Boeing's CEO is Out & Vending Machines Make a Comeback

0:00This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

0:27Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Dave Calhoun is Boeing, Boeing gone as the Planemaker CEO. Then the DJ Tea Ticker is returning to Wall Street today as Donald Trump's True Social makes its public market debut. It's Tuesday, March 26th. Let's ride.

0:52If you are just waking up, there's currently an emergency situation in Baltimore where a major bridge has collapsed into the water. Right around 1.30 a.m. Eastern, one of the supports of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was struck by a container ship leaving the port of Baltimore, causing the span to fall into the water. Video appeared to show cars also falling in, and there's currently a rescue operation underway to save the people who plunged into the water, which is currently at about 48 degrees Fahrenheit. A lot of attention will be paid to this bridge over the next few days and weeks. The 1.6 mile long span is part of I-695 and was opened in 1977 as an outer crossing of Baltimore Harbor.

1:33And it's named after the guy who wrote the Star Spangled Banner. Yeah, what made this particularly harrowing is that a YouTube live streamer caught it on film. So you can literally see the moment where the bridge just totally buckles. And as you said, you can start to see cars falling in. In the short term, the priority is obviously saving anyone in the immediate area. But in the long term, it will shine a light on the country's infrastructure again. as this once again is going to put some strain on a major East Coast transit artery. Now let's hear a quick word from our friends over at Factor.

2:04Neil, talking about Factor every morning is hard sometimes because it honestly makes me very hungry. Talking about the food itself is torture. So that means I shouldn't let you know that mushroom chicken thighs and wild rice with garlic roasted green beans is currently on their weekly menu? Neil, what the heck? I'm dying over here. Listen, I'm just trying to tell you about Factor. chef-made fresh, never-frozen meals like it's garlic filet mignon and shrimp with roasted broccoli, garlic chive potatoes, and scallion sour cream? You know what? Fine. Two can play at this game. Wouldn't you like to have a steaming helping of Factors' chimichurri ground beef bowl and cauliflower rice and zucchini pepper medley right now?

2:43Okay, point taken. You can listen to Toby and me list off delicious Factor Meals all morning, or you can head to factormeals.com slash morningbrew50, then use code morningbrew50 to get 50 % off. That's factormeals.com slash morningbrew50 with code morningbrew50 to snag a 50 % discount. Raise the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today.

3:21Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun will soon just be Dave Calhoun after the struggling plane maker popped open the door panel and booted him from his job running the company. No one could be surprised by this. Boeing has been corporate America's punching bag ever since a panel blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight in January and more safety issues came to light as regulators looked into its manufacturing process. And it's not just the CEO Calhoun leaving.

3:55Boeing's cleaning house of its top ranks, with the head of its commercial aircraft division also stepping aside, and its chairman not returning to his role. This is the kind of shakeup airlines we're desperate to see from Boeing, because they are madder than someone whose screen isn't working on a 12-hour flight. Boeing's problems have become their problems, since they can't get enough planes from Boeing to fly all the routes they want to this year. Calhoun will stay on the job through 2024 to help train his successor. And the search is on to fix this broken company. The search is on. It's interesting, too, because Boeing brought in Calhoun four years ago to kind of steady the ship through turbulent times after those two fatal 737 MAX crashes led to the ousting of his predecessor.

4:36And the company even lifted the mandatory retirement age to allow him to lead the company into 2028 from 65 to 70 years. So this was Dave Calhoun's ship to run, and he clearly did not run it into any direction that shareholders or airline partners liked. So it's interesting to see the rise and then the fall of Dave Calhoun. Yeah, the fix appeared to be in thanks to the airlines who are Boeing's customers being extremely angry that they couldn't produce enough Boeing 737s because they've been handicapped by the FAA after all of these mishaps over the course of this year to produce enough airlines for them.

5:16And Southwest said our profits are going to be down this year. A bunch of other airlines said, like, we don't have enough planes to file the routes we want to. they scheduled a meeting with the with the Boeing board and went around Dave Calhoun they did not want him to be there Southwest American United and a bunch of other airlines were like we need to meet with the board and Dave Calhoun cannot be there and then the board was like all right I think this is a huge problem Dave probably needs to go right and then Ryanair Boeing's largest European airline customer said in a statement that it welcomes management change so you kind of do get a sense of where these customers are at in this Dave Calhoun experiment analysts have also said that they might look to bring in an executive from outside.

5:57But again, that is very tough because Boeing is not an easy company to lead by any stretch of the imagination. It's an airplane manufacturing company. There's 170 ,000 employees. So an internal search is being conducted, but also an external search. I don't know who steps in. Maybe you poach someone from Airbus, but there is some names floating around internally as well. Yeah. One of those names from outside is Larry Culp of GE. What you need here is a turnaround artist because Boeing's culture has been broken for decades. Larry Culp went into GE in 2019. GE is another American corporate giant that had fallen on a lot of hard times, huge industrial company.

