
The TACO trade is back and fridge's are the newest billboards for ads
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Neal Freyman
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.
Toby Howell
And I'm Toby Howell.
Neal Freyman
Today, the suspicious trades before Trump sent stock soaring.
Toby Howell
Then why is your refrigerator showing you ads? It's Tuesday, March 24th. Let's ride.
Neal Freyman
Good morning and happy Tuesday. Okay, here's a new study that I absolutely love. Research from Cornell found that workers who were the most impressed by empty corporate buzzwords who fell for the BS were also the least equipped to make effective business decisions. Shane Luttrell, a postdoc psychologist and the study's author, developed a corporate BS generator to create statements like getting our friends in the tent with our best practices. We will pressure test a renewed level of adaptive coherence and after mixing them in with real quotes from business leaders, asked 1,000 office workers to rate each statement statements Business savvy. The workers who were most wowed by the corporate BS also displayed lower scores on a test of analytical thinking, reflection and fluid intelligence. Toby, I'm a little worried because you are impressed by everything.
Toby Howell
Hey, what the heck? We've seen this throughout corporate history, though. Elizabeth Holmes was uniquely good at doing this, using corporate speed to woo and then ultimately defraud investors. But I always come back to the timeless advice given by Kevin Frank from the Office. Why waste time and say lot words when few words do a trick? Be simple. Talk to people like they're normal humans. It's actually a better way of conveying information and it shows that you have nothing to hide. You're not trying to, you know, blow people's minds with corporate speak. Now, word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Neil, what's the best return on spend you've ever gotten?
Neal Freyman
So there's absolutely no reason to make fun of me whatsoever.
Toby Howell
I'll be the judge of that.
Neal Freyman
But I bought a little device that can open any jar because I have a gentle grip.
Toby Howell
Wow, that is something. Anyway, for the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad NETWORKS, look to LinkedIn ads. They have a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers.
Neal Freyman
You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.
Toby Howell
Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com/mbd. That's LinkedIn.com comm. Terms and conditions may apply.
Neal Freyman
The stage was set for another wipeout in the markets yesterday. Over the weekend, President Trump had issued a 48 hour ultimatum for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or else he would strike power plants all over the country. Iran, rebuffing those calls, vowed to retaliate with damaging strikes of its own. The war appeared to be on the verge of escalating dangerously. And then came the taco. The trade Wall street has dubbed Trump always chickens out. Just as we wrapped up recording the podcast yesterday morning, President Trump posted the surprise that his pledge to strike energy targets was postponed for five days after the US And Iran held, quote, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities. Almost instantaneously, stocks went vertical and held on to their gains for the entire day, with the S and p closing up 1.15%. Meanwhile, skyrocketing US oil prices fell back down to earth, plunging nearly 10% to close below $90 a barrel. Wall street was extremely ecstatic to hear progress on a diplomatic end to a conflict that had already caused the biggest energy supply shock in history and was inflicting more economic damage by the day. Of course, nothing is so clear cut. After Trump's post, Iran denied that any conversations had taken place with the US and accused Trump of manipulating financial and oil markets with his announcement. One thing we can assume, the timing wasn't a coincidence. Trump made the announcement just hours before trading opened at 9:30am Eastern, suggesting that, as we saw with Liberation Day tariffs, he is well aware of market dynamics and was aiming to signal to Wall street that an off ramp was coming into view. Whether that's actually true or not, we don't know.
Toby Howell
It was brutal. Right after we finished the podcast, we get out and go, oh man, like a lot happened in just this really short morning period. Trump added $1.7 trillion to stocks, pushed the price of oil down by $17. That's around 15%. But then by the time that, you know, we went and went to the gym and had our coffee, Iran was basically calling him a liar and Half those gains had vanished. So it was this massive whipsaw very closely. Just the scale of the trades too, had a lot of people kind of scratching their heads. The Financial Times did a little digging. They found that roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas intermediary futures contracts changed hands between 649 and 650am That's 15 minutes before Trump posted his Truth Social post. The value of those trades was $580 million. And again, this is something where right now we're in a period where the oil market is volatile. Like hypothetically, that amount of contracts could have, you know, exchanged hands. But a lot of people are reading between the lines and saying it looks like this is following a pattern where someone is front running. These big announcements from the administration.
