Bullish or Bearish: The Biggest Headlines for 2024

0:00Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozma St John host the 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 I do win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Kyle Hege. Today, we are taking the gloves off with another edition of Bullish or Bearish.

0:40Apple's VR headset, Big Snack vs. Big Pharma, and the viral Stanley Cup. You name it, we're going to debate it. It's Monday, January 15th. Let's ride.

0:56Today is Martin Luther King Day and the brew offices are closed, but we are still around to bring you a special edition episode. And it's made even more special by the fact that we are joined in the studio by Mr. Kyle Haggie himself. I am honored to be here today to moderate this great intellectual debate between the two titans of the podcasting world, myself and Neil, and I guess Toby is also here as well. Here, here. So we mentioned at the beginning of the show, this is a bullish or bearish episode. We did it last year. Kyle is going to introduce topics that we think will be major storylines in 2024.

1:29and Toby and I, maybe Kyle later on, will weigh in with our scalding hot takes. Yes, and I will physically separate you two if it comes to that. I've been obviously, as you can tell, hitting the gym in 2024. So I think I can pull it off. Are you all ready? We are ready. But first, real quick, before we jump into the show, a quick word from our sponsor, Veeam. We are super grateful for Veeam for making this show possible. And that's an emotion that I'm sure a lot of businesses who use Veeam know all too well. Gratitude that Veeam helps you recover your data faster, gratitude that Veeam helps protect that data in the first place, and gratitude that it has some of the highest security standards in the industry.

2:06There's a lot to be appreciative for when it comes to Veeam, so we'd appreciate it if you check out Veeam.com today. That's V-E-E-A-M.com today. This 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. All right, well done, boys. And Veeam is going to have to up their price if they want me involved in the ad.

2:46My cyber is very secure. But OK, let's move on to bullish or bearish. And for those listening, bull is good, bear is bad, and I promise no animals were harmed during the taping of this podcast. So let's get into our first one. Apple stock is up 389 % over the past five years. The blue bubble upgrade has bullied Android users. You have Tim Cook, the goat of supply chain at the helm. Apple feels quite untouchable, but they have a big new product coming out this year, the Apple Vision Pro. And this is their biggest product launch in nearly a decade. This VR headset, the Vision Pro, which is going to be released in just a few weeks on February 2nd.

3:22No company has yet to crack the code of kind of getting people to wear these devices in any significant number. So can Apple's magic touch finally make the metaverse happen? Are you bullish or bearish on the Apple Vision Pro? And Toby, I'm going to go to you first. I think Apple, I am very bullish on this. I think Apple is one of the only companies out there that's truly made an advancement when it comes to interacting with our computers in a different way. Their spatial computing is very cool. They are blending your environment with a computer in a way that Meta or anyone else hasn't. They stripped away those clunky, awkward controllers that you have to hold in your hands.

3:58And I think being able to interact with the device with your hands free is a great and needed innovation. And I'm very bullish also on the entertainment experience, being able to essentially enter a theater in the space of your own home. You have two 4K TVs for each eyeball in this. So I think this spatial theater experience is going to be great. And then also, finally, it's got the most robust app developer community. You need apps on these devices to make it cool. And Apple has just had this years and years of developer community that you can't replicate overnight. So those are three reasons for me.

4:36One, two, three. That's a strong bull argument. That was a lot of corporate jargon. Is that a PR press release? That was a lot of corporate jargon to pitch to consumers who really care about only one thing, and that is the price, which we haven't touched on yet. This thing is going to cost$3 ,500. That's about the same as a Herman Miller couch. You can't even sit on this thing. But to be serious, I think Apple really has not articulated a use case, a really killer app for headsets. And I don't think Meta has either. I don't think anyone, anyone who's trying to release any VR or metaverse product has been able to pitch this compellingly to consumers.