6:34So he went in and has done an actually amazing job. He broke the company up into three different divisions. He paid down more than$100 billion of debt. And all these little GE divisions are now going public and doing really well. So he is a name that has been floated as possible. Someone who could come in, who learned the aerospace industry at GE and could come in and fix Boeing, but it is not an easy job. Not an easy job. Just to put a bow tie on Dave Calhoun's tenure here, when he entered the role, shares were trading above$330. And when he's exiting or right now, they're trading at$190. So that alone tells you how the Dave Calhoun time at Boeing went.

7:13Let's move on. Like a mountaineer, but laying a climber down, an appeals court has agreed to give Trump a little bit of slack in his New York fraud case. The court agreed to reduce the bond amount he owed the New York Attorney General to$175 million, down from$454 million. Had the court not approved his request for a smaller bond in the fraud case, Trump could have faced a serious financial face pant because, like most people, Trump didn't really have a spare$454 million laying around. Now he has 10 days to secure the smaller bound amount, which gives them time to appeal the larger bond, a process that could take months to resolve.

7:51While all that was happening, Trump's social media company, True Social, was gearing up to hit the public markets via a SPAC merger with a blank check acquisition company. I can't believe it's 2024 and we're still talking about SPACs, but when True Social begins trading today under the DJT ticker, it will probably go down as one of the most important SPACs yet. Let's take them one at a time, bond, then SPAC, or take them both at the same time. Where do you want to start? Well, I think you can take them both at the same time because this could have been one of the worst days in former President Trump's financial histories.

8:25The process for beginning to seize his assets could have started, but it turned out to be the single greatest day on record for his wealth because this thing happened with True Social. That increased his net worth by more than$4 billion. He's now worth$6.5 billion. And for the first time, he is among the world's wealthiest 500 people. Digital World Acquisition Corp., which is the shell company that was created to take to social public. The shares are up 185 % since the start of the year, and Trump owns 60 % of the stock. And so his net worth was transferred into paper holdings yesterday, and now he's super rich.

9:05Yeah, the DWAC share price was up around 30 % yesterday. And that is kind of a big reversal from on Friday when this merger was officially announced, the share price kind of tanked a little bit. It didn't go anywhere too down, but it more than made up for those erasers. Part of it is because that civil business fraud judgment against Trump was paused for 10 days, and this smaller bond amount was. So it kind of goes hand in hand, the fortunes of both of them, because remember, Trump is maybe looking towards his stake in True Social to help pay off some of those mounting legal fees, these bonds that he has to pay.

9:42Remember, I've said this multiple times, technically there is a share lockup. He cannot sell any of his shares for 60 days after this goes public. But again, if you have influence over the board, which Trump obviously does, his son is on the board as well as some of his former campaign officers. So he could change the rules a little bit. But again, you don't want to get too loose and fast with True Social shares, even though it probably is held by a lot of Trump supporters. Because if you start using it as your personal piggy bank, then the shares will end up taking it because it is now on the public markets and is subject to the whims of the shareholders.

10:17And now we've had no social media IPOs since Pinterest in 2019. And then in the past week, we've had Reddit and Truth Social go public. Truth Social probably has a lot of convincing to do for actual public investors because it just brought in$5 million over the past three years in revenue, and it's worth$5.5 billion. OK, next story. Abortion issues are back at the Supreme Court today in a major case that could have an even bigger impact on reproductive rights than the Dobbs ruling in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade. I know that sounds crazy, but here's why legal experts say this is such a huge deal.

10:55This case will decide the fate of Mifepristone, the abortion pill that's become the most popular form of terminating a pregnancy in the U.S. after the Supreme Court ended the federal right to an abortion. Medication abortion, which is the official term for using the pill, accounted for 63 percent of abortions last year, a 10 percentage point increase from the 53 percent in 2020. but Mifepristone's availability is in doubt after a Christian conservative advocacy group challenged the process that led to its FDA approval 23 years ago, and an appeals court placed some limitations on access to the pill.

11:29So here we are nearly two years later with the nine Supreme Court justices once again hearing a case that could transform abortion access in the US. Yeah, just to reiterate how popular this option is, nearly two thirds of all abortion in the US health system providers are medication abortions. And also a study released this week found that the number of women who obtained abortion pills from sources outside the U.S. health system, like Mifepristone, more than quadrupled in the six months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. So the challenge to this pill is actually much bigger than the pill itself.

