Morning Brew Daily - GM Joins Tesla's Charging Network & It Costs How Much to Climb Everest?!

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Episode 78: Neal and Toby discuss why GM is adapting their electric vehicles to be able to use Tesla Superchargers and what it means for EV industry standards. Plus N95 masks are in everyone's Amazon carts and why Carvana shares are up and Gamestop fired their CEO. They also get into the money required to climb Mt. Everest and why one man is under fire for thanking his sponsors and not the sherpa who saves his life. And how fast do you have to go to get a speeding ticket that's over... $100k? Learn more about our sponsor, Fidelity: https://fidelity.com/stocksbytheslice Learn more about Brex: brex.com/morningbrew Listen Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I am Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. On this very nice 6-9 show, we're going to chat about the business fallout of this historically smoky week in the Northeast. And we'll discuss why speeding on Finland's roads could cost you more than $100,000. Then we'll get into how Tesla is trying to build the one electric vehicle charger to rule them all, before finishing up with a story about the most expensive Mexican restaurant the state of Colorado has ever seen. Neil, we made it.

It's Friday, June 9th. Let's ride. All right, Toby, it's a hat pod. Hat pod. I'm going backwards. You're going forwards. It's Friday. We're feeling very chill.

But to start off this morning's episode, we have a request from you, the listener. So we're going to do an MBD episode coming up, interviewing Money with Katie, who is the Brew's personal finance expert. Katie is really brilliant. And she thinks about personal finance literally all day. So we want to bring her in to the studio to dish some knowledge to our audience. But to make this interview the most impactful possible for you, we want to know what personal finance issues you're dealing with right now. So hit us up Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com with your personal finance questions. Maybe you're wondering about whether it makes sense to put your money in Apple's new savings account or whether to buy or rent a house or whether you should open up an IRA in addition to your employer's 401K.

I'm wondering all of those things. Thank you. Yes, so Toby, write in with some questions. It's all fair game. Send your personal finance questions into Morningbrood Daily at morningbrute.com. We're going to take a look and pluck a bunch to ask Katie in the coming days and weeks. Also, if you're a YouTube watcher, you can drop it in the YouTube comment section because we'll also be looking there. All right. Before we get to the business news of the day, I want to touch on really the biggest headline that's going around right now. Livy apparently rizzed up Baby Gras.

Oh, gosh. Now, President Trump became the first former president to be indicted on federal charges last night. His lawyer confirmed this appears to be related to his handling of that trove of classified documents that he took with him to his Mar-a-Lago residence after he was not president anymore. There was this ensuing investigation that included the searching of his home last summer by the FBI. So this is the second time that Trump has been indicted. The first one was over falsifying business records. in New York about two months ago. Trump pleaded not guilty in that case

and claimed he was also innocent in this documents case. So we don't know the specific charges of this yet, but reports say they include violating the espionage act, making false statements and a conspiracy to obstruct justice. We're gonna learn more about the charges and the evidence the DOJ has against him on Tuesday when Trump will head to court in Miami.

Meanwhile, despite all this legal trouble, and this may not even be the last time Trump is charged criminally, because there are other investigations going. He's still running for president, and he has a very wide lead over his rival, Ron DeSantis. He's kind of Thanos collecting the infinity stones of indictments right now. But yeah, it seems like it's not hurting his lead.

But this one may be way more devastating. It's whatever the biggest infinity stone is in the middle of the planet. This one is very tough. I like that metaphor. I don't know anything about Marvel, but that sounds right. There we go. All righty, let's get into the business news. Yesterday, GM announced that its future electric vehicles will use the same charging tech that Tesla uses.

The goal is to give GM owners more places to charge their cars, as well as move North American auto industry towards a more unified charging standard, instead of the current kind of Apple Android mismatch system we're currently working with. Neil, this is what's known in the business as a win-win. I was going to use... I had written down 1 plus 1 equals 3. Right. That's even better. So the CEO of GM Mary Barra said that GM will save up to 400 million of a previously announced 750 million investment to build out its EV charging network. And then Tesla gets to increase its influence even more as the most reliable and widespread provider of EV charging station.

