
Retirement plans could get riskier & we're back to coal eh?
Loading summary
A
Score more with the college branded Venmo Debit card and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash Got paid back with the Venmo Debit card, you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want like game day, snacks, gear, tickets and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up now@venmo.com collegecard the Venmo Mastercard is issued by the Bancorp Bank NA Select Schools available Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply at venmo me stashterms max
B
$100 cash back per month Good Morning Brew Daily Show I'm Neal Freyman.
C
And I'm Toby Howell.
B
Today don't look now, but Cole is having a renaissance.
C
Then private equity is sneaking its way into your 401k. It's Tuesday, March 31st. Let's ride.
B
Good morning. Remember Allbirds? How could you not back in 2018, those eco friendly wool shoes adorn the feet of every tech worker in Silicon Valley and gained traction with many yuppies of the era. Well, much like the other signature products of that time like hq, Trivia and We Work, it's all come crashing down. Yesterday, Allbirds agreed to sell all of its assets and IP for $39 million, which is essentially pennies considering this mighty brand was once worth 4 billion. Toby fashion is fickle, but Allbirds offers the perfect example of how to strike gold and squirrel it all away.
C
Here's the deal. If both Neal Freyman and Toby Howell, world renowned leaders in fashion expertise, owned a pair of your shoes, that was probably the top for a brand. But I do feel for Allbirds there. How I Built this episode was awesome. I loved listening about how merino wool was a actually new technology that they brought to the shoe market, but I think they were just a victim of overexpansion. They strayed way too far away from their comfy lifestyle sneakers. At one point they were selling leggings, they were selling puffer jackets and they just got a little bit of a negative stigma because of the massive amount of tech bros that ended up wearing them. But I thought it was a good product. We rocked them both. It is a little bit sad to see them so far from their peak.
B
And now a word from our sponsor company Retreat. Attention fans of Jury Duty. From the creators of Jury Duty comes the next installment of this documentary style comedy series that captivated audiences. This season takes place on an annual company retreat where all the employees at Rock and Grandma's Hot Sauce are actors except one.
C
At the center of it all is a new hero, Anthony, a hard working, kind and very patient temp employee who has no idea that the company is fake and that the entire retreat is staged around him.
B
And here is the fun part. You'll be able to try all four flavors of Rock and Grandma's Hot Sauce sold on Amazon.
C
Jury Duty presents Company Retreat is streaming now on Prime Video. Catch the feel good comedy that'll knock your sauce off and not Too long
B
your 401k could end up being a mix of stocks, bonds and Private Equity yes, you soon could introduce yourself at weddings as a P E guy or gal after the Labor Department proposed new regulations yesterday that would open up 401ks to private investments like private equity and private credit. While still not finalized, it'd be a huge win for these fund managers that have been foaming at the mouth to snag a piece of the $14.2 trillion market for retirement plans. They've argued for years that regular folks like you or us should have access to the investments that have long been reserved for the pros like like startup companies, real estate or infrastructure projects. But the push into your retirement accounts couldn't have come at a more awkward time for the private credit industry. These shadowy institutions, which work like banks to connect companies with capital, have seen a massive boom since the global financial crisis, a boom that recently seems on the verge of going bust. In recent months, investors in private credit have been trying to pull their funds, only to be told that those redemptions would be limited, which has caused a minor panic on Wall Street. Some of finance's biggest names, including J.P. morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, have compared the current private credit environment to the one that preceded the crash of 2008, which means, Toby, there's going to be plenty of scrutiny on whether these types of riskier alternative investments should be plunked into Americans piggy banks.
C
Let's just zoom out from the current moment of private credit and the fact that it could be a very shaky market right now. Is this something that investors actually want their portfolio even in the good times? And Josh Brown, the CEO of Richold's Wealth Management, says absolutely not. He says there's absolutely no chance 401k investors would get access to the best alt managers of the best funds, basically saying that you're going to get the bottom of the barrel when it comes to these private credit deals, so you're not getting the top of it. He he goes on to say, you are not the sovereign wealth fund of Norway. You will not be treated that way. So even if this was the best of times for private credit, which it isn't, then you still wouldn't be getting the best deals. Senator Elizabeth Warren is also someone who has railed against this. She says as cracks emerge in the private credit market, private equity returns fell to 16 year lows and crypto keeps tumbling. Trump has decided now is the time to stick all of these risky assets into Americans. For one case, that is the general, you know, consensus of people who don't want this is that this is too risky of assets to be putting in retirement nest eggs for the majority of average investors. We don't need this. You can just easily get a good return with a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds.
