Morning Brew Daily - Oprah Drops WeightWatchers & Why are Billionaires Buying Land in Hawaii

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Episode 270: Toby and Kyle explain why Oprah is leaving WeightWatchers and what weight-loss drugs may have to do with it. Plus, the humanoid robot company that has Bezos and Nvidia investing millions and why are billionaires buying up land in Hawaii? The guys share their stock and dog of the week and how friendships and social media impact how people spend money. Finally, the wedding of the millennium is happening in India - who is going and how much did it cost? Use code MORNINGBREW50 to get 50% OFF your first Factor box at https://bit.ly/3UUZGG0 Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 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 AI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Toby Howl. And I'm Kyle Hagey. Today there's a new humanoid robot on the block that is aiming to be the vessel that brings AI to life. And we're talking about the billionaire

secretly buying up land in Hawaii. It's Friday, March 1st. Let's ride. Kyle, wonderful of you to join us as Neil takes a much deserved day off. It's been a minute since you've been under the big bright lights. I thought you guys forgot about me.

We absolutely did not. You're looking stellar as always, but we've definitely picked up some new listeners since your last podcast appearance. So can you take a minute to kind of reintroduce yourself to the world and talk about what you do outside of guest hosting this podcast? I mean, I'm focused on the podcast. I'm wearing the morning bradilly sweatshirt. This is all I think about.

When I have other time, I have to reintroduce myself to the entire listeners, I'm an only child. Okay. I'm from Minnesota. and really I am either listening to podcasts or recording them. Big podcast person. I love to read. And I like to explore New York City. I feel like I'm doing like hinge prompts or something.

You're doing great. And I actually learned a lot about you right there. I didn't know you're an only child, but no, it makes sense. Yeah, explains a lot. Well, thank you for joining us. And, yeah, Neil will be back on Monday. Before we jump into the show today, let's hear a word from our new sponsor, Factor. Factor makes delicious, ready-to-eat-eat-meals that come from.

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We're talking Oprah Winfrey. Now, Oprah has announced that she's going to be leaving the Weight Watchers board after serving on it since 2015. And not only was she serving on the board, she was the company's largest shareholder with a stake of around 10% in the company to highlight the Oprah effect. When she joined the board, the valuation went up $700 million. And on her announcement that she's leaving the board, the stock is now down 18%. So Oprah is having a big impact on Weight Watchers.

But the intrigue here is that Weight Watchers said Winfrey's decision is meant to partly, meant partly to, quote, eliminate any perceived conflict of interest around her taking weight loss, medications. It sounds like Oprah is on a Zempic or some sort of similar drug and they think that there might be a conflict of interest around this. Super interesting story. What's your take? Yeah. Last year

Oprah revealed in this interview that she was using these weight loss medications. She told People Magazine that she had to overcome her own shame about it. She uses it to help her weight not yo-yo back and forth. But everyone when she said that was kind of like wait a second, Oprah, you've been the face of weight washers for such a long time.

OZempick and Wagovin, these other weight loss medications, are in direct competition with kind of Weightwashers general premise. So it was an interesting thing, and that was kind of the writing on the wall to that relationship eventually breaking down. Oprah insists there's no drama here, but again, it is definitely a new era of Weight Watchers predicated by Oprah Levin and also competing against these new class of drugs. It's really interesting. I mean, Weight Watchers has an incredible brand.

They've been around for 60-plus years. I actually think they messed up here because GLP1 drugs, OZEPIC, they're coming. And it doesn't mean that you don't need to be conscientious about your lifestyle. In fact, a lot of doctors are saying, like, yeah, these drugs are really powerful, but you still need to worry about the lifestyle aspects. And I think Weight Watchers could have been this brand that's like, yeah, take OZMPIC, but you also need us to, you know, work with your diet, work with your lifestyle. And Oprah could have been the face of that.

