Transcript
Hello. Oh, you're literally pouring a cup of coffee. Yeah, as we do this, such a professional is a professional live from the Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. Is there a good terminal or bad terminal? I'm just trying to make our listeners think we're important by saying that. You're clearly you don't sound like from Heathrow. Yeah, another manic Monday edition of business pants. Join us always borrow our lord of the BS Matti. But I will say Matt, this is your final show for a couple of weeks. I will be back basically in two weeks. Yeah. So I'm guessing 99% of our audience only listens for you. So No one will notice Guardians 0, people will notice. That's how that's the time. Now to say that I for the our listener base, you can get a lot more Jesse and re coming up in the next two weeks which I'm sure you're pleased. Yeah that's right a lot of Jessie and Ari much much to their Chagrin they didn't even know what's going on. That is that our audience? That's our audience. I think our audience is glad to have more oriented today's rusted, muffin tin called April 3rd, 2023 sexy, story, update and a deepesh, dive on, America's newest, billionaire, Bromance that nobody asked for. Do you have a deep dive on that Matt? Or let's just call it a dive. Why do you have to go deep? Why can't you have so many stories? So many updates, it's still it. I really don't understand how that became our thing. It must be trolled me because hey I hate the music and I hate the sound effect. So it's winning. I never should admit it out loud that they irritated. Yeah we would have changed it like months ago. If you didn't say, okay, this one's for you, Matt update on the Disney story. The headline is DeSantis had 10 months to see what Disney was up to, okay? Yeah, so this is the story they did. This is the story where Rhonda Sanchez was trying to take back power from the Disney Corporation in Florida, but the Disney board outwitted him, which doesn't seem that hard when you're people call you meet Bowl. Here. I mean can they just say Whitted? Do you have to outwit? So, Disney notified Orange County about the new agreement on April 21st 2022. Two days later. Whoa! Whoa, dude. That's not okay. Well, this is what this is. The only reason why I bring up this update. Two days later. Well, no, that's it. That's when Disney should have known April 20th. There's no two does a. That's it. They're 21st nothing. And no one cares about hearing was like 10 months later and there was ratified a few weeks after that. So, Ron DeSantis, technically had months to understand that Disney had created this, what was a King Charles clause. Yeah, the Royal clause. And yes, the reason I'm bringing this up Matt is that you wondered out loud if this was a major coup for Bob chapek, but then you did the math and thought maybe it was Bob Iger, but I think this is proof that it was Bob, chapek know. It was, I like I went on in pre-production. I went on a whole rant about how we've underrated chapek, how he like that. Like he was the CEO at the time and then after like 20 minutes of ranting, well, Damian was typing out his phone and sipping coffee and looking outside I stopped and I was like, oh wait, it was signed on the 20 and 2023 and I thought oh maybe it was Igor. That's why they brought him back to bring us back. It was igar. And then on the show, I was talking about how it was Igor. But I was right. The first time it was Chapin. Wow, all right. Yeah, this is interesting content for people. Good. Let's go to our drugs category. Twitter, verification news Twitter application. I don't care. Now you have to spend eight dollars a month for Twitter verification. Already LeBron James says, no, thank you. The New York Times says, no, thank you. Which lets you CEO. Elon Musk criticizing the New York Times tweeting. Its propaganda isn't even interesting. Their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. This is the conversation we're having, I'm sorry, but this is CEO of a I know Twitter's not publicly traded but he's the CEO of many publicly traded companies. I why didn't he say that about LeBron? That that's the real question. You want to the New York Times, sort of like a faceless like liberal leaning, or you call the moderate to be fair. I mean, they're pretty much if you're a liberal, you read the New York Times and you're like, they're not, they're not liberal or not, right? Like they're not that liberal, but if you're conservative, you basically think it's the Antichrist so suppose. But LeBron James is a universal like that. There's not people out there who are like, wow, I really hate everything about LeBron James. Why didn't go after LeBron? He's, he didn't want to do it either, he's just refusing. Meanwhile, how about this report Tesla? That's about the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk. Oh different CEO Tesla has reportedly installed around 3,000 solar roofs since 2016. Matt, they originally had promised to install 1,000 solar roofs per week. So they've done 3000 total and seven years. Didn't quite get there. I don't even 1000. Oh, I'm not gonna bother to do the math because I think that they're off. I think they're missing their target targets. I think by like four zeros at the end. Yeah, here's another headline. The other Chinese apps taking the US by storm. Something else to