's worth saying that this is the restaurant, but one-third of the restaurant is like a knick-knack store of like

greeting cards and rocking chairs.

And, you know, it's like, oh, it's, yeah, that's off-screen from here, but that's where you would buy old-timey candy and things like that.

And then you're going to get a lot of money.

Yeah.

Well, we can reclaim the old candy.

We can reclaim the old ways things used to be.

Okay, I like that.

This is what it looks like now after after the rebrand.

So they modernized it.

Oh, my God.

They made it at Apple Store.

What have they done?

What?

Okay.

This just looks like a Denny.

A Denny's.

What is the possible thinking behind removing the only thing that made it distinguished?

Okay, we'll get to that.

We'll get to that.

Because I, I mean, I am already sensing a vibe here that I agree with.

This rebrand doesn't seem very well thought out and certainly loses anything that made it distinct.

I totally agree.

Yeah, yeah.

But we'll get to that in a second.

So the immediate reaction was not that this is a stupid rebrand like the Burberry or PayPal one or like a bland one.

This is a woke rebrand.

Donald Trump Jr.

came out and said, What the fuck is wrong with Cracker Barrel?

Can I jump in here?

Stake and Shake the Wait, wait, I gotta stick and shake.

Okay, okay, all right, I guess there in a second.

So, this is Robbie Starbuck, conservative media influencer.

Cracker Barrel has gone fully woke, and now it's time to expose everything.

Went into a

feels just like a bad business decision.

I don't know if it's

it must be awesome to be this deep in the conservative grift do you know what i mean like you could take anything that comes out week two 45 minute you could do it and do a 45 minute presentation on on why woke is taking away the cracker barrel the opening part of this presentation you have unlimited ammunition it it it it seems awesome in a way i think it'd be i think our show would be better if we had a big american flag in the background and we just picked one thing a week to call with a woke i like it'd be that'd be more fun

it'd be easier

all right let's see Lifeless and modern.

In a comedic way, as one friend said to me, they removed the cracker and the barrel.

So what's left now?

And the answer is nothingness.

The same nothingness that the left wants you to stomach in every other facet of your life.

What?

And if you think this is just a logo change, you're wrong.

If I think this is just a logo change, I'm wrong.

He goes in 45 minutes about how it's a symptom of how the left.

I mean, you know, I think.

What isn't a symptom of woke?

Yeah, I don't, I don't, I'm not clear.

I don't know.

The goalposts have shifted.

You know, I hate to be that guy, but have we not shifted the goalposts a little bit on what woke is?

All right, so I haven't been.

The stores are not full of Confederate flags, right?

Am I missing something?

No, it's not like it's deeply rooted.

Because there was actually

every Cracker Barrel used to have a giant statue of Robert E.

Lee.

Yeah,

they tore it down.

And take Apple to Saddam.

I was looking this up because I just wasn't that familiar with Cracker Barrel, and everybody's talking about it like we're removing some historical piece.

They've been around since 1969.

This looks 50 years old.

This is not an American treasure.

I think you're, you know, they are losing the general store aesthetic.

So it means that the West is falling.

Yeah, I just.

This was holding up the West with Cracker Barrel.

You know, Newsmax, Firestorm Opposition.

huge backlash.

Wright pulse news.

I will not eat it Cracker Barrel again until the woke CEO resigns.

And then they made up a quote that the CEO did not say.

CEO, this is just in paint.

CEO says MAGA doesn't have to eat here.

I, for one, respect his/slash/her wishes.

That's fine.

I read a Bloomberg article about this, and one of the quotes is that the CEO is a woman, only further fan to the outrage.

Okay, if I could here, let me give you a moment to tell it to this.

Give me, because cracker share this.

It It feels so

it feels so manufactured.

Like this reaction feels so manufactured, right?

Yeah.

And

I want to believe that

is anyone actually upset about this?

You know what I mean?

Like if you're a podcaster talking about this, then I understand leaning into this and making it seem like a fake issue to rile it up.

And then it's, it's almost news itself that this image exists.

Like it, it, it's reactionary and funny, right?

But is there anybody at home who, like, before they saw the media pundits' reaction saw the logo change and was like, woke is taking away Cracker Barrel?

Like, is anyone in the audience, can you tell me a relative or friend that genuinely feels that way?

Because I have a hard time even imagining meeting that person in real life.

I'll say, as someone who's been to Cracker Barrel, my wife likes Cracker Barrel.

When we road trips, she would like to stop there.

I would say

she's not not calling this woke.

But I think this logo change and the store change is bad.

Yes.

I think a fan of the store who liked it would say this is bad.

I can accept that.

And so when you're in that phase, we're like, I'm angry and mad about it.

It's not hard to be like,

and the woke.

I see, I see, I see.

So you're just redirecting it.

You're kind of redirecting.

You're redirecting someone's actual anger.

It's real energy.

It's your general store being turned into Apple store.

Yeah.

And you're redirecting that anger.

And it's like, woke is making you feel it.

Yeah.

i i don't even think the rebrand is because of wokeness i think it's because of illegal immigrants oh yeah

let's get let's get deeper i think the deep state did this

and i'm anyway uh so this is the first time they've had big changes they've they've gone through a lot lately they added alcohol to their menu recently they've done menu changes in fact i went to a cracker barrel within the past year and I was like, this place has gone woke.

Because I looked at the menu.

It didn't have the things I used to get when I was in Arizona.

And so

they've also been,

let me get to the larger picture here.

Cracker Barrel is making this change, not out of the blue, not because of the woke, not because the deep state.

It's because it's dying.

People aren't going to the way they, people are like, I missed the old one, but they weren't going.

People, the thing is, the store was having declining sales year over year.

People weren't going.

And that's in a world that's getting more aged.

We have more old people and they're not going to Cracker Barrel.

Yeah, I did look at a sample size when we were prepping for the show, and it sounds like one in every three people are still going there.

So they cut back of house staff.

In fact, people are reporting over the past few years that Cracker Brawl has had like longer wait times, worse quality meals.

Like it's just getting to be shittier and people aren't going.

And it's like the reason is not the branding.

The reason is not the, well, the reason is not, it's just, it's not a well-liked store.

People remember it more fondly than they actually go.

They're also increasing prices higher than other restaurants.

So you're getting less for more.

I'm sorry, more.

Yeah, you're getting less for more.

That's that never hear that.

Anyway, so I want to bring up Steak Stake and Shake because I think that's my rationale here.

This company is just going on a downward spiral.

I will say this rebrand hasn't helped.

Whether it's the woke backlash or not, the stock price dropped like 100 million.

Like

they're doing poorly after this.

But Stake and Shake, one of their competitors, jumped in and said, you know, we're traditional America.

Sometimes people want to see things change to put their own personality on things.

At Cracker Barrel, the goal is just to delete the personality altogether.

Hence, the elimination of the old timer from the signage.

Heritage is what got Cracker Barrel this far.

And now the CEO wants to just scrape it all away.

At Stake and Shake, we take pride in our history, our families, and our American values.

All are welcome.

We will never market ourselves away from our past in a cheap effort to gain the approval of trend seekers, which sounds awesome until you realize that Stake and Shake's logo is this

and used to be this.

They did exactly what Cracker Barrel has said.

And Stake and Shake right now, as of today, making this tweet, is actually owned by private equity, Bilgari Holdings, who also owns 9.3% of Cracker Barrel and has been trying over and over to get control of the company.

That is awesome.

So, all they want to do is drive down the stock price so they can get a hostile takeover more easily.

It's crazy because it's so funny.

If you look at the comments on this stake and shake thing, it's like all you feel being like,

respect.

Time to find my nearest stake and shake.

This is how you win.

It's like you're just being played.

it's you're being played this guy does not care about someone someone on a twitter blue checked account named america memed with a

uh shirtless man but with the head of an eagle and an america flag

dude you couldn't write this 10 years ago

you could not write this satire and have people all

uh anyway Bilgari holding something more American than that, and they are trying to save Cracker Barrel by getting a hostile takeover of the shares

anyway that's the we're caught up all right that's there's actually not too much more to the story despite the 45 minutes that robbie starbuck can do on it it's a rebrand people don't really like it the company's in bad straits they'll probably roll it back they'll probably roll it back and maybe they'll get a new coke situation where everyone's like i love cracker a new cracker on that new cracker yeah okay you know how just five seconds ago we were wondering if they would actually roll it back they rolled it back minutes after we finished recording this podcast so we're including this now so you know that it's updated You just use this as like your way to re-enter the news cycle and then people actually are paying more.

If it works, man, they might do it.

But realistically, they're still going to suck.

I mean, like companies like Chili's are doing really well right now in the same space because people feel like they're getting more for less money.

Cracker Barrel don't feel like that.

People aren't shopping there.

So whatever they do, they have to fix the core problem of the restaurant not being.

appealing.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

You have anything to say?

You have anything to add?

No, I think I think this rebrand's pretty bad.

And I want to hear even worse rebrands or better rebrands.

I don't know.

Aiden, you want to start?

Yeah.

where does it fall?

Okay, so we've each selected three of the worst rebrands that we could think of and did a little digging

as to how it turned out and how we would rate them against this.

My first company, Johnson Johnson.

Okay.

For audio listeners, Johnson Johnson originally, the old one is like a

cursive font.

Now it's an Arial font, like all the others.

So I think realistically,

this is the least bad of the three that I picked.

And it's very simple, right?

Red cursive text to

red plain text.

That's all it is.

And this came because the company, Johnson ⁇ Johnson, they have had the same logo for 135 years.

And then in 2023, decided to make this change 135 years with that first logo.

Isn't that crazy?

It looks great.

It's not even like complex.

It doesn't have any of the issues that you might have.

Doug, Doug, and that's the thing, because I think as we dig into the reasoning here, Johnson Johnson is a much larger company than I think we think about a lot of the time.

It's a company that doesn't just sell like baby wash, you know, that's that's the first thing that comes to my mind.

Yeah, is those types of consumer products?

They have a huge like med tech side of their company and a huge pharma side of their company.