B
And it's not just that these are riskier investments, it's the higher fees that come with that. So that's another big pushback on private equity and private credit to these retirement accounts is that for many decades, these fees have just pushed lower and lower and lower. So Americans really aren't paying these fund managers much of a fee at all. But if you introduce private credit and private equity into these fund accounts, they're going to be higher fees. Let's talk about the supporters, because there are plenty of supporters of this plan. They say, well, look at the professional investors. They have access to a suite of investments like real estate that don't fluctuate like stocks and bonds do. So they say, yeah, why won't we want to give the American people greater diversification into their retirement accounts? It could lead to better returns overall. And Scott percent, the Treasury Secretary did take this into account. He was working with the Labor Department on these rules and said that they actually must meet six different criteria to take investors considerations into account.
C
I mean, the timing is awkward, though. I mean, you mentioned that it is a very shaky time for the credit, private credit market in general. Just some of those cracks that I want to highlight, in addition the ones you already did is the fact that Moody's downgraded a private credit fund run by KKR to junk status last week. They are saying that the funds outstanding loans are not being repaid. There's all this anxiety around the fact that a lot of these private credit funds invested heavily into software businesses and software is being disrupted by AI. So those are the bear case. In addition to the fact that maybe these assets shouldn't go in at all into your 401k, the fact that right now is not the right time to do it because of just how, you know, not good the market feels to a lot of people.
B
And what's interesting about all of this is that it's actually not illegal in the first place. For plan sponsors, which is our which are your employers to put private credit, private, private equity or alternative investments into your 401k plans. They just don't do it because they could be sued to oblivion. And that's been happening over the past few years is that a bunch of shareholders are suing these plan sponsors, saying that you're not actually protecting our investment. So it is completely legal, but there has been a lot of legal liability going around. And what this Labor Department proposal does is give them what they're calling a safe harbor to shield them from a ton of litigation. Moving on. The historic energy disruption caused by the war in Iran is driving many countries back into the warm, sooty embrace of coal. Japan and South Korea have already lifted curbs on coal burning power plants to keep the lights on. Thailand has restarted coal units. And Indonesia, the world's largest coal exporter, is now allowing miners to increase production, reversing a previous policy that aimed to dramatically shrink output. As a result, coal stocks are mooning, with Australian coal producer Yann coal jumping 40% and Pennsylvania's core natural resources up 30% since the war began. According to Bloomberg. Coal's resurgence was not on anyone's bingo card heading into this year. In fact, 2026 was supposed to be the peak of global coal demand, which was projected to start declining by the end of the decade. But then the war happened and everything changed. Liquefied natural gas is now trapped in the Middle east, and the world's largest gas fields in Qatar, are severely damaged and will take years to rebuild. So the countries that rely on Middle Eastern gas to generate electricity to power factories to basically keep their economies functioning are faced with a choice. Either pay sky high prices for whatever remaining gas is sloshing around the world, or fire up the higher polluting but dependable coal plants you already have. And when it comes to something as critical as meeting your basic energy needs, it's an easy choice.
C
It feels like a lot of emerging economies are saying, man, we got the short end of the stick here because we were sold this promise that gas was going to be sort of this bridge fuel to take us from, you know, a emerging economy into a developed one where we can then invest more heavily in renewable fuel sources. But now that there's been this massive, you know, war, second time in two
B
years, right in four years, they are
C
saying, like, we got the short end of this deal. Like, we. It's being challenged again, this promise of this being a bridge fuel. So they're going back to, you know, the other side of the bridge and saying, all right, well, we have coal. We know it's a dirtier fuel source, but at least we can rely on it. So that is why you're seeing them kind of dusting off these mothballed coal plants and saying, we just want fuel, and this is the way we know we can get it.
B
And most of the impact is going to be in Asia, which buys about 90% of the liquefied natural gas that the Middle east produces. South Korea imports almost one fifth of its liquefied natural gas from the Middle East. Also, South Korea and Japan at the same time have huge coal bases that they can easily fire back up and offset all of the gas, all of the gas shortages that are coming from the Middle East. So the. The biggest coal renaissance is going to come from places like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and India, which already have large coal bases and are able to easily tap into that fuel source.