Plus, it gets to tap into some of the billions of dollars in federal funds set aside by the government for the buildout of a national EV. charging network. Neil, GM, is the second company after Ford to announce a deal like this with Tesla. Do you think this is a good thing overall in the EV market? I think this is great to have these are the biggest, three biggest U.S.-based automakers and the fact that they're working together on electric vehicle technology will definitely spur adoption because when you look at the stats about why people don't buy EVs, the number one reason tied with price is the lack of available. charging. It's like going into, you know, the old LaGuardia airport and looking for an outlet. They're just like wasn't available charging and people were not buying EVs because of it.

So 50 in the recent JD Power survey, 50% of EV-hesitant people said this was the main problem for them. And like, you can see why, at least, even when they find a charger, it doesn't work. So last year, there was a study that showed that at least one in five charging attempts by drivers failed last year. Just broken chargers. Like, again, back to my airport outlet metaphor. Nothing worse than finding one and then it doesn't work. Meanwhile, EV adoption, people are buying more cars than, you know, at a faster rate than

the charging network is getting built out. So I think this is like good for everybody. Yeah. And if you're saying why Tesla, Tesla's charging network is seen as the most reliable in the country. So that's a huge factor. And we were talking about reasons people buy electric vehicles. And actually, Clean Technica, which is a EV kind of publication,

says that people, in their research, the primary reason people buy Teslas, even the sole reason people buy Teslas is because of their charging network. So it truly is just kind of the best of the best. And so that's why GM is saying, I mean, that's not the only reason why Tesla's, it sounds like Tesla's being so magnanimous and saying, Hey, yes, everyone can use our charging network, but that, the line about the federal funds, they're going to clear billions of dollars in support from the federal government. It is kind of funny how this happened because there was this existing charging tech called the combined charging system that all of the automakers agreed to in 2012.

And they're like, yeah, we'll build this tech. And then I guess Elon was like, I think I can do this better and then built a separate, you know, charging network. It's very much like, you know, your smart form metaphor, like Apple building its own charges. And, you know, not going along with the rest of the industry with USBC. That was not a good idea, first of all. That's not the best metaphor, because USBC is way better. Typical pixel. All right, so we'll see how that affects EV charging and adoption, but industry people

say that it will definitely get more people to buy EVs, which is great for the environment. Speaking of the environment, in New York City, we all breathed a little easier yesterday, but the plume of smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south to the mid-Atlantic and blanketed the DMV, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and Philly, with sometimes record-breakingly poor air quality. I think that's a word. So as we hopefully put this in the rear view, just wanted to review how historic this week was, talk about maybe some of the things we learned from, you know, coughing up a lung over the past few days. So Wednesday was the worst wildfire related smoke in the U.S. since at least 2006 when records began. It could have been a lot worse, you know,

from before, but we just don't have, we weren't keeping track. And because this smoke had the most populated centers along the I-95 corridor, almost 62 million people were exposed to a high level of smoke pollution. It disrupted the day-to-day economy. More flights were delayed yesterday in Philly, Newark, and LaGuardia. The Nats game was canceled last night, and many schools kind of went to remote learning. So what's your takeaway from all this? Honestly, just how widespread everything was and how many things it affected.

Like we saw the EPA, EPA's air quality app was at number one in the weather category. First of all, didn't know the EPA had an app, so good on them. And then two, didn't know the app store had a weather category. So good for the EPA. And then also, yeah, just scrolling through Amazon, you saw masks were all over the homepage. We saw the Google Trends report showing that air purifier searches for air purifiers were way up. So I just love seeing like the ripple effects for something like this. Before you move on, we were talking about, on Wednesday we were like, what stocks are going to benefit it?

Right, right. It looks like Whirlpool and Carrier Global, which sell air purifiers, they both went up 8%. Yeah. I mean, again, how do we not think? I know, we're not financial. Neil, we are not financial experts. We say this at on the beginning of every segment. But yeah, you're totally right.

