Stunning Billion $$$ Golf Merger, Alien Whistleblower & Obsession with Succession

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1:04inside scoop on the most credible report yet that we are not alone in the universe. It's Wednesday, June 7th. Let's ride.

1:15Neil, we usually start the show with, you know, the requisite five minutes of kind of Zoom-like small talk. But honestly, today we have just a packed schedule of news, so I think we're going to dispense with the small talk. And we talk about the weather later in the show, so I'm getting into that later. Yeah, so we're just going to dive right into the news. Neil, it's not every day that our favorite two things in the world, business news and golf, smashed together with the force of a Christopher Nolan atom bomb, sending shockwaves through the very fabric of geopolitics, the business of sports, and of course, the great game of golf.

1:50Okay, that might have been a little dramatic, but Neil, that's how it kind of felt yesterday in the office when we got news that the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, which encompasses the European circuit, and live the offshoot Saudi-funded Challenger League, were setting aside their differences and their litigation to join forces under one unified for-profit entity. That entity will be primarily bankrolled by the PIF, which is the Saudi Investment Fund. Right now, we have no idea what the new entity will be called or what the new league might look like. For now, all we know is that the three tours will finish out their respective seasons and that Jay Monaghan, the commissioner of the PGA, will be CEO and Yasser al-Rumayan, the governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, will be chairman.

2:35We also know that a lot of people are pissed off. Oh, yeah. But Neil, take us back a little bit to kind of how we got to this point. I'll sort of just do a little backstory to explain why this was such a shock to everyone. Literally everyone's jaw drops. So back in 2021, Live Golf was created as this rival to the PGA Tour. This sparked a civil war in golf. Liv is bankrolled, as you mentioned, by the Saudi Sovereign Wealthfront, which is known as the PIF. And with unlimited money, they offered the best golfers contracts of more than$100 million to defect from the PGA Tour and play in its league.

3:13Some golfers went, some stayed, but either way, it created this huge rift in the sport with the PGA Tour blocking all of the players who left for Liv from returning to its league. Meanwhile, Liv has this huge cloud over it because it is funded by Saudi money. There was this moral argument being made that you shouldn't play in or support Liv because of the human rights abuses associated with the Saudis. So over the past few years, some of the best players in the world, like Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka, did go to Liv to get their payday. While the PGA Tour and Liv sued each other into oblivion, it was chaotic and both sides felt like the situation was not sustainable.

3:51But it was still extremely surprising that these two warring factions all made up. Yeah, it was the Montague and the Capulets just joining forces all in under 24 hours. My big takeaway, if we go back to yesterday, was just how do you not tell the players that this was happening? We were on social media and finding out in real time just as the players were. So we saw tweets from Colin Morikawa. We saw one from Justin Thomas who said, I was having a great practice session. And then he sent a screenshot of his phone and he was getting like hundreds and hundreds of texts. So it is just one of those things where the PGA has been on the side of the players.

4:26It's been a player first league. And then they drop this bombshell on them without informing them. It's a really, really bad look. And right now, Jay Monaghan, the commissioner of the PGA, is being called the most hated man in golf for kind of brokering this deal behind the scenes without telling the players. Right. And also because he's flip flopped in the past. He used to criticize Liv like crazy. He told players, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour? sort of implying that it was a moral stain that they went over to play and live. And then yesterday he went on a couple news outlets to give interviews about this new league.

5:01And he was like, yeah, I know you're going to call me a hypocrite, but the situation changed and I didn't see a path forward for the way we were going with live in the PGA Tour. So he was like, look, I had to take the money essentially, but people are criticizing him for being a sellout to the Saudis. Yeah, I also would be extremely mad if I was a PGA player who turned down a live contract because, again, you were kind of staking your moral flag on not joining this league funded by Saudi Arabia. And here people, Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, apparently they're going to be able to kind of waltz back into this new tour.

5:35I was seeing reports from some golf insiders saying that new players might have to pay a fine in order to rejoin the league. That's still kind of unsubstantiated rumors at this point. but I would be very, very mad if I got a nine-figure check sent my way. I said no, and then the people who did take the check still get to reap in the rewards of this new global league. So yeah, a lot of mad players for sure. We should talk about the Saudi role in all of this. First of all, I just want to touch on who this guy is. You mentioned him earlier, Yasser Al-Rumayan. Everyone should know this guy because he's literally one of the most powerful people on Earth.

6:12So he's going to be the chairman of the new entity. He's also the governor of the PIF, so he controls$600 billion in funds. He is the chairman of Saudi Aramco, which is the most profitable company on earth. That is the oil, that is a Saudi-owned oil giant. He's on Uber's board of directors because the Saudi fund invested in Uber way back in the day, billions of dollars. He's also the castle of, or he's also the chairman of Newcastle United, which is this big Premier League team that the PIF bought. The man's a professional chairman. He's a chairman on every single entity on earth, it seems like.