worry about the other Chinese apps in the top. 10 downloads once called cap cut, which is a video editing. App also owned by tiktok parent, company by dance. And no one seems to care about, where's the, where's the operation? They're shying, which is a fashion app owned by Chinese billionaire, Chris shoe. So Chris, not his real name, or is his real name. So it sounds like this is another zucky kind of app rights owned by just a single person, right? It's all of them. Yeah. And then he was shopping app owned by Chinese owned online retail giant, PDD Holdings. So she again, should we just outlaw China for just from the globe? Know. Look if anything we should look at these apps and we should say China has us figured out. We like to look at ourselves do stupid things and be loud and buy stuff that is America. How about this? I got us figure out how this man back to France. I know you hate when I talk about France France, almost as much as China, France is to become the first European country to regulate internet influencers, regulating what they can say sell. Right. You don't seem that interested, okay? This is required social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram tiktok to be to set up channels for consumers to report fraud. We I thought you'd like this No regulate like someone regulating Tech know I regulate what you can think and say, I don't know. Well, the regular advertising industry is regulated know heavily. I mean, sort of accept not on like they're regulating the influencers, but not Facebook, and Instagram and tiktok. I'm pretty sure that during the Super Bowl, you can't do a line of coke, like in the back of someone's Chevy. Super Bowl not on Facebook. You could put the line on Facebook. Okay. Well Fred you can't I guess. well, if you're an influencer, right, and I'm sure they're going to Define what in India are, which is a certain number of followers or It's not so good, France, get your Coke snorting off of directors. Here, I'm gonna let's go on the Bro culture and I'll say the biggest, I'll say the merger for last so you can talk about it. Matt at least three billionaires received subpoenas this week connected to a lawsuit against JP Morgan over. The banks relationship with Lake convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. That would be Google. Co-founder, Sergey Brin. Hyatt Hotels, executive chair, Thomas pritzker, and co-founder executive chair, and former CEO of Boston properties Mortimer, Zuckerman, how about that? Yeah, is Epstein's the gift that keeps giving. Okay. Let's go to linger on Epstein at all. Let's go to stakeholders rule. Here ago, Elon Musk back in the news. Elon Musk broke the law with a tweet about Tesla stock options back in 2018, according to the US 5th, Circuit Court of Appeals Said that musk threatened staff in the wake of a union is unionization Drive. I mean, I know this is not going to surprise you but again another indication, why his ESG rating might not be solely based on the fact that he may cars that you don't have to use gas for the rating is a scam. That's true. It's a scam it doesn't. Yeah because it includes this because it includes the CEO breaking the law by threatening its workers because anybody who's counting the number of places that he's a CEO and then the things that he does as CEO at those places is not actually doing their due diligence. The due diligence is we said we are here to save the world with electric cars. That's all you need just full stop. That's it. That's the only thing that matters. How about this? Oh and stop discriminating against oil companies because didn't he just come out recently and say like he's Pro oil and we need oil for the foreseeable future years of too crapping on. If the years of crapping on it he's all for it to come up political animal. I suppose let's go back to Howard Schultz. Found, oh, Starbucks, labor washing about this little nugget Starbucks, fired the worker, who led unionization movement, just days after Howard, Schultz was grilled by Congress. Her name was Alexis Rizzo. She's worked for, she has worked for seven years as a shift shift, supervisor at a New York store, where she led a unionization effort, and I guess Howard was pretty pissed off by being embarrassed. And they, I'm not retaliation know, for being embarrassed by the By the Senate hearings. Know what, how else do you read this but Howard's not there anymore. It's not him. But what about his 68% influence on the board? According to board saber metrics? No, no, he's not there. He said it and he's not a billionaire and he's not upset at you. Just he just wants to hug everyone with the green apron. Is there any other way to interpret this though? Is this a direct F? You know, I'm pretty sure. That's just an if you I mean like he could have just tweeted Fu but this is way better, right? That's true. How about this one? McDonald's. Is closing its us offices and telling International stuff to work remotely as they're preparing for layoffs. And they have a really weird excuse for this. They said there's stopping people from going to the office so that it can deliver Staffing, notices, remotely, citing, The increased likelihood that people will be traveling during the week of April 3rd. So there what they are being considerate to our to our spring break plans by laying us off? Yeah. Why can't they just say, like