CEO Killer Merch Goes Viral & Amazon Sells Cars Now

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, more Americans are falling behind on basic skills. Is it TikTok's fault? Then you really can buy anything on Amazon. It's now selling cars. It's Wednesday, December 11th. Let's ride.

0:47Earlier this week, Time Magazine released the shortlist for its Person of the Year, who will be announced tomorrow. So I want to play a little quiz with you all. Toby, you can participate too. I'm going to give you a list of six names. Five are finalists for Time's Person of the Year. and one is not a finalist. Try to guess which one is the imposter I included on the list. Here we go. Kate Middleton, Mark Zuckerberg, Caitlin Clark, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Kamala Harris. Oh my gosh. They all seem, my initial thought was Caitlin Clark because maybe she's just not quite big enough. But my other thought was Mark Zuckerberg because I don't know, other than come on our podcast, what really big thing did he do this year?

1:31But tell us, what is the correct answer? The correct answer is Kaitlin Clark is the imposter. Oh, wait. So Mark Zuckerberg is shortlisted for Times Person of the Year, but I agree with you. I'm not exactly sure what he did except, you know, get a makeover a little bit. Kaitlin Clark did win Times Athlete of the Year yesterday, so she is going home with some hardware, but she is not up for Person of the Year. Who do you think is going to win Person of the Year? That was sneaky, Neil. I think – wait, is Elon Musk on the shortlist? Yeah. Okay, so he might go back to back. Oh, no, he didn't win it last year.

2:04So I think probably Elon Musk. He's pretty dang influential. You know who else is influential? Donald Trump. He is by far the odds-on favorite to win this thing tomorrow morning. Fair enough. Now a word from our sponsor, Sage. Neil, in your eyes, what makes a successful CFO? For me, a successful CFO is one I never have to think about because they are off doing successful CFO things beyond my comprehension. They are a little like magicians in that way, but they're not actually magic. They're real people who need real tools to drive growth across their businesses. Instead of a magic wand, finance pros need Sage.

2:40The days of not knowing how to do a VLOOKUP are over. Use Sage to cut accounting time and grow your business faster. So less abracadabra, more Sage. Visit sage.com for more info. That's sage.com.

2:56When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. On Monday, Luigi Mangione was charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And just hours later, online stores were flooded with merch that sported his name and likeness alongside phrases like, In this house, Luigi Mangione is a hero.

3:38T-shirts, coffee mugs, stickers, you name it, people were selling it. Wired found nearly 100 listings featuring Mangione's name or image on Etsy alone. And over 800 results come up if you search for deny, defend, depose. the three words that were etched into the bullet shell casings at the scene of the murder last week. It's been one of the stories within the story of the assassination, how different parts of the internet have reacted and in some cases embraced Mangione. The McDonald's that Mangione was spotted at in Altoona, Pennsylvania, it's been review bombed with hundreds of people flooding the restaurant's Google page with negative reviews calling the workers rats and snitches.

4:17This reaction is something we saw right from the outset too. A Facebook post from UnitedHealth Group, soon after Thompson's killing, received 62 ,000 reactions and 57 ,000 of those were the laughing emoji. Speaks to the deep animosity people have toward the health care insurance industry, but also shows just the Internet's intense fascination with this character whose privileged background in Baltimore haven't deterred people from standing him as a folk hero, despite him allegedly fatally shooting someone in Manhattan. It is odd, Neil. Most of these sellers on the merch side of things are just trying to catch in.

4:53You see a lot of print-on-demand shops with products for sale because they let these opportunity sellers capitalize on trends very quickly. You see it really any time a meme goes viral from something as harmless as Mu Dang to something as serious as an assassination of a healthcare CEO. If you go to some of these sellers pages, you'll find other merch maybe related to MAGA or Donald Trump, some featuring a ray gun. They are just these sellers who jump in on any internet train. But I think part of the reason why the internet has had such a field day with this particular story is that so much of Mangione's public life is out on the internet for people to see.

5:28People are going through his Goodreads account to see what books he was interested in, going through his X account to see what he was into. I saw a screenshot from the UPenn Crushes group, a Facebook group where Manjoni went to school. So this is a capital V, capital O, very online story. And how are companies responding to this? So you mentioned that the McDonald's in Altoona was review bomb with all these one-star reviews. Well, Google has removed all of them because they don't want they don't want reviews pertaining to a particular location that from people who have not from people have not even been there.

6:08So they've cracked down hard on that. And then when it comes to these online selling platforms, so something like eBay, they have taken down the ones that glorify or celebrate the actual murder, the violence. but they're allowing the ones to stay on that just say deny, defend, depose, because that is within their guidelines. Amazon has taken a harder approach and removed more of these listings. And then the crowdfunding site GoFundMe took down some campaigns that popped up in support of the suspect because it has a policy against raising money for the legal defense of violent crimes. Another interesting wrinkle to this case that is related to social media is that usually in high-profile crimes like this, you will see kind of this outpouring of internet sleuths that jump online and try to solve the murder alongside or solve the case alongside police.