12:03It really challenges the authority of the FDA. The FDA approved this pill back 23 years ago. And the challenges are saying that the FDA did not do a, basically skirted the rules when it approved this pill. So you have the entire pharmaceutical industry lining up behind the FDA in defense of the pill because they think that the FDA as a regulatory body is really the gold standard across the world for approving drugs. And if the regulatory power of the FDA is curtailed, it could lead to challenges against a lot of other drugs that maybe are more culturally charged that a lot of pharmaceutical companies have produced, and they're very concerned about that.

12:43Yeah, it opens up the FDA to limitless litigation is the term I saw being thrown around because virtually anybody could bring a suit to challenge any drug approval, which is again, not how the system is intended to work at all. And so even though, yes, this does have a lot of repercussions for reproductive rights, it does have just implications for the healthcare industry as a whole and the pharma industry as a whole, which is, you're right, that's why so many kind of pharma companies are lining up saying, If we establish this precedent now and allow you to litigate against FDA drug approval, how are we ever going to convince investors to invest in us to work on developing new drugs if the approval process can get handicapped by the legal system?

13:27So you're right. It does have very far-reaching, wide-ranging effects. And the FDA, of course, says this pill is safer than even Tylenol. It terminates pregnancies with a 99.6 % success rate. So they put forth evidence that shows that Mifepristone is safe. The Supreme Court is going to rule on this end of June, early July, right in the thick of election season. So it could land like an earthquake, just like Roe did in 2022. Up next, you'll hear why vending machines are so hot right now and also learn the location of a new Dragon Ball Z theme park. eczema isn't always obvious but it's real and so is the relief from ebglyss after an initial dosing phase about four in ten people taking ebglyss achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing ebglyss libri kizumab lbkz a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema.

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15:03Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host a highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not Play Play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. What does a March Madness superstar and a packet of Lay's potato chips have in common? They're both into vending machines.

15:41And that's what we're going to talk about today on this edition of Toby's Friends, where I, a Gen Z-er with my finger on the pulse of the internet, educate Neil, my millennial co-host, on a recent trend I've had my eye on. Neil, one of the stars of March Madness, North Carolina State's DJ Burns, went on a podcast yesterday and told the world that he owns a couple of vending machines. And it felt like the perfect segue to talk about this growing trend of people getting into the vending machine business as a side hustle. I totally get it. The formula appears simple. Buy a vending machine for around$1 ,500.

16:16Stock it with product you buy in bulk from Costco. Mark up the prices and watch as your kid's college fund starts to roll in. But it's not always the case because foot traffic is king and competition is fierce. So sometimes you're left with a bunch of honey buns and not much honey. According to the National Automatic Merchandising Association, America has three million vending machines bringing in$18.2 billion, good for an average of$525 in monthly revenue per machine. Neil, what do you think of the vending machine game? Well, I certainly see the appeal. I mean, if the industry group is called the Automatic Merchandising Association, it gets a little bit in your mind that this is automatic money.

16:57You don't have to put in a lot of work and you just kind of refill the vending machines every so often and then you take out the money and cash it in your bank. But I am a little skeptical because of how much chatter this has gotten online. And when you see YouTube video explainers and huge Reddit threads with this get rich, it has this very get rich quick scheme vibe to it. And so I'm a little skeptical that it is as easy to get a passive income from owning a bunch of vending machines as these people make it seem. Yeah, it is definitely a game for small individual operators. There's more than half of operators bringing less than a million bucks a year, according to that same publication.

17:35And then many individuals also have other jobs. You're right. This is a side hustle. It is huge on social media. Like you said, between 2019 and 2023, the number of posts or comments mentioning passive income and vending machines more than tripled on X, 6X on Instagram and increased 75 % on Google search. Everyone wants that. Get out of the 9 to 5 life hack. you start to see that this is a saturated space when you realize that there are vending machine operators selling courses on how to start up your vending machine business. So you're definitely right that it has hit kind of that point of saturation where if you got people selling courses about the side hustle as a side hustle, you're in side hustle-ception right there.

18:17I just don't know how you, where do you find locations? I mean, do you have to pay locations to put your vending machine in? I just don't quite understand how that works. Yeah, a lot of it is you just go to a gym operator, for instance, say, hey, I would like to negotiate a deal to put my vending machine in your place. Something that the courses kind of say is that if you're just starting out - Oh, so you've taken one. No, I was just doing my research here. But they say lie about your pedigree, essentially, because if you go to a gym offering and say, hey, this is my first vending machine, no one's going to say yes to that.

18:48So say, oh, yeah, I've been operating a couple for a while now, and then they might be more on board to it. So you're right. It's got all those tinges of maybe a shady side hustle. but some people really enjoy it and make a good profit off of it. And also seeing DJ Burns, the way he was speaking about it was like, Hey, I live, I know my basketball career is not going to end forever. A guy sat me down and said, Hey, this is a good side hustle you can do and credit to him for actually taking the action, buying the machines. He owns two of them. So hopefully he's getting that nice passive income.