5:19Apple can whip out the coolest technology in the world. It can be, you know, maybe comfortable to wear. But if the content is not good, if there is no reason for using this, then I don't think consumers are going to bite, especially with this price tag. Meanwhile, Meta's Oculus Quest, the lowest price one, is now at$500. So say I'm a consumer who wants to kind of dip into this world a little bit, see what it's all about. Why would I not? The Meta is a very good product for what it is. I'm sure the Apple one is a little bit better technologically. But, you know, I'm not going to spend$3 ,500 on it just as a regular dude.

5:53He wants the Herman Miller couch. That's what I heard from this, actually. But, yeah. I mean, you're going to need a comfortable couch if you buy this, too. So now we're talking$7K for the all-in package. It's quite expensive. I'm already sensing some tension. We have a bull and a bear in the room. What do you think? I am bearish because I think 2024 is the year of in real life experiences. I think the last thing we want is to like go deeper into a virtual setting. I think we actually now want to be interacting with people in real life. Not like Toby sitting at home alone with his Apple Vision Pro.

6:23I got my two 4K movie theaters on my eyes now. Kyle, you have more friends than us. We get it, okay? Okay. The debate is already starting off on a good foot. I like the tension that is brewing. We're going to go to our next one. And so for this next category, we're actually going to go to Wall Street, a.k.a. the public markets. And I think the era of SPACs is over, thankfully. And people are looking to the normal IPO process in 2024. That is what everyone is talking about. Is the IPO market going to pop? I'm going to list off actually some private companies that are slated to go public this year.

6:55And I actually want to hear your thoughts generally about the public market. But then if you have any hot takes on these companies as well. So the five names we have our eye on are Reddit, which is the popular forum website, Stripe, the payments juggernaut, Panera of charged lemonade fame, Skims, the brainchild of Kim Kardashian, and Sheehan, the clothing store your Gen Z sister can't stop talking about. Neil, you're up first. Bullish or bearish? And then any companies you're looking at in particular? Yeah, so one company that I think I'm bullish on, and we should caveat this by saying we are not investment pros.

7:28I have a lawyer in my ear saying that. But just more broadly, Skims. I think Kim Kardashian is an absolute force. The power of influencer-led brands is only increasing. This company started 40 years ago, and it's already valued at$400 billion. It grew sales 50 % from in 2022. Sales were$500 million. Then it went up to$750 million. The big announcement recently was that it was getting into men's, men's underwear. This market is ripe for disruption. At the top of the men's underwear business is Hanes. And second is Fruit of the Loom. I can't imagine more dinosaur companies that are ripe for disruption from someone like Kim Kardashian.

8:10So I'm pretty bullish on Skims getting into the menswear game. I'm looking at a company like Lululemon, which was really focused on women, just focused on yoga wear. I just made that up, but it sounds right. That has done a very graceful and lucrative job of getting into the men's market. Now, every dude I know is wearing Lululemon pants and loves them. I think Skims can do that even more. I have Lululemon on right now. And what I'm hearing is a Skims sponsorship. Let's get some Skims underwear. Seriously. Neil, I agree with you on Skims. You did say it's valued at$400 billion. It's currently valued at$4 billion.

8:46I said$4 billion. You said$400. And as much as we want to be bullish on this, I don't think we can actually justify a$400 billion valuation for skims. My company that I'm most bullish on is actually Panera. And it comes down to actually my bullishness on Kava as well. Kava had one of the best IPOs of last year, the fast, casual Mediterranean chain. And it's a loss-making franchise. It only has 260 stores. Panera has over 2 ,000. And I don't think a lot of people knew this, actually. I certainly didn't. Is that Panera was actually a public company once before, before it was taken private once again in 2017.

9:26And during that time, it was a hundred bagger. If you invested$10 ,000 when it went public in mid-1999, you would have turned that investment into a million dollars. This was once a stock that a lot of people loved. And I think it's going to be a stock that people love again in the new year. Have you tried the Charged Lemonade? I have not tried to charge lemonade, and I will not. It is tough to bet on a restaurant company, especially a fast casual one when so many people are working from home. I think Panera really kind of, you know, it did well, but I think that was during an era when a lot of people were going there for lunch from the office.

