Trump’s TACO Trade Returns & Samsung Wants Your Fridge to Have Ads

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0:30Toby Maloney:Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today the suspicious trades before Trump sent stocks soaring.

0:38Neal Freyman:Then why is your refrigerator showing you ads? It's Tuesday March 24th. Let's ride.

0:50Toby Maloney:Good morning and happy Tuesday. Okay, here's a new study that I absolutely love. Research from Cornell found that workers who were the most impressed by empty corporate buzzwords who fell for the BS were also the least equipped to make effective business decisions. Shane Luttrell, a postdoc psychologist and the study's author, developed a corporate BS generator to create statements like, Getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure test a renewed level of adaptive coherence. And after mixing them in with real quotes from business leaders, asked 1 ,000 office workers to rate each statement business savvy.

1:25Toby Maloney:The workers who were most wowed by the corporate BS also displayed lower scores on a test of analytical thinking, reflection, and fluid intelligence. Toby, I'm a little worried because you are impressed by everything.

1:37Neal Freyman:Hey, what the heck? We've seen this throughout corporate history, though. Elizabeth Holmes was uniquely good at doing this, using corporate speak to woo and then ultimately defraud investors. But I always come back to the timeless advice given by Kevin from The Office. Why waste time and say lot words when few word do a trick? Be simple. Talk to people like they're normal humans. It's actually a better way of conveying information, and it shows that you have nothing to hide. You're not trying to, you know, blow people's minds with corporate speak. Now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Neil, what's the best return on spend you've ever gotten?

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2:53Toby Maloney:The stage was set for another wipeout in the markets yesterday. Over the weekend, President Trump had issued a 48-hour ultimatum for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or else he would strike power plants all over the country. Iran, rebuffing those calls, vowed to retaliate with damaging strikes of its own. The war appeared to be on the verge of escalating dangerously. And then came the taco, the trade Wall Street has dubbed Trump always chickens out. Just as we wrapped up recording the podcast yesterday morning, President Trump posted the surprise news that his pledge to strike energy targets was postponed for five days after the U.S.

3:26Toby Maloney:and Iran held, quote, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities. Almost instantaneously, stocks went vertical and held on to their gains for the entire day, with the S &P closing up 1.15%. Meanwhile, skyrocketing U.S. oil prices fell back down to earth, plunging nearly 10 % to close below $90 a barrel. Wall Street was ecstatic to hear progress on a diplomatic end to a conflict that had already caused the biggest energy supply shock in history and was inflicting more economic damage by the day. Of course, nothing is so clear cut. After Trump's post, Iran denied that any conversations had taken place with the U.S.

4:02Toby Maloney:and accused Trump of manipulating financial and oil markets with his announcement. One thing we can't assume, the timing wasn't a coincidence. Trump made the announcement just hours before trading opened at 9.30 a.m. Eastern, suggesting that, as we saw with Liberation Day tariffs, he is well aware of market dynamics and was aiming to signal to Wall Street that an off-ramp was coming into view. Whether that's actually true or not, we don't know.

4:23Neal Freyman:It was brutal. Right after we finished the podcast, we get out and go, oh man, like a lot happened in just this really short mourning period. Trump added$1.7 trillion to stocks, pushed the price of oil down by$17. That's around 15%. But then by the time that we went and went to the gym and had our coffee, Iran was basically calling him a liar and half those gains had vanished. So it was this massive whipsaw very closely. Just the scale of the trades too had a lot of people kind of scratching their heads. The Financial Times did a little digging. They found that roughly 6 ,200 Brent and West Texas Intiminary Futures contracts changed hands between 649 and 650 a.m.

5:06Neal Freyman:That's 15 minutes before Trump posted his Truth Social post. The value of those trades was$580 million. And again, this is something where right now we're in a period where the oil market is volatile. Hypothetically, that amount of contracts could have exchanged hands. But a lot of people are reading between the lines and saying, it looks like this is following a pattern where someone is front running these big announcements from the administration.

5:30Toby Maloney:Oh, these were extremely suspicious. Just the timing of it, almost$600 million. 15 minutes before this Truth Social post, the Financial Times talked to a couple of portfolio managers about whether this was unusual or not. One of them said, my gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal. It's Monday morning. There's no important data today. There aren't any Fed speakers. It's an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk. Somebody just got a lot richer. And it wasn't just a bunch of money put in the oil markets. It was also S &P 500 futures, which spiked well over 1 % after this Trump announcement.

6:05Toby Maloney:So suspicious trades. We don't actually know what happens, but it fits sort of a pattern that President Trump can make huge waves in the market, in the oil market, in the equities market by these announcements we We saw with tariffs last year and now with the war, because the war is hanging on or investors are hanging on is every word with the war. So we just saw a very unusual trade 15 minutes before this particular true social post.

