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

So, we're at it. The city is a new town in Amheld.

“Your glutes are for you the beautiful city of the world.”

That means you're the most beautiful city of the world. Good morning, Bridele Show. I'm Neil Freeman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the suspicious trades before Trump sends stock, sorry. Then why is your refrigerator showing you ads?

It's Tuesday, March 24th. Let's ride. Good morning and happy Tuesday. Okay, here's a new study that I absolutely love. Research from Cornell found that workers who were the most impressed by empty corporate buzzwords who fell for the BS were also the least equipped to make effective business decisions.

Shane LaTrelle, a postdoc psychologist in the studies author, developed a corporate BS generator to create statements like getting our friends in the tent with our best practices. We will pressure test a renewed level of adaptive coherence. And after mixing them in with real quotes from business leaders asked 1,000 office workers to rate each statement's business savvy.

The workers who were most wowed by the corporate BS also displayed lower scores on a test of analytical thinking reflection and fluid intelligence. Toby, I'm a little worried because you are impressed by everything. Hey, what the heck? We've seen this throughout the corporate history, though. Elizabeth Holmes was uniquely good at doing this using corporate speak to woo

and then ultimately defraught investors.

But I always come back to the timeless advice given by Kevin from the office.

“Why waste time and say lot words when few word do a trick?”

Be simple. Talk to people like their normal humans. It's actually a better way of conveying information and it shows that you have nothing to hide. You're not trying to blow people's minds with corporate speak. Now, word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. Neil, what's the best return on spend you've ever gotten?

So, there's absolutely no reason to make fun of me whatsoever. I'll be the judge of that. But I bought a little device that can open any jar because I have a gentle grip. Wow, that is something. For the highest B to B return on ad spend of all online ad networks look to LinkedIn ads.

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The stage was set for another wipeout in the markets yesterday. Over the weekend, President Trump had issued a 48 hour ultimatum for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or else he would strike power plants all over the country. Iran rebuffing those calls vowed to retaliate with damaging strikes of its own. The war appeared to be on the verge of escalating dangerously.

And then came the taco, the trade Wall Street has dubbed Trump always chickens out.

Just as we wrapped up recording the podcast yesterday morning, President Trump posted the surprise news that his pledge to strike energy targets was postponed for five days. After the U.S. and Iran held quote very good in productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities almost instantaneously stocks went vertical and held on to their gains for the entire day with the S&P closing up 1.15 percent.

Meanwhile skyrocketing U.S. oil prices fell back down to earth plunging nearly 10 percent to close below 90 dollars barrel. Wall Street was ecstatic to hear progress on a diplomatic end to a conflict that had already caused the biggest energy supply shock in history. And was inflicting more economic damage by the day.

Of course, nothing is so clear, cut. After Trump's post, Iran denied that any conversations had taken place with the U.S. and accused Trump of manipulating financial and oil markets with his announcement, one thing we can assume the timing wasn't a coincidence. Trump made the announcement just hours before trading opened at 9.30 a.m.

Eastern suggesting that as we saw with liberation day tariffs, he is well aware of market dynamics and was aiming to signal to Wall Street that an off ramp was coming into view. Whether that's actually true or not, we don't know. It was brutal. Right after we finished the podcast, we get out and go, oh man, like a lot happened

in just this really short morning, a period. Trump added $1.7 trillion to stocks, pushed the price of oil down by $17

that dollars that's around 15 percent.

But then by the time that we went and went to the gym and had our coffee, Iran was basically calling him a liar and half of those gains had vana. So it was this massive whipsaw very closely, just the scale of the trades to had a lot of people scratching their heads. The financial times did a little digging.

They found that roughly 62 hundred Brent and a West Texas inventory futures contracts changed hands between 6.49 and 6.50 a.m. That's 15 minutes before Trump posted his truth, a social post.

This is something where right now we're in a period where the oil market is

“volatile, hypothetically, that amount of contracts could have, you know,”

exchanged hands. But a lot of people are reading between the lines and saying, it looks like this is falling a pattern where someone is front running these big announcements from the administration. Oh, this is where extremely suspicious, just the timing of it.

Almost $600 billion, a million dollars, 15 minutes before this

truth, social post, the financial times talk to a couple of portfolio managers about whether this was unusual or not. One of them said my gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is a really abnormal. It's Monday morning.

There's no important data today. There aren't any fed speakers. It's an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk. Somebody just got a lot richer. And it wasn't just a bunch of money put in the oil markets.

It was also S&P 500 futures, which spiked well over 1% after this Trump announcement. So suspicious trades. We don't actually know what happens. But it fits sort of a pattern that President Trump can make huge waves in the market.

