Short Selling on Trial & Wordle Gets a Game Show

0:01Consider this comparison. PwC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PwC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tech can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why are young people so much more pessimistic about jobs than boomers?

0:43Then the New York Times is launching a Wordle game show. It's Tuesday, May 12th. Let's ride.

0:54Good morning and happy Tuesday. Recess must be protected at all costs. And that's not just me saying it because I happen to dominate at Foursquare. A leading pediatrics group, the American Academy of Pediatrics, issued their first new guidance on recess in 13 years, urging schools to maintain unstructured time at school. The group stressed that recess is critical for kids' growth physically, emotionally, and socially, but warned that recess time has been declining across America to prioritize test scores. Toby, what was your game at recess? I was a big freeze tag guy, obviously, but famously, Neil, when he was on Kids Jeopardy, yes, this is a real thing, he was introduced by saying his favorite class was recess, so I know this hits very close to home for you.

1:37The only one that could get an A in. I am glad that the pediatricians are on it, though, because recess time is shrinking, like you mentioned. Since the mid-2000s, around 40 % of school districts have reduced or eliminated it, According to data from springboard to active schools in the CDC, older kids to generally get less time than younger ones, which brings me to my final point. Give adults recess to I would dominate some free stack. I would dominate you in four square two right now. Let's just have a break in the middle of the day. No one would want to play with you. OK, and now a word from our sponsor, AT &T Business.

2:10Hey, Toby, have you ever dealt with an interruption to all the time? you would not believe how hard it is to get a word in sometimes. Yeah, I mean... It's like no one's listening to small business owners like me who hate interruptions. Well... Thankfully, AT &T Business Connectivity helps reduce interruptions so businesses can focus on serving customers instead of troubleshooting their internet. And that means... That means when customers are ready to pay, when orders are coming in, or when teams need answers fast, your connection works. Sorry, Neil, were you trying to say something? In fact, I was.

2:44Explore connectivity solutions that transform along with your growing business at att.com slash small business. One of Wall Street's most famous short sellers is on trial this week, and the verdict could decide not just whether one man spends the next 25 years in prison, but if activist short sellers as a whole are allowed to keep doing what they do. Andrew Left is the founder of Citron Research, a short selling shop named after the lemons of the stock market. Over the last two decades, he's targeted more than 50 companies, most famously, Valent Pharmaceuticals, but also names like GameStop, American Airlines, and NVIDIA.

3:20Left's playbook is as follows. Pick a company he thinks is overvalued or fraudulent, publish a deliberately attention-grabbing Citron report, laying out the case against it, amplify it on social media, and take a position against the stock, hoping it will fall after everyone else reads what he wrote. Prosecutors call it a kind of reverse pump and dump. They say that Left used his reads to make at least$16 million by misrepresenting what he actually held in his portfolio while quietly cutting deals with hedge funds on the side and timing it all around market-moving posts and TV appearances. Short sellers have long been a thorn in the side of corporate America.

3:57And as Georgetown's James Engel puts it, the SEC would, quote, love to have a short seller scalp to show they take this seriously. Neil, this case, which started jury selection yesterday, is high stakes because the law left is charged under Section 10B of the Securities Exchange Act. It's famously vague, which means a jury is essentially being asked to draw a line that has never really been drawn before. The main question here is, was left just sharing his opinion or engaging in market manipulation? I think it's worth doing a how it started, how it's going with short sellers because in the 2000s and the 90s, these guys were considered really cool pirates.

4:33Wall Street's Captain Jack Sparrow. They exposed fraud and overvalued stocks. They were hailed as bringing down Enron and Wirecard and warning about the 2008 financial crisis. I mean, in 2015, there was a widely seen movie called The Big Short about Michael Burry, who warned everyone on Wall Street about this impending collapse of the global financial system. So they were hailed as essentially heroes. But then in the past few years, the reputation has completely flipped. And I think what may have done that, what may have sparked that is the GameStop meme stock frenzy of 2021 and 2022, where a lot of hedge funds had short positions in GameStop.