we're really afraid of, you know, people with AR-15s. Know, this is the new thing though. Like, as soon as you're gonna do a mass, layoff you make every? So now our contact home like was a necessity during the pandemic but now working from home is what you make people do when you're about to fight. So the necessity for management, it's okay. Yeah. Now we don't have to look at you when we fire you anymore. Just work from home. And when you turn on your computer, if it doesn't work anymore, you're fired. Let's go back to France. This is like do we I'm calling this like we're all over. This is like a weird like oh, it's almost like a shareholder proposal this one. Okay, so it's like an alternative democracy vote in a referendum. On Sunday, Paris, residents voted 89% against keeping shared e-scooters in the city. Isn't that kind of like a shower proposal of Paris had a proxy statement? Shareholder proposal number eight brought by James Mick Ritchie to ban but they're banning them. Well because they're they're incredibly dangerous nuisance. Let's, I mean, I don't know if you've been to a city that rents these things out there, it is comical to watch people weave in and out of traffic on the, I love them absolutely comical. Especially, I love pushing these cities that are not grid-based and the Taurus have literally zero idea where they're going with, no idea. No, it's fantastic. We did it in Rome. That's what we what I put my five year old on one of those things with me. Well, the good news is that I would expect that very elite. Italians Romans wouldn't really understand the system. Well, enough to figure out how to get a referendum up to a vote. Is that Italy? How dare you? I don't know. I thought I thought you'd like that one, the first year olds in the city. Know. I, I like those. I want to ban the cars, not like this. Yeah, yeah, true hearts. I like this. Why are we getting rid of the thing that's actually better? Actually, most of the greens in Paris do want to ban the cars. Actually agree with you, in this one. Yeah, great. So like what like we're just gonna it's just like everyone wants to ban everything. Here's another reason why I pulled that story is because unlike the alternative democracy at public corporations, this is going to be enacted by September 1st. So why can't corporations act? Wow. They when they're votes go through. Why do they have been home? September 1st. That means I need to get to Paris and ride every e-scooter before then. Let's move over to dystopia. Here's a good one, former Google CEO. Eric Schmidt says those in AI industry have to make sure the technology doesn't harm, but just helps Oh, thank you. Eric really useful. Especially I love when I guy who like works for the events defense industry tells me that that thing should help harm, but really the audacity of this statement really though? I mean, just the the Clean Hands. Miss of it. All right. Yeah, I didn't have anything to do with our terrible, terrible society that we live in now as CEOs. Google all the text. Yeah. All the tech Titans and CEOs and billionaires. They really just, they just don't want to get involved. They want to, I mean, they definitely want to have the power, but they just don't want to get involved. I will say this, I finally watched The Social dilemma last night. I hadn't watched it because I knew what it was gonna say and I was like, I do, I really want like two hours of depression. Yeah, I watched 30 minutes of it and deleted YouTube from my phone while. Oh, really. I deleted. I'm deleting every social media. No. Okay, it is. Yeah horrific. So Eric tell me, thanks but no thanks maybe I'm way too old for this discussion. I dropped them. Maybe I'm too old for the discussion, how it I only use YouTube to watch like, you know, the highlights of like Little League games in like Peru. that's, Already here. Well, I have a lot of nephews. Why is YouTube considered social media, exactly? Because the algorithm it's feeding things that it thinks you're gonna want to watch, right? It's attention grabbing and if you look at like if you turn on the screen time app on your iPhone, it tells you how long really? It's actually like driving you to continue watching just by showing you stuff that thinks you're going to like it. Mostly shames me for not using my rowing machine and shows me these buff dudes to row rare. Really and look really fit unlike pasty loser that I I mean, for me, it's like, it's like watching clips from Colbert, Seth Meyers and SNL search for the show. I mean, it is, I know it has use, but the crazy thing was, there's a point in the movie where it has all these Executives from all these companies, CEOs of them software Engineers, none of their. And there's that, they're talking about like, how terrible these things are. And that's one thing. And then they talk about the, the app that is their problem, right? Like and they're like, we built these things. We know how it works. We know what it's doing and I still can't stop using it. My, the one that gets me is this app? And I was like, oh, fuck that. Yeah. Like when the people who built it, no longer can control themselves, they build it so well, It's gone, that's out. So yeah, Eric Schmidt no harm, just helping AI industry. Sure buddy, sure, speaking of which Clearview AI. We talked about Clearview, AI a lot in the past. There's