And the oil market in the equities market by these announcements. We saw with tariffs last year and now with the war because the war is hanging on. Investors are hanging on is every word with the war. So we just saw a very unusual trade 15 minutes before this particular truth, social posts.

We also got the very surreal situation of waiting for an Iranian spokesperson to confirm something that, you know, the US president said because we did get a statement from the parliamentary speaker who said fake news is used to manipulate the financial oil markets and escape the quagmarin, which the US and Israel are trapped.

“Again, like you have to take both sides of this equation with a grain of salt.”

Both sides have their own interests in mind when they're putting out quotes. But it was interesting. We were literally sitting by our computers and we're going, let's wait to see what Iran has to say about these negotiations that are supposedly taking place. The other big story we're tracking is Monday night's collision at La Guardia that killed two pilots

on an air candidate flight and closed the airport until 2 p.m. yesterday. Here's the general outline of what happened. A fire truck had been dispatched to address a separate united plane that had aborted to take off and received permission across runway four by the air traffic controller.

That was when the air candidate plane was landing on runway four and despite pleading by the air traffic controller for the truck to stop, it was on the runway when the plane landed where it was struck by the aircraft traveling between 93 and 105 miles per hour. Dozens of passengers were taken to the hospital, but it could have been much worse.

And what's being dubbed a miracle, a flight attendant was thrown from the plane still strapped toward jump seat and survived with just a leg fracture.

Toby, this is the first fatal crash at La Guardia in three decades and is already

renewed scrutiny around the barebone staffing of overworked air traffic controllers. Yeah, and we are looking into how this investigation is going. The NTSB is looking into it. How is that progressing? Pete Moonteen, who is a correspondent from CNN posted that the NTSB chair

“Jennifer Hammonday said the agency had to beg to get a key La Guardia crash”

at the end of the day. He's been waiting for three hours. So I feel like that's just emblematic of the entire airline industry right now when someone investigating this really tragic crash can't even make it through TSA because the lines are so long.

Moving on, if you felt the world was missing a little bit more Mark Zuckerberg, fear not, Zuck 2.0 is on its way. According to the Wall Street Journal, according to a Wall Street Journal report, Zuck is in the middle of building an AI agent that will help him do his job as CEO.

The idea is to flatten the company out, letting him go to the bot to receive answers about Meta's business that would previously have required layers of people to get through. The rise of AI agents to the top level of the tech world can be traced back to the rise of an open source framework called OpenClaw. That's absolutely exploded recently.

Three months ago, nobody knew about it. This past week in video CEO, Jensen Huang called it the most popular open source project in the history of humanity going on to say this is definitely the next chat GPT.

OpenClaw lets developers spin up a fleet of always on agents across WhatsApp.

Slack discord or any other tools and workspaces, your heart desires. For instance, if you're in the market for a stroller, you can have an agent beyond the lookout for good deals and place bids for you on eBay. While a separate agent can be in charge of controlling your home smart systems like lights and security, all while you go about your workday, it's become all the raids abroad as well.

OpenClaw uses in China is now almost double that in the US, according to cybersecurity company security scorecard. Of course, there are the tractors with one analyst describing the tech as janky, incredibly insecure and half working, but that's not slowing down the hype train. When Zuck, Jensen Huang and roughly 600 million AI users in China are all excited about the same thing.

Should probably take note. Absolutely, if you want to hang out with me this weekend, I will be unavailable.

Sounds like a joke, but there are tons of people absolutely doing this, especially in Silicon Valley and in China. And so are tons of companies.

“Jensen Huang and video CEO said every single company needs an open-cloth strategy.”

And we have seen a absolute marathon of companies trying to release either open-cloth competitors or wrappers around OpenClaw to allow businesses to deploy them. Of course, in video has its own. It's called NemoClaw and it has some security settings to alleviate some of those privacy and security concerns that maybe an enterprise client would have when trying to adopt OpenClaw for their business.

It is a full on phenomenon in China as well. Earlier this month, hundreds of people lined up at 10 cents head quarters, waiting for engineers to install OpenClaw on their laptops for free. They just want to be part of the game. And one of the most difficult parts is setting up OpenClaw.

So it is crazy. And then there's just anecdotes from people using it on a daily basis. One at 24 year old job seeker says that he had OpenClaw. Memorize his resume and then look for new jobs. Every single day, a new software and engineering jobs.

That's basically what you can do.

You can treat it like a employee or an assistant that is always on is not necessarily the

the most adapt that navigating, you know, nuanced security risks. But it's like almost a junior employee, just treat it like that. Give it very strict parameters. But it can go and work very efficiently while you have your attention focus elsewhere.