C
Meanwhile, China is the world's largest coal consumer, but they have had a very longstanding campaign where they've been diversifying their energy supply. So they have the coal if they wanted it, but they also have a ton of renewables. The US Is actually pretty insulated as well. But Trump's administration has recently given coal a pretty big boost domestically. An agency called the Terra Energy center announced a $1 billion investment in what would be the first new coal power project in more than a decade in the US So coal is seeing a little bit of a resurgence in the US as well. One other way you could diversify away from natural gas or oil or coal is biofuels in general. Brazil has been kind of held up as this standard of a country that invested a lot in this, making their biofuel industry pretty sophisticated. They're the second largest producer of ethanol, third largest producer of biodiesel. So they've been weathering the storm without having to turn on coal pants, without having to, you know, rely on natural gas by the fact that they can put plants into their fuel and make their gas stretch a little bit further. So they are weathering the storm a little bit better than other countries are without having to turn on these coal power plants.
B
And quickly, a few more war updates. US gasoline prices have now hit, as of today, dollars, an average, for the first time since 2022, they were below $3 from before the war. And last night, the Wall Street Journal also reported that President Trump has been telling aides that he's willing to end the war against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed. So they would end the bombing campaign and hopefully work diplomatic channels or rely on Europe or the Gulf to open the Strait of Hormuz. So that's a, that's something that could affect the markets today.
C
Moving on, Harry Styles is posted up at MSG Bruno Mars has been in Vegas for what feels like forever. Blackpink's Lisa announced yesterday she'd join them with her own Las Vegas residency. Back in the day, musicians packed up tour buses and came to your city. Now they're asking fans to come to them. This is part of a growing trend of stars choosing to play at fewer venues, essentially passing on their travel costs to fans instead. The list of sedentary stars is a who's who of music right now. Bad bunny played 31 shows in San Juan, Puerto Rico last summer. Adele has planted herself in Vegas and Munich. Some stars are insisting they are using the additional savings to enhance the experience for fans. When Dead and company did some shows at the Sphere, the manager of the band said they recreated Grateful Dead's famous Wall of Sound and opened the exhibit up for free. Bad Bunny famously reserved his first nine shows exclusively for locals to attend, but the general way the industry is going is away from Taylor Swift's sprawling Globetrotting Eras tour and towards a much more localized show schedule. Harry Styles defended his decision in a recent interview with Zane Lowe, saying that he thinks performing a residency in one location leads to a better show than touring in multiple cities. But fans would disagree. Here he is singing We Belong Together, one Styles die hard told the Wall Street Journal lyrics from his new song Aperture. But getting together feels unaffordable and unattainable to a lot of folks. Neal There is a concentrated effort to concentrate concerts.
B
First of all, props to Lisa. Lisa is the first K pop artist to stage a Las Vegas residency. We got this news yesterday. She's probably the biggest individual artist to come out of the K pop boom of the last decade, at least on Instagram. She is is the largest following of all K pop stars with more than 107 million followers. She was on White Lotus. She is a brand ambassador for Bulgari and Nike. She's just a larger than life personality. Now she gets her own Las Vegas stage. But you're right, this speaks to the larger Vegas a vacation of concerts. And it's not surprising when you do it in Vegas. But it is surprising when someone like Harry Styles does it at Madison Square Garden and makes everybody around the country come to Madison Square Garden. And I'm blaming Harry Styles, actually, because he actually inaugurated perhaps this more sedentary trend of making people come to him in 2022 with his tour, his global tour that barely, you know, that just went to a few cities.
C
Yeah, he is going to Amsterdam, London, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, New York City and Melbourne. But that doesn't necessarily feel like a globe spanning tour. Lot of people, especially because he's doing 30 nights at Madison Square Garden. The issue is the demand is absolutely there. Well over 11 million people registered for tickets for his 30 shows at MSG. That is way more than the capacity of 30 Madison Square Garden. So if you are a star, you're sitting down, doing the math and saying, well, clearly people will come see me if I'm Harry Styles, because I'm Harry Styles at Madison Square Garden. It's a lot easier on me. It's a lot easier on my body to, you know, not have to travel around the world constantly. Why wouldn't I just post up here? Because I'll make more money, travel less, and fans still want to come see me. That math is hard to ignore if you are an artist.
B
Right. It's. And it's very hard to ignore if you're also a fan because in addition to sky high concert tickets, which are have been booming over the past few years, you have to pay for additional travel and lodging as well. But it seems like we're just never going to see anything like the eras tour anymore. I mean, Taylor Swift went to 51 cities, 21 countries over five continents. It seems like that particular era is over when it comes to touring.