9:58So I don't know, restaurant margins are very low. There's a lot of competition in this space. I don't know what differentiates Panera from any other fast casual restaurant when you have Chipotle has made its name in Mexican, Kava Mediterranean. There are a bunch of other more compelling options, I think, than Panera, but maybe I'm just disconnected from the real people. It's the bread, Panera bread. Is there one of those companies that you are bearish on? Well, other than Panera, I guess, but any of the names we haven't mentioned so far. I don't think I'm particularly bearish. I know you're bearish on Reddit.

10:30I'm a little bearish on Reddit because it just seems like a worse version of all the other social media platforms that have already gone public. It's got a smaller user base. That user base is less kind of amiable to being monetized. Like Reddit communities are very, very protective and they don't like ads popping up here and there. So I just don't think it's got the scale that you need for a social media company to really pop in today's day and age. Also, there's just this tensions with the community that happened around this public IPO process. So that's the one name that I'm a little bearish on going into 2024.

11:06I love the takes. I think in general, I am bullish just on IPOs in 2024. I think they are going to pop. And it's so fun. Like, I love when people go to the New York Stock Exchange and get to ring the bell. Yeah. So I want a lot of bell ringing in 2024. OK, next one. We are moving on to what I consider to be the biggest matchup of 2024. No, I'm not talking about the presidential election. I'm talking about big food versus big pharma. Big food has been dominating American life since the invention of the Cheez-It, pumping us full of processed sugar and red dye. Five. In the other corner, we have Big Pharma with well-known hits that will help with anything from pneumonia to allergies.

11:43But Big Pharma has a new trick up its sleeve. Ozempic, Wagovi, and other GLP-1 drugs appear to be the next blockbusters for the pharma industry with their ability to induce remarkable weight loss. So the Octagon is set for this high-stakes showdown between Big Pharma and Big Snack, which is going to emerge the victor. Toby, what's your take? I got my money on the big snack industry. It's just really hard to kill. It's kind of like a chameleon. It adapts to whatever trend is in. When low-fat was in, it made low-fat snacks. When high-fat yogurts came back in its style, it adapted to that as well.

12:19Nestle's CEO has already said that they're working on a number of different health aids targeted at people who use Ozempic, stuff like supplements that support weight loss, vitamins, minerals, other nutrients that you might be missing in your weight loss journey. And then Mondala said it's already expanding its portion control snacks, which are those individual wrapped snacks that are 200 calories or less. So I think that if any industry out there can adapt and survive in a new environment where something else is trendy, I think it's the snack industry. It's just very hard to kill. They might.

12:51I mean, I don't think it's going anywhere, obviously, but I think that they are on the defensive, on the back foot. But like you said, they're going to have to make all these changes. And that's because of these miraculous drugs that appear to be coming onto the market that are turning into, they're going to be the best selling drugs of all time. I think that's pretty much a certainty. For me, I think Big Pharma is going to win this battle because I just look at where the money is going. The money investors are on my side. Last year, Novo Nordisk, the maker of Wiggovi, leapfrogged Nestle as the second most valuable company in Europe.

13:26and then it went on to top LVMH as the most valuable company in Europe. So if you're just looking at it X's and O's, you see Wagovi Novo Nordisk is more valuable than Nestle now. I think that's pretty much as binary as we can make this, that Big Pharma is beating Big Snack. I will say, though, if you want to follow the money, there was a lot of money in the Big Snack industry last year. We had that mega merger, Smuckers acquired Hostess for$4.6 billion. I don't really know if a move like that is made if they don't see a future where they can adapt to this new landscape. And speaking of price, by the way, that's one of my bearish arguments against Ozempic, against Wagovi.