5:11And people on Reddit rallied against that and short squeezed them and sent a bunch of them to huge financial losses. And, I mean, Andrew Left even said that. He said, when we started Citron, it was to be against the establishment. Now we've actually become the establishment. Yeah, there is always going to be tension between companies and short sellers, though, because Elon Musk, first of all, hates short sellers, too. He has called them leeches, calls them jerks, calls them value destroyers who make money off of destroying the company's prospects rather than just betting against it. So he really does not like people, one, shorting a company, but then two, talking about shorting a company.

5:49And the other side of the coin, though, is that short sellers occupy a very important place in the ecosystem. The James Angle, who I mentioned earlier, said part of the paybook is to blame the evil, nasty, naked short sellers for a company's problems to distract attention from a broken business model. And that is the same argument that Andrew Leff would put forward, saying that, hey, I am providing an important service here. I am revealing that these stocks are not doing well. And then if they attack me, that just means that they're actually using me as a scapegoat. They have underlying business issues.

6:22All right, let's get into the arguments of this particular case. The government is accusing Andrew left of misleading posts on social media and going on CNBC and saying basically fraudulent statements. It's not just that he took short positions and talked about them. It's that he misled the public into thinking that he had particular investments when he did not. So one example was this, is on January 8th, 2019, according to the government in this suit, left opened short positions on Roku, then went to Citron's Twitter account at 9.41 a.m., called Roku, quote, uninvestable, sent the stock down.

6:56And he also said at the same time that he was, quote, watching Roku from the side. So telling the public, hey, I don't really have anything. I don't have any really stock in this or any financial interest in this. I'm just telling you that Roku is uninvestable. But actually, the government accuses him of making$700 ,000 from his short that particular day. They have a few other examples of him doing this with other stocks like American Airlines saying, yeah, I think this stock is going to go down. And then actually selling that stock just a few minutes later after he posted those tweets or went on to CNBC and making millions of dollars per day doing this.

7:30He's almost a victim of his own success because in 2015, he said to the Wall Street Journal, sometimes you have a great story and the biggest challenge is how do I get people to read it? Wall Street research is painfully boring. I enjoy being entertaining. So that entertaining line leaves some room for debate about whether he's saying factual statements or whether he's embellishing in order to go viral on social media. So I think the jury will look into the exact wording he's using to determine whether this is market manipulation or if it's just someone sharing his free speech and opinions. Moving on, something very unusual is happening in America.

8:04And no, I'm not talking about the Knicks actually being good. Young people are way more pessimistic about the job market than older people. In fact, the optimism gap between young and older Americans is the widest of any country in the world. A new Gallup poll shows the stark difference. In the U.S., just 43 % of people aged 15 to 34 believe it's a good time to find a job in their local area compared to 64 % of people age 55 and above. That's a gap of 21 percentage points, and it's pretty much unheard of. There are a few reasons why this is so weird. First, for decades in the same Gallup poll, younger Americans have been more optimistic about jobs than older people, until 2024, when older Americans became more optimistic and young people's optimism just fell off a cliff.

8:47The second reason for the strangeness is that America is a true outlier relative to most other countries. Globally, younger people are considerably more optimistic about their ability to find a job than older people. There are only six places out of 141 where younger people are at least 10 points more pessimistic about the job market than older people. China, Hong Kong, Norway, Serbia, the UAE, and the United States. I realize I just threw a bunch of numbers and names at you, so here's what I want you to take away. The fact that young Americans are more pessimistic about jobs than the olds is a very new phenomenon, and their relative pessimism is the biggest gap anywhere around the world.