“I think that's what Zuck is doing and meta seems to be rapidly.”

Memorize and probably every other AI company is rapidly adopting these kind of agents for their work force. I think another reason why this has gone so far is that it has just like a really cute mask. OpenClaw is a lobster and in China they call it there's been a meme. It's gone viral called raising lobsters. And that's the process of installing and training OpenClaw.

It's still not so hyped here in the United States. I mean, a bunch of people listening to you to us right now are like, I have no idea this is happening. If you go to Silicon Valley, it's a different story. I think everyone is setting up their AI agents.

But you are also have set up your own OpenClaw. What does that experience been like? Well, a little bit actually, I'm not technically adept enough to actually use and download the open source software. But just yesterday, Claude and from Anthropics. This is a separate thing, by the way.

OpenClaw was downstream of, you know, Claude sounds like Claude. But it's actually the developer works for OpenAI now. So it's a little bit convoluted. But Anthropics said, all right, we're seeing all these people set up their own autonomous agents.

“What if we just allowed you to do that right here in Claude itself?”

So I did that yesterday at launch yesterday. And I had it kind of messing around with my computer this morning doing who knows the white honestly. Like I saw my mouse zipping around my screen as I was trying to prep for the show.

So I'm still in, you know, the first ending of this, but trying to just figure out ways that I could utilize this.

I think a lot of people are doing that. I have a cousin who lives in Austin, Texas, which is not Silicon Valley. He has his own agent called Agent Zander that, you know, text him, his to-do list every morning. You know, just kind of helps him live his life. So it is whatever you want it to be.

It's almost like a mirror reflecting whatever your priorities are. That's what it can do. I do think we are in the early innings of this and it's only going to grow from here. Move it on. People are putting ad blockers on their refrigerators.

One more time because I couldn't believe in myself. Some people are putting ad blockers. You know, the kind you use on websites on their refrigerators. And appliance to keep food cold. As the Wall Street Journal reported, it's what some owners homeowners are resorting to.

After their Samsung smart refrigerators began displaying advertisements on screens. And many are quite upset about it. Last fall, Samsung began a pilot program to explore ads on its smart refrigerators sold in the United States. The goal, according to the company, was to test whether contextual, non-personal ads for things relevant to housework would be useful to people. Months into the pilot, which has served up ads intermittently on some fridges.

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

But these appliances came in at a full premium price.

And finally, yes, one owner told the journal that they made sure their home routers ad blocking software extended to his fridge.

It worked. That is a crazy timeline that we're living in. That your freaking refrigerator is serving you up ads. It is an interesting strategy from Samsung. They have an initiative called The Screens Everywhere Initiative, which feels, you know, opposed to what most people want from their appliances.

All have screens on them, which, you know, maybe means all of them have ads eventually coming to them.

“Doesn't feel like what the consumer actually wants.”

One ad that I thought was especially kind of funny and creepy was they got a full screen ad for Apple TV's sci-fi show, Clear Abyss. I don't want to spoil Clear Abyss, but a big plot line of that is, you know, I guess I am going to spoil it. Aliens taking over, you know, appliances and like TVs in the main characters house. So I just thought that was an ironic twist.

I actually think it's kind of good advertising from purpose, but not a good user experience for the person with the fridge.

It's just amazing how much we're bombarded with ads every day.

There was a study back in 2023. So in 1970s, American went from seeing 500 advertisements per day to over 5000 in 2023. And now they're invading our kitchen, they're in our Uber's. I mean, ads are pretty pretty much everywhere. It's something that we've come accustomed to.

What I thought was interesting is that you want to accept a discount if you're going to see ads. So Netflix rolled out this ad tier and people have happily paid up for it. They know that there is a sort of bargain at play where I'm going to pay six, seven dollars for Netflix a month, but I also, I will see ads when you're paying the full price.

“I think for something like a Samsung refrigerator when you were really expecting ads in the first place.”

That's what really frustrates you. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. Neil, feel my bicep. I should not have to say no to this every day, Toby. But how else will you know about all the goodness from slave cities all in one protein smoothies?

Because I can read Toby and I can see they're made with real whole food ingredients. 25 grams of protein, 10 grams of collagen and functional mushrooms. Well, can reading tell you they taste as good as any milkshake? Yes, I'm the one who will originally tell do that. And you can read all about it to at shopflavecity.com.

That's shopflavecity.com. This episode is brought to you by Apple. Neil, there's nothing like your first Mac. I remember my first Mac like it was yesterday. I got mine right as my sister started to get recruited to play soccer in college.

