Meme Stocks Are Back & ‘South Park’ Lands $1.5B Deal with Paramount

0:28This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Randy Marsh can quit his day job because South Park just inked a$1.5 billion deal. Then bust out your Kohl's cash because the door is opening again to meme stock madness. It's Wednesday, July 23rd. Let's ride.

0:53Must be a slow week at work because we've been crushed by your responses to the new MBD game password we released this week. If you missed what this is, here's a rundown. Morning Brew's Puzzle Master Jack has picked a secret word, a password that you need to guess. Each day of the week, we're giving you a clue to help you get closer to the answer. The earlier in the week you submit, the more likely your name will be selected for the prize. On Monday, the hint was the password is an anagram to a major city. Yesterday, the hint was the password ends with a number that's spelled out. Toby, you've been pouring through the responses.

1:34What has stood out to you? We have gotten a lot of responses, some correct, some not so much. The most common incorrect answers were more and diagnose anagrams of Rome in San Diego, respectively. Very creative, but incorrect because neither end in a number. My favorite incorrect answer so far was either New York 1, which good try, I guess, or Xiphone, spelled with an XI, which is an anagram of Phoenix, and does end with the number 1, O-N-E-1, but is unfortunately not a real world at all. So some of you are doing great. I love you thinking outside the box, but Neil, put them out of their misery and toss them another hint, please.

2:16The hint for today is the password contains a silent T. The password contains a silent T. So combined with the other two hints from Monday and Tuesday, spend some time today thinking about what the password could be. And then remember to submit. Just head to the Google form linked in the show description. We are awaiting your responses. And now a word from our sponsor, Amazon Ads. When's the last time you saw a commercial for something you actually wanted? Oh, man, I don't know. Most of the ads I get are for medications and stuff. You seem like you're in great health, though. I am. The problem is these brands aren't reaching the right customers.

2:55They should be using Amazon Ads. You can show up alongside the content your customers love with the help of trillions of buying, browsing, and streaming signals. They make it easier for advertisers to plan, activate, and measure their streaming TV campaigns. You don't even need to sell on Amazon to be a part of it, but your ads are right there on your audience's favorite shows. It's a single easy-to-use tool that can do it all. Gain the edge with Amazon ads at advertising.amazon.com slash start now. That's advertising.amazon.com slash start now. Well, coley moley, we have a new meme stock on our hands.

3:32Shares in the left-for-dead department store coals more than doubled in pre-market trading as meme stock mania crept into aisle 12. The mania peaked at$21 a share yesterday, up 105 % from a day earlier, before settling up around 37 % by the day's close. The recent rally isn't because affordable mom jeans are suddenly all the range again. The run-up was likely driven by a short squeeze, a GameStock-esque situation where a heavily shorted stock suddenly rises, forcing short sellers to quickly cover their positions. Nearly half of Kohl's outstanding shares are currently sold short, so the pressure was turned up to 11 for unlucky bearish traders.

4:12Kohl's ascent up meme stock Mountain mirrors a similar climb from Open Door just a day earlier. Despite being on the verge of being delisted a few days ago, the struggling real estate tech company climbed as much as 121 % to start the week due to similar frothiness from the social media crowd. Neal, Kohl's is still the same old dreary department store chain, which shows some FOMO is definitely creeping back into markets. As stocks continue to notch all-time highs against a fragile economic backdrop, it looks like some riskier trading activity is creeping back into vogue. Wall Street has a phrase for this, and it's known as the flight to crap.

4:51Chief strategist at Interactive Brokers put it another way. It is clear that the motivation behind many of these stocks activity is something other than disciplined considerations of discounted cash flows. This speculative frenzy has been going on for a few weeks now. Of the 14 companies in the Russell 3000 index that have more than tripled since that market bottom on April 8th, 10 don't generate any profits. There has been a groundswell of retail and retail individual investor support for companies that just aren't making money. It is a sign to some of frothiness in the market and reminds you certainly of the days in 2021 when there was zero interest rates.

