Morning Brew Daily - Diabetic drug diet craze, Mormon church pays SEC $5M & Bill Gates' beer run

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Episode 3: Neal and Toby discuss the Ozempic shortage - the drug that diabetics need, but dieters are using. Also blizzard warnings in LA and record heat in DC, what is happening??? The guys also dive into Spotify's new AI DJ, and why Bill Gates is investing over $900 million in beer. Plus why is the Mormon Church paying fines to the SEC? Listen Here: https://www.mbdailyshow.com/ Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Sources: Diabetic Drug Shortage: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/02/22/diabetes-patients-ozempic-dieters Record Weather Around the US: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/02/22/record-temperatures-warm-east-cold-west/ Mormon Church Pays SEC Fine: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/02/22/mormon-church-fined-investment-portfolio Spotify Develops AI DJ: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/Spotifys-AI-DJ-feature Iron Ball Washes Up In Japan: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/22/mysterious-metal-iron-ball-sphere-beach-japan-officials-investigate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew a i good morning brew daily show i am neil freeman and i'm toby howl and neil how's the early wake up been going for you we filmed the show kind of early in the morning you wake up really early how's it been going for you i love it um i've been waking up at 530 a m sending my alarm so hype for the show so much adrenaline i don't know what to do with it so i've been starting honestly swiping on hinge like 545 just sitting in my bed just super head just super head and yeah, I get these messages back over the past few days being like, what are you doing?

Like that 6 a.m. match hits different. Is it because it's so early or it's because you're a world famous podcast host now? Probably both. Okay. That's good. I'm glad that you're finding success. We got a great show ahead of us today. We're talking about a weight loss drug controversy.

We get into Bill Gates's investing habits. Another unidentified object has washed up on the shore of a foreign nation. and then we're actually finishing with some trivia. I'm excited for that. I know. Let's get into it. All right, let's ride. Okay, so for readers of the newsletter this morning,

they saw the top story with On Ozempic. It is a diabetes drug that is also doubles as a weight loss drug. So here's the controversy and why it's newsworthy. So basically, OZempic is primarily used to treat diabetes, and now there's a shortage of it. And the main drive behind this shortage is that tons of celebrities and a lot of people on TikTok have actually been pushing it as a weight loss drug because it actually does work for both. And I can get into the science of it a little bit.

But Neil, have you encountered any of this ozempic chatter on social media in the last few days? I have not, but it seems like the kind of thing you either know everything about or you know nothing about. And we were, I think, before this show in that I know nothing about this. Right, but luckily, we have a great crew here, and Emily, our producer, sent us a bunch of TikToks of people kind of explaining what it does. Last night. So I'm going to break it down a little bit for our audience. Essentially, the drug works by targeting the amount of insulin produced by the pancreas. And a byproduct of that is that it decreases the amount of glucogen produced by the liver.

I know. Toby Howell, MD. MD right here. But the general outcome of that is that the combo of those two things reduces hunger and increases energy, which is kind of the two main keys for weight loss. And yeah, so let's talk about TikTok's role in this. 785 million views of the Ozempic hashtag, tons of celebrities. Even Elon Musk on Twitter. I was going to say, it's not just TikTok.

It's everywhere. Elon Musk posts about it on Twitter. Right. He posted about a drug that he was taking. because someone said, like, Elon, you're looking good right now. What's the blame for it? And he first said fasting, and then he followed up with another tweet. The real reason.

The real reason, which is talking about this particular weight loss drug that he's been taking. So you can see why it's getting momentum and why doctors are finding it hard to prescribe this to the people who probably need it most. I have the stat. U.S. doctors wrote more than 313,000 prescriptions for a Zepvik in the last full week of January. that's a 78% increase from the year before. Yeah, that's massive. And I think the reason why it's massive is because it works as a weight loss drug. Yeah.