I feel like they fumbled here. They are, they haven't fumbled yet though, because, yeah, I think you're dead on. The real question is, can Weight Watchers and Ozempic coexist? And you're totally right. Technically, they are supposed to because a lot of clinicians are saying, hey, listen, you can't just hop on these drugs and then expect the weight to stay off forever. You do need to also augment them with lifestyle changes. And Weight Watchers has been doing that for a long time. If we do dig into the financial tale, though, you are right. They are maybe fumbling a little bit. Weight Watchers, revenue dropped nearly 15% in 2023 compared to the year prior. In 2021, if we go back to 2021, Weight Watcher's share price was just around $40 per share. Yesterday, the stock plummeted to around $3 a share. And then its market cap is currently dwarfed by its outstanding debt, which is more than five times its valuation. So there's definitely some stuff that Weight Watchers has to work through. Losing Oprah, not a great start to the Ozmpic, GLP 1 era. But let's see if they can No, and they recently had purchased this telehealth company sequence as well, which is very interesting,

because basically, this company allows you to speed up the process to get these drugs. So it seems like they're like on one side, like these drugs are powerful. On the other side being like Oprah, get lost. You never tell Oprah to get lost. I hope they tell Oprah to get lost. I think it was just an amicable part of this because you do not tell Oprah to get lost. Let's move on. You know how they say to future-proof your resume by always learning new skills and staying up to date with current trends in the workplace?

Well, future proofing just got a little bit harder because a startup called Figure AI just for a $675 million out of $2.6 billion valuation to further develop an AI-powered, general-purpose, humanoid robot. The cap table reads like a who's who of AI these days. Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Kathy Woods, Ark, and Vest, and even Jeff Bezos participated in the funding round. Figure is aiming super high here. The goal of the company, which is just 21 months old, is to eliminate the need for unsafe and undesirable jobs, which is admirable. But anytime robots, AI, and eliminate jobs appear in the same sentence, it gets people a little antsy. Kyle, someone who has talked to people quite often about their careers. What was your initial impression seeing figures vision for disrupting the labor market?

I do first have to say robots, job loss, AI, like the SEO on this thing is going crazy. I mean, it's interesting, this company is fascinating to me. They had this video where they kind of revealed the technological prowess of their robot, and it was a robot making a curing. So we're still really, really far away from this having, I think, real impact on the workforce. But the technology is still pretty remarkable. I mean, one, it'll make you a curing. It won't ask you how your weekend was.

So it's already better than most of your coworkers. That's great. But now with, you know, ChatGBTBT, BT, like they figured out. the cognition part, combining the cognition part with like the mechanical elements of these robots is going to be really powerful. And the effects, if they can commercialize this product, are going to be profound. I mean, you could have these in every Amazon warehouse, for example. It would replace a lot of monotonous jobs. And obviously there's going to be some real world implications, but I think that's decades away. I am going to ignore the comment because I am one of your coworkers.

You don't want to talk to me in the morning? What the heck? Just you tell me. But you're so right on the cognition part. You mentioned chat to BT. Part of their announcement yesterday was Open AI also is partnering with Figure to help develop the next generation of AI models for humanoid robots. So Figure is taking on the physical, how AI can interact with the physical world while, yes, opening eyes technically already made a lot of progress on the brains of AI. So it is quite a formidable partnership. My thing that is so interesting about humanoid robots is I've always wondered why do all these companies insist on making the robots look like humans? Technically, they don't have to look human.

They are robots. They could just be a giant tube for all we care. But all these companies have kind of said in the past that the reason why we make them look like humans is because the world is designed for the human body. Like door handles are at the certain height. Walkways are the perfect size for humans to pass through. So the best way, the human form is the best operating system in which to, interact with the physical world.

And I also think there's also something about you want the robots to not look intimidating. You want them to look like not human enough that you don't get too nervous. And I think there's a big public perception thing that Figure is also working with. So those are some of the reasons why you always see these robots end up looking like tiny little humans. Yeah, it does give them a human feel, which I think is important. And what's interesting about figure is there's tons of robots, but they typically do like one niche task. The idea with this is like it's a general robot that can, like one robot could do like

50, 100, a thousand human tasks. And this is a really long game. There are robots that are like could take a box, put it on a shelf. There's not a robot that could take a box, put it on a shelf, do a backflip, make you a Kyrig. Host a podcast. And the host a podcast. Our jobs are safe for now.

Yeah. Also the founder of this company is a really successful entrepreneur. He's taken two other companies, one company public, got another company acquired for $100 million. He's really good at raising money. He's really good at setting a vision. I think this is an interesting company to watch. All right, let's move on to our next story. Toby, we're talking about a match made in heaven.