I was given the very important task of making her a highlight tape. And I movie was my best friend. She ended up playing that Georgetown soap. I'd say it was all worth it. When I got my first Mac, I was heading into freshman year at the University of Maryland. A lot was uncertain that fall, but I knew I had a dependable sidekick for homework,

connecting with other students and devouring blogs about our basketball recruiting class. That's how we felt with our first Macs.

How will you check out the all new MacBook Neo and amazing Mac at a surprising price?

Learn more at apple.com/mac. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. As we step into a new year, it's the perfect time for all the advisors listening to think about how to set your clients up for success. One way to do that is to level up your fixed income strategy. But, bonds are tricky.

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All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard marketing cooperation distributor. If you have more than 10 tabs of X open right now at work, you are part of the growing cadre of very online debtizens who have grown addicted to monitoring the situation. It's this hyper vigilance and the memes that accompany it that I want to talk about on today's

edition of Tobie's Trends. Part of the reason monitoring the situation has become so popular is there are many situations that require monitoring. The US and Israel are bombing Iran. Iran, as retaliated with strikes on six countries.

The state of Hormuz is closed. Oil prices are up. Gasoline prices are up. Cuba's power grid has collapsed. There's also tear of drama.

The Epstein files, ice rates. These are just a few of the buffet of situations that Bloomberg's amandable pointed out in her piece on situation monitoring. It helps that you have more tools than ever at your fingertips to stay ever vigilant. Ellie Habib, an engineer based in the UAE, vibe quoted a dashboard called a world monitor

in his spare time and was shocked by the response to his weekend project. The site which pulls from over 100 different streams of data including stock prices, airport

flights, and satellite movements had more than 2 million people access it in the first 20 days.

Polymarket, which has added a financial component to situation monitoring, opens an entire bar filled with TV screens dedicated to the practice.

Refreshing X constantly just to mansplain the situation to your significant other is a key theme

of the genre. But it's an inescapable meme at this point because it really does feel like there is so much going on right now.

“Neil, do you have the masculine urge to monitor the situation?”

Oh, yes. I am absolutely a serial situation monitor. I don't think it's just necessarily an instance of there's so much going on right now. It's also an instance of a couple other factors. One of them is we have more data at our fingertips than ever.

We have X. We have flight tracking, flight tracking information. We have weather from all around the world and we thanks to vibe coding and AI. We can all put that in one place as this guy did for that particular website. And then the other thing I think is contributing to the rise of situation monitoring is Polymarket CalShe prediction markets and I think it's no surprise that Polymarket

opened this particular bar dedicated to situation monitoring because now at this point, people can actually wager on world events that they would on a sports game. So everyone's treating it. Everyone's treating world events like sports and betting on it and thinking things like who's going to win the Academy Award when will Iran strike Israel before after March 31.

So I think prediction markets and the availability of data are two of the big factors. We've also just been trained to consume data through feeds.

I mean, so much of our life comes to us via never-ending infinite scrolls.

“And so I think we're just accustomed to like when a major event breaks out,”

like that is where we're going to go. It also a bebe who made the world monitor site said it helped people feel in control. We pulled up world monitor yesterday. It is absolutely not helpful. There's way too many sources of data.

Like who needs to know what the weather is on the other side of the world. Also a company next to active flights taking off in New York City. It is literally information overload. But when you're sitting there and you have one monitor with Twitter open. You have one monitor with World Monitor open.

You're like, I am on top of it. I know what's going on. It helps you feel a sense of agency over an increasingly chaotic world. So I do think there's something psychological about the masculine urge to monitor the situation. I do agree.

And I think it's probably broader part of a broader trend of the red zoneification of everything. It does tie in to a lot of how people consume sports now, which is where red zone came along. And not all of a sudden you don't want to watch one football game for three hours. You watch eight or nine or ten. And you are monitoring the situation every NFL Sunday.

And then that was ported over to the Olympics. And this is how people watch the Olympics now with gold zone, which is the red zone of the Olympics. And you got eight things going on at once. You're watching curling.

You're watching surfing, whatever. Somewhere in winter Olympics, it doesn't matter.

“But I think there's a lot of parallels to what's happening in the sports world,”

to the world to current and global events similar to what's happening in prediction markets. If it's sort of expanding the purview of sports gambling. Although there was some lore that was dropped about monitoring the situation yesterday. So a mandomal wrote this great piece in Bloomberg. Highly recommend it checking that out.