With Govi, which is actually the drug that Elon took, people are reporting 15 to 17% body loss. So this is not like a fad. It's not like a pseudoscience. It's true science that targets certain systems in your body that helps you lose weight. Yeah, and the Eli Lilly drug that is associated with this class of drug, In a study that they ran, patients who didn't have diabetes loss up to 22.5% of their body weight after taking it for nearly 18 months. That's so dramatic. I would be down to nothing if I was losing 20% of my body weight.

Skin and bones, man. And then the one final thing that makes this story really interesting is, of course, health care in America is a little annoying and weird when it comes to insurance, to put it lightly. Yeah. But weight loss drugs are not covered by insurance, but diabetes drugs are. Yeah. And so that's why a lot of people, it's kind of like the guy who doesn't have ADD, who would get like Adderall, but just to use it to study. I don't know any of those people. We won't expose anyone that we know.

But people are essentially doing the same thing. We're like, no, I'm not taking this for weight loss, even though they are taking it from weight loss. So there is some like insurance arbitrage that's happening. Interesting. This class of drugs is going to be massive for drug makers. Weight loss drugs in general? Totally. Yeah.

I think that just Eli Lilly will generate peak annual sales of $10 billion from its one drug. That's according to an estimate from J.P. Morgan. So these companies are going to lean in like crazy. Yeah. I'm just surprised that they haven't just released a differently branded. Instead of branding it for diabetes patients, you brand it as a weight loss drug. But I guess, again, the insurance angle comes in where insurance. typically doesn't cover weight loss drugs. So a lot of moving parts in this. But yeah, I'm actually

very glad I got to dive into kind of like this corner of the world. And yeah, hopefully you guys learned a little bit too. We'll see how it plays out going forward and whether they can ramp up production. Our next story, well, you wouldn't really know about it from our walk to work here in New York City. But according to the National Weather Service, almost all of the country is experiencing some form of notable weather. And so I guess that's a technical term that the national weather service use. But, you know, if it's notable weather, we should probably note it. And yes, there's a major winter storm that is impacting a large part of the country. More than 2,000 flights have been canceled just in the past few days. Love this thing. In Wyoming, virtually every road

has been impacted. All five roads. I've actually driven on roads in Wyoming. I would figure that most winters, most roads in Wyoming are impacted, yeah. So there are some freak stuff going on. So San Francisco could get measurable snowfall, and it hasn't seen measurable snowfall in 47 years. L.A. gets snow in the mountains, but it's the first time, I think maybe the second time on record

that they've been issued a blizzard warning. And so L.A. meteorologists are freaking out. They're like, I didn't come here to talk about blizzard warnings. I came here to just kind of say sunny in 75 all over again. And I love for the people watching this on YouTube, we've been flashing a map up of the different kind of like heat colors that are impacting the U.S. And it is just the craziest rainbow. Difference, yeah. Because 100, yeah, how does it get a big?

Because, yes, there is a weather, there is a cold weather storm that is affecting the northern part of the country. But in parts of the southeast, they're getting record temperatures. So Washington, D.C. could get 80, could see 80 degrees today, which would be. Shatter a record set in the 19th century. Oh my gosh. I just love how much small talk we armed our audience with because everyone loves talking about the weather. Now you have notable weather to discuss.

So take forth those stats in... I don't like using weather as a small talk, though. What's your least and worst, or least in most favorite small talk topics? Well, we were talking about this at the office a few weeks ago and ranking like the least forms of small talk. And Dan Toomey, our colleague here, was like, the word, okay, weather is bad, but the worst is talking about the day of the week. So just saying like, it's Thursday.

It's Thursday. Oh, just another Tuesday. Which I kind of agree with. But the weather is up there is number two and then sports is number three. And these are just the universal things we can talk about. Interesting. Do you have you heard what's going on in the Mormon church? The Mormon church is so infinitely intriguing to me.

