Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible, like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd. Terms and conditions apply. Good morning for Daily Show, I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the US is countering Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz with its own blockade. Benentropics' new model Mythos has Wall Street in a tizzy. It's Monday, April 13th. Let's ride. Good morning and welcome back to the week. You know when you go down a YouTube rabbit hole and get caught in a nostalgic spiral looking at all your favorite old videos? That was basically Justin Bieber's set at Coachella. While headlining the music festival Saturday night, Bieber spent a half hour in the middle of his set sitting behind a laptop scrolling through his past videos like Baby and Beauty and a Beat, then playing them over the festival's sound system and singing along in an octave lower. The first takeaway he apparently has YouTube premium, no ads. Second, people kind of dug it. Yeah, I didn't hate it either, Neil. Bebes and YouTube have a history of where he was discovered. That one point, Baby was the most viewed video on the entire platform. It's now the most disliked video ever on the entire platform. So you can't tell the story of Justin Bieber without YouTube. So it did feel very nostalgic because he did go very deep in the archive. On the other hand, though, you paid a lot of money to go watch a Coachella set and instead what you got was him scrolling YouTube. I think the final thing though is that guys, no matter how famous or how rich they are, people do anything in their power to sit you down and show you YouTube videos. This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, host Liz Ann Sonder, Schwab's chief investment strategist and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, analyze economic developments and bring context to conversations around equities, fixed income, the economy and more. Join Colin, Liz Ann and their guests as they share insights into what might be moving the markets and why, as well as what indicators they are watching for signs of change. They'll also answer investor questions on everything from how sectors are evolving to what the bond markets are telling us to where to look for opportunities and considerations for your portfolio. You can download the latest episode and subscribe at Schwab.com slash On Investing or wherever you get your podcasts. President Trump announced the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, escalating the conflict with Iran after marathon peace talks failed to produce a breakthrough over the weekend. You might be thinking, wait a second, isn't Iran already blockading the Strait of Hormuz? Yes, and what the U.S. intends to do is a blockade of a blockade, blockade-ception. Think of it like a chess match where one player's piece is under attack, but instead of moving that piece in danger to safety, they decide to put pressure on a separate opponent's piece. It's a risky high stakes move to undermine Iran's main source of… Energy experts have been pushing the Trump administration to apply the blockade strategy for weeks, Bloomberg reported. Here is the rationale. In the current status quo, Iran has full control over the world's most important energy waterway, but it's not keeping a Strait entirely closed. It is allowing its own ships to go through, as well as ships from several countries like China and India who have to cough up a toll. One estimate from Frontier Investments suggests Iran is making $150 million a month for the U.S. Iran is making $150 million a month from those tolls, a huge financial lifeline. With the U.S.'s planned blockade, which begins at 10 a.m. Eastern today, it's aiming to cut off that revenue source. As President Trump told Fox News, it's going to be all or none, meaning Iran will need to open the Strait to all ships, or the U.S. won't let any get by into the open seas. The economic bricsmanship comes after a JD Vance-led delegation to Pakistan couldn't agree to terms with Iran on a resolution to the war, which is currently in a tenuous two week ceasefire. Vance-led said the biggest hang-up was Iran refusing to give up its nuclear ambitions, a non-starter for the United States. So now we're staring down a double blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that won't make oil markets happy. A double blockade? Who could have seen this coming? Actually it was Telegraph because the U.S. has used a similar approach against Venezuela earlier in the year, and this was definitely in the cards. A lot of energy experts were, as you said, pushing Trump in this direction because essentially you can set up a blockade out of range from Tehran's weaponry, and then you can also do it with less risk than going after something like Karg Island, which is where Iran kind of exports most of its oil from. So if the options on the table were strike Iran's critical energy infrastructure, or set up another blockade, we've already done a blockade, we being the U.S. of Venezuela. This is just another attempt at that. So it sounds crazy on the surface to blockade a blockade, but again, this is how you return leverage to your side is by choking off their exports. David Ignatius at the Washington Post who has kind of aligned into what discussions are happening in the White House said, the strategy here is a quote credited to Eisenhower, if you cannot solve a problem enlarge it. So this is the way the U.S. is trying to just tighten the economic screws from Iran because as I