Okay, they made famously made the worst of the vaccines that you were allowed to take for a while.

The only one that got, you know, dude, I remember when everyone was vaccine shaming based on which one, yeah, you were a cooler person if you had Pfizer.

Yeah, if you were JJ, jay pleb

i love all the all the like stuff and like uh conspiracy stuff around vaccines and it's like they did make a bad one they took that one back

famously they they made a vaccine that was so bad that it had to get recalled and uh in an effort to merge these different sections of their company uh they changed like the branding of their pharma side of their company and uh they wanted to unify everything and then when they did that they switched to this logo and I think something funny about these large companies is they spend so much money on these rebrands and like reorganizing it.

And in a blog post from the company, they explained a few things behind this.

So I wanted to read just a couple quotes from that blog post as to why Johnson and Johnson change their logo.

The logo.

The new logo is modernized for this next chapter.

Each letter is drawn in one penstroke, creating a contrast that delivers both a sense of unexpectedness and humanity.

The company will embrace both the long and short form form versions of the logo, expanding and building more equity around a short form J and J to show up in more personal, contemporary ways, especially in digital interfaces.

So personable.

And then my favorite, my favorite ampersand.

The new ampersand captures a caring human nature.

It now presents itself as more globally recognizable symbol and represents the openness of the brand as well as the connections

that bring the company's purpose to life.

Dude, what a fucking job.

I think, look, can we just be real?

This is why they changed it.

People can't read fucking cursive anymore.

That's why they changed it.

We have reached an era of society where most people are uncomfortable with cursive writing and they decided to change the logo.

I think it's a lot of language to say that.

And I think for people, you know, naturally who

ampersand?

The openness.

Not being very open.

It just feels like it doesn't have a lot of openness.

Am I crazy?

They made it bigger.

Can you imagine getting paid like $30 million to type in Times New Roman Johnson ⁇ Johnson and print it out?

That is not an exaggeration.

These companies get paid this much.

Millions for these reasons.

They would make each one in one pencil.

They wouldn't dare type it out.

I honestly, I think this is one of the least bad because I think while there was some pushback, I don't think that anyone is like that deep of a fan of Johnson and Johnson to like care, right?

And I think if you were just glancing at stuff in the supermarket, you might not even notice in your peripheral that they changed, I hadn't noticed.

Exactly.

And then I think the company and its profits, like they know, did anything about the business change?

No, the profits have continued to go up since this.

And I think so much of their business is like, you're not going to like their pharmaceutical factories and like looking at the logo that they print on them.

You have a strong brand attached to it.

So I think as far as bad rebrands go, I think this is one of the least bad offenders.

And I will put this in,

I mean, okay, higher up is worse.

Higher up is is the worst.

This would be the worst rebrand.

So I think we can safely put this one in the D tier.

And I think if you can't read.

I might say C.

The only reason is because of the amount of history.

Like, how many exactly?

140 years.

And again, Cracker Barrel is a 50-year-old company that is capitalizing off of nostalgia.

At no point was like part of American history.

Woke took away cursive.

I mean, can you imagine if Coca-Cola changed their iconic script font to Coca-Cola type?

Yeah.

I would say C.

How about C is L.

100.

What'd you tell me?

100 years.

Like, I was on your side until 100 years.

Because a brand, yeah, I don't know.

Johnson and Johnson.

Johnson and Johnson.

Shady rebrand.

All right.

I have a weird one.

Imagine it's the 1940s.

Okay.

You come up with a candy.

World War II.

World War II.

You come up with a candy that has a chemical in it that, as far as I can tell, is not safe for consumption anymore, but it kind of suppresses your appetite.

Okay.

And it helps you to lose weight because you have less appetite.

What would you name your company?

Novo, North.

No, no, because it helps you to lose weight.

Sort of like helps you lose weight, like AIDS or assists you with losing weight.

Yeah,

oh,

I know what this is.

You would call it AIDS

A-Y-D-S because it aids you with your weight loss journey.

And in the 1940s, this is a really good idea.

And so then the years go by, and you just keep your company keeps growing.

It's going really well.

It was very low, right?

It's funny because in the 1940s, it's like you just have no idea the SEO destruction that's coming.

you're on the Titanic as the iceberg of the 80s is coming.

And then there's this weird thing gay guys keep getting until eventually there's a massive celebrity who gets AIDS.

And suddenly there's like a hundred thousand AIDS cases in the U.S.

in the 1980s.

It becomes a massive, massive deal, right?

And there's a lot of, I would say, even paranoia around AIDS.

So as you can imagine, suddenly people became uncomfortable with consuming something called AIDS during the midst and height of the fear of the AIDS pandemic.

And so sales start falling dramatically.

This starts hurting the company.

Clearly, a rebrand is needed.

And what they do is they swap to diet AIDS.

I looked at the old newspapers from 1988.

That can't be true.

The AIDS package.

No, I looked at the newspapers.

I read, there's copies of them.

AIDS packages will soon have the word diet stamped in front of AIDS.

That's what they did.

They didn't change.

They didn't stamped on.

Well, no, no, no, but like in the things, it doesn't have a picture here because it was brief.

Spoiler alert, AIDS went out of business very quickly after this.

They just started putting diets.

So there were all these people who were like investors who were telling AIDS to change their name.

They're like, dude, just change your name.

And they were like, we have too much history to change our names.

We're not doing it.

And they just called it diet AIDS, which sounds like a situation.

In no defense, I'm killing AIDS.

How hard that situation is.

It's like if...

Fucking a disease called Sour Patch Kids started killing somebody.

Like, they can't plan for that.

You know what a very topical example is?

Corona.

Corona the beer.

No, I'm serious.

Corona the beer was like really struggling at the beginning of the pandemic until eventually they got everybody to start calling it COVID.

So that was a shit.

Dude, imagine big Corona is the push as to why

COVID-19, COVID-19.

So look, they were in a shit position, but I think the obvious thing is that you changed your name from the debilitating disease that is killing people.

You don't put diet in front of you.

It's like a brand equity.

It's like you're just starting.

You're just a new company now.

Nobody knows about it.

Yeah, Yeah, but you could still be like now knowing it.

I just put in diet, diet AIDS.

No, I agree.

And by the way, I checked.

Diet Coke was out at this time.

So people already knew that Diet Blank is like a soda.

Yeah, it's like I'm just picturing the world where you have like you're launching your new soda company in the 90s, and you're like, yeah, what if we called it SARS?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's Diet SARS.

Diet Cherry SARS.

It's good.

What do you guys think about this one?

I think of all all the, look, they were screwed either way, external circumstances.

I think they needed to change their name entirely.

Maybe start it with AIDS and like...

A for AIDS.

I can put in B or A.

You can do a whole marketing campaign.

I'm imagining like, you know, taking out a page in a newspaper and it's like, it's with a Y.

That'd be kind of funny.

Yeah.

So I should mention, because of AIDS, the disease, this did briefly boost sales and then promptly crashed.

There was like a brief period where people are like, oh, cool, AIDS.

Like, I don't know that.

Is it the consciousness?

Oh, because of that reason.

I would give it an A or a B, Aiden, where you feel.

Oh, that has to go an A.

Because

you're looking the problem dead in the face and saying, no, we will continue all the time.

This is the same diet.

Yeah.

This diet will do it.

Okay.

I don't know my order.

I'm just going to pick a random vote.

Oh, classic.

Okay.

This one is possibly.

Ah, should I save it?

No.

Yeah.

This one one is possibly monetarily one of the worst rebrands of all time.

Most companies do a rebrand when times are tough.

This is a company that did a rebrand when times were good

and got no result for it.

This is Tropicana orange juice.

Yeah, you're right.

In 2009, this is the Great Recession, but orange juice sales were good.

They got rid of the iconic orange with a straw out of it and put a glass of orange juice on the front.

Now, this rebrand is not just the logo, which was, I guess, guess, worse, more bland, more basic.

Oh, yeah, the actual Tropicana tape.

But they also changed the package design.

And this is a big problem because people reported

in the grocery store aisle, they thought this was either a fake knockoff or cheap or a different product.

They were like, why is it no longer pure premium and now 100% orange?

Am I getting something worse?

So sales dropped 20%

literally overnight.

Like within a month of this rebrand, people stopped picking up Tropicana at the stores.

They spent, I found it out, $35 million on the rebrand.

Then they spent another $30 million on advertisements for the rebrand.

Then they lost $50 million in sales immediately.

And then they backtracked.

So, Perry, if you could pull up a slide or you can pull up my screen, actually.

This is what it looked like in the store.

So you could tell not only was it

also every variant became blandified.

You couldn't tell which one you were buying.

Is it all the same carton?

Yeah.

Basically, all the same carton.

For audio listeners, it's like the original one is like, it's an orange with a straw in it.

The Tropicana Texas very fun.

And then there's a giant block of color on the carton to indicate what variation it is.

And the new one is all the same with a tiny thin strip of color at the top.

I think the best example is like, imagine, imagine first day of school in like fourth grade, and you open a fresh new pack of markers you've just gotten.

It's like a 24-pack.

You open it up.

All of the tops are black.

and there's like a tiny red thing that says red

and this is what i'm looking at basically

anyway it was so not distinct customers hated it so vehemently they did roll it back um and it ended up being okay for choppic can they're not a dead company but uh they lost in total maybe like a hundred million super quickly on this rebrand and when they recently did a new rebrand so this is 2009 they recently did a new one 2003 they kept the memory of this pain very sharply in there this is their new rebrand they basically changed you know they're like, okay, we're keeping the orange, we're keeping the straw, we're adding more color, we're adding, so the new rebrand's great.

I think this is awesome, but I, I am, I'm more bringing out that this, this one was one of the worst ones I could find of all time.

I, that's S for me.

This is truly abysmal.

This is, yeah, and the revenue hit as well.

It's like, it's not, yeah, dude, this is bad.

I'm just shocked someone thought this would work or look.

Like, if you just look at this right here, just your eye tells you that, I don't know, I'm just shocked that they paid so much to pay $35 million for this bad.