So I'm glad it's in the news again. They're probably not because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is known as the Mormon Church. and its investment manager, Insight Peak advisors, are paying $5 million fine to the SEC to settle regulatory charges that hit a huge investment fund. Okay. And I'm talking huge. So I got this push notification on my Apple News, as I'm sure a lot of people did.

And when I saw the amount that they were hiding and then the amount that they were fined, it didn't compute my brain because they're hiding 32, they're in trouble for hiding $32 billion, and they're paying a $5 million fine. That is the tiniest of slaps on the wrist. Yeah, I don't quite know how the SEC calculates its fines. So. Yeah, no. But let's talk about how the heck the Mormon church can amass such a fund.

And for people who are unfamiliar with Mormonism, a practice in the church is tithing 10% of your annual income to the church. And we've talked about Mormon and Mormon in. Salt Lake City in particular is kind of this tech hub and a lot of very successful entrepreneurs have kind of moved there. So when you're tithing 10% of a very lucrative base, you can quickly amass like this huge, huge fun. Huge fun. And we're talking, so there was a whistleblower that kind of exposed this whole scheme. And this scheme was that they created all these shell companies to sort of hide the scope. And that's kind of what the SEC didn't like.

They created 13 different shell companies to hide their vast portfolio. And this portfolio, at the time the whistleblower came forward was worth $100 billion. That's more than twice the size of the Harvard Endowment. The Harvard Endowment is massive, and it was basically the size of the SoftBank Vision Fund. I wonder which has performed better. I would assume the Mormon Church has performed better. They have some savvy investments. So I'm looking at their investments.

They held $40 billion worth of U.S. stock. They have Timberland in the Florida Pan Handel, and they also invested in hedge funds like Ray Dahlio's Bridgewater. their stock investments were mostly big tech like Microsoft Apple Amazon Alphabet pretty pretty chill but I found this really fun thing where they actually bought GameStop stock in December or in the fourth quarter of 2020 and we all know what happened in Q1 of 2021 with GameSot so they rode the wave they rode the wave and they sold we don't know exactly when they sold but at one point their stake was worth 900% more oh my gosh speaking of this is

actually a very good transition from investments made by giant megafuns. Bill Gates was in the news again. He bought a $902 million stake in Heineken yesterday. A lot of questions came out. Because everyone's like, what? Does Bill Gates even like drinking? And the people did some digging on the internet to figure out, is Bill Gates a beer drinker? And they found a 2018 Reddit AMA, which is Ask Me Anything, where Bill Gates, literally self-described as not a big beer drinker. And his quote was, when I end up at something like a baseball game, I drink a light beer to get the vibe of all the other beer drinkers.

Sorry to disappoint real beer drinkers. That's a crazy quote to me. I know we're getting a little side-track. Like, what is that? Does he think real beer drinkers only drink IPAs or don't drink light beer? The guys lived his entire life in Seattle, okay? Okay, that's probably explain. That is like, you know, they're drinking.

IPAs there. They'd never heard of Quarzlight or Bud Light. So, but so this is an interesting investment, obviously. So we did a little digging into, like, some of other, some other investments that Bill Gates has. His biggest holding by far is his buddy, Warren Buffett, Berkshire

Hathaway. He's got $10 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock. And then it's a bunch of boring businesses. Waste management, Canadian National Rail Company, Caterpillar, who makes heavy machinery. Sounds very like Warren Buffity. Who are we to say? Sounds very Mormon Churchy, actually.

And then obviously, whenever Bill Gates is in the news, the stat that I like to bring up, and I don't know, some conspiracy theorists like to bring up is Bill Gates is actually the biggest landowner in the United States. He owns 270,000 acres of farmland. Is that a crazy stat to you? It is a crazy stat. I just want to know, like, who's making these decisions, basically. Is Bill Gates, like, pouring over balance sheets and figuring out what is, who's, where he's

going to invest? or he probably has a team for sure. I just want to know who, who, what guy was looking through Heineken's financials and was like, you know, I think Heineken is poised for massive growth and they take it to Bill Gates. And then he's like, you know what? I am not a beer drinker, but I like Heineken. Okay, when we make $100 billion from this podcast, we'll figure out how the, the world of upper levels.

