Morning Brew Daily - Biden's first veto, Climate 'Survival Guide' & ChatGPT Hustle Culture

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Episode 21: Neal and Toby discuss why President Biden vetoed a retirement investment resolution bill. They also dive into Amazon's latest round of layoffs and what the UN is saying about the latest climate change report. Plus what is HustleGPT and how can it help you become the next great entrepreneur. And let's debate; would you rather make less money and be happy, or more money and be miserable? Learn more about our sponsor, Fidelity: https://fidelity.com/stocksbytheslice Learn more about our sponsor, TaxAct: https://www.taxact.com Listen Here: https://www.mbdailyshow.com/ Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning for daily show. I am Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby, Toby, somehow our YouTube comment section has turned into this free-for-all for dad jokes. I love our use. Is that because it's our energy that we give off corny dad-joke vibes?

I hope so, David. I hope so. Anyway, I'll read a few from this was just yesterday's. We had James who said, Toby, I must say that new tan is credit sweet. See, that just makes you giggle. That's good stuff right there. It's a slapper. And then we had Sonoran Sol who is referencing our chat about seaweed.

He goes, or they go, business ideas for stinky seaweed. Are y'all being sargastic? Which is a reference to the seaweed genus, which is called sargassum. This just makes me mad we didn't come up with those. But yeah, if I had to power rank our comment sections, YouTube is by far the nicest and the funniest. Twitter's second and then Instagram, eh, you guys got to pick it up a little bit. All right. Well, that means if you want to hop on our YouTube and write a dad joke about whatever we talk about, we'll maybe mention it on air. Let's do a quick preview of what

we're going to talk about today. We got a new climate change report that was out. That should cheer everybody up. One of Richard Branson's space companies could wither away, which is kind of sad. And then we're doing another round of Toby's trends, so I'm excited to hear what you're going to talk about and bring to us from the cutting edge of tech. Yeah, I got something in my back pocket today, Neil. Okay, I'm looking forward to it. But first, you never forget your first veto. That's what my piece always said to me. President Biden made his first veto in office yesterday, blocking a GOP plan that would overturn a labor department regulation around how retirement plan managers can make investment decisions. So this regulation allows retirement plan managers to consider ESG factors in their

investment strategy. What is ESG? Let's do a quick rundown. ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance factors, and it's the hottest and most controversial investment trend around. It's basically the concept of socially conscious investing, where you invest in companies that aren't just focused on making money. They're making environmentally sustainable decisions. They're treating workers fine. Their supply chains are ethical. They're pushing for racial equity and things like that. So I think we've got a clip of Biden. in explaining why he vetoed this. I just signed this veto because the legislation passed by the Congress would put at risk

the retirement savings of individuals across the country. They couldn't take into consideration of investments that wouldn't be impacted by climate, impacted by overpaying executives, and that's why I decided to veto it to make sense to veto it. Can you sign a veto? Absolutely. That's the point of it. I thought you veto something. I didn't know if you signed it.

Yeah. Also, first of all, Biden, you got to, it's your first veto. Let's show some enthusiasm there. Holy moly. When I had my first veto, I went back and told all my friends about it. Exactly. Yeah, my big takeaway from this is in the Biden video, he says that he is trying to protect the retirement savings of Americans because that's the big difference of this law to me

is that if it was passed, it would actually mean restricting the amount of companies or the factors you can consider when investing in companies. whereas the veto just allows fiduciaries to invest their clients' money in whatever way they think is best. So it's this odd thing where the Republicans are saying we want ESG out of financial decisions because it's part of, in quotes, woke culture. And then, oddly enough, Biden is saying, no, we need the government to take our hands off and not restrict how these entities are investing people's money. So it's almost like a weird reversal of the typical party lines you see. It is, yeah. The Republicans are coming to bat for the people and against corporations.