C
All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. Neil, feel my bicep.
B
I should not have to say no to this every day, Toby, but how
C
else will you know about all the goodness from Flav cities all in one protein smoothies?
B
Because I can read, Toby, and I can see they're made with real whole food ingredients. 25 grams of protein, 10 grams of collagen, and functional mushrooms.
C
Well, can reading tell you they taste as good as any milkshake?
B
Yes, I'm the one who originally told you that. And you can read all about it too, @shop flav city.com that's shop flav city.com. toby, what do you think of these new tax laws?
C
Why are they making new ones? I don't even know the old ones.
B
And that's why there's TurboTax, because being tax compliant is among small business owners top concerns. But it's it's often time consuming and research intensive to figure out taxes on your own.
C
Turbo Tax Experts for Business can match you with a tax expert with expertise and knowledge for your specific industry to ensure you have confidence you're maximizing deductions and your taxes are filed correctly.
B
Learn more@turbotax.com business that's turbotax.com business
C
marketing your brand these days probably feels harder than finding a good avocado at the grocery store at 5pm Lucky for you,
B
Instacart built a one stop shop for grocery media across more than 2200 retail banners to help you reach all sorts of high intent consumers.
C
Instacart's ad platform covers the entire shopping journey and it's all backed by real time optimization and closed loop reporting.
B
Keep your brand top of mind and top of the grocery list with Instacart. Hit the checkout with instacart@ads.instacart.com that's ads.instacart.com
C
One thing to know about this podcast is that Neil is a baseball fan, and I am less so. But despite my general shunning of America's pastime, my social media feeds have been taken over by baseball recently. Specifically highlights of the sport's new automated ball strike system that allows players to use cameras to challenge calls from umpires. I've seen so many clips, in fact, I'm going to go ahead and declare it a Toby's trend because of the sheer amount of attention baseball is getting right now. The ABS system in particular has been the star of the young season so far. We've already seen a batter win consecutive challenges on two straight missed calls from umpire CB Buckner, leading to 40,000 home fans jeering in his face. We've seen the Mariners Randy Rosarina pull the ABs equivalent of a bat flip, walking well down the first baseline after challenging a third strike call. His confidence was ultimately rewarded after the cameras confirmed his suspicions that the pitch had been a ball to get deep with it. So much of the current zeitgeist is reflected in the introduction of the new ABS technology into a very old game. Sam Adler Bell, the co host of the Know your Enemy podcast, summed it up better than I can, so I will paraphrase his words here. The ABS system sits at the vex crossroads of several highly charged dynamics in our collective life, he wrote on Successful challenges by your team feel amazing, like a long awaited blow against authority. But the overall existence of ABS inevitably ignites anxieties about human judgment. And yet the challenge system relies on human hubris, intuition, boldness and risk. It's a very compelling encounter between populism and the machine. Anxiety about robots replacing humans. Yep, it's their cathartic protests against authority figures. Baseball's got it on a more elemental level. Bloomberg columnist Connor Sen noted this might be the first time in the history of pro sports that players have the opportunity to humiliate the umpire. Slash referees, with home fans getting to cheer it on. Neal, even for a non baseball fan, this is tremendous content. I am all in on ABs and baseball right now.
B
Yeah, you can get absolutely deep with it, which I encourage. It's very interesting to think about how humans interact with each other, to human and humans and robots and the incoming robot takeover. But at the same time, at a more basic level, it's just great entertainment. As you mentioned, it's just great content. It adds a new element to watching a baseball game which for years had been a chore. You have to sit down there for three and a half hours, watch a nine inning slog. But thanks to different, like thanks to critical product changes that MLB has made over the past few years, like adding the pitch clock to make games more like two and a half hours and then adding abs, which adds this whole new element to the game. It's creating a more compelling content product and eyeballs are everything these days and baseball is winning the attention war right now.
C
I think it's good to this interdiction the technology because it is not human versus robot. It is still human versus human because there is the element of having to challenge. You have to tap your head and say, hey, I think, think that pitch was a ball. I think that pitch was a strike. Which is why people like it. It's much better than the NFL too because the NFL still has all this human judgment when it comes to replay. ABS has a definitive yes or no answer. So I think that is great. I love that it's so cathartic for fans too because how many times have you seen a referee, you know, steal a win away or an umpire steal a game away from your team and all you wish you could do is just say, why doesn't anyone hold them accountable now they are accountable when it happens at a home game, when the Reds, you know, challenged two consecutive pitches, they had already hit two homers that day. The cheers in the stadium were louder than any cheers that they had seen thus far. So it really is a drama inducing element. It's cathartic for fans. It's so fun. It goes viral on social media. Just has all the makings of making baseball just a very zeitgeist sport right now.