Like the people were looking for like the economic angle of how to profit for this, obviously. I also just want to give a shout out to TikTok, actually, because I saw so many videos documenting firsthand experiences of people on the ground in New York, in Philly saying, look at how crazy this is. And I think it's leading to kind of a greater sense of empathy for these kind of environmental disasters like this. Pre-Tick-Tac, we wouldn't have seen just how bad. We would have seen pictures, but none of these videos that were coming out. So I actually think TikTok might be, in this case,

a big positive for society in the sense of, yeah, now you know how like your fellow man is living on the other side of the country, whereas before you might not have. Right. I think that was my takeaway. It's like such a wake up call for those of us on the east coast. Yeah. People on the west coast and in places in Asia like Pakistan and Delhi kind of live like this on a daily on a daily basis or at least in many parts of the calendar. They suffer from AQI levels. And now I know what AQI is because of this week of like 200 and 300. And now many of you listening probably know what that means as well,

even though you didn't previously. So yeah, it just like was a huge education. I think more people on the East Coast are going to keep an air purifier in their home. There were all these DIY methods going around TikTok and social media about how to make a, you know, a janky air purifier. that helps you clear out. But as wildfires get worse, thanks to climate change and, you know, just the overall climate heats up, we're going, like the East Coast is not going to be spared from these things

that previously we felt like we were insulated from. For sure. All right, Neil, we're on to our Friday segment, Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week, where Neil and I take you through one stock that is receiving a gold star from the market and one that has been put in time out. As always, I mentioned it earlier. We are just humble podcasters. Do remember that none of what you are about to hear is financial advice.

We could not grab Whirlpool stock when we should have. Yes. Before we jump into the individual stocks, I want to take a moment to kind of look at the big picture. As of yesterday, the S&P 500 has officially entered into bull market territory. You can woo at home if you want, whoo! Which by definition means that the index is up 20% from its bare market lows. This actually put an end to the longest bear market since the 1940s. So if you're one of those people who hates checking their portfolio,

if they see, all they see is red, I think it's safe to look now officially. But okay, Neil, that's the macro picture. You're up first. What is our stock of the week? Our stock of the week, Carvana might be having a bit of a nirvana. And I'm going to credit tech crunch with that line. The online car retailer that rode the used car COVID wave to crazy heights,

then went bust in even more spectacular fashion, just had its best day ever yesterday, with its stock of 56%. And the reason is because it raised its profit guidance for the first quarter, or the second quarter, I'm sorry, as its cost-cutting initiative seems to be actually working. Meanwhile, it is burying all of the investors who bet against it. So Carvana short-sellers have now lost more than $1 billion this year, as Carvana's stock has shot up 423%. It's still down. I should say it's still down 93% from its peak in 2021 when interest rates were super low and everyone was buying used cars. But it looks like the company may have given itself a little breathing room here. And so it has a new lease on life, which is what investors are sort of keying in on this week.

Yeah, it seems just like a return a little bit to efficiency for them too. They kept citing that their gross profit per unit was up, which by the way, some accounting executives are like, wait a second. That's not a real thing. But that's something that they look at. So it is, it does give me 20-20 vibes to kind of look back at Carvana because that was one of the ones that just went parable. What is up with those elevator? Like, what is that?

Those towers? Yeah. I mean, I think it's a brilliant marketing stunt is like you put them out next to the highway and you see them. The problem people were saying when Carvana was really struggling, they're like, you can't convert this into anything. You have this massive glass display tower custom built for Carvana. I suggested indoor skydiving places. Right. You know those?

So just for people who don't know, Carvana at certain places around the country has these big glass elevator looking like things with cars. It's great. I think it's marketing. You may notice it next time you take a little road trip. For sure. All right. Dog of the Week is mine.