9:23It is hard to put an exact finger on why this is happening. Gallup, who conducted the poll, pointed to maybe anxiety around automation and AI displacing entry level jobs. But it is insane when you look at, one, how optimistic the older people are. That is why the generational gap is so big right now. It's not only that young people are comparatively much more pessimistic than other rich countries, but also that our old people are very optimistic. And I wonder if it is tied to AI and automation, where old people are just blissfully unaware that maybe it's coming for them and young people spend too much time reading about how AI is coming for your jobs.

10:02There is something to be read into the fact that we have just such a bubbly and happy older crowd and just such a dark and very sad younger crowd. Yeah, but AI automation is happening all over the world. So maybe so, you know, that's why it's still so perplexing why we're seeing this massive historic gap in the United States. Maybe this will explain why the olds are so happy, because baby boomers hold more than eighty five trillion dollars in assets. They're the richest generation by far. It's nearly twice as much as Gen X, four times as much as millennials. They're sitting on so much housing wealth.

10:34The housing market has gone gangbusters over the last decade or so, and it's just exploded. So they have a lot of wealth. They're not necessarily looking for a job either. Meanwhile, younger people are entering the job market looking at, yes, AI and automation and just this general hiring freeze that's going on in the United States. And their optimism around the job market has just fallen off a cliff. We should say, though, that in terms of history, their optimism toward the job market is not historically low. Job prospects, they felt worse about their job prospects, young people, in the 2000s, in the 2010s.

11:09And then in terms of globally, they're more positive than a significant share of peers. The United States young people ranked 87th out of the 141 countries survey. South Korea had just 28 % of their use that it was a good time to find a job. So it's just that gap that's big. Overall, young people in America are necessarily more pessimistic about the job market than other peer countries. Moving on, stalking people on Venmo is about to get a lot more difficult. The payment app is getting its biggest redesign since it was first launched, and new users will, by default, be placed into a privacy setting where their posts will only be viewable to friends and not the public.

11:45That's just one facet of sweeping changes coming to Venmo over the next several weeks. Parent company PayPal knows that Venmo is a 2026 app living in a 2016 body. So it's giving it a new look and new features to highlight that Venmo can do a lot more than help split a restaurant bill with your friends. The redesign will roll out in stages, but once it's done, you may not recognize Venmo. Three new services will be added to the platform. The first is Send, home to close friends, groups, gifting, and scheduled payments. Next is Money, where you link Venmo to apps and websites and also see how your crypto is doing, if you're into that.

12:17Finally, rewards, which shows offers and cash back from Venmo's new rewards program. The idea behind the redesign, according to Venmo SVP Alexis Soa, is to bring to the forefront capabilities users didn't know were there. She told TechCrunch, one of the biggest insights is how many features and functionalities we have that customers just have no idea exist in the app, which is true. I basically only know where the remind button is because some people don't pay on time. Toby, seems like a much needed makeover. Venmo had some truly bizarre flows within that app. Some that I'll call attention to is to send a gift card, which one I didn't know you could even do in Venmo.

12:54You would first have to initiate a payment to the recipient to then activate the gift card flow. So obviously no one knew that existed. To split an expense with a group, you would have had to navigate out of the payments tab and into your own profile settings, which is not very intuitive whatsoever. A lot of people likened it to hunting for buried Easter eggs with the app. Like what kind of payments app feels like you're discovering new features rather than it just being very easy and upfront. And then also just the search function was so bad. I needed to know, even though I pay Neil for a smoothie every morning or golf on the weekends, I would type in Neil-Fryman-7.

13:34I don't know if that's your actual Venmo. I don't think there are seven of us in the world. Right. You have to get the exact username correct. And it was just so frustrating. Now they're saying that, hey, when you pay a friend, there's a pay again feature that appears next to the last payment to make payment quicker. So that's the biggest thing that they are fixing is just making it easier to pay your friends who you pay most consistently. And you can you also can't overlook the privacy aspect here. I mean, in 2021, BuzzFeed News found President Biden's Venmo account and all the people in his inner circle.