Yeah, I was going to ask you, so you're Bill Gates rich, right? Not yet. Not yet. In a hypothetical world, in a real world in maybe 30 years. What are you investing in? What does your portfolio look like? I mean, the first thing that come to mind is buy a sports team. I mean, it's been in the news recently, but I can't think of anything more fun than being

the owner of a sports team. You get your box, you get the parking spot. So it might not be the most savvy investment, but that's what I would do. It has been a savvy investment in the past. I mean, if you bought in the NBA 20 years ago, you probably have a massive return. So I like it. All right. I want to move on to a new segment we're calling is Toby bullish?

or bearish. And what I'm going to do is introduce a new product feature or a new announcement from a company. And I'm just going to put it to you. You have a lot of opinions on these things. Are you bullish or are you bearish on this thing? Okay. So today we're going to talk about AI news that's not chat, GPT, or ping. Or Bing.

Spotify released an AI-powered DJ that curates and commentates over a personalized playlist. So think of it as a radio station, but they are no commercials and the DJ is a robot. Are you, Toby, are you bullish on AI DJ from Spotify? I mean, first thing is I'm very bullish on it, actually. But it's a nuanced bullish because a nuance bullish. A nuance bullish. Because I swear Spotify has already had recommendation algorithms running in the background. And the example I'll give is the other day my roommates and I were cleaning our apartment.

We have an Alexa that's connected to my Spotify. And my roommate goes, Alexa, play so-and-so. I don't know what song it was. And then Alexa played music for the next two hours. And by the end of it, we were like, that was a great playlist. Like, what was that, Seth? And he's like, that wasn't me. That was Spotify just recommending songs.

So I do think Spotify's a recommendation algorithm is already great. I'm sure it's been using AI. Now it's branding it a little bit. But there is the component of the DJ. Right. You have this guy and we listened to it earlier. And he just kind of walks you through the context of the song a little bit. It's kind of like an X-Rine Mead of an XM radio station where they kind of enter, there's no commercials,

but they interject in the middle of songs to like kind of transition you from one song to the other. So this is just another example of new age streaming platforms becoming more like the things that they replace. So we've talked about streaming, becoming a lot more like cable. And now Spotify is just resembling radio. I am bullish on this, but I'm not bullish on this for myself. Because I am a, I love knowing a human curated thing, something for me. Okay.

So I listen to radio. Like, I, I'm faced with so much choice fatigue when I open up Spotify. And so that's why I like terrestrial radio and our Philly listeners are going to love this. But my favorite radio station when I lived in Philly was WXPN. And they have, they actually, in their marketing slogans and materials, they really like hammer AI and algorithms. Oh, interesting. Yeah, they always say something like rhythms, not algorithms, and curated, not

encoded. Oh, so they're against. They're against it, yes. And I, and I'm like, I love that. I want someone who's super into music, curating music for me. So you don't want to cheat on your first love by going to Spotify, I see. I love XPN. And, yeah, I, and yeah, so I'm bullish because I think other people are perfectly fine with AI recommending them, but I always think there's some sinister thing going on. All right. So Toby fully bullish, Neil moderately bullish. No, Toby, nuanced bullish. Neal. Neal also nuanced bullish, I would say. But this segment is not. But this segment is not about asking me whether I'm bullish or not. Let's just put it out there.

Okay, let's jump into our final segment of the day. Neil, another unidentified object of cylindrical nature has washed up somewhere. I don't know if I would call that a cylinder. This time it's not in the air. Sorry, spherical nature. You're right. So the headline news is that a Japanese coastal town is kind of up in arms because a five-foot-in-diameter ball washed up on the beach one day. And of course, everyone's on a little bit on edge because we've had the spy balloon controversy.