5:36SPACs were going crazy. GME and AMC were going crazy. And this is also reminding some of 1999 when right ahead of the dot-com bubble bursting. The difference between 1999 and now, though, is that WallStreetBets subreddit is a thing they are a force to be reckoned with. Kohl's was the most commented ticker on the subreddit over the previous 12 hours, which is rare to see because usually Tesla supplants every stock on that forum. And then we have to talk about the volume again. We spoke a little bit about this, about open doors, insane amount of shares that were being traded. Same thing for Kohl's.

6:1275 million shares were traded by 9.51 a.m. Eastern, which was already a daily record for the stock. The trading day had hardly even started. And again, when you have 50 % of its float being shares that are sold short, that means the hands that are trading quickly are putting a ton of pressure on these bearish bets, which causes them to have to sell more shares to cover their position. So hence the idea of a short squeeze. So just the sheer amount of people getting involved in these meme stocks is very reminiscent of 2021. And it just goes to show or drives the point home that retail traders are an absolute force in the stock market right now.

6:50Retail traders comprise 20.5 % of total volume of the shares traded in the stock market. And many of them are going to companies that aren't so valuable. Trading activity in names priced below$5 makes up more than, which is Kohl's, which is Opendoor, makes up more than 26 % of the overall trading volume. We were wondering what the lasting impact of the meme stock mania back in 2021 is. I think we're still trying to figure that out four years later. But one of the main takeaways is that individual investors, retail investors, are hugely influential in certain stock moves in the stock market. And we just saw FINRA, which is a governing body of kind of a lot of these brokerages, they are trying to lower their day trading role.

7:41Usually you had to have at least$25 ,000 in a margin account in order to make more than four trades in a five-day period, four trades a day in a five-day period. Now they're looking to bump that number down to just$2 ,000, hopefully opening the market up to more of these retail traders who do like to get their hands dirty on a daily basis. So that is another kind of implication of meme stock madness is more of us can be degenerate day traders. And maybe a big reason why this is happening now is there's not a lot of sports to bet on. True that. Okay, Coca-Cola and General Motors are a combined 249 years old, but both iconic companies made major announcements yesterday that show they're just trying to keep up with the times like the rest of us.

8:22Let's start with Coke, where anticipation of its earnings call was especially high. Everyone was wondering whether it would confirm President Trump's social media post last week and announced a shift from using high fructose corn syrup to cane sugar in its signature drink for the American market. The answer is not really. The company did say it would launch a new Coke product for American consumers made with American sugar, but it won't replace the existing corn syrup mix it's been using for decades. CEO James Quincy said this is really an and strategy and not an or strategy. We are going to continue to use a lot of the corn syrup that we do now.

9:00And that is a relief for U.S. corn producers, which warned of a spectacular jobs wipeout if a buyer as huge as Coca-Cola would transition wholesale away from corn syrup. Analysts thought this outcome was unlikely heading into the earnings call because using high fructose corn syrup is much cheaper than using cane sugar. And besides, the U.S. doesn't make enough sugar to supply Coca-Cola's immense scale. So most of it would need to be imported anyway. Bottom line, Toby, is that come the fall, Americans will be able to choose from a corn syrup Coke and a sugar cane Coke like Mexican Coke, which will serve as a nice little natural experiment over which tastes better.

9:36I know, we already did this natural experiment in the office. You and me sat down, had a Mexican Coke, had a high-fricto corn syrup Coke. Unfortunately, we both said the high-fricto corn syrup Coke did taste better, so we already did kind of carry that experiment out. Now it's gonna be carried out across the nation. This new kind of Coke product, though, does show an interesting wrinkle of the Trump administration. They aren't necessarily trying to make companies change through laws or regulations. He kind of just puts pressure, immense media pressure on these companies. And you end up with these new products.

10:09We're also seeing it kind of out of RFK Jr. He's called out these companies for artificial drives for high fructose corn syrup, but largely avoided actual regulations on those things. But even still, we are seeing big food companies like Nestle, Kraft Heinz, General Mills, they've all pulled synthetic dyes from some of their products recently. So this playbook is something that you don't necessarily see. Usually you just have laws and regulations that make companies change. Not so in this administration. One guy is literally forcing product changes at companies. So Trump, if you are listening to this post on true social, iPhone batteries must last 20 hours.