6:58But in this case, the Wall Street Journal documented multiple instances of the online community actively not trying to help. And there actually was no aid. And in some cases, there was actually trying to hamper the investigation. So that was another interesting thing that we saw bubbling up is that people weren't doing the online sleuthing thing that you mostly see on TikTok or Instagram or something like that. And And in some cases, we're going the opposite direction entirely. What do internet experts think about this? Well, there was a report from earlier this week from the Network Contagion Research Institute, and they called this phenomenon of online accounts glorifying the shooter as a cause for concern because usually you see this kind of stuff on fringe platforms like 4chan and 8chan after mass shootings.

7:41The report's authors wrote, While this phenomenon was once largely confined to niche online subcultures, We are now witnessing similar dynamics emerging on mainstream platforms, amplifying the risk of further escalation. Finally, what is the latest on the case itself? Mangione and his legal team appeared at an extradition hearing in Pennsylvania. They are working to contest bringing him back to New York to face murder charges. He's pleading not guilty to those offenses, his lawyer said. I haven't seen any evidence that he's the shooter. Yesterday, marked one year since Javier Mille took over as president of Argentina, the political newcomer and libertarian economist sparked intrigue all over the world for his pledge to use unconventional methods to bring Argentina back from the brink of hyperinflation and revive its flailing economy.

8:28So far, so good. 365 days into Mille's presidency, the progress has been notable. Inflation has plunged from a monthly rate of 26 % last December to 2.7 % in October. The rapidly depreciating peso has strengthened considerably against the black market dollar, and Argentina's sovereign bond prices have almost tripled since his election. Bringing down inflation has not been without pain, though. As promised, Millet took a chainsaw to government spending, implementing hardcore austerity measures, including laying off tens of thousands of government workers, freezing infrastructure projects and imposing wage and pension freezes below inflation.

9:09Unemployment and poverty have climbed. Still, Argentines are giving him plenty of latitude to continue his turnaround plan. Millet's approval rating stands at about 50 percent. Toby, this fiscal experiment has gained global attention and may provide a blueprint for other conservative leaders. I think to really understand the impact of Javier Mille, you have to go back to a year ago. Supermarkets were changing their prices almost on the daily as they were trying to keep up with inflation. People were spending their pesos as soon as they got them because they'd be worth less in a week, in a month.

9:41So you have to go spend them now. So in comes Mille, the anacrocapitalist, the former TV guy. He vows to blow up the central bank. He vows to bring a chainsaw, a literal chainsaw. that imagery has been a very big part of his presidency to the government and kill sky high inflations. And I guess you can really look at his effect in two ways. On the bad side of the coin is what you mentioned. Unemployment is way up. Economic activity is a little bit down. Poverty is up to a two decade high. But then on the other side of the coin, inflation has plummeted. It has come down. Bonds have regained some of their value.

10:14And the country's risk of default is at its lowest point as it's been in five years. So it really is whatever side of the coin you want to look at, you can either support his policies or detract them. And many, many people in Argentina do support them, a 50 percent approval rate with poverty over 50 percent. And there also hasn't been these mass protests that were envisioned when he implemented these severe austerity measures. I mean, 200 ,000 construction workers have been laid off because he froze all infrastructure projects from the banking community. So these are people that are working with Argentina from J.P.

10:48Morgan, the Argentina country head for JP Morgan, compared it to a company coming out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy that needed to get its financial house in order. It has a lot of assets, but it has a lot of distress as well. And this guy is pretty happy with the progress so far. He says this company, which he means Argentina, is getting out of a Chapter 11 after less than a year. Things couldn't be better from where I stand. So one year in, things are going pretty OK because Milley wanted to kill inflation first. He did that. Now there's a much bigger challenge of getting the economy back going again and really opening up Argentina, which is a very, very regulated insular economy to the world and global market.

11:32Right. You do need to see this economic revival that he has been promising follow through because there has been a lot of pain. So you need to have something on the other side of it. One reason why people think his approval rating has remained relatively steady despite that increase in poverty that you've mentioned is that he was very open and honest about like things are going to get worse before they are going to get better. But now you are in the things have to get better phase of things. So that will be the real test to see if all this pain was inevitably actually worth it. And let's talk about his global influence too.