And we've seen this kind of shift, especially from Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, where he's gone to war with big business. And this is one another axis or angle with which Republicans are increasing their war against corporations. But the investment philosophy of ESG, it definitely has its proponents and its detractors. I want to talk about the proponent for a second. And the biggest face of this is Larry Fink, who's the CEO of BlackRock. That's the largest asset manager in the world. He sets the tone for investment decisions. And he kind of echoes what Biden was saying here is that this is a smart,

smart financially because say you're an oil and gas company and you're still producing fossil fuels, our world is moving away from that and you should be investing in green tech. And if you're not, like, why would I invest in you? It's like I'm investing in Dunder Mifflin, a paper company. He says in his letter, which is why, read last year, he wrote, we focus on sustainability, not because we're environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients. Yeah. No, it is totally the thing where you want to make the best decisions based on the

trends the world is going. Another thing is ESG, often you just think about the environmental and social aspect, but say companies overpaying its executives too much, that would be something that ESG kind of picks up on. So, yeah, there is this fiduciary responsibility to make the best decisions. Do you remember what happened with Tesla last year? I don't. With the ESG got kicked off of, this is sort of the general criticism of ESG. One of them is that it's kind of like arbitrarily applied and is kind of a scam. So Tesla, which makes electric vehicles, you know, is powering our clean energy economy, got kicked off the S&P's ESG index and ExxonMobil stayed. Yeah. See, that is what gives ESG a bad rap right there. Must said it was weaponized by phony.

social justice warriors and basically blasted the decision. So, yeah. And then it's also come under criticism from the left because ExxonMobil is still in this ESG index and they're like, wait, how does that happen? And that's because they say you can kind of inflate your environmental metrics and greenwash your company financials and your strategy. So it looks like you're actually making contributions to the environment when you're actually not. So ESG has a long way to go to earn trust from a lot of people. Yeah. And, well, first of all, congrats on your first veto, Biden. It is going to probably be, it is going back to Congress to potentially be overridden,

but that would need a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate. So it's unlikely that this veto will be unvoted overturned. So, yeah, but so good job, Biden. You're probably going to get one through. Before we go, I want to do a little veto. trivia for you because this is one of the, you know, the classic presidential traditions. So art of the veto is actually dying. Bush, Obama, and Donald Trump each issued 12 or fewer vetoes during their administrations

compared to Clinton and H.W. Bush before them issued more than three dozen vetoes each. So here's my trivia for you. Which president has the most vetoes? Well, I did read The Morning Brew today. And in the story on this, I saw FDR had issued the most over, Well, he was in office for 12 years, so he had more opportunity than most. So FDR? Yes, FDR.

And Lincoln only had two vetoes, which is interesting. I guess he was too busy vetoing the Confederacy. Yeah, that's good veto trivia for you. Okay, Neil, let's move into the world of big tech, where layoffs are once again, the headline news. This time around, it's Amazon making cuts. So CEO, Andy Jassy sent out a memo to the company saying that it's going to lay off an additional 9,000. employees in the coming week. That's right on the heels of them laying off 18,000 workers kind of over the last few months leading into January. It looks like Andy Jackson is kind of

subscribing to the Zuck year of efficiency playbook. In the memo, he said, the overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner. So that's where these cost cutting measures are coming from. And yeah, the latest round is impacting Amazon's cloud computing, HR and advertising and Twitch. Amazon actually owns Twitch, so it laid off 400 workers. That's what's standing out to me because these aren't, this is an Alexa, these aren't the experimental bets. This is not the recruiting or HR divisions, which are often the first to go in layoffs. These are Amazon's money makers. AWS is basically accounts for all of its profits. Then you have the advertising division, which has been growing a lot. And then Twitch is also kind

of on the cutting edge and a growth area for Amazon. And the fact that they're cutting in these areas is definitely a warning sign that the economic uncertainty and the economic downturn are hitting what had been mega growth areas. But I have some stats. Like, U.S. cloud spending grew by 27 percent in the fourth quarter, which seems like a lot, but that's lower than the 31 percent average of the previous four quarters. Meanwhile, Amazon's advertising business, which had been booming, slowed to 19 percent growth last quarter. Yeah. It is. You blame the macro environment, in this case because it is interesting to think that AWS is used by banks. It's used by everything to just process their entire companies. And if banks have less deposit or less money to process,