10:47Thank you for your attention to this matter. Okay. Let's move on to GM, which during its earnings call said that tariffs would wipe out $1.1 billion in profits. About half of the vehicles the company sells in the U.S. are imported, and with tariffs now in place against Canada, Mexico, and South Korea, where GM makes cars for the American market, the automaker is seeing its bottom line bottom out. In a statement, GM CEO Mary Barra said she's busy, quote, positioning the business for a profitable long-term future as we adapt to new trade and tax policies and a rapidly evolving tech landscape. That positioning includes cutting costs and rejiggering GM supply chain in an attempt to offset 30 % of the tariff bill, but it won't be enough to stop the bleeding at the moment.

11:30GM predicted that tariffs would cost it four to$5 billion throughout this year, about one third of its total pre-tax profits in 2024. And its stock slid more than 8 % yesterday. The good news for consumers is that GM seems to be okay with eating those extra costs for now and isn't planning broad based price increases. Yeah, GM imports roughly half of the vehicles it sells in the U.S., and that includes their entry-level cars that are around that$30 ,000 price range. So it is a lot of pressure on these entry-level sticker prices. They're not the first automaker to even talk about this this week.

12:06Stellantis, which makes Dodge and Ram, also said that it lost$2.7 billion in the first half of the year, partly because of tariffs. So GM is right there alongside it. They say that if you eat into our profits like this, it's harder to invest in new technologies in the future. That being said, though, it did still have a relatively good quarter overall. I mean, their profits were almost$2 billion. So it could have been a pretty blowout quarter, which does show that consumers are still, you know, buying their products. They are just unfortunately eating a lot of the tariff when it comes to their bottom line.

12:40Let's move on. If you want a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad, you're going to have to have a deep knowledge of combinatorics, geometry, and number theory, face off against the most talented high school computational minds in the world, and also battle the most powerful AI systems in the world. Google announced this week its latest reasoning model achieved the highest honors at the IMO in Australia over the weekend, answering five of the six questions in the competition correctly. OpenAI previously said its model also performed similarly, though Google's was the only one officially entered in the competition.

13:15Both companies said their models followed the same rules as their flesh and blood competitors, completing the test in the allotted four and a half hour time period and showing their work along the way. It's that latter piece that has industry watchers so excited. Last year, Google designed two systems specifically to take on the IMO, Alpha Geometry and Alpha Proof. They earned a silver medal, getting four out of six questions correct. But those systems needed to have humans involved, both to convert plain language questions into technical jargon, the models could understand, then to interpret the model's answers as well.

13:49Deep Think, this new model from Google, on the other hand, works entirely in natural language from start to finish, and it wasn't built specifically for solving math problems. Neil, I haven't won a gold medal since I took down the St. Pete Meek and Mighty Triathlon under 12 division. Google just nabbed one in the most prestigious math competition in the world. So there were 630 students, high school students, participating in this competition in Australia. 11 % achieved gold medal scores along with OpenAI and Google's large language models. Just five people, or six questions, just five people got them all correctly.

14:30They were all stumped, including the AIs. By this one last problem, I'm going to read it out to you just in case you want to bring out a piece of paper. Consider a 2025 by 2025 grid of unit squares. Matilda wishes to place on the grid some rectangular tiles such that each side of every tile lies on a grid line and every unit square is covered by at most one tile. Determine the minimum number of tiles Matilda needs to place so that each row and each column of the grid has exactly one unit square that is not covered by any tile. Some people might take a lot of time with this question. For me, it's a little easy.

15:05The answer is obviously the limit does not exist. But there are this is a big breakthrough, as you mentioned, for these AIs, because it is not a single purpose. These are general natural language processing ones. They can do pretty much any test. When you talk about AIs that beat humans at go poker, other contests, those were those were designed specifically to be a human at go poker and other competition. This is a this is a more general knowledge one. And what really stood out to me, I thought this was fascinating. There was a four and a half hour time limit to solve that Matilda question and a bunch of others.