You've touched some rage in my soul, i realize because i remember experiencing this as a child and it traumatized me uh that i i drank like tropicana orange juice with my breakfast every morning and in 2009 was like i think when i would still go to the grocery store with my mom and i uh i remember being

so mad when i found the new rebranded juice because i couldn't crack a grail guy because i this is another episode where you are the guy

I know.

And then I looked over at my mom and I said, woke's taking it away from me.

You said the West is falling.

The West is falling.

11-year-old me.

He called it no nine, actually.

And I, no, but I do remember being unable to find the orange juice because of the rebrand, like specifically.

And

it's funny that it's actually manifest, like that childlike frustration with being unable to find my orange juice at the grocery store manifested into something actually right off.

I didn't didn't know you had a personal memory on it we should have anyway but so uh one thing i want to say one good rebrand they did other than this one is they rebranded pulp to juicy bits do you see this here what extra pulpy with juicy juicy

i don't like that yeah with a smooth orange with no bits with no bits

I always thought pulp was a gross word, and now I like it.

I want my juicy bits.

I like pulp, but I don't like saying it.

That's like one one of those Australian

noun rebrands they'll do where Australians, like, it'll just be called breckie on the menu.

And it's like, we can't use normal words.

We can, it's, it's okay to use, it's okay to say pulp.

Yeah.

Or when you're like in Applebee's and you have to order like a nine-part name, like the fun fries with, with the,

you know, whatever.

I just, I want the fries.

Chip some dip, please.

All right.

We got it.

Yeah.

Okay.

So number two.

we have Gap.

Oh, I forgot about this one.

Oh, yeah, that one was terrible.

Gap in 2010.

So, this is also a famously bad rebrand that a lot of people might not even remember because they pulled it back within a week.

Oh, my God.

This was so bad.

Can you describe it visually to people?

Yeah, so for people listening, basically, they take the iconic gap logo you know, the blue square with the small white text, like thin text in the middle, and they basically just turned it into black text that says gap with a small blue gradient square off to the side.

Millions of dollars have been spent paying consultants to turn something into plain black Arial fonts.

All of these are the same.

Yeah, this is it.

This is like I made, I can make this in Google Docs.

Yeah, like

they probably did five minutes before it was due.

They were partying for four weeks.

Like, oh,

we got that gap presentation tomorrow.

We're all being on the table.

Dude,

what if we just did it in WordArt?

So the thing with this is starting in 2008, after the financial crisis had come into play, Gap is seeing a large decline in sales.

And in 2010, they think, you know, let's try to freshen things up by just changing the logo.

But one of the big problems with this rebrand at the time is that they changed literally nothing else.

This logo change came with no announcement, no explanation as to why they did it, no reason as to why this was specifically the logo.

Nothing changed inside the stores.

There was literally nothing besides them changing the logo.

And estimates range in how much this cost them.

The scary number you will see online is they spent $100 million on this rebrand.

However, if you look a little closer to that, that seems to be an overestimate.

That was the expected spend with all the

reprinting and things that they were going to have to do

falling through the execution of the logo.

But it's estimated to be tens of millions that they spent on the rebrand up until that point, to which after a week, they just walked it back and went back to the old logo.

They also saw a 10% dip in their stock price when this happened.

And

I think it was,

there was a comment in the former director of marketing at Netflix when he saw this, or when he was evaluating it, said, rather than make a strategic shift followed by a signal to consumers, they just signaled first, which only served to consume concern, confuse consumers more.

People saw the same website, the same stores with the same merchandise, with the old,

a lot of the merchandise with the old logo still.

But all of that painted under this new logo.

It just didn't make any sense.

And I think this is a good example of, you know, if it's not broke like don't don't fix it i think there's a there's maybe a stronger argument of like oh if sales were declining the company wasn't in a good spot like maybe you do need to revisit something but to just do this with no s no as you said like if it is broke and you want to fix it so you can change the brand to signify that you have to change other things to tell the consumer this is different now check us out but if they go and see the same stuff with a new logo it's just you just lost it did you also throw a temper tantrum when you went in gap i don't even this is only a week long so i don't even remember it's funny because even if you were a really big fan of the brand, like it's like if you're pre, if you were like an adult or like a kid not on social media and or like not checking gas, you wouldn't even notice.

You might not even have known this happened because they revoked it so quickly.

It would have been funny, though, if we had a slum dog millionaire thing where every one of these you have a different memory from your childhood.

This is how this dramatically affected me.

It's like, finally, I have an outlet for this.

As we start describing it, he starts, his eyes widen, like, I forgot.

No, no, the guy in Ratatiwe.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I would personally put this one.

I think because they walked it back and they didn't have to live with the consequences for very long, I would put it in like B.

B feels soft.

B sounds fine.

Yeah, this is just middle of the line, terrible.

Yeah.

Look, my next one is simple.

If you're an electronic store, you got to feel like you're modern and you're hip and they are the place to go for people wanting the future, which is why when Radio Shack, the electronics company, started to really struggle, right?

Like kind of in the early days, they were a little more like do-it-yourself kind of eye, but they were late to like the digital media.

They were late to make a website.

They didn't make a website until 1999, which is kind of crazy for a company that is trying to sell electronics and be modern.

So in 2009,

they launched a campaign where their new nickname is The Shack.

They dropped the radio and they just call themselves the Shack.

And I would argue that this actually does not help modernize things.

And it might sound like it's like something in Jerry's backyard that you would try to avoid and not an electronic store that you should go to.

I'm going to go get my new TV at the shack.

Sounds like you're stealing it or something.

Yeah, it sounds like you're going to rob them or that you're buying, it's like fenced goods.

It's like, yeah, you're winking when you say it, like, I'm going to the shack.

And for, you know, spoiler of people who don't know, Radio Shack did go out of business about six years after.

Really?

Yeah.

Didn't end up with the route.

The shack did not land.

This also, they didn't change anything in the store.

It was just like, just call it, it was just like, call us the shack now.

I like that it still says it's radio shack the shack.

It was a tagline, our friends call us the shack.

You have bad friends.

That's not a good campaign.

That's not a good rebrand.

This isn't the worst, but I wouldn't say this is C or D.

Like, it's bad.

Do you know when you walk into a Best Buy and there's that second store at the back of the Best Buy that like sells fancier higher-end products and it's branded as its own thing?

That's what this reminds me of.

Like,

because it still just says Radio Shack in the corner with the same old logo,

it's like they're trying to do an offshoot of their own.

It's like the opposite of that.

It's a place in the back of the Radio Shack where it's even worse, more off-brand.

This is like the Air Canada

Shack.

It makes their main store nicer by comparison.

Or like Horizon Airlines of Radio Shack.

Thank God.

Don't go to a Shack.

We'll just go to Radio Shack.

What do you guys feel?

C?

I feel like they were doomed either way.

This is probably a C or a D.

Like, no matter what they do.

i can drop this a d we don't have a d yet i think this is substantially uh not as bad as some of these other ones are friends close to shack were they still the shack when they did you know right at the very end of their life when they were in their like um bed bath and beyond end of life era they did a meme stock pivot for a bit and started doing crypto i remember that radio shacks someone bought the whole company for pennies on the dollar and then just used the logo to try and do a crypto company a gme right now they're they're owned by an el salvadorian company And I don't know more details than that.

In retrospect, I should have read it.

They're not funny enough to call them the shack.

That's actually.

They actually rebranded.

They're doing those like crazy prisons down there now.

Dude, for shape, as an El Salvador.

We're going to talk later in this episode about how Kilmer was sent to the Shaq.

It's an evil company, I'm telling you.

That's crazy.

They've gone dark.

This is one of my favorite brands of all time.

I think it's one of the the funniest branding stories.

It's been a saga.

It's a roller coaster.

Every few years, you get a new little update to it.

The HBO Max rebranding saga

is just juicy.

It's just fun to me.

They were HBO in the 90s, a well-respected

home box office.

You can get movies on TV and get a thing.

Then they became HBO Go with the advent of digital.

Then they became HBO Max.

No, you skipped one.

I skipped one.

HBO now HBO now that's right yeah sorry I had a picture of all four and then HBO now and then HBO Max and then David Zazlav buys the company or commerges it with discovery they said the HBO brand is too high quality because we're gonna put dr pimple popper on here and home renovation rewans and fill that up so we can't have hbo and there has to be a separate thing so now it's just max they lost a huge chunk of subscribers overnight people thought they were being charged for the wrong thing or they didn't know what they

people wondered where their hbo was they only wanted to watch game of thrones and hbo shows they didn't know what was going on and then very recently this year flip it over they they brought it back it's now hbo max again as of like a month and a half ago do you know like what how are they doing now like did in the in the long run the last couple years has this really hurt them and their business well it's tough to say uh it i would say all streamers other than netflix are losing money that includes disney plus which has maintained a brand that includes paramount that includes all of them are losing money.

So it's hard to say whether this would drastically have changed one way or another, but it didn't help.

The constant rebranding surely can't help by any principle of marketing.

It just doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense how you could have the wire on your platform and be losing money.

It just doesn't.

How much you pay.

It's kind of like The Office was to Netflix, you know, like driving.

I think they could rebrand to HBO The Wire and they just sell it to you.

That's a huge market.

That's the secret is if they only had the wire, I would still be suggesting.

It's only the first season that you have to pay for HBO the wire max to get all four.

So I don't know.

I wouldn't put it in the all-time top tiers because they did go back from it.

And,

you know, the product has been relatively good for people that like it.

I don't think it's changed massively the amount of people, but it's a terrible

saga as well.

It's bad.

It's real bad.

Well, are we grading the fact that they, because they've arrived back at HBO,

but it it wasn't a week like the gap okay this is this is like years that this has been confusing people i have been intermittently confused by this four years i think this is like really caused harm to how they just yet maybe you're right because if they had just moved faster and been smart i feel like they could have just been hbo the entire time yeah so maybe like i'm down to go a okay i me too i also want to think just how insane it is to be like the multi-billionaire owner that comes into this brand new merch company You have one of the greatest media properties of all time, and your first big decision is like, what if we got rid of it?