a headline did today. Clearview, AI scraped, 30 billion images, from Facebook and gave them to Cops us. Police have used the database nearly a million times. Oh good. God, he's really likes that about this one refunding. BuzzFeed publishes, AI generated. Travel guides collaborative, collaboratively written with Buzzy. The robot. How about this new rule for you to consider Matt? If AI. Can generate content about a certain thing. We should just ban that content from the internet, right? Because why do we why does it all kind of like aligned with what you're saying about YouTube the social dilemma. Why do we even need content? That can be generated by AI? This, not Artful, it's not important. It's what is it? I saw a post from somebody on LinkedIn, who said, they used chat GPT 50 to 60 times a day house that impossible. They use it for everything, they use it to research anything and they say, they said you have to learn how to like interact with it, so it doesn't give you fake news where you keep asking it, these questions to get it to where you want it to be, but they said like the need, it's cut their time, looking for things like when you're like looking on YouTube for some video, just ask chat GPT and it will find it faster than you can type a search in well like and I was reading that thinking to myself, That you say four seconds, well you say four regulation know that I'm happy you actually increase the amount of nonsense content that you're gonna get right? Because you know, you're better off wasting time searching for things and not getting the dribble that you're gonna get right between watching the social dilemma and seeing like that post and reading about Chad GPT and Bloomberg just announced a new their own chat AI function. They input 50 billion pieces according to them of financial information, Financial content into a chatbot train it and now you can ask it like to look up, anything Financial on the Paisley, a paid product, Bloomberg terminal, right, what? But like, all those things make me want to do is go outside. I don't like I. Now, now, all of a sudden, I have like this deep deep urge to put my phone in a bathtub full of water and go outside for a while. Well, luckily, I have a master's degree in searching, so I don't even have to use. I can do it myself when you have to search for credit suisse's ibida, that's true. How about this one? Sam Altman. Compared open ai's Ambitions with the scale of the Manhattan Project in 2019. Oh, that's not what you want to compare it to Altman. Cautioned that the AI would would come with a serious risk of misuse drastic accidents in societal disruption. But then he said, went on to say, am I doing something good? Or really bad? If you have to ask the question, just stop doing the thing. No, I was gonna say that if you have to ask, am I doing good or bad? Okay, that's maybe okay. But if you have to ask, am I doing good or really bad? Yeah, you're right Matt's, right? Get a new job. Yeah. Park Ranger with that job. Yeah. Clean up a trail unbelievable. We have all these like, Tech CEOs, who are asking for a pause on a thing that they all want built, stop building it if you really have to pause it because it's so dangerous. Why are we doing this thing? Like, I don't understand what's happening, a couple of more outside, couple more outside, one from the blowhard index. I like this one, a case of mistaken identity is sparking a sell-off in Republic First Bank core which had fallen by more than 40% this month because investors have been used it with embattled First Republic Bank Republic. First CEO, Thomas guys, will wrote in a letter on the website. We are not First Republic Bank very soon, I like that. Like and I did a little digging and Matt, it turns out, he's right. Why? First of all, they only have one female director, not four. Oh, and they have a chairman emeritus on their board with maybe the greatest name in our database, Harry Madonna. That's not like an onion date. No, this is the chairman emeritus at Republic First Bank court. And can I also add something? Yeah, Harry Madonna. That's right. Can I also one more thing which I'm calling total bulshit on this. If there was mistaken identity and their stock was going up, he would never complete never know, there's no there's no press release going out, calling this lies, call this seal. He's definitely like we're, he's gonna be like looking at the end of your stock price and looking at his bonus and being like, wait, I can't be held accountable because they got my name wrong. Like this. Just, this is a different company. Don't take my money away. Yeah, well, you know, happily accepted a bonus. If it went up, this is a probably a check in issue's favor because they wouldn't they wouldn't screw this up. Right. Everyone's mad at ISS. But they but they know the difference. Well how much influence did they say Harry Madonna? Had unfortunately? Yeah, well they don't they don't have influencer data only, we do. So they don't, that's correct. And finally, I don't know if you want to talk about this but since you're not gonna be here, Wednesday for a Wednesday, did a show. I thought I'd throw this headline at you. More fodder for the walk data Wars. The headline, is another black guy for ESG. First of all, I don't really know what that means. Black. I had the ESU under. Okay. In this world