Neal Freyman
Oh, these were extremely suspicious. Just the timing of it. Almost $600 billion million dollars. 50, 15 minutes before this Truth Social post, the Financial Times talked to a couple of portfolio managers about whether this was unusual or not. One of them said, my gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal. It's Monday morning, there's no important data today. There aren't any Fed speakers. It's an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk. Somebody just got a lot richer. And it wasn't just a bunch of money put in the oil markets. It was also s and P500 futures, which spiked well over 1% after this Trump announcement. So suspicious trades. We don't actually know what happens, but it fits sort of a pattern that President Trump can make huge waves in the market, in the oil market, in the equities market. By, by these announcements we saw with tariffs last year and now with the war, because the war is hanging on, investors are hanging on is every word with the war. So we just saw a very unusual trade 15 minutes before the this particular True Social post.
Toby Howell
And we also got the very surreal situation of waiting for an Iranian spokesperson to confirm something that, you know, the US President said. Because we did get a statement from the parliamentary speaker who said fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped. Again, like, you have to take both sides of this equation with a grain of salt. Both sides have their own interests in mind when they're putting out quotes. But it was interesting when we were literally sitting by our computers and we're going, let's wait to see what Iran has to say about these negotiations that are supposedly taking place.
Neal Freyman
The other big story we're tracking is Monday night's collision at LaGuardia that killed two pilots on an Air Canada flight and closed the airport until 2pm yesterday. Here's the general outline of what happened. A fire truck had been dispatched to address a separate United plane that had aborted a takeoff and received permission across Runway four by the air traffic controller. That was when the Air Canada plane was landing on Runway four and despite pleading by the air traffic controller for the truck to stop, it was on the Runway when the plane landed where it was struck by the aircraft traveling between 93 and 105 miles per hour. Dozens of passengers were taken to the hospital, but it could have been much worse. And what's being dubbed a miracle. A flight attendant was thrown from the plane, still strapped to her jump seat and survived with just a leg fracture. Toby this is the first fatal crash at LaGuardia in three decades and and has already renewed scrutiny around the bare bones staffing of overworked air traffic controllers.
Toby Howell
Yeah, and we are looking into how this investigation is going. The NTSB is looking into it. How is that progressing? Pete Moon teen who is a correspondent for cnn, posted that the NTSB chair Jennifer Hammonday said the agency had to beg to get a key LaGuardia crash investigator through TSA in Houston because she'd been waiting in line for three hours. So I feel like that's just emblematic of the entire airline industry right now when someone investigating, you know, this really tragic crash can't even make it through TSA because the lines are so long. Moving on. If you felt the world was missing a little bit more. Mark Zuckerberg fear not. Zuck 2.0 is on its way, according to the Wall Street Journal. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Zuck is in the middle of building an AI agent that will help him do his job as CEO. The idea is to flatten the company out, letting him go to the bot to receive answers about met his business that would previously have required layers of people to get through. The rise of AI agents to the top level of the tech world can be traced back to the rise of an open source framework called Open Claw that's absolutely exploded recently. Three months ago, nobody knew about it. This past week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called it the most popular open source project in the history of humanity. Going on to say this is definitely the next chat CBT or OpenClaw lets developers spin up a fleet of always on agents across WhatsApp, Slack, Discord or any other tools and workspaces your heart desires for Instance, if you're in the market for a stroller, you can have an agent be on the lookout for good deals and place bids for you on ebay. While a separate agent could be in charge of controlling your home smart systems like lights and security, all while you go about your workday. It's become all the raids abroad as well. Open Claw usage in China is now almost double that in the U.S. according to cybersecurity company Security Scorecard. Of course there are detractors, with one analyst describing the tech as janky, incredibly insecure and half working. But that's not slowing down the hype train. When Zuck, Jensen huang and roughly 600 million AI users in China are all excited about the same thing. Should probably take note.
Neal Freyman
Absolutely. If you want to hang out with me this weekend, I will be unavailable. I'm going to be holed up trying to optimize my life with Open Claw. Sounds like a joke, but there are tons of people absolutely doing this, especially in Silicon Valley and in China, and so are tons of companies. Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO said, Every single company needs an Open Claw strategy and we have seen an absolute marathon of companies trying to release either open cloud competitors or wrappers around Open cloud to allow businesses to deploy them. Of course Nvidia has its own it's called Nemo Claw and it has some security settings to alleviate some of those privacy and security concerns that maybe an enterprise client would have when trying to adopt OpenCloud for their business.