6:49But yeah, very powerful. Right. So it's kind of spooking people how much the Saudis are infiltrating global sports. They basically control golf now. That is without a doubt happening. And they've been making huge moves to bring over massive players in soccer, which is without a doubt a much more influential and powerful sport than golf, as much as we like golf. but soccer is watched by billions of people. And they're bringing over the best players, spending billions of dollars to bring over Benzema, who's a huge French soccer star. They already had Ronaldo. And they're eyeing Messi, who would be their crown jewel.

7:23Yeah, people are kind of saying the sports-watching agenda is almost complete because, yeah, they now basically control golf. You just said it. They're spending almost a billion dollars on players to bring over to the Saudi League. So we've been talking about, we've mentioned sports-watching on the show countless times. But now it seems like they've done it. Like they've completed it. So, all right, Neil, if you had one final takeaway from this, the crazy day in golf, what would it be? I think it's the Saudi thing. Just the breathtaking speed at which they've become the power brokers in some of the most powerful, in the most influential sports is sort of like you could close your eyes, wake up and be like, what the hell just happened here?

8:04Yeah. All right. Moving on for the next part of the podcast, there was just a metric ton of important news yesterday. So we are going to take a quick spin around the world to learn what happened with a quick toward the headline segment. Toby, you're wearing the yellow jacket. So you can take us to our first leg. All right. Our first headline is yesterday I woke up to an air pollution warning on my weather app. And it turns out I was not alone because hundreds of millions of people in the eastern U.S. are facing unhealthy air quality as smoke from wildfires in eastern Canada burn out of control and waft over the country.

8:40So New York City at one point yesterday had the worst air quality of any city on earth. The worst in the world. I believe it. I walked outside. It was like this orange glow. It smelled kind of like wildfire or fire. Are you having a campfire? Yeah. It was just really not good. I was like, I got to get me inside right now. I know. So in total, 414 fires were burning in Canada as of yesterday evening, including 239 that were considered out of control. This is all part of Canada's worst wildfire season ever recorded with more than 6.7 million acres in the country having already burned in 2023. Stay inside, Neil.

9:18I guess that's the takeaway. Hopefully it'll dissipate today, but it kind of reminded me like, wow, this is what people in California kind of live with in the summer and the fall during their wildfire season. And I've only looked at pictures and seen San Francisco with this, you know, orange glow to it. And then I was now we're living it. Yeah. I'm like, I got to get me to Duluth, the climate, the climate free city. Yeah. OK. Our next headline involves crypto. The SEC sued Coinbase yesterday, alleging that the largest crypto exchange in the U.S. has been operating as an unregistered exchange on U.S.

9:50soil. It's the second enforcement action the SEC has taken towards a crypto company after Binance was also hit with a lawsuit from the SEC this week. But I honestly don't feel all that bad for Coinbase, even though they allow investors to trade 254 tokens on their platform, but the SEC only considers 13 of them securities. I was just like, just ditch the 13 that are in question. I feel like they're putting themselves in this situation. But obviously Coinbase kind of pushed back saying that the SEC is taking an enforcement only approach with the crypto industry. They're not setting out the clear rules that the crypto companies want.

10:30So analysts saying this could be life or death situation for Coinbase because the SEC is basically accusing them of operating their entire business is illegal in the United States. And so the stock dropped like 12 % yesterday, but basically 50 % of their entire revenues are at risk from this action. And so Coinbase is saying we're going to take this to the Supreme Court because basically their entire business year is being, yeah, it's an existential risk. Gary Gensler is the SEC chairman and he is feasting on crypto right now. He's on the warpath, yeah. Which is funny because they thought he was going to be a friend to crypto because in 2018, he taught a Bitcoin and crypto class at MIT.

11:15Yeah, but it turns out he didn't like what he saw. Yeah, absolutely. Our third headline, there is an ecological catastrophe brewing in Ukraine. Some are saying among the worst human-made environmental disasters in Europe ever after a major jam attached to a hydroelectric plant was destroyed and released untold amounts of water flooding toward downstream communities. Thousands of people are being evacuated and at least 150 tons of oil were washed away in the flood, which means this is going to obliterate some ecosystems forever. Just a major ecological disaster that one former Ukrainian official said was the worst since Chernobyl.

11:53So both Ukraine and Russia are trading blame for destroying this dam. There's no conclusive evidence about what happened. And in the fog of war, it's just really tough to know what is going on or who the perpetrator is. Or there was also evidence that this dam was damaged even before this was happening. So it's also, you know, a really interesting timing because Ukraine is pairing this highly anticipated counteroffensive. And this could delay that movement. Yeah. I mean, you saw this rippling across wheat prices because it could damage the breadbasket of like Ukrainian wheat production. So we saw wheat being traded 4 percent higher on the Chicago Mercantile exchange.