14:03The average retail price of these drugs is just extremely, extremely high steel. They all will run you. Wagovi, Ozempic, Monjaro will all run you over$1 ,000 a month. And so that's just pretty prohibitively expensive. You might say that price will eventually come down. But I think that's going to kind of dent the widespread adoption that so many people are forecasting. If we're doing like the ESPN pregame of this matchup, there is an X factor here. What is the X factor? The X factor is whether insurance will cover this. That is the X factor. I think anyone can agree with that. The intangibles.

14:38The intangibles. Will insurance show up today's game? I think there is a decent chance that it could because there are more studies that are coming out that these drugs do much more than just do weight loss. I mean, there was one huge recent study about Wagovi that says it reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes by 20 % in adults with heart disease and obesity. When you look at something like that, that makes it much more compelling for insurers to cover this. Yeah, I've even heard people are like going to the gym more on it. Like it seems to be this like miracle drug they can't quite figure out, but good things are happening to people.

15:10I do think this is like the most American matchup of all time because there's two things Americans love. a quick fix, which is like, oh, a drug I take that loses weight, and a tasty little snack at the end of the day. So I don't know which one is going to break first. This is, I think, the matchup to watch going into 2024. Let's move on now to our next topic of bullish or bearish, and that is electric vehicles. So for a long time now, electric vehicles have kind of been the prince that was promised. This technology that was going to usher in a greener future, one lithium-ion battery at a time.

15:43I think Tesla appears to be the king here, but you actually have a ton of players getting into the space. Fisker, Rivian, and Lucid, and even the kind of big automakers, the legacy companies. But recently, the pace of adoption has slowed, and these legacy automakers I just referenced have actually started to scale back their production plans of EVs. So Neil, you're up first for this one. Are you bullish or bearish on the future of electric vehicles? I'm bullish only because the U.S. government, which is the most powerful economic force in the entire world, along with pretty much every other government, wants this to happen.

16:16They're going to make it happen. There's going to be incentives. There's going to be subsidies. They have these targets that they want to hit. I mean, the Biden administration has effectively mandated that two-thirds of all new vehicles will be electric by 2032. And as we've seen for centuries, private industry is going to have to bend under the will of the government because this is the biggest customer. They can make change. They put their thumb on the scale and they are choosing they can choose winners and losers. They're choosing EVs to be winners here. I don't know how long it's going to take.

16:46A lot of the adoption has taken a lot longer than we expected. But I think ultimately we're all going to be driving electric vehicles someday. It's a strong econ take talking about the power of the government and aligning incentives. I like the argument. I know. I mean, I'm actually not bullish on that particular argument because you can't really sway consumer habits if consumers don't like the product that's being created. That being said, I do think the products being created are kind of meeting consumer expectations more and more. And one big part of that, I think, because I'm actually long term bullish on electric vehicles as well, it's because the unified charging network in the U.S.

17:23is going to be huge. That's constantly been one of the greatest sources of anxiety and one of the biggest reasons why you wouldn't purchase an electric car because you're not sure if you're going to get stranded on a highway. You can't take those long road trips because there just hasn't been this robust charging system. But I think GM and Ford, they just jumped on the Tesla charging network. So finally, we're getting to this standard that makes people feel more confident, which will be huge. That and the price of electric vehicles have been the two hangups for people. And I think we're slowly getting over those humps.

17:52Doing research for the show is looking into range anxiety, which is why everyone says they don't want an electric vehicle. It's actually a myth that people drive long distances in the United States. The average U.S. driver traveled about 40 miles a day, and 93 % of U.S. trips were less than 30 miles. So everyone maybe just has this vision of them going on this long road trip, very romantic, when in actuality, they don't need a car that goes more than 50 miles per charge. then they can come home and charge it back up. I blame the Rascal Flatts. They put life is a highway, everyone. Everyone thinks they're doing cross-country road trips.