Toby Howell
It is a full on phenomenon in China as well. Earlier this month hundreds of people lined up at Tencent's headquarters waiting for engineers to install Open Claw on their laptops for free. They just want to be part of the game and one of the most difficult parts is setting up Open Claw. So it is crazy. And then there's just anecdotes from people using it on a daily basis. One at 24 year old job seeker says that he had Openclaw memorize his resume and then look for new jobs every single day. New software engineering jobs. That's basically what you can do. You can treat it like a employee or an assistant that is always on is not necessarily the most adept at navigating, you know, nuanced security risks. But it's like almost a junior employee. Just treat it like that, give it very strict parameters but it can go and work very efficiently. While you know, you have your attention, focus elsewhere.
Neal Freyman
I think that's what Zuck is doing and Meta seems to be rapidly met and probably every other AI company is Rapidly adopting these kind of agents for their workforce. I think another reason why this has gone so viral is that it has just like a really cute mascot. OpenCloud is, is a lobster. And in China they call it. There's been a meme, it's gone viral. It's called raising lobsters. And that's the process of installing and training open cloud. It's still not so hyped here in the United States. I mean, I bet a bunch of people listening to you, to us right now are like, I have no idea this is happening. If you go to Silicon Valley, it's a different story. I think everyone is setting up their AI agents, but you are also have set up your own Open Claw. Like what has that experience been like?
Toby Howell
Well, a little bit actually. I'm not technically adept enough to actually use and download the open source software, but just yesterday, Claude from Anthropic, this is a separate thing, by the way. Open Claw was downstream of, you know, Claw sounds like Claude, but it's actually the developer works for Open Air now, so it's a little bit convoluted. But Anthropic said, all right, we're seeing all these people, you know, set up their own autonomous agents. What if we just allowed you to do that right here in Claude itself? So I did that yesterday. It launched yesterday and I had it kind of messing around with my computer this morning doing who knows what. Honestly, like I saw my, my mouse zipping around my screen as I was trying to prep for the show. So I'm still in, you know, the first inning of this, but trying to just figure out ways that I could utilize this. I think a lot of people are doing that. I have a cousin who lives in Austin, Texas, which is not Silicon Valley. He has his own agent called Agent Xander that, you know, text him his to do list every morning. You know, just kind of helps him live his life. So it is whatever you want it to be. It's almost like a mirror reflecting whatever your priorities are. That's what it can do. I do think we are in the early innings of this and it's only going to grow from here.
Neal Freyman
Moving on. People are putting ad blockers on their refrigerators one more time because I couldn't believe it myself. Some people are putting ad blockers, you know, the kind you use on websites, on their refrigerators, an appliance to keep food cold. As the Wall Street Journal reported, it's what some owners, homeowners are resorting to after their Samsung smart refrigerators began displaying advertisements on Screenshots, and many are quite upset about it. Last fall, Samsung began a pilot program to explore ads on its smart refrigerators sold in the United States. The goal, according to the company, was to test whether contextual non personal ads for things relevant to housework would be useful to people. Months into the pilot, which has served up ads intermittently on some fridges, Samsung said the turnoff rate, yes, you can turn off the ads, was low in the single digits. But the smart fridge owners the Journal talked to didn't share that view. They said the ads were intrusive and violated perhaps the one last place in American life that had been off limits to ads, the kitchen. Furthermore, they felt like they got ripped off by the price of the refrigerators, which cost well over $1,000. If the fridges have been sold for a discount, they said, maybe you could probably tolerate some ads, but these appliances came in at a full premium price. And finally, yes, one owner told the Journal that they made sure their home routers ad blocking software extended to his fridge. It worked.
Toby Howell
That is a crazy timeline that we're living in that your fridge freaking refrigerator is serving you up ads. It is an interesting strategy from Samsung. They have an initiative called the Screens Everywhere initiative, which feels, you know, opposed to what most people want from their appliances. They want to include beyond fridges, washers, dryers, ovens, all have screens on them, which, you know, maybe means all of them have ads eventually coming to them. Doesn't feel like what the consumer actually wants. One ad that I thought was especially kind of funny and creepy was they got a full screen ad for Apple TV's Sci Fi Show Pluribus. I don't want to spoil Pluribus, but a big plot line of that is, you know, I guess I am going to spoil it like aliens taking over, you know, appliances and like TVs in the main character's house. So I just thought that was an ironic twist. I actually think it's kind of good advertising for purpose, but not a good user experience for the person with the fridge.