12:33So you do see the ripple effects, even though this is just one dam in Ukraine. You see it rippling across the world. Big dam. Finally, the Republican race for president is taking shape. So former New Jersey governor and noted Cowboys fan Chris Christie threw his hat in the ring yesterday, joining former vice president Mike Pence, who also said he was running this week on Monday. Interesting fact about Pence. He's the first vice president to run against the president he served under in 83 years and only the third vice president ever to run against their boss. Interesting. OK, well, I don't know how this is going to work in Morning Brew, but Austin, I promise I will never run against you as my boss.

13:14But I don't think I've fully wrapped my mind around the fact that we're about to enter like election season while running this podcast, our first election season. So it's going to be it's going to be an interesting time. I check predict it, which is this online prediction market, which I encourage everyone to go to to kind of look at just look at who's the favorite, who's not the favorite. So Trump right now is a 57 percent chance of winning the Republican nomination. He's crushing DeSantis right now is a 29 percent chance. and then Tim Scott is in third at 7%. Where's Christie and Pence? I don't think they're up on the board yet, but Tucker Carlson is at 1%.

13:50So you can bet on Tucker Carlson if you think he has a greater than 1 % chance of winning the GOP nomination. There you go. All right, Neil, packed first half of the show. Before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break.

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14:36And Doug. Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. All right, Neil, we're back with a story about aliens. Golf and aliens in one day. That's called range, baby. But aliens are in the news because a whistleblower who used to work on what amounts to the government's UFO task force, David Grush.

15:24Grush. I did not pronounce that. Grush. Grush. David Grush has come out with a bombshell claim in a piece from the debrief that not only has the U.S. government recovered materials of non-human origin, they've actually been finding partially intact and fully intact vehicles for years. So, Neil, why is this particular report any more credible than the hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings and conspiracy theories out there? Well, it comes down to who the whistleblower is. David Grush has his bona fides. He's a former combat officer in Afghanistan who also served as a reconnaissance office's representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019 to 2021.

16:07That is a big mouthful right there. And the Army's liaison on that same task force, his peer, called him Beyond Reproach. So, Neil, I would also call you Beyond Reproach. Thank you, Neil. I ask you, do you think we just got news that UFOs exist? and have been crashing on Earth for years? Think about the implications of this. It means there's a huge UFO conspiracy in the government that implies we've been visited by many aliens for the past few decades and that the government has been trying to cover up this evidence. I know. Because what this guy is saying is that, like, why he's blowing the whistle, quote-unquote, is because he says these covert programs that have found these aliens and UFOs have withheld this information from him.

16:52They've cut them out of the equation and also from Congress. So it means there's these like few organizations working in Nevada or wherever in these very highly classified bases that have found aliens and have not told anyone about it for decades. Yeah. He also literally what is happening. I know. So he literally called this out and said that these crashed UAPs, which, by the way, is just the like government term for UFOs or these unidentified aerial phenomenon. on uh he's saying there's a secret cold war brewing with multiple nations trying to exploit and reverse engineer the technology to garner and i quote asymmetric national defense advantages okay so i do a lot of publications were covering this and saying this feels a little far-fetched but the guy is very legit so we're giving it the time of day but everything seems to follow it literally is like a plot of a movie that there's these multi-level government cover-ups and that they're trying to use this alien technology to gain a national defense advantage so it all felt a little too neat to me but again this was like getting covered covered pretty heavily yeah and everyone was like you know everyone was like yeah this let's first out be very skeptical and then they were like here's the reason to be skeptical which were kind of slim and then they were like here's the reasons that maybe this guy is credible which you know was a little beefier but i also before we move on, I want to mention this new study from University of Florida.

18:16They discovered that a third of all planets around the most common stars in the Milky Way galaxy could be in the Goldilocks orbit like Earth that could hold onto liquid water and possibly harbor life. Hey, listen, I'm on full team aliens with this. Absolutely. You don't need to convince me of this. So yeah, I'm glad that we're getting studies to corroborate the feeling that we are not alone in the universe. All right. Well, while you ponder the fact that there is might be a government conspiracy around UFOs, I'm about to read you a sentence that is 100 percent real. I promise. Mr. Bean is being accused of peddling misleading information on electric vehicles.

18:54So here's what happened and what it can tell us about the environmental benefits and some harms of EVs. So over the weekend, the comedian Rowan Atkinson, who plays Mr. Bean, published an article in The Guardian saying that he feels duped by electric vehicles. Atkinson has a degree in electrical engineering and bought his first hybrid car 18 years ago. So he's been an EV proponent for a long time. But he soured on them and criticized EVs for a number of reasons, specifically that the production of EVs releases nearly 70 percent more emissions than the making of gas powered cars. And that's because of this very energy intensive process to extract the metals used for the heavy batteries used in EVs.

