Talibs Weekly Email - Week 9
🇳🇿Reparations in New Zealand, 📚Barnes & Noble is still alive?, 💸Side Hustle Idea: Stream while you sleep.
Here’s whats in this newsletter.
Good Afternoon & Rise and Shine!
Hope everyone is having a great weekend so far and is able to enjoy some sunshine!
Episode 32 drops this Wednesday (hopefully) We will discuss the Raptors road schedule (2-0 so far), how Pascal Siakam is a bit overrated and how the beast that is Philly is now a tamed poodle. Check it out here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Thanks for being on my accountability journey this year!
🇳🇿Planet Money: Episode 975: Reparations In New Zealand
️👨💼Barnes & Noble going to act small to beat the large giant that is Amazon
💤Side Hustle Idea: Making money while you sleep..now through TikTok
Podcasts
🇳🇿Planet Money: Episode 975: Reparations In New Zealand
TLDR: This podcast talks about Reparations that occurred in New Zealand with the government and a Maori Rangitane tribe. We often hear news headlines that are about apologies, protests and quite a spectrum of opinions on this topic. This podcast breaks down what exactly a reparation is.
🌎What is Reparation? Reparation originates from the word “Repair”, While reparation has a range of meanings, they all convey the sense of fixing or making up for a past wrong.
📥What happened in New Zealand: The country had an indigenous population and was colonized by the Europeans in the 1840s. Maori had lost ownership of 97% of their land often through poor deal making, corruption and at times violence. However, in the last 35 years, the government has spent billions of dollars to address certain issues and actually pay for them.
⏳What does a Reparations package entail of? There are three parts to any reparations package - Land, Money & an Apology. The negotiation relates to all three parts of the deal.
🌳Land: In this instance, the tribe had a list of about a hundred cultural sites that wanted back for themselves. The top of the list was Mount Bruce or Pukaha (as the tribe called it). The crown gave them 10 cultural sites back and were hestitant to give them Mount Bruce. They initially wanted to share the land but after the tribe showcased the importance of the site, they were able to showcase the community behind the site and the cultural significance the site held - the crown ultimately decided to give the land back. In good faith, the natives did not push to change the name to Pukaha - they just wanted their land back where they could continue their strong traditions and community ideals.
💸Money: And then on the money side, she was looking at 20, maybe $30 million based on what other tribes had gotten. The crown does not offer compensation because if it were to offer compensation - it would be too much and could actually bankrupt the country. What they offer here is a “redress” - a package of money/land that is a tiny fraction of what was taken from them but large enough to help them re-build. Also there are hundreds of tribal groups so keeping consistency/negotiation was critical in the crowns eyes.
🙇Apology: This is something that bureaucracies are notoriously bad at apologizing. (Actually showing up and apologizing). What ended up happening was the crown would officially apologize to the tribe in their hometown in front of hundreds of natives. The exact wording is negotiated and both sides would have to approve on the final draft before the apology is presented.
🎐End Result: The tribe ended up $32 1/2 million worth of money and land, including, of course, Pukaha/Mount Bruce. The government doesn’t cut checks to each individual member of the tribe, all that money goes into a trust controlled by them. They are able to withdraw a little bit of that money for things to help the community.
My Thoughts: This podcast was especially relevant in this day in age as the Canadian government deals with many native tribes and protests. If you think about the gap between a historic betrayal and modern day apology - that gap is so wide that many countries can’t figure out how to bridge it. New Zealand showed the world that a bridge is possible with empathy, compassion and the key element of monetary reparation. Talk is Cheap. The most important to note that it is not compensation because the economic distress that it would cause is rather detrimental to the current economic system but rather view the $ as redress.
Articles
👨💼Bloomberg: Barnes & Noble’s New Plan Is to Act Like an Indie Bookseller
TLDR: Barnes & Noble has been dethroned by Amazon and now is transforming their business into the corner mom/pop store that it initially destroyed in the 90s. (PS - You’ve got Mail)
📚Remember Barnes & Noble: They were the quintessential large book store that all these independent small mom/pop book shops disliked. (cue. You’ve got Mail). They were able to slash prices, provide more books and deliver an unique experience. They had revenues around $7.2 billion in 2012 at its peak which declined to $3.2 billion in 2018. It has been a downfall since 2012. Just to add - the company has consistently failed to turn a profit.
🚚What happened: Amazon —> The same customers who went to the big box stores for lower prices now went to Amazon for lower prices.
