Hot Wheels Are On a Roll. But Do You Know Why?

Rosie Blau : And, say Ferrari, and we can all summon up the slick, super-fast car. Not quite so many of us actually own them. And given the cost, most of us never will. So how is the company still doing so well?

From the Gods' excellent podcast

And the answer?

Rosie Blau: [00:24:38] So basically they’re charging rich customers ever more for a slightly better car.

Tom Lee-Devlin: Exactly. I mean, you can see this in the way that they’ve really been pushing personalization. So custom paint jobs, carbon fibre, and they’re often able to add 20% to the price of a car, which is pretty impressive, given that on average they’re going for 500,000 euros. And the company has also really proven to be very resistant to the Trumpian tariffs. No sign of a slowdown in America. It has really incredibly loyal customers and 80% of them are already owners of other Ferraris. And it keeps really close contact with these customers. It has 180 dealerships worldwide. And it tries to kind of draw these avid collectors into an inner circle.

And its boss since 2021, Benedetto Vigna, has been a huge hit with investors. He was considered a slightly odd choice at first. He’s a theoretical physicist by background. He used to work in the semiconductor industry before Ferrari, but he’s widely considered to have done a stellar job.

Vigna's team developed the three-axis accelerometer, a three-dimensional motion sensor which was initially applied to the airbags of automobiles. After reducing its size and cost, the sensor was used in the Nintendo Wii console's wireless controller and iPhone's screen rotation feature. For this invention, Vigna was included in the shortlist of twelve candidates for the "European Inventor 2010" award promoted by European Patent Organization. In his career he has registered more than two hundred patents.

So, the company has done a fantastic job of growing while still really adhering to this ethos that its founder Enzo had of selling one less car than the market demands.

Have You Heard of Neil Dagger? I Hadn't.. (chatGPT --> $$$)

Full disclosure, I did not expect him to look like

Neil, a graduate in CS from University College, London lays claim to a small fortune from using and teaching others how to use chatGPT

To make more $, use the oracle for:

💸 Monetization & Passive Income

1. Ebook Creation & Self-Publishing

• Generate book ideas, outlines, and entire drafts with ChatGPT

• Use it to refine grammar, tone, and formatting

• Sell on Amazon Kindle or Gumroad

2. Blogging & Affiliate Marketing

• Use ChatGPT to write SEO-optimized blog posts

• Automate content calendars and posting strategies

• Insert affiliate links and monetize via traffic

• Resources : Read More button. Read Aloud button

3. YouTube Scripts & Video Ideas

• Get help writing video scripts, titles, and descriptions

• Plan channel growth strategies with AI

• Automate comment replies and community engagement

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🧠 Expert-Level Prompting

4. Prompt Engineering for Freelancers

• Offer “prompt-as-a-service” to businesses or creators

• Build prompt libraries and sell them on platforms like PromptBase (BTW, congratulations Ben Stokes )

5. Coaching & Course Building

• Design full lesson plans, quizzes, and instructional content

• Position yourself as a niche expert using ChatGPT as a backend assistant

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⚙️ Automation & Time-Saving

6. Business Email Writing

• Draft cold emails, client proposals, and customer service responses

• Translate messages into multiple languages

7. Social Media Content

• Create post calendars for Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter

• Draft captions, hashtags, and image ideas

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📈 Entrepreneurship & Branding

8. Business Idea Generation

• Brainstorm startup ideas, app concepts, side hustles

• Validate ideas by simulating “customer feedback” dialogues

9. Landing Pages & Ad Copy

• Write persuasive sales copy and A/B test variations

• Use it with website builders to generate full landing page content

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🔄 Niche Services & Gig Economy

10. Resume & Cover Letter Services

• Offer resume/CV editing powered by ChatGPT

• Create tailored templates for different job roles or industries

11. Legal & Technical Drafting (with caution)

• Draft basic contracts, disclaimers, or privacy policies

• Translate technical documents into layman terms

Key takeaways

Get it to apply SEO : Prompt: Use the above outline to create an in-depth detailed blog post with SEO already applied.

Don't do all in one shot. Go for iteration. Prompt: Make it funnier and make the tone informal.