12:05I mean, the fact that he brought a chainsaw and talked about taking a chainsaw to the government is very much in line with what you're seeing adopted in the incoming Trump administration. with Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. Mille is buddy-buddy with Trump and Elon Musk. He's very close with Elon Musk. So you're starting to see his influence creep north of the equator to the United States. Have you ever been shopping for some extra toilet paper on Amazon and thought to yourself, huh, really wish I could also buy a car right now? Well, you are in luck because the so-called everything store took the name literally and partnered with Hyundai to launch Amazon Auto.

12:41You can now browse, work on financing and arrange delivery for your very own Hyundai without ever leaving amazon.com. The actual shopping experience makes a lot of sense. You can search for the model you want, go deeper to customize things like trim, color, and interior features. And during the checkout process, instead of clicking one day shipping, which it doesn't offer, you can e-sign all the annoying paperwork and then schedule a time for pickup at your local participating dealership. Neil, at first glance, cars on Amazon seems a little crazy, but all the typical Amazon signals used to judge whether you should buy something, things like user reviews and star ratings, are part of this program and could be helpful.

13:19So maybe go ahead and toss in that$56 ,000 Ioniq 5 while you're doing a little Christmas shopping. Yeah, well, earlier this morning, Tobin, we fired up Amazon.com and we just literally typed in car. And it worked. I mean, we saw all of Hyundai's new cars in front of us. You clicked in. We saw all the specs. And I think one reason why people may gravitate to this, obviously, this is the early stages of Amazon's entrance into cars, is that, you know, survey after survey shows that the dealership experience, the, you know, the experience of going in, talking to a dealer, buying a car from them, haggling is miserable.

13:56So I think people are looking for different ways to buy cars. Online car shopping has been around a long time. I mean, Tesla really revolutionized this because Tesla doesn't have any dealerships and you have to buy a Tesla online. Same goes for other EV upstarts like Rivian. So Amazon is not the one who Amazoned car buying, but now it's getting in and, you know, maybe its competitors should be worried. Yeah, the Amazonification of car buying has already happened, but now Amazon wants to put itself at the middle of that, at the center of it. Some dealers are a little skeptical because, of course, they're going to be skeptical.

14:31because they think buying cars is a complicated business. And there are also these rules in the US that prevent retailers from selling cars directly to consumers. There's actually a lot of protections for dealerships that make them still be central to the process. But Amazon has skirted around those rules because it is working with Hyundai dealerships to say that, hey, people order online on our platform, but you have to go to the dealership to pick it up and you guys still facilitate the transaction there. So they are playing nice with the dealership industry, which is why some people are bullish on this because basically it's just a top of funnel.

15:06Yeah, it's just Amazon. You go click it and instead of it showing up in one day, though, you have to go and pick the car up. But I think people are pretty OK with going to pick up a car and not having it shipped to their doorstep. Yeah, they're getting around these laws by just saying they're the middleman connecting dealers with customers, which is what they say to every other third-party seller on their platform. The question is, what do these competitors do? AutoTrader, Carvana, CarMax. You know, I expected their share prices to like go down 30 percent yesterday because Amazon's getting into the business.

15:37Seems like investors aren't too worried at the moment. All of those other companies sell used cars and they have a much bigger selection than Amazon does right now. Amazon will slowly dip its toe in, though. Next year, it says it's going to expand just beyond Hyundai, which is probably pretty important because people don't just buy those cars. And then also getting into more cities right now, it's just in 48 cities. Up next, U.S. adults are getting worse at reading and math. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EBCLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about four in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks.

16:22And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EbGliss, LibriKizumab, 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. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EbGliss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EpGliss. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe.

16:51Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EpGliss. Before starting EpGliss, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about EpGliss and visit epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema 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.

17:24This 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. Made the best idea win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. Every decade, a test is administered to adults around the world to assess basic life skills like reading a thermometer, finding info from a website, and creating a comprehensive travel itinerary. The idea is to measure job readiness and critical thinking skills among people in the workforce. Well, the results are in from last year's survey of adult skills, and they are not good for the U.S.

18:02It showed that Americans are falling behind other advanced economies. Out of 31 industrialized countries and economic regions given the test, the U.S. ranked 14th in literacy, 15th in adaptive problem solving and 24th in numeracy, which is the ability to understand and work with numbers. More than one third of U.S. test takers didn't demonstrate the skills that would be expected of a primary school student up from 29 percent in 2017, the last time the test was administered, and 28 percent of U.S. adults ranked at the lowest levels of literacy compared to 19 percent in 2017. The findings show that the learning loss U.S.

18:40students experienced during the pandemic may also be happening with those out of schools. And it could be a problem for employers who are looking for workers with skills they don't have. Toby, what's your takeaway from this study? Why is the U.S. languishing in terms of basic skills? I mean, it's not just the U.S., though. It is most of the developed world did see losses in literacy and numeracy. Some of the potential reasons for this that they looked at globally was increased migration, which if you bring in a lot of adults who are non-native speakers of that language to a country, of course they're going to fare worse in tests that involve literacy.