Let's go max.

What the fuck does max me?

Who cares about max?

There's a real theme of people being paid ungodly amounts of money.

There's a whole cool ecosystem in our country where extremely rich people paying each other to do bad things.

To do the same thing and then undo it over like you have to get paid that much to do nothing in net over four years is crazy.

Somebody typed out that Johnson ⁇ Johnson logo.

That's crazy.

You have to have balls to be the

advertising intern who's like, this is a 103-year-old brand.

It's time for me to change.

I can fix it.

Aiden, what are you going to get?

Aiden, wait, oh, wow.

I'm already on to my last one.

All right.

This is

Jaguar.

Oh, the recent one.

I actually think this one is incredibly interesting because I think people might

be missing the forest for the trees on this.

Okay, before you say the actual situation, I want to say, you know, I make fun of the joke all the time.

This is a brand where I might say they've gone too woke.

This is something where it's like, in my heart of hearts, I'm like,

does this make sense?

Is this too woke?

Is this what Jaguar is going to do?

You're the guy.

I'm the guy.

You're the guy.

I mean, Robbie Starberry's comments going, talk more about Jaguar.

Drift away.

Drift away.

Okay.

Tell me the truth.

Okay.

Here's, let's take just the surface level reaction to this, right?

I believe what they did was they announced the rebrand.

Wasn't it at the Super Bowl?

Wasn't this a Super Bowl ad when they initially showed?

Last year, right?

This is like nine months ago.

Perry, if you pull this up, we're going to have this on the background.

Like,

it is extremely

bizarre.

It is incredibly bizarre.

It is a crazy ad for a car company.

You have no idea that it's going to be Jaguar until the very end.

You don't see, I believe, a single car in this ad

until the very end.

It's like a Wes Anderson film.

Yeah.

Like, everybody is dressed like a Tropicana curtain.

Everybody's

dressed how Tropicana should have sounded.

I'm sorry, there was no car.

That's just a rock.

No car.

This is at the Super Bowl.

Yeah, so no, no car in the ad the entire time.

And,

you know, this ad received a lot of controversy when it came out because people are like, this doesn't make any fucking sense.

Like,

there's no car.

This is,

you're not showing us anything uh except this new logo and then also in so as of april of 2025 there was a 98 drop in sales in europe of jaguars wow they went from selling 19 uh sorry 1960 uh units in april 24 to 49 in april of 25.

now that initially looks really bad, right?

It does.

But the reason that that's the case is because they stopped making cars after this rebrand.

They don't they no longer produce anymore, they actually didn't have many cars to sell periods.

There's no car in the ad because they don't make they couldn't afford one.

What would have been cool, though, is if they said what they do now,

you know, like if they

which you don't get from this ad, but the whole point of this campaign and this repositioning is Jaiwar has been going downhill in terms of their sales for a long, long time.

This is not a powerful brand that is, you know, heavily recognized or has the oomph that it used to decades ago.

And they're realizing that they need to seriously reposition themselves.

The parent company of Jaguar is a company called Tata of India.

And the overall, that overall owner also happens to own Land Rover, and their huge money maker is the Range Rover.

And Jaguar's vehicles and the SUV that Jaguar tried to produce and like enter into the popular SUV market was not performing well.

And it wasn't making the company any money.

So they're like, you guys need to restrategize.

So the plan right now with this rebrand is they're pivoting away from their old existing customer base.

They're going in a completely new direction where they go for more expensive, higher end, all-electric luxury vehicles.

And they don't have an actual model officially announced right now.

They have a placeholder, like concept model that they've shown off, but I think they're not releasing or showing the new actual car they're going to sell until later this year.

And while a lot of people point to this huge dip in sales as an indication of this brand falling off, a lot of the feedback and people shitting on this are people realistically not in the market to buy a Jaguar to begin with, especially this newly positioned Jaguar that's going to be presumably even more expensive, right?

You only need to appeal to a pretty niche market to make your new luxury car very successful.

And they're like, we can't continue to run it down this old route.

We're reinventing the brand entirely.

So the other thing that the benefit here and the gamble that has yet to be seen if it pays off is when they start selling the new vehicle, all of this attention that has been driven to the brand because of this rebrand and because of this new position is much, is bringing the brand into a conversation that it hasn't been a part of in a really long time.

Nobody was talking about Jaguar for years before this.

But now people talk talk about this brand because of how out there and ridiculous this is.

And people are kind of excited to see, well, what is the actual car you're going to release with all this hubbub?

And the payoff of this is if this new angle of the company, which is completely reinventing the direction of the company,

will actually pay off.

So I want to treat this.

a bit better than I think most would.

I think I'd be willing to put this in.

I would be willing to put this in C because there's no version of the old company that was going to continue succeeding in my mind.

And I think they haven't, and the product, and the product that they're creating under this rebrand hasn't actually released yet.

So I think to fully judge it as a failure is wrong.

Okay.

So if our show starts failing and we put up an ad that says delete ordinary and it's just us shoveling piles of feces around and we say we don't release what the show is.

We're just shoveling feces.

And the argument is: well, the show was dying anyways.

Yeah.

I'm going to be completely real with you.

I think that would totally work.

If we took

that ad, if we released that ad, took the show off air for six months, and then came out with a new show where the first episode of us is like shoveling and flinging shit around, that would get so many views.

Okay, you're right.

C tier, D tier.

This is good.

It's good.

I've actually sold it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, I'm solving.

You convinced me.

D tier.

Next to Johnson and Johnson.

All right, I got one that maybe guys I'm gonna think about.

Rebrands, they're all about appealing to modern sensitivity.

You know what's been trending downward recently?

Tell me, Doug.

War.

War has been trending downward.

That's why when the U.S.

government rebranded from Department of War to Department of Defense, it was an extremely valuable rebrand rebrand because now people don't think that we're an aggressor and it's cool because you can say things like oh we went on the defense in vietnam it used to be called the department of war up until 1949 the u.s government called it the department of war after world war ii we changed to the department of defense which is ironic because that's when we stopped being defensive as a country and started doing all sorts of offense yeah we didn't do we literally go that's literally went the opposite at that point that's when we stopped doing this It's like been in my head.

I'm sending you a link.

Perry, can you please pull that?

This is an insane poll.

This is from 30 minutes ago.

As of 30 minutes ago, Trump wants to rename the Department of Defense back to the Department of War.

Damn.

Wow.

How topical.

That's crazy.

So should we bring it back?

Here's my pitch.

We do time things really well with Trump doing weird things that relate to what we're talking about.

I would argue that the name should reflect what you do, which is war.

And as much as I'm personally, I'm going to a villain share, I'm not a big fan of war, but I don't think that calling it defense and then doing war is actually a very good thing.

I don't think if Tropicana renamed themselves to Jaguar Cars because selling orange juice, that that's a good rebrand.

What if, what if, imagine this, 1949,

they create the Department of Defense, but we also create the Department of Attack.

How do you feel about that?

Those guys are assholes on the Department of Attack.

They're so aggressive.

They hate the DOA.

Wait, you know what?

I don't actually think the perception on war has changed very much.

I would say this is not a successful rebrand.

I would go to B or A.

Wait, okay, so I was going to push back on this because in a way, I think subconsciously, they were probably effective in what they wanted to accomplish, right?

It's like Department of Defense is...

much more palatable.

I think it sends a different message when you hear the name.

And the intention behind the rebrand was probably successful.

Like, I just think about the way I view the DOD passively versus the way that I would think about a department of war.

Yeah, I guess if it has offense, yeah, a department of war in the name, it's a little more like, oh man, you know, or somebody saying, like, oh, I'm going to work for the DOD or we have a contract with the DOD.

It's like, I think there's two ways to evaluate this, right?

It's like, if you're evaluating the rebrand's success on honesty, I would agree with you.

I'd put this in like SRA.

But if you were evaluating this rebrand on success of its effectiveness of its intended purpose.

No, no, you've convinced me.

I think it was effective.

Yeah.

I would actually maybe put this in D.

I think this may be a really smart rebrand.

Yeah, I think it's a smart rebrand.

I hope we don't go back to the Department of War just sounds so it sounds like I have a question.

I have a question.

Why did we put the Shaq in D again?

Because they were dead anyway.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, okay, okay.

It didn't fail.

It's funny to see the Shaq in the Department of Defense.

Also, another reason this should be in D is because, like, from a business perspective, the DOD makes more money than ever before.

Yeah, and spends more money than ever before.

Okay, so

one thing we wanted to touch on at the end of this segment was quickly talk about I got one more.

I got my last rule.

This is the one I use the most every day.

And I, two years on, still haven't started calling it X.

Twitter to X.

This rebrand, I'm going to pull up a slide here, Perry.

Two years on.

It's truly one of the worst.

Yeah.

55% of Americans still call it Twitter.

I still call it Twitter.

When I go to this website, I type in twitter.com and it redirects me to that.

I haven't stopped.

I haven't changed one iota.

When he did this big rerun and rebought the company, I'm not talking about like the performance of the company so much, but just

he said it was going to be an everything app.

It was going to be way different than it was before.

Oh, I know about the everything.

And two years later, it's the same app.

I mean, it is, you post messages and retweets.

And I'm not using it for banking.

It's got everything.

It's got calls.

It's got Grok.

It's got, you can send your money on it.

You can hire people on it.

It's the everything.

You can get Grok to make you any image.

Everything.

You can make an image of your band.

Twitter before couldn't make Mario smoking weed.

After, could.

And that's why there's the chat logo had to die.

People still call them tweets, by the way.

Now it's just posts.

So I find the rebrand to be pretty ugly.

And I want to remind people of this image that came out right after the rebrand that I still think rings true, which is this.

This is a guy showing his browser.

These are all porn except one.

That one's Twitter.

And I think that really sums up just how seedy this website is.

The weird Black X,

the logo on the app has like scratches on it.

It looks like it's a

drug selling.

It's kind of fair, right?

Because

it's mostly porn now.

It's so much of it.

It's porn.

Elon every day is retweeting like scandalous anime girls made.