14:05It's just so easy to find this sensitive information on Venmo. And even now when I go on to Venmo and I see like a public feed of people's posting who they paid and what, it is baffling that people still do that. But opting people into the private, just the close friends setting initially, I think, is it fixes a big problem that Venmo has. And you can't deny the timing here. It is very notable PayPal, which is Venmo's parent company, is now restructuring to spin Venmo off into a standalone business unit and then are giving us all this window dressing for Venmo. You wonder if they are exploring a sale and a number of companies have pitched PayPal broadly on buying it because PayPal is not doing so well or just being buying it for parts, potentially Venmo.

14:50Yeah, I have the numbers here. So PayPal stock is down 37 percent in the past year. Venmo, on the other hand, is killing it. In the first quarter of 2026, its total payment volume was up 14%. It's its sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. The app has over 100 million active accounts, and users visit the app more than 10 times per month. So if you want to talk about a healthy business, even though they were walking uphill against some of the UI and UX decisions, that is a very successful app right now. So, of course, PayPal, which is struggling as a company, is probably looking at cleaving it off into a more successful entity.

15:28OK, final question. What is the grace period that you think for reminding somebody to pay you that hasn't paid you? I quite literally. So I had a car in college and my friends would borrow it and they would rack up a ticket here, a ticket there. I still have outstanding ticket requests to two of my friends. They just have never paid. It's unbelievable. So I think the grace period is never the statute of limitations never ends because Will Stills owes me from a 2019 ticket he got back in college. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. Neil, spring is here and I've totally refreshed my wardrobe.

16:11That's great. Have you thought about taking a fresh look at your finances as well? Will that make me more dapper? can't hurt. Northwestern Mutual can match you with financial professional who will work with you to build a plan based on what's important to you. That helps you grow your wealth and protect what you've worked so hard for. Make the most of your finances this season with the right financial partner by visiting nm.com. That's nm.com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company. Toby, how's your bone density these days?

16:43Well, according to my doctor, it's not very good. That's not how air quotes work, but maybe you should try FlavCity's all-in-one protein smoothies. Not only do they have 10 grams of collagen, good for those bones, but they're also made with real whole food ingredients, 25 grams of protein, and functional mushrooms. They've got delicious flavors like mint chocolate, banana bread, brownie batter, and more that are as good as any dessert. Head to shopflavcity.com to get your protein fix. That's shopflapcity.com. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds.

17:21Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. terms at aka.ms slash college pc wordle is moving from your family group chat to your tv screen nbc is adapting everyone's favorite mental warm-up into a prime time game show hosted by today's show anchor savannah guthrie it's the first time the new york times has used its puzzles as fodder for a partnership with a major broadcaster reflecting just how big a deal games has become in its content ecosystem a trend i want to talk about on today's edition of toby's trends.

18:08The New York Times is essentially a games company at this point. Its puzzles and games were played more than 11.2 billion times in 2025, with Wordle leading the charge with just about half of those. In 2024, subscribers to its non-news products like Cooking, The Athletic, Wirecutter, and Games outstripped its news-only subscribers. Now it's tripling down on games by launching the Wordle Show. The mechanics of the TV version are going to be familiar to its millions of players. Filmed in Manchester, England, contestants will compete for a cast prize, doing their best to deduce a five-letter word in six guesses or less, or else be forced to wear a Liverpool jersey and sing in Old Trafford.

18:48Guthrie's involvement comes after her emotional return to the Today Show after her mother's kidnapping. In an interview, Guthrie said that Wirtle had been a point of connection between her and her mom. Neil, Wirtle has a great brand, a cult following, and some pretty high-level strategies developed at this point. You like this bet? Yeah. First real ones know that there was already a Wordle on TV and it was called Lingo amazing show on game show network. I used to watch all the time as a kid, there's actually a UK version going on right now. They tried to bring it back. RuPaul hosting in 2023. Uh, this was basically Wordle before world became a thing.