Neil, our Dog of the Week is a name that I haven't really thought about since 2021, honestly, kind of like Carvana. And that's GameStop. GameStop's share. as much as 17, GameStop shares fell as much as 17% yesterday after the company fired CEO Matthew Furlong and appointed Ryan Cohen as the new executive chairman. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Ryan Cohen, who's the founder of Chooey, was at the center of some of that crazy GameStop rally back in late 2020 and 2021. But now the market has kind of totally soured

on his supposed Midas touch. That combined with some disappointing earnings that saw that saw sales in the United States and Canada fall by 16 and 18 percent, respectively, is why GameStop is our dog of the week. So GameStop, it really is. Ryan Cohen used to come in and, like, the stock would shoot up 30%. Not anymore. And now people are kind of seen through kind of the charade a little bit. A little bit.

It's also its fifth CEO in five years. Yeah. So they churned through CEOs. Like I turned through an ice cream gallon. Heck yeah. All right, Neil. Before we jump into our next story, we're going. to take a quick break.

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the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavah Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. All right, Neil, our next story takes us to 29,000 feet above sea level. Mount Everest is seeing a record number of climbers this year, which has brought along its fair share of high-stakes drama between climbers and the Sherpas who guide them.

So the most recent story involves a Chinese man named Fan and his guide who spotted a dying Chinese woman at an altitude where rescues are not often attempted. There's this rule in mountaineering, no rescues above 8,000. meters and this woman was at 8,450 meters. But the guide reluctantly agreed only after Fan and one of his friends offered him $10,000 to help save the woman. You can probably guess where this is going, but the trio did end up saving the woman, but then after the dust settled, she refused to pay either Fan or the Sherpa the full $10,000. So Fan is especially mad because now he's on the hook for the 10 grand,

plus what the expedition already cost him, which came out to $56,000. This story has a ton of drama, but it kind of speaks to this new Everest that we are currently living in where these existential and monetary stakes are just so, so high because it's so popular to climb Mount Everest these days. The bargaining markets of Mount Everest up 8,000 meters. It's crazy. Yeah. Apparently, this story went viral, and Chinese social media was viewed more than 300 million

times on Weibo, which is the Chinese version of Twitter, just like really. hating on this woman for not for like kind of got to compensate yeah you're sticking it to this guy your saviors but yeah so if we want to talk just about kind of the business of climbing mount everis first of all Nepal has issued 478 permits to climb Everest this year which is a record number off those permits Nepal actually doesn't make as much money as you might think so the government charges around $11,000 per foreign climber and so in total they've collected $4.86 million from this permits which it's not nothing, but it's not an exorbit amount. This is my favorite detail of kind of some of the charges associated with climbing Everest,

is that all climbers are required to pay a $4,000 deposit to Nepal's government. And if you bring back 18 pounds of garbage on your way down, then you get that money back, but then if you don't, you lose that money because so many people have climbed Everest, there's this massive trash problem on top of Everest. So 18 pounds is what the Nepal government says is the typical trash output of someone who climbs Everest. So it's kind of like, I don't know, whatever we were taught as nature, like leave it as you found it. Leave no trace. Leave no trace.

They're trying to incentivize leave no trace up there. But yeah, Everest economics are wine. It's a big business. And meanwhile, there's this Nepali Sherpa while everyone else is dying. He's just like going up to Everest every week. He submitted Everest earlier this year for the 20th time, which is a record. And twice in a week. The lungs on that guy.

This guy is impressive. All right. Let's move from Nepal to Finland, where if you are wealthy, I would advise against speeding. So a man was fined around $130,000 last weekend for going 50 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone. $130,000 for going $20,000 over the speed limit. How is this possible? because in Finland, which is known for its ultra-progressive tax system, certain penalties are also linked to your income.

And the guy who was speeding was this guy named Andres Wickloff, one of Finland's richest people. So we had to write this massive check. And let me explain what the hell is going on, because I'm sure there are many Americans reading this who are ready to revolt on behalf of the rich, Finnish people. All the way back in 1921, Finland introduced what's called a DeFind system, and it works like this. You take the amount of spending money an offender has for one day, divide that by two. And then there's this multiplier based on the severity of the crime and a few other factors. Finish authorities say it's just like their tax system, right? Like you pay more in taxes or you make more, you pay more in taxes.