6:29Neal Freyman:And we also got the very surreal situation of waiting for an Iranian spokesperson to confirm something that, you know, the U.S. president said, because we did get a statement from the parliamentary speaker who said fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped. Again, like you have to take both sides of this equation with a grain of salt. Both sides have their own interests in mind when they're putting out quotes. But it was interesting. We were literally sitting by our computers and we're going, let's wait to see what Iran has to say about these negotiations that are supposedly taking place.

7:04Toby Maloney:The other big story we're tracking is Monday night's collision at LaGuardia that killed two pilots on an Air Canada flight and closed the airport until 2 p.m. yesterday. Here's the general outline of what happened. A fire truck had been dispatched to address a separate United plane that had aborted to takeoff and received permission across runway four by the air traffic controller. That was when the Air Canada plane was landing on runway four. And despite pleading by the air traffic controller for the truck to stop, it was on the runway when the plane landed, where it was struck by the aircraft traveling between 93 and 105 miles per hour.

7:37Toby Maloney:Dozens of passengers were taken to the hospital, but it could have been much worse. In what's being dubbed a miracle, a flight attendant was thrown from the plane, still strapped to her jump seat, and survived with just a leg fracture. Toby, this is the first fatal crash at LaGuardia in three decades and has already renewed scrutiny around the bare-bones staffing of overworked air traffic controllers.

7:56Neal Freyman:Yeah, and we are looking into how this investigation is going. The NTSB is looking into it. How is that progressing? uh pete muntean who is a correspondent for cnn posted that the ntsb chair jennifer hominday said the agency had to beg to get a key laguardia crash investigator through tsa in houston because she'd been waiting in line for three hours so i feel like that's just emblematic of the entire airline industry right now when someone investigating you know this really tragic crash can't even make it through tsa because the lines are so long moving on if you felt the world was missing a little bit more mark zuckerberg fear not zuck 2.0 is on its way according to the wall street journal according to a wall street journal report zuck is in the middle of building an ai agent that will help him do his job as ceo the idea is to flatten the company out letting him go to the bot to receive answers about meta's business that would previously have required layers of people to get through the rise of ai agents to the top level of the tech world can be traced back to the rise of an open source framework called OpenClaw that's absolutely exploded recently.

9:04Neal Freyman:Three months ago, nobody knew about it. This past week, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called it the most popular open source project in the history of humanity, going on to say this is definitely the next chat GPT. OpenClaw lets developers spin up a fleet of always-on agents across WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, or any other tools and workspaces your heart desires. For instance, If you're in the market for a stroller, you can have an agent be on the lookout for good deals and place bids for you on eBay, while a separate agent could be in charge of controlling your home's smart systems like lights and security, all while you go about your workday.

9:41Neal Freyman:It's become all the rage abroad as well. Open claw usage in China is now almost double that in the U.S., according to cybersecurity company's security scorecard. Of course, there are detractors, with one analyst describing the tech as janky, incredibly insecure, and half working. But that's not slowing down the hype train. When Zuck, Jensen Huang, and roughly 600 million AI users in China are all excited about the same thing, should probably take note.

10:06Toby Maloney:Absolutely. If you want to hang out with me this weekend, I will be unavailable. I'm going to be holed up trying to optimize my life with OpenClaw. Sounds like a joke, but there are tons of people absolutely doing this, especially in Silicon Valley and in China. And so are tons of companies. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, said every single company needs an open claw strategy. And we have seen an absolute marathon of companies trying to release either open claw competitors or wrappers around open claw to allow businesses to deploy them. Of course, NVIDIA has its own. It's called Nemo Claw, and it has some security settings to alleviate some of those privacy and security concerns that maybe an enterprise client would have when trying to adopt open claw for their business.

10:48Neal Freyman:It is a full-on phenomenon in China as well. Earlier this month, hundreds of people lined up at Tencent's headquarters waiting for engineers to install OpenClaw on their laptops for free. They just want to be part of the game, and one of the most difficult parts is setting up OpenClaw. So it is crazy, and then there's just anecdotes from people using it on a daily basis. This one 24-year-old job seeker says that he had OpenClaw memorize his resume and then look for new jobs every single day, new software engineering jobs. That's basically what you can do. You can treat it like an employee or an assistant that is always on, is not necessarily the most adept at navigating nuanced security risks, but it's like almost a junior employee.

11:36Neal Freyman:Just treat it like that. Give it very strict parameters. but it can go and work very efficiently while you have your attention focused elsewhere.

11:45Toby Maloney:I think that's what Zuck is doing. And Meta seems to be rapidly, Meta and probably every other AI company is rapidly adopting these kinds of agents for their workforce. I think another reason why this has gone so viral is that it has just like a really cute mascot. OpenClaw is a lobster. And in China, they call it, there's been a meme that's gone viral. It's called Raising Lobsters. And that's the process of installing and training OpenClaw. It's still not so hyped here in the United States. I mean, I bet a bunch of people listening to you, to us right now, are like, I have no idea this is happening.