15:39The AIs took all of the four and a half hours. They were literally reasoning and thinking through these questions as a human would. Yeah, they don't go down one linear line of thought. They actually do run multiple reasoning processes just like you or me hypothetically would if we were confronted with these mathematic questions. That is almost actually why it got the final question wrong is that it zeroed in on this idea that like 10 was the amount of rectangles and it couldn't get off that train of thinking. And again, a lot of the researchers were like, hey, listen, this was the hardest problem.

16:10A lot of the humans didn't get it right either. But it is fascinating to see how instead of just using reinforcement learning to solve math problems by almost brute force, it is thinking, I mean, with quotations around it, reasoning through multiple lines of thought to get the correct answer. pretty crazy though that only five five people got it right we were looking at the questions this morning it's all great to me it doesn't look like anything i can understand but one reason that i don't think has come up that why ai and google are entering these competitions is it's a very fertile recruiting ground open ai said they employ a lot of people who were participants as young kids in this uh math olympiad and you can imagine we've talked so much about the race for ai talent that to start the talent pipeline early in the Math Olympiad to show like, hey, guys, you're doing this math.

17:03Look, our AI models are super cool. When you graduate college, why don't you come work for us? I can see that's a big reason why they do it. That is also why I think OpenAI published that they achieved a similar score two days before the official results came out, even though they didn't enter the competition, trying to win like the PR battle in that sense, even though technically they didn't participate in the competition itself. All right, let's take a quick break and talk about South Park next. After a wait of more than two years, the 27th season of South Park begins tonight, but maybe it should be called Aspen instead.

17:38The satirical cartoon show inked a streaming deal with Paramount that's worth, wait for it,$1.5 billion over five years or$300 million a year. The agreement will bring the Paramount-owned South Park back home to Paramount Plus for the first time in the U.S. and solidifies South Park as one of the most valuable franchises in TV history. Because low-key, South Park is a financial juggernaut, and its creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are extraordinarily rich. Before this latest$1.5 billion deal with Paramount Plus, South Park got paid$500 million to appear on HBO Max for five years. separately in 2021 parker and stone signed a 900 million dollar deal with the company that's now paramount to produce six more seasons of south park and 14 specials yesterday in addition to that streaming deal parker and stone agreed to make new episodes for five more years to the tune of 250 million dollars annually still even with all that cash weighing down their pockets the two were pretty upset with how streaming negotiations were going with paramount calling out skydance Media, the company that's set to buy Paramount for meddling in the discussions.

18:48Remember, this merger is the same one that's been at the center of the conversation around Stephen Colbert's cancellation and a number of high-level departures from CBS News and 60 Minutes, all properties under the Paramount umbrella. But bottom line, you'll be able to find South Park on Paramount +, where it'll likely be making fun of Paramount+. Now, we are in the wrong line of business because what do you mean we're talking in the billions for this TV show? And it is smart of Paramount to try to get this deal across the finish line because they already had to delay their season 27 premiere.

19:22The official South Park X account issued a statement from Parkin Stone saying, this merger is a bleep show and it's bleeping us up. That is two guys that you don't necessarily want on your bad side because they will absolutely etherize you in their show itself. The figure behind this deal is not necessarily as big as it seems. There's this agreement going back to 2007 where Park County, which is Stone and Parker's joint venture, has a joint venture with Paramount called South Park Digital Studios. That revenue sharing agreement enables Paramount to recoup about half of its licensing fee. That being said, 50 % is actually still a really good number if you're the creator of the show.

20:05So one and a half billion dollars, it's not all going into their pockets, but still, when you're talking billions, that's still a lot of zeros going into your pocket. Now let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Guy Fieri better head out to Hollywood because there's a new diner to review, and apparently it's electric. Tesla opened up a retro future 24-7 diner concept this week out in LA that doubles as a place for drivers to charge their electric vehicles. While there, you can sample from its classic diner menu that includes hamburgers and hot dogs made with locally sourced ingredients or popcorn served by Optimus Tesla robots.