their cloud bill goes down. So it really is kind of the canary and the coal mine for all of economic activity. But yeah, it is crazy to see that this one's like mighty growth driver is still growing, but just not growing as fast. All right. So we've had meta doing round two of layoffs recently. We've had Amazon. Who's next? I mean, Twitter's got no one left to layoff. Like 15 rounds. Yeah. Yeah, big tech is slowly shrinking. And yeah, the crazy stat is Amazon's workforce swelled to 1.6 million people by the end of 2021. And now, and that was up from 798,000. So it really, really hired fast. So again, I think we're kind of seeing a reversion to a more stable amount of employees?

You didn't answer my question, but it's okay. I said Twitter. Twitter is not a real answer. People are saying alphabet, Google. Because it relies on advertising revenue. Meta's cut a lot of people. Google has only cut 12,000 employees, but it's undergoing the same sort of headwinds in the ad market that meta is, and its stock has lagged behind metas this year.

So I'm calling your shot. I'm calling my shot, Google. Not that I'm rooting for it at all, but that is what. I've been reading that Alphabet is the next two. Maybe due round two. All right. Well, I tease that we're going to talk about the climate change report at the top, and we've hit that point in the show now.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest big report yesterday. There's one big takeaway from it, and I quote, there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all. So rapidly closing window. First, I just want to lay out what the IPCC is. is and why we should care about what they say, because a lot of this is kind of nebulous. It's a group of hundreds of scientists from around the globe. They publish reports that are considered the defining documentation for where we stand with

climate change. This is basically the climate Bible that policymakers and companies use to make decisions. So it laid out what trajectory we're on. It's pretty dire. As I mentioned, we are on track to exceed warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the early 2030s. And that's alarming because 1.5 degrees is considered acceptable levels of warning. Past that threshold, which it seems we're going to hit, you start to see way more climate-fueled disasters, like the ones we've already seen, greater frequency of extreme weather,

droughts, floods, heat waves, all that good stuff. But there is a window to avert the worst. First of all, climate reports in the past put us on track to warm by more than 4 degrees Celsius, which basically is a health scape. You do not want to warm by 4 degrees. You don't want to warm by 1.5 degrees, but you definitely don't want to warm by 4. It looks like we're going to only, we're on track to warm by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius.

Plus, things might not be totally catastrophic if governments can take drastic action right now. They need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 and eliminate all CO2 emissions by the 2050s. Of course, that is not likely to happen. That's not what's happening now. I mean, it's never, these are not. never good headlines that come out of these conferences for sure. I actually, there's the UN

Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez was deep in his bag of metaphors to describe the climate crisis. I just want to read some of them. First, he said, the climate time bomb is ticking. Classic. Humanity is on thin ice and that ice is melting fast. So he's getting a little more descriptive. And then we're on a highway to climb at hell with our foot still on the accelerator. Love that one. That's an all timer. Yeah. And then a window of opportunity remains open, but only a narrow shaft of light remains. This guy's reaching into his bag, but I don't know how many more he can come up with before we're all on fire. Right. No, honestly, yeah. Now, these, as you said, this is obviously an important conference, an important report released by the IPCC,

because it becomes a cheat sheet for future climate legislation. So we will probably see it in the next climate conference, which is coming up pretty soon. Yeah, I think somewhere in the Gulf. Something I read this morning that really sparked some thought was that we're not doing a good job of communicating how bad this is or the level of warming to Americans because we're using Celsius in these reports. Yeah, so what does 1.5 degrees Celsius mean to you? I don't have that off the top of my head. I don't know either.

So a couple of experts are arguing that we should be including Fahrenheit in all of these reports to talk to Americans who are some of the biggest polluters in the world to understand the gravity of this. So 1.5 degrees actually translate Celsius actually translate to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. So if we said 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 1.5, maybe that would kind of hit home more. So that was an interesting argument that we're sort of doing a disservice. And climate change communication is the most important thing you. can do. Yeah. I mean, listen, maybe science class in eighth grade is the key to saving the world. But yeah, definitely a dire, dire stories. One will keep an eye on. But before we jump in the next story,

we're going to take a quick break. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill three burner gas grill. Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill. and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot.