It's not peanut butter and jelly. It's not Toby and Neil. It's not you in ordering McDonald's at 3 a m after a night out. It's billionaires in Hawaii. That's right. Business leaders with net worths equivalent to the GDP of several countries are purchasing massive parcels of land in the island state. Jeff Bezos owns a sprawling beach mansion in Maui, Mark Zuckerberg of Morning Brew

Daily Fam. name is cattle ranching in Kauai, and Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, owns 98% of Lanai. And since the pandemic, Mark Beniof, founder of Salesforce, has been on a Hawaiian shopping spree as well, purchasing 22 parcels of land in just three years. That's right. Mark Benioff, the guy telling his employees they should stop W.A.F.H. or working from home, has been W.F.H. himself, aka working from Hawaii. And this small town he's purchasing land in Weimar, is this really tight-knit community. They have a large native Hawaiian population. And the people here say they don't want to lose that culture. And that's kind of the fear that a lot of Hawaiians have, that this

quote-unquote mainland money is coming in, purchasing parcels and maybe disrupting their way of life. What's your take on all this? Yeah. So an NPR reporter sat down with Mark Benioff and kind of dug into exactly what the heck is going on. When they were first talking to locals around the island, no one really knew what Mark Meneoff was up to. Some thought he was building a sales force training center, was moving a bunch of engineers to Hawaii and basically having a big old, I don't know what you call it, retreat on the island. Others say that he's been helping the community. Others also just shook their head and said, listen, we have no idea what's going on, but we're not liking that it's probably going to drive up housing prices. But digging into it, Mark Menniof has

had this very long history with Hawaii. That's right. The founding story of Salesforce involves him swimming with dolphins off the coast of the Big Island in the 1990s. And having a vision of selling software as a subscription service over the internet. So the very fabric of sales force is tied to the island. And it does appear that a lot of his purchases do have some sort of philanthropic tie. He wants to invest in this community that has given a lot to him.

But it is interesting to see Hawaii as kind of the flame that attracts the billionaire moths. Yes, Toby, I literally wrote down that SaaS dream. And I'm like, man, if you're swimming with dolphins and you come out thinking about subscription software, like, something's up. Something's up. You know, what's interesting about the Benioff story is it has been, like, very, like, mysterious. And locals are just basically saying when there's not clarity or disclosure about what's going on, like, people have these fears. Like, the rumor mill kind of starts churning. This article was really, really good.

I recommend everyone read it. But the headline was, Mark Beniof is buying up a ton of land in Hawaii. No one knows why. I feel like that's saying, like, billionaires are buying yachts and hanging with supermodels, and no one knows why. NPR, I know why. It's Hawaii. We all get why he's doing this.

But, yes, he has had a long history with Hawaii. This will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. And, you know, I guess he's swimming with dolphins. Yeah, the final note here is that the big fear is that home prices are just going to start rising out of control across the state of Hawaii, median home prices have risen by at least 22% from pre-pandemic times. And why Maya, where we're talking about, it is crazy, crazy. Median home prices have topped $1 million in January, up 87% from prices before the pandemic. So those fear of rising home prices are definitely valid. All right, before we jump into

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where we bring you one stock that matches your energy in any situation, and one that's just kind of a buzzkill. As always, Kyle and I are just humble podcasters, so please do not take any of this as financial advice. Kyle, I can't believe this, but you beat me in the cool sweatshirt-wearing contest this morning. So you're up first. What is our stock of the week? That's right.

You can't go wrong with the MBD sweatshirt. My stock of the week is the Jacksonville Jaguars. Now, unfortunately, this doesn't mean you can buy the team. unless you are a billionaire going through a midlife crisis. But what this does mean is that the second annual NFL Players Association team report cards just dropped, and the biggest increase came from the Jacksonville Jaguars, who went from 28th to 5th this year. Now, the bad news for the Jaguars, this doesn't mean the Jaguars are the fifth best team in the league,

but rather they're essentially the fifth best team that people want to play for when it comes to lifestyle training facilities for players. And the reason for this big jump is they got rid of rats. had a rat infestation for three to four weeks in their locker room, and they literally got a new facility, no more rats, and then their ranking went up. So if you're looking to boost your ranking, get rid of the rats. The other interesting thing from this association report was the back-to-back Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, ranked 31st out of 32 in this survey. So maybe good facilities are overrated. It appears the data proves that.