20:42Tesla drivers will be able to order through an app in their cars for pickup, or they can hook up to a charging station, grub, and catch a movie on the diner's drive-in movie screens. Neil, it seems like an odd time to open a diner, especially for a company that is struggling with falling sales. But Elon thinks there's some runway here posting on X that if our retro futuristic diner turns out well, Tesla will establish these in major cities around the world. This is the Elon Musk we knew from a decade ago where he would take these random side quests that proved to be very successful marketing stunts for his companies.

21:15I'm thinking about that boring company flamethrower that sold out within seconds. and this diner, which looks pretty cool, he says it's Greece meets the Jetsons with supercharging, is a brand building exercise at a time when the Tesla brand has been absolutely obliterated. There were very long lines for Tesla super fans, which you forgot that they existed, but they were waiting until 4.20 when obviously this diner opened and it is a sign that Musk still has a lot of fans out there despite a lot of his political involvement over the past few months. So generally, I think this opening created some unusually positive vibes around Tesla.

21:58It also shows what you can do with a charging station. I think a lot of retailers are probably looking at ways to create experiences around bringing people who have to charge their electric vehicles like Tesla. There's 80 superchargers there. So maybe Elon is paving the way here for what a future retail supercharger mashup looks like. Toby, what's your diner order though? I know I was looking through the menu here. They have a surprisingly affordable chicken and waffles. That is kind of my guilty pleasure when it comes to diner food. Only$13.50. That seems like in New York, that's at least 20 plus dollars.

22:33So I'm going chicken and waffles here. I want to know your diner order though. If you're listening, drop it in the Spotify or YouTube comments. It's a very heated topic of conversation. Mine is obviously the tuna melt. Ozzy Osbourne went off the rails one last time. The metal pioneer turned reality TV star died at 76 on Tuesday, according to his family, without specifying a cause. Ozzy's death comes just a little over two weeks after he played a final concert with his band Black Sabbath in their hometown of Birmingham, England. The concert, seen by millions around the world, raised$190 million for charity, making it the highest grossing charity concert of all time.

23:14As the New York Times pointed out, Ozzy was a pioneer in two very different entertainment domains, heavy metal and reality TV. Lars Ulrich of Metallica once said, when it comes to defining a genre within the world of heavy music, Sabbath stand alone. And then later in life, Ozzy and his family starred in the Osbournes, the most popular show MTV ever aired, and one that paved the way for dozens of other shows about celebrity households. Toby, I'd venture to say Ozzy Osbourne was one of the most recognizable people on the planet, an absolutely giant personality. R.I.P. to the Prince of Darkness.

23:48Reading his obituary from multiple news outlets, the dude lived an insane life. One of my favorite pieces of lore about Black Sabbath is that their whole reason for their name and their vibe on stage is that they notice that if people paid money to feel scared at the movies, then maybe the same could be true of concerts. So they just applied that logic and created this entire vibe and aesthetic that became so influential. From a music perspective, he was respected as well. A songwriter, biographer who covered Osbourne said in an interview for his obituary that Ozzy's vocal tone is distinctive.

24:21But I think the main thing is his vocal lines just relentlessly shadow the chord progression with an insistence most singers would probably avoid so they can look more clever. So next time you listen to a Black Sabbath song or an Ozzy Osbourne song, listen to how he's just kind of singing the chorus, singing the melody, and it comes out amazing. And then my final anecdote I want to share about him is that he repeatedly failed his driver's test because he did have a lot of substance alcohol problems. So he started riding to his local pub on his lawnmower, and then he got tired of that, so he bought a horse.

24:55So I think that sums up just kind of the kind of person that Ozzy Osbourne was. Absolute legend. And whenever you learn guitar, what is the first riff you learn? There's Deep Purple and there is Crazy Train. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Wednesday. If you have any thoughts on today's episode, send an email with questions, comments, or feedback to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake.

25:25Hair and makeup is going down to South Park, going to have themselves a time. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.