He really has gone into that lately.

Wait, is he?

Yeah, i i think this is probably not coincidence that he landed on x

he appears to be like a mega gooner like a super hardcore gooner my breaking point was when i opened a post that was about the new spider-man video game on like ps5 and the top reply was someone getting fucked like just just bear pack and i was like i can't even open this spider-man post anymore like

yeah i used to do this segment called best tweets on stream where people would submit funny ones and and we'd react to them.

And I used to scroll down to read the comments.

I can't do it.

It's too risky.

Yeah.

I can only look at the post and I can't scroll down anymore, which is kind of crazy.

It's kind of fucking crazy.

It's become such a minefield.

Yeah, I just think, you know, I wouldn't say Twitter is a well-run, great company.

I think, yeah, I have many bad things to say about it.

But before Elon made it woke.

I have a question.

I'm too woke.

Because I think there's a layer.

There is a layer of pushback here because Elon is the person who decided to do it.

So just come visit the world world where it's not Elon who took over Twitter and it's just the old company deciding to change the name to this.

Do you think we're still in the same situation?

I would like to believe I'm viewing this without Elon hate eyes.

And I think, yeah, part of it's the porn, but I think actually less than that is it sounds too much like a placeholder.

Like that's the, that's why I think people still aren't calling it X.

They're calling it Twitter because X sounds like a place.

I mean, that's literally what you use as a placeholder in math or anything else.

If he called it, I don't know, Elon's funhouse or something, like that's at least a different thing, but X doesn't feel like a different thing.

It feels like, oh, we're using shorthand.

Did you see that post on EFH?

On what?

Elon's funhouse.

Like that would have stuck way more than X.

Nobody calls it X.

That's what I think so.

Does the word tweet?

Like, did you see that tweet?

Make sense to me.

I know exactly what website you're talking about on platform and what you mean.

And X doesn't have any of that.

It doesn't have one letter.

And calling it post could be anywhere.

I think that was, this is what I thought about too.

It's like, I think even if Elon had nothing to do with it, I don't think I would have changed my language around the site because tweet, the word tweet specifically more than Twitter

became so

tweet

became like the phrase Googling something.

It's just the way you say what that type of post is.

It's like, it is the word for a post that is dispersed out to the masses.

It's insanely powerful, brand.

I mean, like, it's like when X-Rox became synonymous with copying something.

You know, it's like, that is such a big deal.

Your brand is so locked in.

And to throw it away so you could have this weird fucking S, I just, I think it's a terrible branding choice.

I want to put in S, but I could also be down for A.

I don't know what you guys say.

I would say S.

This is one of the worst rebrands to me.

I think setting that aside from Elon, for me personally, it's just strictly the value of the re, it just is awful.

I think I agree with your reasoning.

It's like the placeholderiness plays such a big part in it.

It feels useless.

There was no reason.

And also you could point to all the metric failures of the company after after this change.

So let me villain share myself.

I'm going to give one counterpoint.

So this company was worth $44 billion when Elon bought it under Twitter.

He made all these changes.

He fired a lot of people.

He lost a lot of advertisers.

The CEO quit, yada, yada, yada.

By all metrics that they could measure because it's a private company, so it's hard to tell.

It was down 70 to 80% in value.

They lost billions of dollars.

But then he sold it to himself for 44 billion.

So he lost no money.

So by all metrics, X is worth exactly the same as Twitter.

God's sake, come on.

This rebrand is actually perfect and there's no flaws.

I'm pretty good in D.

I'll go, I want to go S.

I would go S.

I think it is one of the worst.

All right, well, before we move on to our good ones, we also wrote a couple just so we're not, you know, just ragging on things all the time.

We now come back to Cracker Barrel.

We've gotten some history.

This has actually been really informative.

I've enjoyed this.

These were good.

I don't know how you guys feel.

I do not think this is one of the worst rebrands of all time, but it's kind of up there.

I do not think it's as bad as Tropican or X, but I think it's on the same as AIDS and HBO Max.

And here's my argument: I think HBO Max to Max, that's changing the branding in a way that's confusing, but the product saved the same.

With Cracker Barrel, what they are doing is changing the style, and that's the only appeal of their company in the first place.

So I think they're dropping the fundamental product.

I'd say Cracker Barrel is AIDS.

Up in A tier.

Congratulations, Cracker Barrel.

You are not the worst rebrand of all time.

But you are slightly less woke than X.com.

But I, okay, one caveat.

If one week from now they roll it back, let's put it with Gab because he did the same thing.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, if they roll it back.

I feel like they're going to roll it back, but we'll see.

We'll see.

The problem is they change all the stores.

All right, good ones.

A couple of good ones.

Okay, my quick one.

This is actually,

I think I might have needed to go

further back here.

This is not the logo change that I quite, I wanted to show.

Okay.

If you look up the oldest, we can probably show this in the edit, the oldest Spotify logo, it looks like shit.

It looks like a child drew the logo across like paper and they're bad handwriting.

It's just very disorderly.

And I think it's meant to represent something similar to like music notes.

You can see it in the upper left-hand corner of that image.

I think it just looks terrible, dude.

Looks like the old Yahoo logo.

That is a terrible logo.

So that was Spotify's first logo.

And I think their rebrand to basically these two things.

Spootify, it feels like.

Yeah.

It doesn't look like

it's Spoodify.

It looks terrible.

It's a terrible logo.

I think it just looks bad.

It feels bad.

The shade of green is kind of weird.

And Spotify's new logo is great.

I think they've had just a solid, you know, they made it a little more basic over time, but I loved this rebrand.

And it only complemented the company as it got larger and larger and larger.

So I say no issues there.

I had forgotten that old logo even existed, to be honest.

And it is truly

ugly.

That's a good one.

By you, Doug.

All right.

We are Americans.

I'm going to crash out on the Europeans for a second.

All right.

We're fucking dumb.

Okay.

We can't remember all your fucking names.

All right.

We have the capacity to know three countries total outside of America.

America.

Usually it's Canada.

Mexico.

Canada.

And Canada.

Which is why I'm glad that Holland has rebranded to the Netherlands.

Okay?

Because nobody's clear if you're an American whether it's Holland or the Netherlands or Dutch.

It's all confusing and weird.

Everybody calls it differently.

So finally, a few years ago, Netherlands, because actually the country is called the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and that's what they call it.

And Holland is part of their

province.

It's like if everybody kept calling our country Texas over and over, and we're like, no, this is part of it.

They're officially rebranding to just the Netherlands and Holland will maybe be phased out.

And I also guarantee that most people like X.com will keep calling it Holland forever.

Okay, but I need to go one step farther because I'm tired of like it's the Netherlands, but the people are the Dutch.

It's too confusing.

Separate stuff.

They need to be called the Nether.

Yeah.

It needs to be a Minecraft tie-in, and I need to call them the Nether.

And it'll be so much easier for me as an American.

Or we move it all the Dutch.

I could work too.

The Dutcherlands.

So it's the Dutch, the Dutchers, the Dutcherlands.

And Dodge.

They're on the path, is what you're saying.

They're on the path.

They're fixing it.

They're fixing it.

Even as the local Euroboo, I do think this is an important change.

Great call.

A lot of European countries should start catering to us specifically.

I did one that I was trying to find one that people hated when it came out and they overreacted.

This is the one because I feel like, here's one thing.

We make fun of these rebrands, and I think these are all bad.

But the truth of it is every rebrand ever is hated when it first happens.

Almost, even the Spotify white people are like, what the fuck's this new spot?

Like, everyone hates it at first.

And then, if it's better, it'll stick around.

Instagram.

When people changed from this cutesy camera logo to this,

people hated it.

But now, I don't think anyone cares.

I think it's actually proven to be pretty solid.

Uh, they've kept the script font, it fits for apps better, it's easier for an app.

Uh, it's good, it's just you can't read that text.

You cannot read that text, they need to go the Johnson Johnson route.

You know what I'm saying?

I like this, Aiden.

This is how we will capture the Gen Z male.

He's fucking chill.

I haven't would have kicked you out for Gavin Newsome if you were that cool.

Gavin!

Dude!

Bro!

California!

That's a good one.

All right.

I like that segment.

That was fun.

Dude, that was a blast.

I learned a lot.

Let's move on to- Let's get depressing.

Let's get it.

All right, the world's not fun.

Stop having fun, you guys.

All right, first off, you know, it's not going to have fun.

Ooh, Ooh, speaking of like tweet and how people just literally call it as a verb, I was doing some Twitching last night and I was realizing that a lot of the viewership numbers are down.

So for people who are not aware, there's a big problem with view botting on Twitch where people will purchase, you know, bots, fake accounts to go inflate a viewer number, right?

So if you're a streamer, you can boost yourself with a bunch of fake viewers.

You get up to thousands of viewers or whatnot.

I've been hearing so much about this.

I'm very excited for you to catch me up because

drama.

No, I worked at Twitch.

I mean, like right now, the new view botting.

Everyone's freaking out.

There's a look.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't go that deep into it.

I'll tell you what I do know.

And part of the reason I didn't go that deep is because everybody's saying different things.

So if you're not going to listen to me, every single streamer who is view botting right now and calls some drama.

You know what I'll say is, okay, so this has been going on for many years.

People, people, oh yeah, we should move the board.

People for many years have been saying that there is a viewbotting problem.

And the reason Twitch doesn't do anything about it is because let's say I buy view bots on your channel.

You are clearly being view botted.

Twitch does know that.

I know that for certain.

I've talked to people at Twitch.

They're like, we know this person is being viewbotted.

But if they can't prove that that person is buying them, then let's say I want to get Kai Sonat banned.

I could just view bot Kai Sonat.

He gets banned because he has view bots.

So it makes sense that Twitch can't go shut down a channel just because view bots exist.

You have to figure out who does it.

So this is why for many years they have not really cracked down on view botting, even though there are many people.

I guess I won't list them.

I know specific people.

I shouldn't?

No, I probably shouldn't.

You need the Phantom Lord Skype logs, if you will.

You work here, Twitch.