this report is always so interesting. It's an annual report. This year, 1,7606 players, nearly 76% of every player in the league was surveyed. You basically get the tea on everything that's going on in the NFL. And I do think the rat thing is hilarious. The Jaguars, everyone's like, listen, all you had to do is get rid of a rat infestation, and we are happy. I do think the Kansas City Chiefs are incredibly interesting. They're big knocks where their owner, Clark,

Hunt ranked 32nd among all owners as the least likely to invest in his facilities. But Andy Reid did rank as the top head coach around the league. So if you have the choice between bad owner and bad coach, you definitely take the bad owner. And like if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Like this guy's like, we don't need new facilities. You keep winning. Maybe they should lose a little. Some of the other weird stuff that came out of the survey, former Raiders head coach,

Josh McDaniels was ranked as the worst head coach. So Raiders fans, I know how you feel about that. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers weirdly has been charging players around $1,700 to opt out of having a roommate on road trips, which, again, like, it's this is the NFL we're talking about. Why are you charging your own players to get out of having roommates? And then also the Bengals who last year didn't provide three meals a day at all for any of their players. This year, they're turning over New Leaf and providing three meals a day to their players, but only on Wednesdays for some reason. Super interesting. It's so funny how different you expect the NFL.

to operate as this high star-studded league where everyone's getting pampered all the time. Not the case. So they're charging players. And Toby, if we were on a road trip, I would room with you. And I wouldn't pay $1,700 to not room with you. Don't tell Neil that, but I appreciate that. Let's move on to our dog of the week, which is the cloud software company Snowflake. There was an interesting scenario on Wednesday where you got a chance to see exactly how much the public markets value a company's CEO.

Snowflake announced that its chief exec, Frank Slutman, who had been leading to the the company since 2019, was retiring and shares immediately plunged 24% after hours trading, erasing around $17 billion in market cap in a matter of minutes. Now, I should add that Frank Slutman is kind of the Lionel Messi of Enterprise Software. He previously took data domain and service now public, as well as Snowflake back in 2020. Sluptman is maybe one of only a handful of public market CEOs, where a stock would immediately tank on news of their retirement. But it was interesting to see it play out in real time like that.

And incredible succession vibes where it's like, this is dad. You literally saw the market value drop $17 million just because this guy is leaving. Now, the person who's filling in or coming into the CEO role is their senior VP of AI. Obviously, AI is a hot topic. So there's still some hope. The earnings were actually beat expectations. That also demonstrates how important Slutman was or is perceived to be because they did better than expected. And the stock dropped $17 billion.

Right. There was a little bit of contamination, though, because their forecast, they issued a little bit of a weaker forecast for the upcoming quarter, but you're right. They did technically beat on a lot of earnings. So it was, we did see that it was mostly purely just Sluppin's retirement. It got me thinking, what other CEO do you think could have this impact? If they step down, which company do you think would suffer a 24% drop like this? Oh, that's a good question. My immediate mind goes to Mark Zuckerberg, actually. He has been the co-founder and the CEO of Facebook for decades. I don't even know his succession plan. They've never even hinted at someone else coming. If he just left, I think Facebook would be in a tough spot. That was definitely the name that came in mind. I also thought maybe you'd say Mark Beniof because he was top of mind, also founder, CEO.

Yeah, but it is interesting to think. I was wondering, too, if Elon Musk suddenly stepped down from Tesla, would the stock tank or at this point would it just kind of waffle? I think if he stepped down from Tesla, the stock would tank if he stepped down from Twitter the stock. That is dead on. All right. Let's move on to a really interesting story here about financial health and friends. You know those like random parables your parents would tell you when you were growing up? It turns out at least one is true, and that is comparison is the thief of joy. So Edelman Financial Engines just dropped this really interesting survey where they looked at 2,000 people

regarding their attitudes towards wealth. And the finding was about one quarter said they feel less satisfied with the amount of money they have because of social media. And one third has said they spent more than they could afford, basically to keep up with the Joneses after seeing like Instagram and other apps of people's lifestyles. And this falls in line with other recent studies that we've probably all heard of, one that looked at how different groups compare their own financial well-being after learning where they were ranked within their peer group. And essentially, if you're doing really well and you see that other people are doing worse than you, you feel happier. And if you're not doing well, even if objectively, maybe you didn't know how other people

are doing and you were fine with it, once you have that subjective experience of not doing well, you feel way worse about your position. This explains a lot about human psychology and how just humans interact socially with each other. It's a big explanation too for why the heck no one really feels great about the economy. Despite the economy looking very promising in a lot of areas, I mean, we got cooling inflation, a strong labor market, a GDP that grew. 3.1% over the past year. But it doesn't really matter if the economy grew 3.1% if your neighbor Jim just bought a sick new set of golf clubs for himself or something like that.