order, ESG would have two eyes, right? Because, you know, because let's let's play out the symbols and the imagery here, right? Yeah. So you can get two black guys. Alright, so another block. So this, this writer is suggesting that all of esg's eyes. Now have our blackened. Both eyes are currently that's, that's a bluebird. What was the first black guy? Yeah, I have no idea. They don't say that. They're basically saying the issue is a complete failure, but that's why I don't, you know, I couldn't be true. But anyway, here's the headline. Another black guy for ESG in msci's, his mask downgrade, a change in methodology will see ratings on thousands of funds lowered, highlighting. Once again, the problems was such scores. So they're saying because of a tweaking methodology and some of the scores of it. You know, we're talking about a small percentage of scores out of many, many thousands that this is a Second black eye for ESG. This is, I've talked to no less than three reporters about this. Have you really? Yeah, because it's stupid well, and none of them are gonna quote me because I keep saying, you guys don't have a fucking clue. What's like the half of the ratings, quote down with a mass. Downgrade is they were raiding ETFs. That would hold futures of gold, right. So a gold future is not the asset of gold and they were trying to assign a rating to basically cash, Futures and they were high ratings. So what msci I did is say, well this is dumb. We shouldn't write those things so we'll make them unrated. We'll just take away the rating till we figure out if we can write them, okay? The other half of them, msci changed the methodology. So that, you know, when we worked there, the ratings don't move that much like the they stay pretty something like, so. 85% or something of the rating, 80 to 85%. Of the ratings are exactly the same year over year. So there's very little big motion like and when there is motion is usually like a little bit, they were giving credit to companies where like a bottom rated company. Which was an asset of a fund would go from Triple C the bottom to B the next to bottom and they gave an adjustment Factor. For momentum because that company moved in an upward Direction they said, okay, we will give you a little bit of a bump on your fund ratings for being at companies where the ratings went up. Well, That's dumb because that doesn't tell you anything about the underlying asset. It doesn't even tell you much about directionality. When only 15% of the company is really have that happen. And it's not doesn't tell you anything about intentionality so they you can just see how it happened. They're sitting around and they're like, this is kind of dumb. This doesn't really work. It's not additive, it's not giving us more information. So let's remove that adjustment factor and it will cause the ratings to shift in this way to be more accurate. Now, when they want to do something, to make something more accurate. Now, it's a black. That's what I for doing something that makes it more functional. That's the takeaway from this incredibly profound thesis, right? Is that if you if you at first screw up in our eyes and get a black eye, you can't fix it. There's no because you if you attempt to get better at what you're doing, we're gonna punch you again on the other side of your face. You got that. Thank you. Bloomberg, for that. Great. Yeah. Bloomberg, not on it. We've been talking for four hours now. Before we get out of here, do you, do you want to talk about the I'll set it up for you? This horrible Bromance merger WWE and UFC owner Endeavor agreed to his massive 21 billion dollar merge. We've been talking a lot about WWE recently because of adorable owner. Vince, McMahon of the new Enterprise Matt Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel we'll run the combined company, a CEO and WWE majority owner and executive chair, Vince, McMahon is assuming the executive chair role, the new combined company that's what's happening at that merger. But you know what? Since we're already 10 hours into my, it's a laborious headlines. How about this? You have a lot of incredible. Researcher. You've done these two horrible. I mean they call them public companies but really not ever companies. They're not, let's cover this Wednesday. Woke data will will like you're still here. Yeah. It's a tease teases. We'll pretend like you'll still hear It will will play some of what you found on Wednesday and then the audience won't feel sad that you're really like where you're gonna go like Mars or whatever you're going, they don't care. Um, but I'll tease with this, the ultimate in sweaty, bro, mergers, Fake public sweaty, Brom merger. And for those of you who care, Matt is not exaggerating at all, not Not even disturbing one tiny bit of an exaggeration. Disturbing combination of two entities. And, and the only proof you'll ever need that these fake public companies. It's bullshit. It's just, it's bad, it has to be bad for something everyone. Get away from them. That's all we got for Monday. Real. Get some tape of me on Wednesday, talking about sweaty, bro. Merger at WWE, and Endeavor. And until then tomorrow's, corporate theater. I'm gone for like, two weeks. I hear from me at all. It'll be the Damien show. Just preparing yourself till I get back. Goodbye until tomorrow for Damien. Goodbye, again.