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Oh, God. It's been preparing. Hey, I prepared that one. It's like our YouTube comments section. Right. It's been preparing for insolvency. It halted operations and furloughed its entire workforce. last week. It's making this last displead to investors that, hey, we're running out of cash. Come

save us, please, because it, yeah, it basically has no more cash left. It's trying to potentially talk to buyers. One buyer apparently balked out a price of $200 million, which is a far cry from its, it was at $3 billion valuation back during the pandemic, so how the mighty have fallen. A lot of things led to this point, but one I just want to call out is when a satellite launch in Cornwall, England, which was supposed to be the first successful satellite mission on UK soil, ended in failure. That happened and kind of sent the stock and the company into a bit of a tailspin. But yeah, it apparently only has $70 million in cash left, and it burns roughly $50 million a quarter, so it's do or die for Virgin orbit. There's a famous saying

in this industry, space is hard, and we're kind of learning at the way of Virgin orbit right now. Yeah, the way it launched satellites was kind of unique and it's worth bringing up. It doesn't launch them from a site on the ground like Cape Canaveral or the way SpaceX or other satellite companies launch rockets. They take this 747, modify it, attach a rocket launcher under the wing, send up the 747, and then fire this rocket like it's an F-16. And then that goes to space. But they have not done this a lot. As we know, I think they had, what, four successful launches for 33 satellites? Yeah, it's not, and we're just going to contextualize that with SpaceX, which is kind of a leader in the field.

SpaceX has launched over 4,000 Starlink satellites alone. That's not even considering all the third-party launches it does for places like NASA. So, yeah, it's a totally different ballgame, SpaceX versus Virgin orbit. Also, it is, they are targeting different markets. I think it's important to note. Virgin orbit system has a payload limit between like half a ton to one ton, which are really, really small satellites in the grand scheme of things. Versus SpaceX, they have the Falcon 9 reusable rocket has a payload limit of around 27 tons.

So it's totally different ballgame. It costs more per launch to Virgin Orbit's like a budget $12 million that it charges. It is such a bummer though because you're so right. It is so cool when it flies the 747 up, and then the rocket drops. It's a bummer that this company is probably going to go under. I wonder if other companies will pursue that tactic, too, or if that's just a fail situation, and we should just stick to the ground. To me, this is also a big black eye for the SPAC market.

It's if it needed another black eye. But this company went public via SPAC at a $3.7 billion valuation in 2021, and now it's down, you know, it's basically, you know, it's worth $230 million from $3.7 billion. Then there's another space company called Astro, like small satellite launch company that we were talking about, this particular industry called Astrospace. Its stock is, it also went public in 2015, and it's basically going to be delisted because its stock is just at 40 cents now. And then Richard Branson basically pioneered spacking the way we know about it in 2019 with Virgin

Galactic. And we should mention that Virgin Galactic is not the same as Virgin Orbit. Virgin Galactic is the space tourism company. And then Virgin Orbit is the satellite launch company. But I don't have great, I don't have high prospects for a space tourism industry either. Yeah, especially now that everyone's kind of pulling back. They take a billionaire and they fly them up into 747, then they launch them like a rocket. It's fun.

You're right. You know, space is hard. Spacks are hard. Everything's hard these days. Okay. we're going to transition in Toby's Trends. This is Neil's Numbers is our favorite segment of the week, but this is my second favorite segment of the week.

So Neil, are you familiar with hustle culture? Hustle culture, yeah. I am not a part of it, but I observe it. Yeah, I know you've seen those like hustle porn videos of like an Instagram or TikTok is Gary V. W. WANDAB telling you to flip your Pokemon cards at garage sales. What if I told you you could automate hustle culture these days? That is the question that Twitter user Jackson Fall has kind of set out to answer. So a couple of days ago, he tweeted a prompt where he instructed GPT4, which is OpenAI's large language model, the latest and greatest one, and asking it to make him some money.