Use the "Act as" to invoke personalities. This way, you're directly tapping into the training data.

He acknowledges that creating ebooks isn't trivial, and involves all of the following:

• Finding the right topic and niche to target.
• Conducting research
• Organizing and structuring the content
• Creating engaging content in the right style
• Formatting for different devices (kindle, etc)
• Proofreading and editing
• Cover design
• Promoting and marketing
• Pricing

You have to wonder how long something like this can actually work:

Prompt: Give me some ideas for a high search, low competition idea for a YouTube video.

As a consumer, looking for quality human-generated content, maybe you want to use chatGPT to "tell me how to ensure that the material I am about to consume is not AI generated."

Points for one I haven't seen before: Prompt: Please write the code for a chrome extension that blocks distracting websites and helps users to stay focused.

Example of a (free, MidJourney) prompt by @promptlord89 (doesn't seem to have any for sale) : 

(Generic)

Create a professional-quality digital caricature of [famous celebrity name], emphasizing their [distinctive facial feature] with stylized exaggeration. Render in [art style: vector art/digital painting/illustration/cartoon] with highly detailed texturing and dimensional lighting. The portrait should convey a [mood: playful/mysterious/confident/eccentric/intense] personality with [color scheme: vibrant/muted/high contrast/complementary/warm] color palette. This caricature maintains recognizability while artfully exaggerating signature features in a 3D-like quality with studio lighting against a clean background. Perfect for profile pictures, fan art, social media avatars, or digital collectibles.HDR, 8K --ar 1:1 --stylize 450 --v 6

(specific)

Create a professional-quality digital caricature of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, emphasizing their exaggerated muscular features and raised eyebrow with stylized exaggeration. Render in the style of vector art with highly detailed texturing and dimensional lighting. The portrait should convey a confident, humorous personality with vibrant color, hyper realistic, pop art style color palette. This caricature maintains recognizability while artfully exaggerating signature features in a 3D-like quality with studio lighting against a clean background. Perfect for profile pictures, fan art, social media avatars, or digital collectibles.HDR, 8K --ar 1:1 --stylize 450 --v 6

Resulting in:

SaaS → PaaS → RaaS (Quilin > Asahi Brewing)

Economist : They were hit so bad, they were forced to take orders by fax!

The big bad wolf : Qilin RaaS - Russian-speaking criminal group. Double-extortion specialists - steal data and demand ransom and also threaten to leak it. The group's toolkit is advanced and includes customizable encryption modes, anti-forensic techniques, and the ability to spread across networks

Investments in hacking tools have paid off big time for the Chinese apparently: In 2011–2012 Chinese-linked actors reportedly penetrated major Israeli defence contractors and exfiltrated data related to Iron Dome / missile systems.

NPR: Why this is China's golden age of hacking

Rosie Blau: So what should companies be doing?

Alex Hern: It’s difficult to say a lot of businesses did the easy stuff and stared at the hard stuff, be that embedded systems in robotic arms, or even things like the room booking screens that companies like The Economist have around the office, and went, oh, maybe we don’t have to do that. And it turns out you do. You have to fix everything because anything can be a way in. The other problem is that, to draw an analogy from the pandemic, we learn when everything went to crap, that actually having a little bit of slack in the system is good, having resilience is good and that maybe having run parts of society on outsourcing to the cheapest provider didn’t work so well when you really needed extra resilience. What I think some businesses are learning is that outsourcing core parts of their IT security to the cheapest provider is similarly having a problem. And it seems like one of the popular ways into ransomware in general is to call a large outsourced IT security hub and just keep going until you find the 40th, 50th call center handler who follows the script the wrong way and hands over credentials when they shouldn’t. That can often be the toehold that an attacker needs to break into the wider network. So perhaps not looking for the cheapest way of running your IT can be one of the things that businesses should learn.

VPV Vs TOR

Eg. https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/

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Because the Read aloud thing wasn't showing up on the mobile version, I went into settings and told it to use the Custom for the mobile settings. But now, when I go to View Web Version (on mobile) it no longer shows me the search box. So, on mobile, there is no way to search.