I have a counterpoint, and I want to go a little deeper into the underbelly of Twitch here.

That is one reason that they don't crack down on viewbotting.

The other reason is that it looks real nice to advertisers when you have 20 to 30% more views on the whole website.

And if you have a big drop in viewership for your top creators, all of a sudden you can't sign the deals you used to be able to sign.

with advertisers.

And as long as they're not checking and you can look the other way, it's kind of a win-win for everybody, but the casual person not cheating on Twitch who falls behind the viewbotters.

Yeah, this is the to this is the problem, right?

Is that Twitch is fine with it?

And if you're a streamer who's viewbotting yourself, you're fine with it.

And what's cool is if you're the viewbotting streamer or your Twitch, you will get more money.

The way this system works is that, you know,

a company comes to you as an agency.

It says, we want to advertise Genshin Impact.

We want to advertise Xfinity, whatever it is.

and you get paid based on your viewers.

So I will get paid more for an ad versus, you know, at 5,000 viewers versus somebody who has a thousand versus somebody that has 100, right?

That obviously makes sense.

Some of the time it's based on conversion of like, oh, how many people with factor, I got paid on how many people signed up for factor.

So it's a very concrete conversion, but very often it's just you've got this many viewers.

So if somebody view bots themselves, they just straight up will get more money.

If they view bot themselves to 10,000 when they actually have 2,000, they're going to make five times the amount of money.

And it's sometimes even more because you then get get a premium if you're like one of the top creators.

It's a pretty ridiculous amount of money to give people a sense.

You can get easily

$10,000 to $20,000 per hour if you are in that range.

Oh, yeah.

Above.

Like, you know, somebody like XQC is, or maybe not XQC because he's kind of fallen out of it, but, you know, Kai Sanat or anybody who has like 10,000, you're talking about tens of thousands per hour.

Kai's got a hundred thousand.

Right, right, that's why I didn't say it because he's in a scale that's like probably a million.

There was a period of time a few years ago where XQC was living in our house, like for I think like a month.

And there's a, just a hilarious era in my life where I would go downstairs into our home office to work in the house that we all lived in.

And then XQC would come downstairs and sit on the couch in that room.

And then me and XQC and Slime would talk every morning.

Like in very, very strange period in my life.

But he told us how much money he made from ads.

during his streams.

And he was like, yeah, the stream for 12 hours of making like 50, 60K.

And I was like, dude, what the fuck on your twitch ads in one stream like that

and to be clear that's not that's separate from as an agency giving you a sponsored stream to do so there's also ads where you're making more money for every ad served to a in quote human so that you know basically if you viewbot this is great this system's awesome if you're twitch this system's awesome it looks like your platform's doing really successful Twitch is finally cracking down on this.

And there's not exactly clear why, but the estimates, this is the past couple of days, August 21st and and 22nd, estimates is the viewership has dropped 5% to 20%.

That's a broad range.

Yeah, so there's been a range.

And that's part of the issue is this has been fluctuating so much.

So I did try to figure out who are the people who have dropped.

So people, for example, look to Asmund Gold and they're like, oh, he dropped 20,000 viewers.

He was viewbotting, but he bounced back in a day or two.

And same with like all the other people I looked at.

There's a couple of really egregious examples like Mira, who's known to just do this 24-7 bot thing.

So there's a couple of like really obvious ones, but for the most part, they're I mean, even without naming names, some people have just refused to stream until the viewbots have figured out that's they just stop streaming because they don't want to go live with the lower counts.

Yeah, there's, there's that.

There's a number of successful streamers who coincidentally have not been streaming over the past week or two because they might go live with half the viewers and everybody's going to go, okay, we know.

Streamers can't even take a vacation anymore without scrutiny.

It doesn't make any

vacation, coincidentally, Tom Rex and cracked down on the bottom.

It's already the hardest job in the world.

And you guys are just coming in today.

You're actually spitting.

you're right.

So, I think it's interesting.

It's not only interesting in general, but I read a thread both by XQC, weirdly enough, which is a fairly thoughtful thread, plus Devin Nash, who does a lot of like internet media type stuff.

And the argument is basically: look, this works for a couple of years.

You can trick a bunch of big companies into coming into Twitch and spending a bunch of money on ads or sponsoring the guy with 20,000 viewers and pay them, you know, $50,000 an hour or whatever.

But if those viewers aren't real, if a third third of the viewers are not real then they aren't going to get the actual returns that they should on their advertising dollars and if they will compare that to youtube or instagram or twitter and they will see concrete results of like well when we spend this much on twitch we don't get that much back and so eventually they start leaving the ecosystem and the argument is the past few years that you've started to see that where advertisers are leaving twitch twitch itself has not released membership you know over the over the time they realize they didn't work yeah yeah exactly yeah this was this is very similar we talked about this on uh one of our Patreon episodes a few weeks ago, where in esports right now, there's been this shift in the way viewership is collected.

Over time, the largest esports have allowed people to co-stream or restream

their largest events.

And someone like Tarek for Valorant or Onipixel for Counter-Strike might be re-streaming the main broadcast of a tournament.

And that is actually where a lot of the viewership just lands for that tournament period now.

So OniPixel, in Onipixel's case, he might be the largest stream for a CS tournament at any given time.

And

that viewership data is still collected and used to sell sponsorships on these broadcasts.

But for the people that are restreaming, oftentimes, you know, for example, in Onipixel's case, when there's downtime between matches, that guy's playing GeoGuesser.

He's not showing

what's going on, like the embedded ads on the broadcast, right?

But the sale of those viewers is still being sold to advertisers or agencies as the same value as a viewer on the main broadcast, even though those viewers aren't necessarily interacting with the ads.

And the same goes for this situation where

everybody involved in the system basically has no incentive to raise the flag, right?

Other than maybe long-term health of the ecosystem.

But for short-term gains, everybody involved in this process, whether you're like at the agency,

you know, making this or getting spending the money for a brand that you're marketing on behalf of, you get to look like you've done your job and like made some sort of big deal.

The person on the other end, on the other agency making the sale, gets a commission and brings the money in.

And then the streamers or the platforms or the esports that are getting the deals make money on their end.

Everybody is making more money.

So when that's the case, it's hard.

Everybody wants to ride the gravy train until it finally cracks for some reason.

Which is why I think, if you pull this up,

Perry,

there's some evidence that Twitch has already undone the change.

Yeah, yeah.

So I've been looking at specific channels and seeing their drop.

And there's a major drop on August 21st and 22nd.

Yeah.

And then it bounced back.

These are the dips where

the line has fallen below the previous average.

And now it's back to tracking it.

I think they went back to where it used to be.

The chart today is almost directly along with last week's compared to the previous four days.

They were far below their last week's viewership.

So what do you guys think Twitch's incentive is here?

They get to say they cracked down on it.

and this is something that I think they genuinely wanted to crack down on it.

It's probably becoming a bit of a problem, but then they realize that it's 24% drop in site-wide viewership numbers, which is disastrous for them, their jobs, for all their comps year over year.

They've put themselves in a fucked situation.

They can't get out of this.

There is a deeply entrenched, valid belief amongst advertisers that you are paying for a bunch of bots when you go on Twitch, that a large percentage of it.

So you need to unwind that that while also not making your company look like it's suddenly failing because everybody's a bot like i don't know what you do it's like the uh the fictional tech company in succession run by the swedish guy and they find out that his entire success of his platform is actually just 90 of his users are bought it but they've like all like gotten so far you know they're all in so deep that most people just want to hide the fact that the users are fake and like keep the grift going

Yeah,

yeah, that's what it feels like with Twitch.

It feels like they're already panicking and undoing this because that, or it's quite quite possible, the body websites immediately found out a way to avoid detection because there's a lot of monetary.

I think that is extremely likely.

That's why that's totally likely and possible.

But

either way, the crackdown did not last very long.

Did you guys see the, I mean,

allegation that most of the viewership

fall off was with streamers that are a part of large organizations.

So it seems like there's a larger drop in streamers that were a part of some group, like phase.

They saw the largest dings in their viewership because, presumably, like someone at the company of those overall organizations has more of an incentive to view bot their signed people than an individual would have to like.

Yeah, I think we just follow the incentives.

Anyone who can make money from this probably in the long term was doing it.

Like it was, it was trending that direction.

And so, um,

yeah, it's, it's sucked.

I mean, it really does suck for people on Twitch trying to get discovered without it because then you're just never going to, you're underneath a layer of viewbotted people that are always at the top.

Yeah.

And there's no other way to get it.

Or anybody who's legitimate because our ad rates will go down.

Like they're, you know, the whole industry will suffer because everybody's getting burned and they don't, you know, they're going to know if my viewers are bots or not.

Like they have to be able to do it.

Well, it's tough, by the way, because Twitch is.

Twitch is like barely at the threshold of big enough to even be on the radar of some of these big companies.

Like Twitch only gets 2 million concurrents a day or something like that.

Like,

it's solid, but, uh, and it's dropping.

You know, it's like it had this huge spike in 2020 and it has been slowly but steadily dropping.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know it was still dropping.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I thought it, I thought it was going back up again.

Oh, no, no.

Still dropping.

I saw the number like literally yesterday.

2025 is the worst since 2019.

I mean, it's like, wow.

It's bad.

I have been streaming less.

It's because you.

They're like, the Dutch looks.

So Twitch is kind of panicking because, you know, the big brands gave Twitch a shock.

It's like, oh, it's this new culture, new thing.

Kids are into it.

It's big.

But it's not that big.

YouTube is 100 times bigger.

So it's in terms of overall viewer minutes.

So yeah, they're just there, they don't want to make their viewership seem fucking 24% smaller and they don't want to lose the bot or have bots.

I think they're there.

It would be interesting to have Dan Clancy on him and talk about this because.

Oh, I'd love to talk.

So interesting.

And then we can ask some hard-hitting questions about Clancy.

Clancy, Bill.

It's the only subject for 40 minutes.

Well, you know, stepping out to, you know, Twitch, probably the most important American company.

Brackenberg woke in Twitch.