19:25And it was very successful, very popular, at least for a niche game show. So I think this could be successful with the Wordle brand because the Wordle brand is so strong. And I just have to think that the New York Times buying Wordle from Josh Wardle for low seven figures a couple of years ago was the steal of the century because they are monetizing this thing up the wazoo. It is unbelievable. I thought it was going to be a flash in the pan because it was very much a pandemic era thing, but it just became so sticky. I think it's the perfect level of difficult, but not too difficult to start your morning with.

19:59I am putting my game show hat on here though, and wondering what the mechanics of it it's going to be. Is it going to be the least amount of guesses? Like, are you trying to get it in three instead of six? Is it just the first to get it? So it's a speed type of thing. I wonder how many rounds are going to be, but I want you to put your game show hat on. Do you think it is compelling TV? What was yes, because lingo was compelling. And what was compelling about it? Lingo, put wordle branding on it and you'll be fine. They would just have different teams go back and forth trying to solve a particular word.

20:30It was literally word. You have to find a, it was mastermind combined with word games. But then what you would do is pick a ball out of a bucket that you couldn't see. And then you had to, and this was sort of a lottery game where you had to get a row of five balls. So that was like an added, it's hard to describe. I go on YouTube. It was like an added element after Wordle, where it was kind of this luck factor where the more times you got the particular word, you got a ball to create this winning streak of five. So yeah, they kind of took it a little sideways, and there was a fun ending round as well.

21:07So it wasn't necessarily the least amount of guesses. It was, could you just get this out? I was thinking Connections would be for the better game show, but that already exists too, and the Brits already have that as well. It's called Only Connect, which is an awesome show. So if you ever want to feel really, really dumb, go watch Only Connect. Because if you think connections is difficult, they are operating on an entirely another level there. So when in doubt, just look at whatever the British did first when it comes to game shows. Bring it over to America. I do think the Wordle game is going to be a success.

21:38Yeah, you have some homework, which is watch Lingo to feel maybe smart. And then if you watch Only Connect, if you want to feel really dumb. The other homework is if you want to sign up for this game or try to get on it, casting is open now. Teams of three. You have until May 29th at 8 p.m. Eastern to apply. Let's do it. Yeah. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. President Trump endorses spending the federal tax on gasoline to help out American drivers suffering from surging prices due to his war in Iran. In an interview with CBS News yesterday, Trump said, quote, we're going to take off the gas tax for a period of time.

22:14And when gas goes down, we'll let it phase back in. The federal gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon has been around since 1932. And despite numerous attempts by presidents to lift it, it has never once been suspended. And to be sure, Trump cannot do this by himself. He needs approval from Congress. But there appears to be momentum there, too, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle supporting a measure to lift the gas tax until October 1st. While the White House did not support a gas tax holiday previously, there is growing recognition that rising prices could be a political liability come the midterms in November.

22:46Gas costs over$4.50 a gallon on average now compared to under$3 before the war. Yeah, Axios called this a political zombie, though, because it always comes up and it never quite happens. So maybe this is the time the political winds finally shift in its favor. And because they are just such unprecedented rise in gas prices, it could actually happen this time. But more often than not, and literally it's never happened before, it doesn't come to pass. Even if it is passed, though, it doesn't really offset a lot of the pain that Americans are feeling at the pump. Because you mentioned that gas is pushing$4.50.

23:22It's up nearly$1.50 per gallon since the war started. This would cleave off$0.18. So it's not a one-to-one thing. You really are saving about 9 % to 14 % per gallon at the pump, which is just not going to do it for a lot of Americans. Yeah, Patrick DeHaan of Gas Putty, who is the online oracle of gas prices, said it's like putting lipstick on a pig. The real problem remains unresolved. I feel like we've said the real problem for the past two months. It's got to get the straight of Hormuz open. All right. Dua Lipa has filed a$15 million federal lawsuit against Samsung, accusing the company of plastering her face on TV boxes across America without ever asking permission.