12:16Toby Maloney:If you go to Silicon Valley, it's a different story. I think everyone is setting up their AI agents. But you are also have set up your own OpenClaw. What has that experience been like?

12:25Neal Freyman:Well, a little bit. Actually, I'm not technically adept enough to actually use and download the open source software. But just yesterday, Clawed from Anthropic. This is a separate thing, by the way. Open Claw was downstream of, you know, Claw sounds like Claw, but it's actually the developer works for OpenAI now. So it's a little bit convoluted, but Anthropic said, all right, we're seeing all these people, you know, set up their own autonomous agents. What if we just allowed you to do that right here in Claw itself? So I did that yesterday. It launched yesterday, and I had it kind of messing around with my computer this morning doing who knows what, honestly.

13:01Neal Freyman:Like I saw my mouse zipping around my screen as I was trying to prep for the show. So I'm still in, you know, the first inning of this, but trying to just figure out ways that I could utilize this. I think a lot of people are doing that. I have a cousin who lives in Austin, Texas, which is not Silicon Valley. He has his own agent called Agent Xander that, you know, texts him his to-do list every morning, you know, just kind of helps him live his life. So it is whatever you want it to be. It's almost like a mirror reflecting whatever your priorities are. That's what it can do. I do think we are in the early innings of this, and it's only going to grow from here.

13:36Toby Maloney:Moving on, people are putting ad blockers on their refrigerators. One more time because I couldn't believe it myself. Some people are putting ad blockers, you know, the kind you use on websites, on their refrigerators and appliance to keep food cold. As the Wall Street Journal reported, it's what some homeowners are resorting to after their Samsung smart refrigerators began displaying advertisements on screens, and many are quite upset about it. Last fall, Samsung began a pilot program to explore ads on its smart refrigerators sold in the United States. The goal, according to the company, was to test whether contextual, non-personal ads for things relevant to housework would be useful to people.

14:14Toby Maloney:Months into the pilot, which has served up ads intermittently on some fridges, Samsung said the turnoff rate, yes, you can turn off the ads, was low in the single digits. But the smart fridge owners the journal talked to didn't share that view. They said the ads were intrusive and violated perhaps the one last place in American life that had been off limits to ads, the kitchen. Furthermore, they felt like they got ripped off by the price of the refrigerators, which cost well over$1 ,000. If the fridges have been sold for a discount, they said maybe you could probably tolerate some ads. But these appliances came in at a full premium price.

14:46Toby Maloney:And finally, yes, one owner told the journal that they made sure their home router's ad blocking software extended to his fridge. It worked.

14:53Neal Freyman:That is a crazy timeline that we're living in, that your freaking refrigerator is serving you up ads. It is an interesting strategy from Samsung. They have an initiative called the Screens Everywhere Initiative, which feels, you know, opposed to what most people want from their appliances. They want to include beyond fridges, washers, dryers, ovens, all have screens on them, which, you know, maybe means all of them have ads eventually coming to them. Doesn't feel like what the consumer actually wants. one ad that i thought was especially kind of funny and creepy was they got a full screen ad for apple tv's sci-fi show pluribus i don't want to spoil pluribus but a big plot line of that is you know i guess i am going to spoil it like aliens taking over you know appliances and like tvs in the main character's house so i just thought that was an ironic twist i actually think it's kind of good advertising for pluribus but not a good user experience for the person with the fridge it's

15:49Toby Maloney:just amazing how much we're bombarded with ads every day. There was a study back in 2023. So in 1970s, American went from seeing 500 advertisements per day to over 5 ,000 in 2023. And now they're invading our kitchen. They're in our Ubers. I mean, ads are pretty much everywhere. It's something that we've come accustomed to. What I thought was interesting is that you want to accept a discount if you're going to see ads. So Netflix rolled out this ad tier and people have happily paid up for it. They know that there is a sort of bargain at play where I'm going to pay six,$7 for Netflix a month, but I also, I will see ads when you're paying the full price.

16:27Toby Maloney:I think for something like a Samsung refrigerator, when you weren't really expecting ads in the first place, that's what really frustrates you. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's

16:35Neal Freyman:trends right after this.

16:40Toby Maloney:Neil, feel my bicep. I should not have to say no to this every day, Toby.

16:45Neal Freyman:But how else will you know about all the goodness from FlavCity's all-in-one protein smoothies?

16:51Toby Maloney:Because I can read, Toby, and I can see they're made with real whole food ingredients, 25 grams of protein, 10 grams of collagen, and functional mushrooms.