B
Yeah. So baseball has a lot of momentum. There's a lot of talk of it leapfrogging the NBA as America's second favorite sport. There are a few problems that it still needs to address, and one of them is the fragmentation of where fans can watch games. According to the Athletic, if you are a Yankees fan in New York, to watch every single game this season, it would require navigating 10 networks, five or more subscriptions, and would cost almost $800 for the season with minimum subscription costs. A Mariners fans laid out. A Mariners fan also laid out what it would take to watch the first five games for the Mariners. And it was Mariners TV game one, Apple TV Game two, Mariners TV Game three, Peacock Game four, TBS for game five. And then the first game of the entire season of the MLB was on Netflix. So this is a problem that I think Rob Ban from the commissioner and everyone involved in baseball, including entertainment execs, need to figure out. This is not just a baseball thing. This is a sports everywhere problem. The jokes are that you can watch. There are jokes that like you can watch every single inning on a different streaming service. And it was almost too true.
C
Here's the thing, Neil. I'm not going to watch the actual games. Let me see the clips as they filtered through to social media. That might be a you thing, but like, again, part of my point is that this is uniquely crafted for social media. They have all these micro moments within a very long season that filter its way to social media. So again, I think that's what baseball is doing, right? The fact that it has become a lot more clippable lately. Go ahead and watch all the games if you want, but I'm probably not going to navigate that maze of subscriptions. Maybe that is why I'm not.
B
That's a big problem.
C
Yeah.
B
Okay, let's run to the finish with some final headlines. Insider trading questions within the Trump administration are only escalating. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that a broker for U.S. defense Secretary Pete Hegseth inquired about a multimillion dollar investment in major defense contractors in the weeks before the US Israeli strike on Iran, citing people close to the situation. Ultimately, the deal didn't go through, but it allegedly raised enough questions that BlackRock, which was offering this defense investment, flagged it internally it's also unclear whether Hexath knew what his broker was doing or how much latitude he had given his broker. In a post on X, Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell called the report entirely false and fabricated. Still, it adds to growing pressure on the administration to explain strangely well timed bets on stocks in the oil market that have occurred ahead of big Trump induced market moves during the war.
C
What many pointed out that it probably wasn't even going to be a good trade if it was placed. Idf, which was the fund that his broker was looking at, has risen 28% over the past year, but it's down about 14% over the past month, right around the time when the war broke out. Also, apparently IDF is a very illiquid fund that doesn't get a ton of volume per day, which is probably why it made it easier for BlackRock to flag. Again, all of these reports are being denied by those close to Hegseth, but it was funny that people pointed out that it probably wouldn't even be made money on the trade had it gone through. Moving on, the CEO of Air Canada is stepping down after botching the response to the deadly crash at LaGuardia involving the deaths of two company pilots. Michael Russo announced he's retiring by the end of Q3 after receiving backlash for a video he put out expressing his condolences for the accident. It wasn't what he said, but the language that he said it in that struck struck the wrong chord. He delivered the entire thing in English. This did not go over well in Quebec, where Air Canada is headquartered, where French is the majority language and where one of the two pilots killed was from. The only French he spoke was Bonjour at the beginning and mercy at the end. Quebec's National assembly voted 92. 0, calling for Rousseau to step down. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney piled on reminding everyone that Air Canada is legally required to communicate in both official languages. Neil Rousseau apologized, saying he was very sorry that his inability to speak French had diverted attention away from the grief of the families. But by then it had spiraled into a very large controversy.
B
I think it was a bit flabbergasting for us in the United States to see why this was such a big deal, that he said it in English and not French. But you know, French is a big deal to the people of Quebec. About 80% of people in that province are French speaking, and this was not the first time that he got into hot water around using English instead of French. French he spoke to back in 2021, Russo spoke to a bunch of Montreal business leaders gave a speech almost entirely in English that that received a ton of backlash as well. So he pledged to learn French and he took 300 hours of French classes. And the fact that by 2026 he could only deliver this statement in English, I think just added more fuel to the fire under and he was already under the microscope. So he has decided to retire. It's a fascinating story. Earlier this month, WNBA players secured a historic new labor deal that will result in an almost 400% pay raise. Turns out they had a secret ace in their hand. Helping out with negotiations, Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia Goldin. In 2023, Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel Prize in economics. Then, according to the Wall Street Journal, she was flooded by requests, but only accepted a handful. One of those requests was from WNBA players asking her to help them get the pay boost they've long felt they deserved. Goldin said yes, perhaps because she's the most qualified person in the world for the job. For decades, golden has painstakingly researched women's roles in the workplace and their pay discrepancy with men. When the ink was dry, the players scored not just a massive salary bump, but what golden told the Journal is the biggest pay increase any union has ever negotiated.