19:17In the course, what did they say was the like most lucrative place to place a betting machine foot? I mean, anywhere with high foot track it. So a lot of like laundromats are a good one. Gyms are a good one, but it is foot traffic is king. All right. At Chick-fil-A, there are few surprises. You know, you're going to get a top tier sandwich. You know, you can't show up on Sunday and you know, the chicken won't have any antibiotics. But about that last one, not so much anymore. The fast food chain is backtracking from its years long pledge to include no antibiotics ever in its chicken because of what it says are supply shortages of chicken without antibiotics.

19:53Instead, Chick-fil-A will move to a common standard known as no antibiotics important to human medicine, abbreviated as NAIHM, which limits the use of animal antibiotics to cases where the chickens are actually sick. So there could potentially be some antibiotics in your sandwich alongside the pickle. The poultry industry has had a love-hate relationship with animal antibiotics. as new information has come out about their impact on human health. Antibiotics were used widely in animals until the 2010s when chicken producers moved away from them. Now, though, Chick-fil-A and others are playing a reverse card on their reverse card because there's just not enough high-quality antibiotic-free chicken available.

20:33Yeah, it's a supply and demand issue, but I just want to dig into why antibiotics in animals is an issue for humans at all because technically it can help create antibiotic-resistant bacteria in humans. According to the CDC, more than 2.8 million people develop an antibiotic resistant infection each year. In more than 600 ,000 of those cases, that infection came from something, an individual ate. So again, that's why you don't want to pump animals full of these antibiotics, because if you are consuming them, it leads to bacteria saying like, okay, I can resist these antibiotics that I'm eating.

21:09And you want to save your antibiotic usage for times when you really need it. So that's kind of where the whole movement stems from. And in the particular industry, it seems like Tyson food seems to be the pioneer here of moving away from antibiotics because they supply 20 % of all chicken in the U S so as Tyson goes, so goes the rest of the industry because they're supplying so much of the chicken. They had no antibiotics rule since 2015, but last year they decided they rolled it back and moved to this new standard, which I'm going to forget all of letters, but no antibiotics for human that are important in human medicine.

21:47They went to that standard. Burger King now is at that standard. McDonald's also, and now Chick-fil-A. So it appears that they've reached this little middle ground across the industry. I think part of the reason why these producers in Chick-fil-A feel like they can get away with justifying the switches, because remember avian flu just kind of wiped out the industry last year. That was when egg prices went parabolic. So I think their farmers were using this as a chance to say, like, hey, we need to have these disease resistant chickens, which is very ironic, though, because avian flu is not treatable by antibiotics at all.

22:20So it might have been this moment where they were they're using maybe the court of public opinion to say, remember when egg prices went that high, we need to have more just bacteria resistant chickens. So that's why they're kind of reversing on that standard for a while. It's a little bit of speculation, but I do think that's one of the reasons because last year was not a good year for the poultry industry at all. Let's move on. If you grew up dreaming of going Super Saiyan, better look into flights to Kadia because the first Dragon Ball Z theme park is coming to Saudi Arabia. The park will be 5.3 million square feet, feature seven different areas inspired by the original anime series, more than 30 different rides in a bunch of hotels and restaurants.

23:06Why Saudi Arabia? It's part of the seemingly never-ending quest for the oil-dependent nation to diversify its economy away from relying on fossil fuels. And the Japanese producer of Dragon Ball signed off on the strategic partnership. This is an especially bittersweet announcement because it comes just weeks after the death of Dragon Ball's creator, Akira Toriyama, which caused an outpouring of love that was massive in global and scale. Neil, it's not often you get a new theme park these days, especially one based on such storied IP as this. Right, but it does make sense. I mean, Dragon Ball is one of the most popular fictional properties in the world.

23:43If you go back to 2020, 2002, to our budding search engine industry, Dragon Ball was the third most popular search term on Yahoo that year. So this is an absolute massively popular franchise, started in 1984 as a manga comic and then turned into an animated series that I grew up watching with all of its amazing characters and the incredible animation and obviously the fight scenes. So there's a lot of nostalgia attached to Dragon Ball. I think it's still persisted into this day. Yeah, it has become a very popular kind of target of investment for Saudi Arabia in particular. The producer of Dragon Ball Z is actually teaming up with the Crown Prince to create more anime series and movies.

24:24So it's not just this park. It is expanding into a broader partnership as well. Also, let's talk about Qadiyah a little bit. It is this planned multi-billion dollar city in this massive plot of land in the desert, 40 minute drive outside the capital of Radea. It's kind of Saudi Arabia's take on these billionaire cities I've been seeing pop up every once in a while because they are trying to plan it from the ground up. And who wouldn't want a Dragon Ball Z theme park in their planned city? It's also set to have a Six Flags and a water park as well. So they're definitely doubling down on the amusement side of things.