We've had all these unidentified objects kind of appearing places. So they have identified that it is not a mine, like they initially perhaps suspected, which is good. By the fact that it did not blow up. It did not blow up. Well, they did send a bomb squad down to X-ray it to make sure. Yeah. Is this, is this, it's only newsworthy because it just keeps happening. Totally.

But it's kind of interesting. Yeah, the footage we're showing now shows these guys kind of inspecting it on the beach, and it's kind of baked in there. And it reminds me of the scene of an opening of like an extraterrestrial movie or an alien movie where something weird washes up and you have these humans inspecting a very foreign object that they don't know what it is. But to me, it's just part of this really interesting thing where we have the James Webb's space telescope taking pictures of the furthest galaxies,

and we have all of this radar, GPS technology. We think we know everything about the world and the galaxies, and yet there's still all this random stuff showing up that we don't know what it is, and it's kind of spooking us. Yeah, the ocean spits out unto the ocean is a lot, yeah. But it was also reminding me of those obelisk that appeared, remember early in COVID? Yeah. All over the...

Did that end up being a marketing stunt, or was that just... I don't remember. So maybe this is a marketing stunt, too. We're so cynical at this point. We don't even know. Well, we had, this thing is crazy. I mean, we had a, the U.S. military shot down a $12 hobby balloon with a $430,000 sidewinder missile.

We're on edge. We're on edge. So, I don't know if we'll ever figure out what the, this spherical object is. I think it's just a buoy if we're being, if we're going to dampen it. It looks like a buoy, but it was fun to see people kind of freaking out about it a little bit. All right, so Toby teased at the top that we're going to end with a little puzzle or trivia, and I'm going to that because a bunch of you have called us dorks in the comments, and that is absolutely true.

So we're just going to lean into that. Toby, you want to tell us how this is going to work? Yeah, so we were kind of reminiscing about the good old days of HQ trivia, when everyone in the office would kind of gather around a phone and try to win a trivia competition. Obviously, the show isn't live, but we would love to give you a trivia question and have you kind of work on it throughout the next two days with your friends. if you work remotely, send it in a Slack channel.

But we want you to put your brains together and work collaboratively on this riddle that Neil is about to give you. Yeah, this one's from the Guardian, and hopefully it doesn't take you too long, but it might take you a few minutes or an hour or so. And here it is. It goes, in quotes, I'm going to read a sentence,

and the sentence goes, this sentence contains blank letters. Okay? You're going to try to write a number out in words in the blank space, in the blank space, in the blanks in the above sentence that will make this statement true. Okay, so I would say, like, this sentence contains 97 letters. Right.

That is not the correct answer. Not the correct answer. But that is just one possible. And I would write out 97. And then the number would have to match the letters. Okay, I see that there's layers to it then. No, it's a really good trivia question. It's not really a trivia question, but it is a puzzle.

A riddle. And so work on it over the course of the day. Okay, and then how do our listeners submit their answers to it? Well, this is a good point to bring up that we have. an email inbox. Let's go. Obviously, because we're Morning Brew, and we live in email. And it's Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com.

So send it in, and we will review your answers and say, you've got it right. Yeah. No, I'm excited to kind of interact with the audience a little bit. I know. Hopefully, also, you don't just have to email us about the trivia question. You can just give us show feedback or just say hi because we'll be checking the inbox. Totally. All right, that's it for today.

Big day tomorrow. Yeah, let's run it back tomorrow. Toby's turning 26 tomorrow. That's kind of what I was talking about. I know. I'm getting old. I'm getting old. All right, well, that's it from us. We just want to give a huge shout out to our crew back in the control room. The show's producer and editor is Emily, Trust the Process, Mill Iron.

The show's technical director is Joe Hampton. Our supervising producer is Bryce Belloff. VP of Tech and Operations with a new promotion is Dan Bousa and Devin Emberney is our chief content officer and our shows of production of Morning Brew. We're running back tomorrow. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, big board buckslot machine by aristocrat gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package.

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