C
The golden kind of crushed this thing. That was the general vibe from players and reporters. She did two things. She framed the question very well. She kept bringing negotiations back to this very central issue of what fraction of the league revenue is going to go to players salary and benefits. So everyone was just saying from a negotiation perspective that clarified everything. We just want a bigger piece of the pie. And that helped them win a bigger piece of the pie. And then she also did something where she built a life table for players. This is something, you know, actuaries do in insurance. She found that the average length a player stays in the league is just two to three years. So any benefits that they negotiated needed to kick in before two to three years in order for the current crop of players to benefit from them. So it was those two things that sound relatively simple on the surface, but in terms of a very complex CBA negotiation process ended up just making things a lot more straightforward, a lot more simple and won them this biggest deal. One thing I have to point out too is that she was inundated with requests about what she would do after she won this Nobel Peace Prize. She noticed this Nobel award. She accepted only three invitations. One was advising the WNBA players union. Two was appearing on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. And three was throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a Red Sox game. That is what you should do after you win a Nobel Prize.
B
Everything's coming up baseball. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Tuesday. We've reached the end of the first quarter, March 31st, the final day of Q1. If you'd like to reach us, send an email to Morning Brew daily at Morning Broadcom or DM us on Instagram @MB. Daily show let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our supervising producer. Raymond Liu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham, and our association associate producer is Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is desperately looking for Harry Styles tickets. Devin Emery is our president, and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
C
Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.
Episode Title: Private Equity Weasels Into Your 401(k)? & Coal is Making a Comeback
Date: March 31, 2026
Hosts: Neal Freyman and Toby Howell
This episode dives into two major business stories: proposed regulations that could let private equity and private credit investments enter Americans' 401(k)s, and the unexpected resurgence of coal as a key energy source following a major war in the Middle East. Additionally, the hosts discuss trends in the music industry, technological changes in baseball, Air Canada's PR controversy, suspected insider trading in the Trump administration, and a historic WNBA labor deal.
[00:51 – 02:07]
[02:51 – 07:05]
“There’s absolutely no chance 401k investors would get access to the best alt managers or the best funds. Basically, you’re going to get the bottom of the barrel… You are not the sovereign wealth fund of Norway. You will not be treated that way.” — [04:11]
[07:05 – 11:24]
“We were sold this promise that gas was going to be this bridge fuel to take us from an emerging economy into a developed one… But now that promise is being challenged again, so they’re going back to the other side of the bridge: coal.” [09:18]
[11:56 – 15:31]
“Props to Lisa. She’s probably the biggest individual artist to come out of the K-pop boom of the last decade… She just gets her own Las Vegas stage.” [13:26]
[17:17 – 22:41]
“Successful challenges by your team feel amazing… But ABS ignites anxieties about human judgment. The challenge system relies on human hubris, intuition, boldness… It’s a compelling encounter between populism and the machine.” [18:01]
“Baseball is winning the attention war right now… Thanks to product changes like the pitch clock and ABS, it’s a more compelling content product.” [19:20]
“Here’s the thing, Neal. I’m not going to watch the actual games. Let me see the clips as they filter through to social media… That’s what baseball is doing right.” [22:11]
[22:42 – 23:32]
“It adds to growing pressure… to explain strangely well-timed bets on stocks in the oil market that have occurred ahead of big Trump-induced market moves during the war.” [23:14]
[23:32 – 25:07]
“French is a big deal to the people of Quebec. About 80%… are French speaking… he pledged to learn French and took 300 hours… by 2026 he could only deliver this statement in English.” [25:07]
[25:07 – 28:09]
“Goldin kind of crushed this thing… she reframed negotiations to focus on what fraction of league revenue goes to players and built a life table… so any benefits had to kick in before two to three years in order for current players to benefit.” [26:45]
For business, culture, and sports watchers alike, this episode offers sharp analysis, a blend of levity, and insights into the way global trends ripple through money, markets, and everyday experiences.