19:36Sadly for Mr. Bean, the EV industry people were pouncing and said, OK, you definitely made some small valid points in the production of these cars, but you're just parroting the oil industry's arguments. Once EVs get on the road and off the assembly line, it's not even close, the benefits. studies show that emissions from evs over their entire life cycle are an average three times less than a comparable gas-powered car yeah first of all i just want to go back a little bit reading the sentence written by mr being saying my first university degree was an electrical and electronic engineering with a subsequent master's in control systems i was like go off mr bean i had no idea that he was this yeah pretty well-versed kind of electrical engineer um and then yeah his big point that he was saying was buy older cars because he said the problem is actually the lifespan of a car specifically in the uk is only three years and so like that's why cars are so inefficient and polluting is that people are just buying new cars constantly so he's like go buy an old car don't buy these electric vehicles because yeah it's not what everything they promise but yeah just his final takeaway was just i was just trying to start a discussion like the fact that you guys are talking about it means I succeeded.

20:54So I always think that's a bit of a cop out whenever you take like a stance saying like, oh, I was just doing it. Here's some fake. Here's some very misleading information, but I, you know, at least you're talking about it. So no biggie. Yeah. I don't think Mr. Bean is going to stop the EV revolution though. Did you know the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car globally, like any of any car globally in Q1? Yeah, that's, I mean, that was Elon's stated goal at his Tesla investor day. He's like, I want it to be the best-selling car in the world. It is pretty wild that that's where we're at in the EV context.

21:25It happens so fast. Now the best-selling car in the world is an electric vehicle. So yeah, it's only going to accelerate from here. So the EV industry was like, Mr. Bean, thank you for bringing it up. And we know we have to address the emissions that are released from the making of the batteries and the making of the cars themselves. But just when you look at the bigger picture, this is the best alternative we have to reducing emissions over the entire life cycle of the car. Our final story, I want to cover how Succession's coverage is covered. Here's what I mean by that. There was a heated debate yesterday after Axios reported that HBO's Succession received a massively disproportionate amount of news coverage relative to its viewership and the number of people who even read those articles.

22:07Essentially, this analysis suggests that media people, aka us, who wrote articles about Succession because it is about media and they were personally obsessed with the show, not that it was important to their readership. So, for example, 1 ,000 articles were published about Succession's finale two Sundays ago with an average readership of 17 ,000 people. But only 56 articles were written about the finale of perhaps an even better show, Young Sheldon, the Big Bang Theory spinoff, though the average readership of those articles was way higher at 65 ,000. You can see the same gap when looking at recent finales of NCIS and CSI, which people seemed more interested to read about, but were written about far less than succession.

22:56I mean, I was just dying laughing when we decided to cover this because now it's the media us talking about the media axios, talking about other media publications covering succession, which is a drama about the media. So, I mean, can you get any more self-referential and more navel-gazy than that? But yeah, this created an online discourse as anything about succession obviously does. And basically saying that just because that young Sheldon is bigger and has a bigger audience doesn't mean that it's not more rewarding to cover a show that 5 million people versus 20 million people obsess about.

23:32It is more interesting if you have this obsessive audience that wants to consume all material around it. So I don't think just saying, oh, this thing is more popular, it should get more coverage necessarily holds up when you think about, you dig down to what people like to read about, honestly. So I'm on the team Succession. Team Write About Succession? Yeah. I guess so. Which is so funny because I have not seen Succession and I was supposed to be in this conversation the one naysayer to Succession. You have watched it. I think it was overboard. I don't think so. You know, this article implies that there should be a one to one coverage ratio between the popularity of something and how much you write about it.

24:15But if that was the case, we would start our show talking about Taylor Swift every single day. We kind of do, Neil. I'm not going to lie. Again, we kind of do yeah, but it seems to me and I don't I agree that you shouldn't necessarily Cover something just because it's more popular Proportionally, but it does seem to me that the coverage of succession was way over the top Based on what the actual people in the freaking world actually watch and consume I can Most people probably just gazed over all of those articles and look for something else and the media people were like I'm obsessed with this show.

24:48Please. Let me write about it I feel like there was some degree of that. Yeah, the takeaway is let's go watch Young Sheldon after this. See what all the hype is about. I'm interested. All right, that is our show. Before we get to the credits, I want to give a shout out to Tom and Noella, who let me know they are listening to Morning Brew Daily all the way from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Wow. We're global. We are global. We love learning about where you're listening from and what you're doing when you listen to the pod, so don't hesitate to post it in the YouTube comments or write to our email, morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com.

25:21Let's get to the credits. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Veles and Raymond Liu are the associate producers. Yuchenna Waogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and makeup is on notice for producing the worst hair quality in the world. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow.

25:47Thank you.