19:19Also, aging populations don't help either. A lot of countries are getting older, and data over the years has suggested that numeracy and literacy actually peak at age of 30, and then it's downhill from there. Not downhill, just you don't get better after the age of 30. Another reason that was put forth by one of the people who helped administer the studies was that a lot of adults are getting a lot less practice than they used to reading books. And you can blame TikTok, you can blame Instagram, whatever you want to say. But our time is pulled in a lot of different directions. People aren't reading as much as maybe they were a decade, two decades ago.

19:53So those are a couple of the reasons why we might be seeing these trends. And you're right. The world broadly is not doing so well. But the U.S. has had a precipitous decline. It's just administered. The last time it was administered was 2017. In the interim, Denmark, England, Canada, and Germany surpassed the U.S. in literacy. Singapore, Ireland, and France moved ahead in numeracy skills. So the U.S. is falling down the leaderboard. But let's talk about the leaderboard. Who did well? Well, the same eight countries got the top eight in all three categories. Finland, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Estonia, Belgium and Denmark and for everyone living in Finland you know pop a Finnish what do they call it long drink I think yes pop a long drink because you were the top of the rankings in all three fields yeah Finland is crushing it Japan is also doing very well there are real world implications to these tests as well real world implications of having smarter people in a society because people who perform better in these tests actually see wages that are 75 percent higher than those with worse scores.

21:01And it's not just financial either. Higher scores also report that they are happier and in better health. So lower scores seem to be more suspicious of others and more likely to report feeling alienated as well. So it's not just a test. It is something that has a broad impact up and down societies. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. The quest to build self-driving cars has claimed another victim. General Motors said it would stop trying to make an autonomous robo-taxi through its cruise unit and instead shift its focus to making advanced self-driving technology for its existing fleet of cars.

21:37For CEO Mary Barra, cruise was an ambitious and ultra-expensive bet that went south. GM poured$10 billion into making robo-taxis with the hopes the unit would bring in$50 billion in revenue by 2030. But a safety incident in San Francisco sideline cruise's cars, even as competitors like Waymo shot ahead and expanded into other cities bar decided it just wasn't worth it to keep pouring money into this business without a viable path forward she said you have to understand the cost of running a robo taxi fleet which is not our core business and is very expensive toby do you understand yeah i do understand this is a major egg on the face moment for barra and then also just gm in general it just ran into a lot of issues i mean i not even pun intended there because yeah it did strike and drag a pedestrian.

22:28It then had some federal regulatory scrutiny and it potentially lied in its report to them. And then Cruise's co-founder and CEO left as well. Cruise laid off 900 people. The writing was on the wall, but what this really is too is any loss for Cruise is a big win for its competitors, a big win for Waymo. It really does look like Waymo. You can toss Tesla in there as well, although they're a bit of a wild card, is the clear winner in the self-driving space as of now because they are operating in multiple cities across the country. Waymo's operating in a bunch of cities, and they just announced earlier this week or last week that they're going to Miami by 2026.

23:05So they are pulling ahead. You're right. Tesla said it would roll out a robo-taxi fleet in 2026. Amazon also has a competitor in this space, but Cruise is no longer with us. They're just going to be doing that advanced driver assistance tech for GM's existing vehicles. A federal judge in Oregon has temporarily blocked the proposed$25 billion tie-up between Kroger and Albertsons, doing a blow to what would have been the largest supermarket merger in the United States. The judge sided with the FTC's argument that the merger would lead to reduced competition, potentially harming consumers through higher prices and fewer choices.

23:41In a separate ruling in Washington, a state judge also permanently blocked the merger. So this thing is looking dead in the water and deals a huge blow to both Kroger and Albertsons, who argued that joining forces was necessary to compete with the big boys of the grocery world like Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. Yeah, this is Lena Kahn, the FTC chair, doing the Steph Curry sleep move right now because this is perhaps her last decision or her last action that she's brought against merger. She's done a ton. She's had some wins and losses over the past four years, but she is going to be replaced in the incoming Trump administration by a guy who's already on the FTC commission named Andrew Ferguson, who is expected to take a much lighter touch than Lena Khan to mergers.

24:27He is still going to go after big tech companies. He said that they deserve a lot of scrutiny, but for mergers like maybe the supermarket mergers or the handbag merger that we talked about that Lena Khan successfully blocked, those might get to skate through. So maybe these two companies will try again in a few months, But right now, it seems like this temporary injunction that the judge ruled for will put this merger completely on ice. Yeah, the judge was not so down with the fact that Kroger and Albertsons were like pinky promising that they were going to lower prices, which isn't actually a legally binding process.