Brackenberg woke Twitch.

But, you know, secondary to all of these things, Intel.

Intel.

And I wanted to hear a little bit about you had been doing some like background on Intel and also wanted to follow up on the government's ownership in them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So we already talked about this briefly last week, so I will keep it brief.

The government, the federal government, the United united states now owns part of intel we own a company which is funny coming from the republicans because it's a pretty socialist thing to do uh for the yeah and she gavin newsoms no what do you say he put an image of trump in front of a communist flag saying all hell are socialist leaders

it's really that's pretty funny it's really bizarre uh to come from the republicans who are cheering this on so quick history of why intel specifically because we talked last week about the idea of the government buying a company and having partner, and how this is not standard for an American company, this is not the norm.

The U.S.

government doesn't just like hold companies unless it's fully owned.

Um, Intel's a bit different.

We all know Intel, presumably, because we're all you know, gamers and it runs our computers and everything.

And Intel,

they burned me too many times, bro.

I went to AMD.

You did AMD?

I find I hated AMD because I was an NVIDIA guy, obviously, but now I'm NVIDIA AMD dual because I can't stand Intel, bro.

And I'll continue on, but they're woke.

I I knew it.

Okay, so Intel comes out as microchip manufacturer.

Microchips are unbelievably complex and hard to make.

If you go watch a YouTube video about it, it sounds watching a video about how microchips are made sounds like in a movie or a TV show where they have like the science hacker who is who is intentionally saying things that make no sense.

And at the end, somebody's like, in English, scientists.

It's like that, but real and pretends to be triple on into the Glaxophar.

It's that.

Like I have a decent amount of technical knowledge, and even I am like, what the fuck is going on?

It is truly baffling how complex it is to make microchips.

We are doing it at like nano scale.

We are making a city into a chip.

It is unbelievable.

So very hard stuff.

Over the decades, Intel came out and they were dominant.

They were the PC manufacturer chips.

They made the dominant ones.

We've all seen Intel's running our PCs, but they started to really fall behind in the past two decades.

So there's two big areas.

One was mobile.

So as mobile phones started to take off and become this massive part of our ecosystem, mobile phones have a very different, let's say, incentive than a PC at home.

What matters the most is battery.

But what Intel had done is made chips that were incredibly good at like doing tasks that are really complex and doing them fast, but use a lot of battery, use a lot of power.

And so Intel's chips were not actually very good at mobile computing because they're just going to burn through a mobile device's battery really fast.

So ARM came in, which is this British manufacturer, made a different instruction set architecture, basically a different system for making chips and said, we're doing this specifically for mobile.

And ARM now dominates mobile chips.

So basically any computer chip that goes into a mobile device, Intel has nothing to do with.

It's other companies like Apple or Samsung who are using ARMS architecture and they're making mobile.

So as the mobile device has exploded over the past couple of decades, Intel has been completely left in the dark.

They've tried multiple times to make like a mobile version of their architecture.

Didn't work.

They couldn't do it.

So that was the first big failure.

And the second one is now AI.

So AI is coming out.

And what do you want with AI?

Well, AI is not about doing a lot of, doing a couple things really, really well.

It's about doing billions of math equations.

So if you buy, let's say, a 16-core processor from Intel, you buy that for your computer, you can roughly think of this as 16 guys who are really smart, who can do tasks for you.

And that's really good if you're doing Photoshop or browsing the internet or whatever else.

You're only doing a couple of things.

But if you're trying to do AI,

you actually just need like a billion math equations to be done.

So would you rather have 16 really smart guys to do a billion math equations or a hundred thousand dumb guys who can do math equations?

Why would I as a man want 16 men in my PC?

16 women maybe hot.

So instead of these 16 guys in an Intel processor, because again, it's made for the PC.

That's what they've fundamentally been building.

In a GPU like NVIDIA has, the whole point of it is that instead of having a 16 core processor, there'll be thousands of cores.

Each core is a hot woman who can just do linear algebra, okay?

And nothing else.

And so

turn the hat around.

Just dude.

And so if the entire thing underpinning AI, which it is, is linear algebra and doing just an absolute shit ton of these equations, the NVIDIA chip, even though it was originally meant for gaming, happens to be the exact same thing.

It happens to be a chip that is designed to do a billion short, simple math equations, but can't handle the complex stuff so intel is really good at their niche and has failed at both mobile and ai because they are fundamentally designed for something else this is like the exact speech jensen wong gave to all the new hires day well i'm not kidding really he didn't say hot whip cards but he basically did he's like the moore's law fell apart for intel they're not useful for this thing Yeah, exactly.

I mean, they went through some things you did.

Yeah, it's funny.

And so, so that's, that's all well and good.

But again, coming back to manufacturing chips.

Now, if you are Trump or anybody who is trying to figure out the future of America, I think everybody is on the same page.

AI is going to be very important to the future, whether you like it or not.

In that headspace, you need to be able to manufacture computer chips, even setting aside AI.

Right now, if we weren't able to manufacture any computer chips, like computers run our society.

I was going to say, even if you took this element out of the equation, right?

So much of basic technology and especially like defense technology rests in your ability to create chips like this.

Yes.

Everything now runs on chips.

Everything that we do.

I mean, our fucking toasters have chips.

Like everything has a chips.

Our cars have chips.

80, 80% of them are made in Taiwan.

And Taiwan is stone's throw away from China, which is our largest geopolitical rival, and wants Taiwan.

Yes.

And you can't allow that risk.

And some say it's a part of China.

Some say China's best Taiwan.

G, if you happen to be listening and pondering whether you want to come on the show.

Please let us in when we come in a few months.

True.

so there's it's up in the air, and we need to visit to figure it out.

And honestly, I'm really open to the idea that if China let us in, we would for sure think

I'm saying that if I was treated in a certain way, yeah, my political views could be shifted.

100% true, we can be bought.

G, we want to modernize our views, we want to cracker barrel redesign them for the modern age, Tim Poole.

I'm looking at you, baby.

You did it, you paved the way.

If we get a hundred grand a month from Xi Jinping to talk,

oh, yeah, we just do I'll tell you what, I wouldn't.

I would

turn your hand back on.

I'm a soy cuck who wouldn't compromise my

time online for

you.

You're so woke.

But okay, so just a real quick reground.

So why does Intel specifically matter?

There's all these companies around the world that make chips.

Well, the thing is, there's the designing a chip, which is how you come up with how it's going to work and power your device.

And then there is actually making the thing.

Actually making the thing is unbelievably, obscenely hard.

Intel is able to make their own chips.

they actually manufacture them in america and essentially no one else does the only other companies that are making chips go to taiwan and they ask tsmc the taiwanese company to make them because they currently make the most advanced ones there's also samsung uh but samsung is even then largely yeah using tsmc so the only company in america the only american company that can make a chip is intel and so if you view if if for example suddenly taiwan was cut off from america for some reason, we would not have any more NVIDIA chips.

They're all made in Taiwan by TSMC.

We would not have most of the chips that we use for mobile devices or our fridge or our cars or whatever else, right?

So it is an existential threat.

And the only company left that can do it is Intel.

And they are floundering.

They are getting worse.

They're falling behind TSMC in their ability to make them.

They aren't doing well in AI.

They aren't doing well in mobile, but they are the only one in America who can make them.

You know, asterisk, there's other companies trying.

TSMC is opening branches in the United States.

Yeah, yeah, in Arizona plan.

But they aren't caught up yet.

And again, that company relies on TSMC.

If TSMCC suddenly was taken by China right now, it is, to my knowledge, at least a couple of months ago, unlikely that those plants would really do much.

I also have a loose understanding that, you know, through the CHIPS Act that was passed under Biden, the idea is we're going to give a lot of support and money to not only TSMC to come over and create this new factory in Arizona, but give a lot of money to support Intel.

And they haven't done very well with that so far, which is part of the reason why the buy-in is happening now.

Right.

Yeah.

So, so Biden already with the CHIPS Act was like, we're going to give a bunch of money to these companies.

We're going to try to get foreign chip manufacturers to build factories in America.

We're going to try to get our American chip companies to make more here.

And we're going to help Intel make sure they can open a whole nother factory.

We'll make sure it happens with the money.

The money isn't happening.

So, one approach to this is you say, Intel, you're sucking balls.

You're going to die.

We're not helping you.

And another approach is to just give them more money, which is what the CHIPS Act was.

Was, you know, the Trump administration says, here's another $40 $40 billion, like get it done, make that chip plant in Ohio.

And the third option is they buy or take part of Intel.

And that's what happened.

And the CEO of Intel basically said, you, the United States government, can have 10% of our company.

And this is a very weird precedent that kind of makes sense as a national security point of view and is also super weird.

To be clear, they did buy it.

The U.S.

government was not handed 10%.

Trump said that that happened.

But what actually happened is there was $9 billion left over of Chips Act money that didn't get dispersed to intel because they didn't reach one of those milestones oh there was a milestone they didn't reach so it's kind of like they don't so the chips grant is now purchasing part of it the nine billion left over chips grant that wasn't said to be given to intel trump was like well that's free money i mean you got nine billion you got sitting around

so you use it to buy not at market value slightly below market value so maybe there was some sort of deal there but he bought three million shares 300 million shares of intel and so they got 10 has there been any plan like publicly communicated plan about about what this ownership means and the way it's supposed to affect the company?

Other than other than a general idea that things are supposed to

everybody in the room, including Craig.

There's going to be a plan because at the beginning of this month, he was calling the CEO a Chinese spy who needs to step down.

After one week, this is like a week ago.

This is all so recent.

A week ago, he was called the CEO.

He clearly compromised and needed to resign.

Is he compromised?

No,

we can talk about Lip Bhutan.

Lip Bhutan, look, while he was working working at Cadence, which is a company that helps create the software to design chips, very important company.

He was very successful.

He may have given some tech to a Chinese military university.

Okay.

Okay.

And he did do that.

And that is the concern.

And, you know, he's now saying, like, look,

it was above board and there was a slight mistake there and yada, yada.

But you did that growing up.

You never gave a little tech to a Chinese base.