Neal Freyman
It's just amazing how much we're bombarded with ads every day. There was a study back in 2023, so in 1970s, American went from seeing 500 advertisements per day to over 5,000 in 2023. And now they're invading our kitchen. They're in our Ubers. I mean, ads are pretty, pretty much everywhere. It's something that we've come accustomed to. What I thought was interesting is that you want to accept a discount if you're going to see ads. So Netflix rolled out this ad tier and people have happily paid up for it. They know that there is a sort of bargain at play where I'm going to pay six, seven dollars for Netflix a month. But I also I will see ads when you're paying the full price. I think for something like a Samsung refrigerator when you weren't really expecting ads in the first place, that's what really frustrates you.
Toby Howell
All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends right after this. Neil, feel my bicep.
Neal Freyman
I should not have to say no to this every day, Toby, but how
Toby Howell
else will you know about all the goodness from Flav Cities all in one Protein smoothies?
Neal Freyman
Because I can read, Toby, and I can see they're made real whole food ingredients 25 grams of protein, 10 grams of collagen, and functional mushrooms.
Toby Howell
Well, can reading tell you they taste as good as any milkshake?
Neal Freyman
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 Howell
this episode is brought to you by Apple Neil, there's nothing like your first Mac. I remember my first Mac like it was yesterday. I got mine right as my sister started to get recruited to my play soccer in college. I was given the very important task of making her a highlight tape and Imovie was my best friend. She ended up playing at Georgetown, so I'd say it was all worth it.
Neal Freyman
When I got my first Mac, I was heading into freshman year at the University of Maryland. A lot was uncertain that fall, but I knew I had a dependable sidekick for homework, connecting with other students and devouring blogs about our basketball recruiting class.
Toby Howell
That's how we felt with our first Max. How will you check out the all new MacBook Neo, an amazing Mac at a surprising price?
Neal Freyman
Learn more at apple.com/Mac Mac that's apple.com
Toby Howell
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Toby Howell
more than 10 tabs of X open right now at work, you are part of the growing cadre of very online denizens who have grown addicted to monitoring the situation. It's this hyper vigilance in the memes that accompany it that I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. Part of the reason monitoring the situation has become so popular is there are many situations that require monitoring. The US and Israel are bombing Iran. Iran has retaliated with strikes on six countries. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil prices are up. Gasoline prices are up. Cuba's power grid has collapsed. There's also tariff drama. The Epstein files ICE raids. These are just a few of the buffet of situations that Bloomberg's Amanda Mol pointed out in her piece on situation monitoring. It helps that you have more tools than ever at your fingertips to stay ever vigilant. Elie Habib, an engineer based in the UAE Vibe, coded a dashboard called a world Monitor in his spare time and was shocked by the results response to his weekend project. The site, which pulls from over 100 different streams of data, including stock prices, airport flights and satellite movements, had more than 2 million people access it in the first 20 days. Polymarket, which has added a financial component to situation monitoring, opens an entire bar filled with TV screens dedicated to the practice. Now I should mention that most situation monitoring is ironic. Refreshing X constantly just to mansplain the situation to your significant other is a key theme of the genre, but it's an inescapable meme at this point because it really does feel like there is so much going on right now. Neal, do you have the masculine urge to monitor the situation?
Neal Freyman
Oh yes, I am absolutely a serial situation monitor. I don't think it's just necessarily an instance of there's so much going on right now. It's also an instance of a couple other factors. One of them is we have more data at our fingertips than ever. We have X. We have flight tracking, flight tracking information. We have weather from all around the world. And thanks to Vibe coding and AI, we can all put that in one place, as this guy did for that particular website. And then the other thing I think is contributing to the rise of situation monitoring is polymarket Kalshi Prediction Markets. And I think it's no surprise that polymarket opened this particular bar dedicated to situation monitoring because now at this point people can actually wager on world events that they would on a sports game. So everyone's treating it, everyone's treating world events like sports and betting on it and thinking things like, oh, who's going to win the Academy Award, when will Iran strike Israel, before or after March 31st? So I think prediction markets and the availability of data are two of the big factors.
Toby Howell
We've also just been trained to consume data through feeds. I mean, so much of our life comes to us via, you know, never ending infinite scrolls. And so I think we're just accustomed to like when a major event breaks out, like that is where we're going to go. It also Habib, who made the World Monitor site, said it helps people feel in control. We pulled up World Monitor yesterday. It is absolutely not helpful. There's way too many sources of data, like who needs to know what the weather is on the other side of the world. Also a company next to active flights taking off in New York City. Like, it's literally information overload. But when you're sitting there and you have one monitor with Twitter open, you have one monitor with World Monitor open, you're like, I am on top of it. I know what's going on. It helps you feel a sense of agency over an increasingly, you know, chaotic world. So I do think there's something psychological about the, the masculine urge to monitor the situation.