So you are so right. Comparison and especially the social media aspect of it where it's so easy to see what other people are putting out as the highlights of your life. It affects you and affects your financial well-being. Right. And it used to be like you could only compare yourself to your neighbors. They probably had a similar lifestyle to you. You're spot on, Toby.

Like now with social media, every day I wake up and I see Mark Zucker. Bought a new house in Hawaii. I'm like, man, I'm not doing enough here. And the article in the Wall Street Journal was really interesting because they followed this couple that essentially like was feeling really bad about social media in making it compare their finances. And they just got more involved like locally. And they really focused on like their own situation. They got involved with their local chamber of commerce and they said they felt a lot better. I think it's just a good lesson for all of us. Like sometimes stepping away from social, getting back to reality, you know, turns out it makes you feel good. Yeah. I mean, it's,

It's not revolutionary, but it's much harder to do than you might think. So, Kyle, if you see me in my exorbitant lifestyle and social media, don't worry. You're doing. Yeah, when you pulled up in your Porsche this morning, I was like, I have to record a podcast with them. Damn. That was actually a taxi cab, but I appreciate that. Okay, let's move on to our last story of the day. A little sibling rivalry could lead to one of the biggest parties ever thrown.

Moukesh Mbani, who is the chairman of Reliance Industries, the Indian conglomerate, involved and everything from textiles to telecommunications is Asia's richest man with a net worth of $114 billion, and he's throwing the weddings to end all weddings for his youngest son. I bring up sibling rivalry here because back in 2018, and Bonnie threw his daughter the most expensive wedding India had ever seen. Beyonce performed, receptions were held in Lake Como in Mumbai, and the reported cost came in at almost $100 million. How do we know this next wedding will outdo that one? Well, the three-day-long pre-wedding party that kicks off today is a pretty good indicator. Rihanna has reportedly been booked to perform alongside the magician David Blaine and everyone from Bollywood celebs to Bill Gates and even our boy, Mark Zuckerberg, are expected to attend.

Kyle, diving into the details of what Mbani has planned for this party was an insane experience. I mean, you're getting Super Bowl performers. You get David Blaine. I didn't even know that guy still existed. You mentioned Mark Zuckerberg. He only got the invite because you interviewed him on the morning. That was the rumor. I mean, it's super interesting. This family has a 27-story home, so clearly they love extravagance, but the Indian wedding industry outside of just this family is massive. The country

spends about $75 billion on weddings every year. It's the fourth largest industry in this country. So it's really important to India and Indians to have these really kind of like big weddings. And so, you know, more power to them. It's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're the richest person in India and India does love large extravagant wedding celebrations, you've got to go very big. Some of these details are insane, though. Around 2,500 dishes are expected to be served. Again, we're just talking about the pre-wedding party right now to guess over three days

to ensure they never eat the same dish twice. I love that. They're also chartering jets to return guests after the wedding. But get this, the guests have been asked to limit themselves to only two luggage items or three suitcases per couple. So even if you're getting a private charter jet flight, They still have luggage rules these days, which is just very ironic to me. Who are you hoping to sit next to?

If you're at the wedding table, who are you hoping to be next to? I think an interesting one, someone who's attending this party that's very relevant right now is Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, who literally this week announced an $8.5 billion merger of its India media assets with reliances on Wednesday. So I think he's sitting close to kind of the head of the table here because that is probably the most important business person. who is attending the party. You get some Disney tea. Yeah, if not, maybe David Blaine. I always liked him on YouTube going up. All right, Kyle, a pleasure as always, sir.

And may I add that you're looking especially spiffy in that Morning Brew Daily hoodie, you are rocking. Thank you, Toby. But let's roll these credits if you want to rate Kyle's performance on a scale of 10 to 10. Our email address is Morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Raymond Lou is our associate producer.

Yuchinawaogu is our technical builder. director, Billy Minino is on audio. Hair and makeup, somehow managed to snag an invite to the Embani party. What the heck? Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Have a great weekend, everyone, and I wish you all well. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars.

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