You make more the more you pay in fines. Is this good public policy, Toby? I mean, it is. I was digging into is it good economic policy? And on the one hand, rich people do on the. average drive more recklessly. So if you charge them more, then technically you're disincentivizing reckless driving from the group most likely to do it. So I was like, okay, totally on board with this. But then some people were saying, do we want more speeding in

poorer neighborhoods? Because it's the the fine is less severe. So I can see how there's kind of a tradeoff on both sides. So that was a professor of economics, Casey Mulligan, his take from the University of Chicago. But yeah, there's a lot of like game theory here. here and like social theory. Oh my God. It got my mind into a pretzel. My first thought was that this is basically a driving tax. Yeah.

Because for the richest. Yeah. It's just like call it a driving tax. Say any, okay, rich person, anytime you go into your car, you have to pay, you know,

you're just going to pay to drive because that's essentially what this is doing. But then on the other hand, you know, if you're using this as a deterrent to prevent speeding, then a, you know,

a $100 fine for this guy, is not going to be, it's basically non-existent compared to the rest of us where we actually will always be thinking about the $100 fine in the back of your head. So having a sliding scale kind of makes sense and this may not be theoretical actually because the New York City Council is debating a bill

that would have a very similar income sliding scale in terms of like parking tickets and you know when you're double parking. So the guy who introduced it was like, why should Should the guy who's double parking of Bentley pay the same thing? Right. The guy who's double parking a 98 Toyota. I just can't see that flying in America.

They tried it back in the past, but yeah, we'll see. Tough, tough day for... I do want to hear what people think about this policy, though, if you want to write in and let us know you think of the sliding scale traffic fine. Absolutely. All right, Neil, our final story of the day involves a restaurant located in a Denver suburb called Casa Bonita. But it's not just any restaurant, Neil. I can't even begin to describe how bizarre this place is.

For starters, it's 52,000 square feet and the outside is bright pink, but the inside, oh man, the inside is wild. It has waterfalls, cliff diving, fake gold and silver mines, puppet shows, and even a person in a gorilla costume who sometimes also joins in on the cliff diving, and it serves Mexican food, of all things. So why are we talking about Casa Benita? Well, the creators of South Park, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone have sunk $40 million in to restoring it. Now, there's some rhyme and reason to this. Trey Parker's from Colorado and grew up

going to birthdays there. And it left such an impression. They actually made an episode of South Park about it. So they have this weird intertwined history with this restaurant. But I just want to back up a little bit to that number I mentioned. 40 million dollars into a Mexican restaurant. Crazy. It's one of the biggest Mexican restaurants in the world. Well, reading into some of the details about what was going on before, you know, it closed during the pandemic in 2022. You mentioned the cliff diving pool. So divers would dive into this pool. And the only way out was through a 30 inch wide tunnel brimming with pipes. So you, you dove into a pool of water and then went into basically an electrical room. So this, this must have violated every health code you

ever think of. Yeah. They called it the death room, honestly, when they saw it. So they, they are renovating this place, trying to stay true to what like the childhood charm that they associated with it. This is like the rain forest cafe on steroids. I can't wait to go. Let's get out to Denver. But apparently there are, there's a waiting. You can sign up for the waiting list and there's already more than 100,000 people on it. So maybe next year we'll go to Denver and check out Casa Bonita, the South Park Restaurant.

That is our show for the week. Oh my God. I did not realize we did fast week slow week. We'll get it on Monday maybe. We'll check back in. It was a very slow week for anybody. 4 a.m. We're meeting at Toby.

We were awake for 25% more of life, and it just grinds on. All right, remember to write it in with your personal finance questions for Katie Morning Brew Daily at morningbrew.com and let us know what you think about that Finland speeding ticket thing. A huge shout out to our crew. What a week. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Velas and Raymond Liu are the associate producers. Eugenua Ogu is our technical director.

Billy Minino is on audio. Hair and makeup lost all their life savings after blowing us. a stop sign in Finland. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. Toby, let's go golf. Let's go. Great show. Great week, Neil. I wish you all well.

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