Neal Freyman
I do agree, and I think it's probably broader part of a broader trend of the red zone, ification of everything. It does tie into a lot of how people consume sports now, which is where red zone came along. And not all of a sudden you don't want just watch one football game for three hours. You watch eight or nine or ten and you are monitoring the situation every NFL Sunday. And then that was ported over to the Olympics. And this is how people watch the Olympics now with gold zone, which is the red zone of the Olympics. And you got eight things going on at once. You're watching curling, you're watching, you know, surfing, whatever, summer, summer, Winter Olympics, it doesn't matter. But I think there's a lot of parallels to what's happening in the sports world to the two current and global events similar to what's happening in prediction markets if sort of expanding the purview of sports gambling.
Toby Howell
Although there is some lore that was dropped about monitoring the situation yesterday. So Amanda Mole wrote this great piece in Bloomberg. Highly recommend checking that out. She kind of said that there's like this Jeff Bezos meme that personifies monitoring the situation, and that was kind of like the jumping off point where it really hit mainstream. But then people on the timeline found an Anthony bourdain tweet from June 20, 2013, where he says, I am, quote, continuing to monitor the situation. So I do think Anthony Bourdain coined this term, you know, over a decade ago, which was not something that I knew. But it is kind of makes sense, honestly, that there's direct through line to Anthony Bourdain. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Up first, the reclusive billionaire behind OnlyFans has passed away. Leo Radvinsky, the majority owner of the adult content platform, died of cancer on Monday at 43 years old. RAVINSKY took a controlling stake in the company in 2018, and powered by people stuck at home during the pandemic, turned it into a behemoth. As of 2024, OnlyFans had over 4.6 million creator accounts, 377 million fans. It was pulling in $7.2 billion in gross revenue. Despite OnlyFans success, Ravinsky was notoriously private. Born in Ukraine, his family moved to Chicago when he was a kid. He studied econ at Northwestern. He gave almost no interviews, made no public statements, and largely operated in the shadows while paying himself roughly $1.8 billion in dividends since 2021. One of the more reclusive and controversial businessmen of our time, Neal.
Neal Freyman
Yeah, we don't know a lot about him, but he absolutely changed the content, the online content game forever. Not just adult content, but just across the board. The fact that Only fans took a 20% cut of the revenues. Content creators took 80%. You hear stories about how there are a few Only Fans creators are making millions and millions and millions of dollars over the course of the year. One thing we do know about Leo is that he was sort of predestined to lead an adult online company just from the very beginning. Back when he was 17, he started his first Internet business called Cybertania, which was a website referral business. His mom actually did sent the incorporation papers for him in 1999 while he was still a teenager. Then he operated websites called Ultimate Passwords, which claimed to offer hacked passwords to pornography sites. And then this sort of snowballed into when he started something called a website called My free cams in 2004, which blended casual online chats with sexually explicit live content. So he was always on the journey to lead a company like OnlyFans. Well, you don't see this type of deal that often or at all. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced it would pay French energy giant total energies almost $1 billion to not build wind farms off the east coast and instead invest in fossil fuel projects in the U.S. the Department of Interior will reimburse $928 billion to total, the amount it paid for two offshore wind leases, which it will then use to produce oil and gas. The New York Times called it an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels. Explaining the deal at an energy conference, Interior Secretary Doug Borgum called wind power ineffective and predicted a new era of affordable, reliable and secure energy. The CEO of Total, for his part, said it was a pragmatic business decision considering that offshore wind had gotten too expensive in the US Given the Trump administration's resistance.
Toby Howell
Yeah, Total Energy got bailed out here because a lot of other companies that, you know, embarked on this sustainable offshore wind projects don't have an oil and gas business to fall back on. So it really was a get out of jail free card. They got reimbursed and now they have a new, you know, big project in the works. But not every, you know, wind company can say that.