🏬What : Barnes & Noble (B&N) have had 4 CEOs in the last 5 years, they’ve all failed to turnaround the business by either focusing on online distribution or sought to standardize the barnes & noble network of shops - basically making sure all barnes & noble stores look the exact same and have the same vibe across. (like Starbucks!) Two decades of Amazon capsizing the bookselling industry, B&N was flirting with bankruptcy. It was acquired by Elliot Management, stores had been slashed to 600 (at its peak - 1500 stores existed), sales were in its 7th year of decline and the company was burning cash.
Source: Statista 2020
🔖Whose this new guy? James Daunt was credited for turning around a variety of book stores in the United Kingdom. He was hired by Elliot Management (the Private Equity group) that bought B&N.
Whats the plan? The plan is actually very similar to what he did in UK only this time - he’s going to apply the same strategy on a larger scale.
🏢a) Store Design: B&N will shrink the space is allocates to miscellaneous items and replace it with expanded children/young adult section. They’ve tested different layouts to speed up the traffic. No longer will you be able to buy the miscellaneous items such as random salts, random chocolates and random puzzles.
📚b) Curated Bookstores: He wants to empower the local B&N stores to arrange their local windows with titles that will be relevant to that area. Basically, alluding the fact that people in New York City have different reading habits than people in Alabama. I found this study which basically has top books per state using goodreads data.
⤵️c) Downsize: The word that most new CEOs love and fall in love with, this is common with many restructuring plans however the company plans to open 1,500 small shops in under-bookstored locations. (this would match the company’s historical peak). He wants to be strategic in these stores by placing them in affluent neighbourhoods, basically mimicking where Peloton stores.
My Thoughts: This is such an interesting case study. The overall end goal has been price sensitivity in this industry. Consumers initially flocked to B&N for lower prices and then moved to Amazon for even lower prices through Kindle. Price seems like an important lever in this industry and the moves that B&N is making doesn’t lower any prices at the moment. I do not believe that these moves are game-changing industry moves, these moves would be good enough for the hedge fund to make some profit of their investment.
🛌NY Times: How to make money while you sleep
TLDR: Literally making money while you sleep.
💤So whats this new trend? Here’s the thing, sleeping on camera isn’t actually new, in 2015, many teenagers began casting their sleep on the platform YouNow using the hashtag #sleepingsquad. This trend is now back and quite prevalent on TikTok
💸How are people making $: Hundreds of TikTok users have begun live-streaming themselves overnight, through TikTok’s live feature , viewers can donate digital coins that can be cashed out. Users have made around $50 to $250 a night streaming random things.
🤳Did this happen before? In January 2019, a streamer on the live streaming gaming platform passed out and woke up to 200 new followers. The clip actually has more than 3.6 million views and has become the most watched twitch video ever. The irony - the most watched twitch video is someone not playing games!
📸Any other examples? On Feb. 9, 18.5 million viewers tuned in to watch one man sleep on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese counterpart.
💲So how does this work? Before they go live, TikTok sleep-streamers usually create a promotional video that they post to their feeds, advertising the sleep-stream happening that night. When bedtime approaches, they prop up their phones on their night stands, crawl under the covers and hit the live button.
😪Whats the appeal? The appeal isn’t in watching people sleep, its actually the chat section of the app. Live-streams on TikTok aren’t archived ,so sleep streams are simply a dark screen where users can meet and talk. Watching someone sleep is just the excuse. Its all about trying to find online friends.
The main takeaways are that the chat is not really available anywhere else in TikTok, the sessions aren’t saved so you can chat with whoever is there. Its an opportunity for real-time dialogue than the comments section on someones post.
Behind the Scenes: Audiences really like the authentic & engaging behind the scenes look. The less production = the better. Watching someone sleep is the least production thing you can do. Audiences want to chat about it.
My Thoughts: I wrote about live-streaming last week on TikTok in China and this one is TikTok in US, the takeaway is still the same “Loneliness is an Epidemic”. People are literally logging into chats that are authentic to talk to people without actually having a history of their conversation.
Books
Here are my books to read/finish for the next while
Educated by Tara Westover(a little bit slow at times)
Loonshots by Safia Bahchall
Completed
If you’re looking for books to get, I would suggest checking out bookdepository.com or thriftbooks.com (both are cheaper than amazon at times)
Great stuff Talib! A thought-provoking read.