497: Apple + OpenAI & Google, Smile Direct Club vs Align, Amazon Ads, Temu, XPEL Update, Crowdstrike, Banning Meat, and Fallout

"it’s the hard steps that matter in the end."

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

–John le Carré

Stay fluid. Stay ever-changing and evolving, my friend 💚 🥃

🛀💭📚🏋️‍♂️ If someone asks me for advice about anything and I later find out that they followed the advice by reading the book, listening to the interview, watching the videos on YouTube, starting a newsletter and writing every day or whatever it may be, the very fact that they followed-through makes me upgrade my priors for that person by many notches upward.

It’s rare for even the people who are motivated enough to ask about something to then keep up with it with any velocity. The specific topic almost doesn’t matter, whether big or small, simple or complex.

The same happens often enough with exercise that it’s a cliché.

People want to see themselves as someone who takes their health seriously, so they get a gym membership, buy some piece of equipment for their basement, and then rapidly stop doing the thing. Partly it’s because forming new habits is *hard*, but it’s also a self-image thing. It feels good to take those early easy steps — but it’s the hard steps that matter in the end.

So if I notice that someone *does stuff* over and over again, even if any particular thing turns out to not be for them, it’s a great sign that they are going to make it.

🤑😇😈 As the saying goes, confirmation bias is one hell of a drug!

Selling it is a very big business. It’s very profitable.

Do you know how much you’re buying? (maybe unknowingly)

Or how much you’re selling? (maybe unknowingly)

None of us is completely sober. It’s hard to not touch the stuff without noticing.

🛒📚 If you’re buying a lot of books, including used and out-of-print ones, check out BookFinder.

It’s a meta-search engine that looks at all kinds of sources and then ranks ALL the results on a single page. You can set it to your country and currency, to new only or used books too, etc.

Other than being slow, it’s very cool. h/t to th4lweg

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🙁 Smile Direct Club vs Align: Not Smiling Anymore 💸

Smile Direct Club made many Align shareholders sweat around 2019-2021.

A new lower-cost competitor?! Are they a disruptor?

SDC’s market cap peaked at almost $8bn against Align’s $13bn at the time. A little over 60% of the incumbent, who was founded in 1997, right out of the gate!

The whole company now has a market cap of ˜$600k USD 😬

Shares trade for *2 tenths of a cent* 😬😬😬

There are multiple lessons for observers. I don’t know them all because I haven’t been following this story closely enough, but one is certainly that there’s a strong *hunger* out there for a good underdog challenger story.

We tend to over-simplify the narrative of success. For example, we forget that it took Align 20+ years to get where it is now, building relationships with dentists and orthodontists, establishing a consumer brand, building manufacturing capabilities making them probably the biggest users of 3D printing in the world, creating a software database from millions of customer scans, etc.

This doesn’t make it impossible to attack, and fast followers can often successfully ride the coattails of pioneers, but it’s still very difficult to replicate hard-won success.

🛒 Temu? 🇨🇳

This reminds me a bit of the threat that Temu poses to Amazon, and whether it will turn out to have been overstated:

Temu has shelled out billions to acquire new U.S. users; PDD paid Meta nearly $2 billion for ads last year and was also a top advertiser at Google, The Wall Street Journal has reported. [...]

In the U.S., the number of people who used Temu at least once a month shrank to 50 million in the first quarter, down 10% from the 55.6 million peak in last year’s third quarter, according to Sensor Tower.

If you come at the king, you better not miss… 👑

📺 Prime Video to Show Ads for Amazon Products When You Hit 'Pause' 🛒