18:30The government's going to ban Rascal Flatts as well. That's I can get behind. One bearish argument, though, is that hybrids potentially could be the way to go. Remember, Toyota was the one legacy car maker that didn't go all in on EVs. Ford and GM, they built all these new factories. And now they're kind of grappling with this glut of supply of some of their electric vehicles. Toyota said, listen, we're going to ease our way into it. We're going to still keep producing our hybrid vehicles. And their prices are selling like hotcakes. They can't even keep them on the lot. So that's, I don't know if it's a bearish argument, but I do think hybrids have a bigger role to play in the coming years than anyone gives them credit for.

19:07And one reason I think we're not seeing as fast adoption as we expected is I don't think we realize that people don't just buy a new car every year like it's the next iPhone. I mean, these people have their cars for years. And currently, the average age of passenger cars and light trucks in the U.S. has just hit a record of 12.5 years. They're old. I noticed how you didn't say Google Pixel there, by the way. You said new iPhones. You can't even help it. He's a green bubble guy. You can't even help it. Good point, Neil. Sorry to bring up the Pixel point. But before we jump into the next part of our show, let's take a quick break.

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20:22The price of your internet. With the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, you get five years of the most reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment included for a price that stays exactly the same. Restrictions apply. New residential customers only. Taxes and fees extra and subject to change. Most reliable Wi-Fi based on OpenSignal Awards USA. Fixed Broadband Experience Report, August 2024. So U.S. movie theaters had a huge 2023, largely thanks to Super Mario Bros. and the famed Barbenheimer. But despite posting a 30 % gain from 2022, box office revenues were actually still 15 % below the average of the last three pre-pandemic years.

21:04And rumor has it inflation is already exacerbating the already outrageous popcorn prices. Someone's got to bring these popcorn prices down. But the question on everyone's mind is, are theaters ever going to return to their pre-COVID glory days? So are you bullish or bearish on the future of movie theaters, Toby? And you already had a Vision Pro take, so I'm curious how that's going to integrate here. I got lots of takes. I am bearish on movie theaters because of two things. One, the decline of Marvel. The Disney Marvel machine has been the box off pretty much ever since Iron Man came out in 2008.

21:37but cracks have started to emerge this year. Warner Bros. overtook it as the top grossing studio at the box office. So when you got your biggest player, the player that puts the team on its back every year, struggling, I think it's bad for the industry as a whole. The other thing I think is bad for the industry as a whole is the rise of sequels again. This past year of movies was such a breath of fresh air because we finally escaped from this horror of sequel after sequel. We got Barbie, which was original. We got Super Mario Bros., which was original. Oppenheimer. these weren't spinoffs or sequels and finally people reacted they showed at the box office that they love this kind of new and original content and then you look ahead at the slate for 2024 we got joker 2 dune 2 sonic 3 gladiator 2 bad boys 4 deadpool 3 ghostbusters 4 kong poop hand up 4 you just go down the list and we're back in sequel hell again how did this i can't wait to see all of those he's a sequel guy okay neil i'll hand it off to you no i actually don't like sequels, but I am bullish long-term on movie theaters because of one specific moment in time.

22:41In 2020, Warner Brothers, we were at the height of the pandemic. Warner Brothers makes this very drastic decision to release all of its movies in theaters and on streaming at the same time. This was a huge deal because everyone's like, all right, this is the end of movie theaters. For the first time ever, we are going to be releasing movies in theaters and on streaming at the same time. This was a sign that companies were pushing everything they had into streaming. They were letting theaters go. What happened a year later? Warner Brothers reversed that decision, and they went back to movie theaters.

23:20After all that, that was the moment where if movie theaters were going to die, they could have died, and they didn't. So I'm bullish on the long term of movie theaters because people – it was before COVID too. Everyone was like movie theaters are dead with TV. There's the era of prestige TV and quality content is going to TV. And yet movie theaters didn't die. COVID, movie theaters didn't die. And now I think we're seeing a rebound. It's only going to continue. But it really depends on the content. I think that's what – if the content is good, people will go to movie theaters. If there's Super Mario Brothers, if there's the Barbies of the world, there's the Oppenheimers of the world.