Neal Freyman
Finally, in case you missed it, the UK version of Saturday Night Live made its debut this weekend and people didn't hate it. Reviews were mixed, but mostly positive in that most thought it was going to be a huge flop and it was actually pretty funny at times. President Trump even shared the cold open making fun of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Trump on his truth social platform. They didn't exactly reinvent the wheel here. American viewers of SNL UK would have found a lot familiar with the show back home. There was a celebrity host, Tina Fey, a fake pre taped commercial, a buzzy musical guest, wet leg, and a ragtag roster of comedians you've never heard of doing sketch comedy. Even the set was eerily familiar to the one at Rockefeller Center. Toby I watched a bunch of the clips on YouTube as one does, and I liked it.
Toby Howell
The New York Times review summed it up well, they said from an American perspective, watching Saturday Night Live UK is like stepping into a well run st. Starbucks in a foreign country. Comforting and recognizable with a few departures from the norm magnified. One of the standout jokes was Tina Fey saying that she's the youngest person to ever host SNL uk. She's the first person, so of course she's the youngest. So she was always great. The Brits seemed to like Weekend Update the best. That was something that kind of ported over the most seamlessly. And then the Times ended the review by saying, if Piers Morgan appears by week eight, there's a problem. So off to a good start, but I'm tuning in. You were doing the thing where you turn your iPhone around. Just. Sorry.
Neal Freyman
People do that.
Toby Howell
It's all right. You wanted to share something that you enjoyed, so I won't fault you.
Neal Freyman
No, but people, those are the worst people, and I am one of them. Where you're like, hey, look at this funny clip on Instagram. Here, watch it. That was me for SNL uk. I apologize to everyone. I did that, too, here at the office. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. If you'd like to reach us, send an email to Morning Brew daily at Morning Bukom or DM us on Instagram @me 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 associate producer is Olivia Lake. Ed Lewis is our technical director. Hair and makeup is monitoring the situation. Devin Emery is our president, and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
Toby Howell
Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.
Episode: Trump’s TACO Trade Returns & Samsung Wants Your Fridge to Have Ads
Date: March 24, 2026
Hosts: Neal Freyman & Toby Howell
This episode covers market-shifting moves by President Trump regarding threats to Iran and the resulting “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out) trade, the controversy over Samsung putting ads on smart refrigerators, the viral rise of AI assistant “Open Claw,” and other trending business and tech headlines. The tone is witty and conversational, with plenty of sharp commentary on the latest news shaking up business, tech, politics, and memes.
[00:52 – 02:14]
[02:55 – 06:30]
[07:05 – 07:57]
[07:57 – 13:37]
[13:37 – 15:49]
[18:58 – 22:26] — Toby’s Trends Segment
[23:11 – 27:40]
OnlyFans Owner Passes Away:
Leo Radvinsky, majority owner of OnlyFans, dies at 43. Noted for extreme privacy and meteoric platform growth ($7.2B revenue, >4.6M creators). Neal highlights his lifelong trajectory in adult content startups.
Wind Farm Bailout:
Trump administration pays Total Energies nearly $1B to cancel offshore wind and redirect to fossil fuels—a “get out of jail free” for companies with oil & gas fallback.
SNL UK Launches:
The British “Saturday Night Live” debuts to better-than-expected reviews; format is familiar to American viewers. Standout: Tina Fey hosts the premiere. New York Times: “Like stepping into a well-run Starbucks in a foreign country. Comforting and recognizable.” (27:40, cited by Toby).
On Corporate Speak:
“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?”
— Toby Howell quoting Kevin from The Office (01:38)
On Suspicious Trump Trades:
“Somebody just got a lot richer. And it wasn’t just a bunch of money put in the oil markets. It was also S&P500 futures…”
— Neal Freyman (05:30)
On Fridge Ads:
“They said the ads were intrusive and violated perhaps the one last place in American life that had been off limits to ads, the kitchen.”
— Neal Freyman (14:28)
On Situation Monitoring Meme:
“It is absolutely not helpful. There’s way too many sources of data… But when you’re sitting there and you have one monitor with Twitter open, one monitor with World Monitor open, you’re like, I am on top of it.”
— Toby Howell (21:33)
On OnlyFans’ Legacy:
“Not just adult content, but just across the board. The fact that OnlyFans took a 20% cut of the revenues. Content creators took 80%. You hear stories about how there are a few OnlyFans creators are making millions and millions…”
— Neal Freyman (24:47)
With their trademark wit and clear-eyed analysis, Neal and Toby dig into the wild intersection of politics, markets, technology, and internet culture shaping today’s headlines. From the surreal notion of a fridge needing an ad blocker, to the meme-ification of world affairs and the head-spinning pace of AI adoption, this episode is a sharp, engaging walk through the most important and absurd stories in business and beyond.