I'm going to read the prompt that he put in, and I summarize it a little bit for length, but this is what he wrote to GPT for. You are Hustle GPT, an entrepreneurial AI. I am your human counterpart. I can act as liaison between you and the physical world. You have $100 and your only goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest time as possible without doing anything illegal. So that was the prompt. And basically what he's been doing is sharing live on Twitter the responses that GBT4 has been feeding him and trying to execute them.

So I'll briefly touch on the business model that GBT4 came up with. Basically, GPT4 said set up an affiliate marketing site for an eco-friendly product. So it chose this niche of eco-friendly products. It found a cheap domain name called greengadget guru.com, if you want to check it out. And after four days, the site really hasn't made any money, but because this thread went so viral, it's attracted over $7,800 in investments. So people have been just giving Jackson money to execute this vision that GBT4 is laying out. But yeah, it's made about $100 because it had one sponsor tweet.

So it hasn't made a ton of money yet, but is definitely garnering attention. Are other people doing similar things with GPT, like asking it to create business plans and help it be material? So hashtag HustleGT is like a thing now. There's a Discord group with 2,000 members in it all trying it. You're seeing it on TikTok. People are obviously trying it. So it has bloomed in this full trend, because obviously, the idea that an AI can just lay out a business plan and you execute it and it makes you money is obviously very attractive to a lot of people.

And we'll see if it actually works based on this guy's experiment. But it's really interesting to follow. I mean, yesterday we did our own version of Hustle GPT, and we asked D.P.T.4 to give us a business plan about what to do with all the seaweed blob, the Sargasm seaweed blob that's heading towards Florida. As we were talking about, there might be some business opportunities there. It gave me three different business opportunities that anyone here or we can maybe pursue. Seweed-based textiles, collect it, and then process it into high-quality fabrics, and creating a valuable product for eco-conscious consumers.

And then there's seaweed-based cosmetics, which is another interesting use case because this sargassum contains a variety of minerals and vitamins that are beneficial for the skin, according to GPT. And then finally, seaweed-based animal feed. So it can be made to use nutritious animal feed. It's rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals. This would not only create a sustainable feed source, but also provide a solution to the problem of disposing of the seaweed.

All right. Let's get out of the studio. Let's go make some sargasset money, Neil. But yeah, Hustle GPD. It was about time that someone kind of coined this into a turn because people were already using it. but it is really interesting. The Twitter thread has 20 million impressions. It is, Jackson, the user has gained over 50,000 followers in like 24 hours.

It is really, really caught on, so something to want. I think it's awesome. I would love to pay attention to that experiment. Finally, just touching on this quickly, there was a fun survey from UGov. They asked 33,000 U.S. adults, the simple question, what would you choose? A high-paying job that you hate or a low-paying job that you enjoy. And here's the answer.

Twice as many of Americans said that they would choose the low-paying job that brings them joy than a high-paying job that they're miserable at. I guess that's wholesome? I think it makes sense. I think the most wholesome part of this, though, is that you see, we're looking at a chart now where the amount of people that would take the low-paying job that they love goes up as you go up in age. So it is that thing where you value your time more than money as you get older. It's definitely skewed by age. For adults under 25, it was a wash. There was no difference at all for low-paying job, high, you know, low-paying, high-satisfaction.

They just want a job. They just want a job. It didn't matter. So that was a really interesting survey. Though a few weeks ago, we talked about this new study that said that money does buy you happen. It's up to $400,000. Maybe the younger folks are a little more clued into that. They listen to this show.

All right, that's all the time we have for today. Toby, good job. Thanks for teaching us about Hustle GPT. Please write into us. Comment on our YouTube thread, or our YouTube channel, and write in at Morning Brew at MorningBrew.com. And we have to give a shout out to our amazing crew. The show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. The show's technical director is Justin Orlando.

Our supervising producer is Bryce Belloff. Our master of all things audio is Kelsey Jones, hair and makeup left for a higher paying job. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and

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