She kind of said that there's like this Jeff Bezos meme that in personifies monitoring the situation. And that was kind of like the jumping off point where a really hit mainstream. But then people on the timeline found an Anthony Bourdain tweet from June 20, 2013 where he says, I am, quote, continuing to monitor the situation. So I do think Anthony Bourdain coined this term, you know, over a decade ago,

which was not something that I knew, but it is kind of makes sense. Honestly, that there's direct through line to Anthony Bourdain. All right, let's run to the finish with some final headlines. Up first, the reclusive billionaire behind only fans has passed away. Leo Redvinsky, the majority owner of the adult content platform,

died of cancer on Monday at 43 years old. Redvinsky took a controlling stake in the company in 2018, and powered by people stuck at home during the pandemic, turned it into a behemoth.

As of 2024, only fans had over 4.6 million creator accounts,

$377 million fans, it was pulling in $7.2 billion in gross revenue. Despite only fans' success, Revinsky was notoriously private. Bourdain and Ukraine has family moved to Chicago when he was a kid. He studied Econ at Northwestern. He gave almost no interviews made no public statements and largely operated

in the shadows while paying himself roughly $1.8 billion in dividend since 2021. One of the more reclusive and controversial businessmen of our time, Leo. We don't know a lot about him, but he absolutely changed the content. The online content game forever, not just a dog content, but just across the board.

The fact that only fans took a 20% cut of the revenue's content creators took 80% here's stories about how there are a few only fans creators are making millions and millions of millions of dollars over the course of the year. One thing we do know about Leo is that he was sort of predestined to lead an adult online company just from the very beginning back when he was 17.

which was a website referral business.

“His mom actually did sent the incorporation papers for him in 1999”

while he was still a teenager. Then he operated websites called Ultimate Password, which was claimed to offer hacked passwords to pornography sites. And then this sort of snowballed into when he started something called a website called My Free Cams in 2004, which blended casual online chats

with sexually explicit live content.

So he was always on the journey to lead a company like OnlyFans.

Well, you don't see this type of deal that often, or at all, yesterday the Trump administration announced it would pay French energy giant total energies almost $1 billion to not build wind farms off the east coast and instead invest in fossil fuel projects in the US. The Department of Interior will reimburse $928 billion to total

the amount it paid for two offshore wind leases, which it will then use to produce oil and gas. The New York Times called it an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels.

“Explaining the deal at an energy conference,”

interior secretary Doug Borgham called wind power ineffective and predicted a new era of affordable reliable and secure energy. The CEO of Total for his part said it was a pragmatic business decision

considering that offshore wind had gotten too expensive in the US

given the Trump administration's resistance. Yeah, Total energy got bailed out here because a lot of other companies that embarked on this sustainable offshore wind projects don't have an oil and gas business to fall back on. So it really was a get out of jail free car.

They got reimbursed and now they have a new big project in the works, but not every wind company can say that. Finally, in case you missed it, the UK version of Saturday and I live made it stay by this weekend and people didn't hate it. Reviews were mixed but mostly positive in that most thought it was going to be a

huge flop and it was actually pretty funny at times. President Trump even shared the cold open making fun of UK Prime Minister

“Kierstarmer and Trump on his true social platform.”

They didn't exactly reinvent the wheel here. American viewers of SNLUK would have found a lot familiar with the show back home. There was a celebrity host, Tina Fey, a fake pre-taped commercial abuzzy musical guest, wet leg, and a rack tag roster of

comedians you've never heard of doing sketch comedy.

Even the set was eerily familiar to the one at Rockefeller Center. Toby, I watched a bunch of the clips on YouTube as one does. And I liked it. The New York Times reviews something up well. They said from an American perspective watching Saturday Night Live UK

is like stepping into a well-run Starbucks in a foreign country comforting and recognizable with a few departures from the norm magnified. One of the standout jokes was Tina Fey saying that she's the youngest person to have her host SNLUK. She's the first person, so of course she's the youngest.

So she was always great. The Brit seemed to like we can to update the best. That was something that kind of ported over the most seamlessly. And then the Times ended the review by saying if Pierce Morgan appears by week eight, there's a problem.

So off to a good start. But I'm tuning in. You were doing the thing where you turn your iPhone around. So we have a beautiful idea. It's all right.

You wanted to share something about you enjoyed. Yes. But people, those are the worst people. And I'm one of them. Okay, look at this funny clip on Instagram here.

Watch it. That was me for SNLUK. I apologize to everyone. I did that too here at the office. Okay, that is all the time we have.

Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. If you'd like to read just send an email to [email protected] or DM us on Instagram @mbdelishow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer.

Raymond Lou is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Hey, Lewis is our technical director. Hair and makeup is monitoring the situation. Devon Emory is our president and our show is a production of Morningbrudeli.

Great show Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.