I lived in a military base growing up.

I was selling secrets left and right.

Let me on the side.

They would come to my door.

I think they got afforded gold and having a perfect door.

That's all weird.

I'm with you from last week, Atriag, which is just, it feels very strange for the U.S.

government to pick winners.

And by buying 10% of Intel and now having influence over the way the company is operated, it's like in theory, you want to encourage lots of different companies to try to compete and do this successfully.

And it just feels weird that now the U.S.

government will be incentivized to make Intel succeed more so than others.

It is interesting.

So I want to contrast this a bit with my understanding of the Chinese approach to these things.

And we

just read a book.

We released a book club episode called The House of Huawei, which is about Huawei, a giant telecom and consumer product company that exists primarily in China, but all over the world.

And they, in that book, lay out the ways the government has influence in Chinese companies.

But one of the examples it gives is that Huawei, this private company, still requires to have, you have to have party members who are like on the board inside your company, who are there to sort of like dictate values of the party or influence direction of the company based on what the party desires, even though the company is technically private.

And

China doesn't actually own that company, though.

They have influence through that mechanism.

And through, if we look at an industry like EVs, China's primary approach wasn't to

take over the private market

within their country.

They laid out a bunch of incentives and subsidies for the entire supply chain behind EVs and encouraged as basically as many companies as possible to proliferate and like chase the EV dream.

And now have like, as companies came out of that winners, like certain ones becoming particularly successful, they pulled back the subsidies and are letting the winners run.

basically.

And I think this is a very different situation rather than creating an environment where a bunch bunch of these companies might pop up and convene in the future.

They are picking the winner and like we need to bet on this single horse and primarily lean on that as being successful.

And I understand also that the Chinese approach that I just described literally took over the place of many, many years, right?

You can't create a bunch of new chip manufacturers and companies overnight.

But I do think that

this doesn't seem like it's laying the groundwork for a bunch of of companies to come out successful like 10, 20 years from now.

Yeah, I agree.

I think I talked about this on stream.

I'm obviously against it.

I think it's it's uh

leads to a lot of conflicts of interest.

And so this guy on my red, I don't know if you can pull my screen here.

He brought up a Deadbark company as an example

where he said, you know, he wanted to support what I was saying about conflict of interest and a chop a failure.

Dutch company.

Basically, what I said

was that, you know, if you're Trump and you negotiate this deal and you get 10% of Intel, you can't realistically, politically, let Intel fail.

So, like, if the money you give them isn't enough or they need more, or you have to put your thumb on the scale in more ways, you will continue to throw good money after bad to keep this national champion afloat, which kind of puts them in a situation where they can, they're not really under market pressure to get better or improve it all.

Right.

And so, this happened to this Denmark company.

I don't know.

You know how to pronounce this?

Orsted?

How am I with the

line through it?

Orsted.

Okay.

I think it was originally known as dong energy

anyway.

The Danish state had 50% of the stake, and it was considered strategically important for Denmark's green energy transition.

The idea was to secure national interests by tying government directly to a key industrial player.

But governments don't act like other shareholders, they've continually run into trouble with huge cost overruns, collapsing U.S.

ambitions, and massive write-downs.

The stock plunged 80% in five years, down 40% year to date.

So they had to keep issuing new shares to stay alive, and the government had to keep stepping in with additional 30 billion DKK, 4 or 0.3 billion US in liquidity sports, but stabilizes the company.

It's the same slippery slope Adrianc worn about with Intel.

Once the government is financially and politically tied to a company, failure is no longer an option.

Taxpayers have to continually backstop these bad companies.

And I feel like this will happen with Intel and already sort of happened.

with the Chips Act and Joe Biden.

Like we threw money at it.

They didn't hit the milestones.

Now we're throwing more money at it to get a percent.

Now we're going to throw more money at it because it's an American company.

Maybe we'll get more of a percent next time until eventually it's a state-owned failure.

Like what is the,

at a certain point, they have to make a good product and be on time and do what all their competitors are able to do.

I'm endlessly going back and forth between, because I saw the top comment on this and is also bringing up this idea of like some kind of utilities need to be government-owned to make sure they're actually available to the population.

And versus, unfortunately, when governments own things, they tend to, once you lose the incentive to actually perform and, you know, improve your product and compete in the market, things get slow and sluggish and inefficient.

I had it.

You see that over and over and over.

I had a recent conversation with somebody somebody because it sounds like in this case, they're at the, you know, they're developing new, they're helping Denmark's energy transition, right?

They're developing new technology and helping push towards this goal of like a greener society.

It reminds me of a conversation I had a while ago about co-ops with somebody, and they were explaining how the co-op structure of businesses makes the most sense when you have an existing business that is very solid, stable, doesn't need to make any drastic improvements or changes to its business model, and just brings in some sort of consistent revenue for a consistent service.

That business model makes a lot of sense for a co-op style business.

But when you have something that is more cutting edge or something that is responsible for developing a new technology, having that company be a co-op actually limits it in a bunch of

limits it in a bunch of ways.

And you're, I think this is similar where these companies that are responsible for innovation and developing some sort of key technology for a national security interest actually are hurt by being nationally owned because of this all-in like sunk cost fallacy issue of, well, if they aren't, they aren't subject to the same market pressures to get anything done, but you feel obligated to keep pumping in whatever you need to sustain them.

And if it doesn't play out, you just have to keep chasing that loss.

Like, whereas if, you know, in the case of a public utility, like we get water to people's homes, they pay us money for the water they use every month.

Like it makes sense for that to be just provided by the government.

Cause there's no big, there's no big innovation in the way we, you know, get water to people's homes once you've set that all up.

Do you does that make sense?

No, it does.

I mean, you know, the there's things like natural monopolies, right?

Where you just want the government to step in because you don't want a hundred different private companies laying their own power lines or water lines or yeah, you know, they can't all do it.

There's not enough physical space.

Something i was thinking of is like norway's oil is nationalized from what i understand right and that business is pretty clear cut it's like we're we we're bringing in oil and or or energy and we like sell that there's no huge innovation in that process or in what we need to develop there to like make that company like grow or move forward but in this company's case right they're responsible for developing new uh energy technologies that are supposed to move the nation difficult technology like yeah yeah yeah uh you know Bernie Sanders was surprisingly supportive of this move by Trump.

I mean, I guess it's not surprising when you think about it like a socialist perspective, but his statement was that like if the taxpayers are going to give money to microchip companies like Intel, they should be able to get a return.

And my counterpoint was that I think the return should be done through taxes.

Like that's, you know, like

if

you want to get money back to the people for healthcare from Burger King and McDonald's, you just have a corporate corporate tax rate.

No matter who's winning, I'm getting 20% or whatever.

But if I buy 10% of Burger King, then now Burger King has to win for

the citizens to get a return.

I think picking and choosing an individual company feels like a, but I will acknowledge, I fully acknowledge, and you've brought this up in your history, is like Intel.

The thing I hate about this is that Trump is saying, I want to do this 100 more times.

Trump is like, this is a great idea.

I want to do this for many more companies because Intel is such a unique case of a unique product in a unique time.

And we can't wait for 100 new competitors to buy us up.

We have, you know, I can see that this is a unique spot, but the idea in general, I'm very against it.

Yeah, I think in principle, I feel like China's approach is much better, where you're creating the environment of incentives to encourage as many successful, the best company to come forward and like dominate that industry.

That seems like a better approach.

But maybe because of the security interests around this issue, you simply do not have the time to go that route.

Yeah.

Or maybe there's not the political will either.

Like maybe you just couldn't accomplish it.

I feel like I had a different takeaway from that book than you do.

It feels like kind of the point of the book was the Chinese government is saying they're not very involved, wink-wink, but they are clearly dictating everything at all times.

Or at least there is the ever-present threat at all times.

They're like, oh, we might purge you.

Oh, we might shut you down.

Oh, we might take everything from you.

No, they still have all those levers, right?

But what I mean is, like, in if we were to look at the, if we were to look at the book of like telecom companies, they didn't just like king, I don't really

feel like they

made Huawei the kingpin.

There was like other competing telecom companies in the space, one they actually did directly own.

And then if you look at a more modern version of this, because Huawei appearing is through in a different time of Chinese history to begin with, right?

I think a better look is at the EV market, where it's not just BYD, right?

BYD is the most successful company or one of the most successful companies out of tens, maybe hundreds of like EV/slash battery companies in China that popped up within their know private-ish market that was built upon the incentives and subsidies that they created now at the end of the day do they have a bunch of like ways of moderating and pulling levers on companies within that environment that don't exist in America

100% yeah but that initial baseline yeah they created a marketplace and let the competition do the work that is what China did for that market and they subsidized those marketplaces yeah and the same thing for uh like solar companies that exist in China as well I would agree I think the EV market in China in the past few years has been one of the most competitive markets of anything in the world lately.

Like it is the most real example of companies fighting brutally over price and innovation and quality to try and gain market share.

And the winner is the consumer because they get more cars to choose from at better prices.

I think it is working.

I think that system works.

I wouldn't say for everything China does, but for EVs, Yeah, and I think there's something to be learned from that.

And I don't think that's, I think it's the opposite of what we're doing with it.

Yeah, this is not what we're doing.

This is a failing company at the end of its cycle that we're going to buy into.

Guys, we're running low on time.

There's many more things to discuss in the world, so we'll probably have to talk about it on the Patreon and on next week's episode.

I want to talk about, you know, Trump nationalizing the

or federalizing the National Guard, Brego Garcia,

whether another brand has gone woke.

There's a lot of things.

But, you know, I don't know if there's any other topics you guys want to bring up or what, but what's the.

I'm so unclear on what going woke means now.

I wonder if we've gone woke.

I don't know if this episode has gone woke.

I don't know if you went woke when you turned your backwards hat around.

Is this woke now?

I don't know.

Tell me.

I can't tell if you're woke.

The goalposts have shifted so far.

And if you want to find out where they've shifted, you can join us on future episodes.

We'll see you guys next time.

Thanks for watching, Luminades.

Bye.