mentioned, they're making about $150 million a month from these tolls as well as selling its own oil out into the open market. Oil prices are above $100 a barrel, but Iran can actually fetch around $140 per barrel for these, for this actual physical crude. So it's making now annual run rate. We're talking like in software terms, but of billion dollars a year in selling its own oil. What this also will do though is, is test how much pain, economic pain America and the rest of the world will take because right now there's going to be no oil or no fertilizer or any other sort of these key raw materials flowing from the Persian Gulf out to the rest of the world. And that's why you're seeing oil markets actually reacts very significantly this morning. They're up 8% to about $105 a barrel. Yeah. Trump conceded that energy prices may not fall soon and maybe higher as we roll into a midterm elections. He's kind of suggests that the economic pain right now is worth it in the long run. We are seeing just the economics of this blockade and now double blockade filter through the American economy. We've seen EV interest pick back up. This has been a side effect. Edmonds, which is a car shopping platform said that we're seeing interest rise to nearly what it was before the tax incentives ended last year. Used EV sales jumped 12% in the first quarter according to Cox automotive. So basically people are looking at their gas bills and looking at the pump and saying, actually, it does make sense to transition to electric vehicles because of just how elevated gas prices are. Energy prices are absolutely skyrocketing. I know we previewed the inflation report on Friday. It came in at 8.30 a.m. Eastern after we were done recording. It showed that consumer prices were up 3.3% in March from a year earlier. That's up from February's gain of 2.4%. It's the highest reading in two years. It is because of gas prices. Energy prices were up 12.5% from a year earlier up from just a 0.5% gain in February. So whatever is happening in the Middle East is absolutely filtering. Everyone can see it on gas station prices every single day through March and into April. But yeah, a huge uptake in inflation, the fastest pace in two years because of what's happening over in the Strait of Hormuz. The mythos around Anthropics' new model mythos is only growing. According to a report, Treasury Secretary Scott Bassett and Fed Chair Jerome Powell summoned major bank CEOs to Washington last week to discuss the model that has been compared to a dangerous cyber weapon. Anthropic has held back on releasing mythos to the public, which it says can kneecap much of the modern web by finding undiscovered vulnerabilities at an unprecedented rate. The cybersecurity chops of mythos affects banks, so the government wanted to make sure Wall Street is aware of the possible risks. So they called the meeting to ensure everyone is adopting the proper precautions to defend their systems according to Bloomberg. Remember, Anthropic distributed mythos to only 40 or so organizations ahead of a public release forming a sort of cyber security brain trust called Project Glasswing. The company also briefed government officials on its capabilities before release. The goal is to let big enterprises get ahead of bad actors who could use the new model to penetrate secure software. Neil, we keep hearing mythos framed in this all powerful light. Some say its capabilities have been overstated and the fear-mongering only helps Anthropic, but the last minute meeting shows that Wall Street is clearly talking about it. This is a meeting I would have loved to have been in. I mean, look at the people in this room. Goldman Sachs, yo, David Solomon, Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, well as far goes Charlie Sharf, Morgan Stanley's 10 picks, city groups Jane Frazier, and then also you have Scott Bassett and Jerome Powell. The one person who couldn't make it apparently was J.B. Morgan, J.B. Diamond. I don't know what he was doing. That was more important than this particular thing. But I want to focus on one person in this meeting, that's Jerome Powell, because in the past few weeks he has spoken a lot about cyber attacks against the financial system. And think about the banks that I was just talking about, who was represented there? Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley. These are systematically important financial institutions to the United States. Essentially, these are too big to fail. The fact that the Federal Reserve is there, they deal with systemic risk. And that's why I think this is a very important meeting to talk about. It is important, but also after we kind of covered this story last week when Mythos came out and Project Glasswing was announced, a lot of people said, how real are these vulnerabilities that Mythos so apparently uncovered? An analysis from John Martindale for Tom's Hardware found that some of the bugs that they kind of highlighted are not as bad as they think. They flagged one vulnerability in a software called FFMPEG. That vulnerability had existed for 16 years already. No one knew why they included it in the report. There was another one around Linux that said that a lot of them had been recently passed. They are less severe in terms of how bad the vulnerabilities actually were. So another separate kind of analysis found that of the exploits found, they found 600 examples, but only 10 were severe vulnerability. So some of people from the tech circles are saying that, all right, Anthropic, you put out this messaging that Mythos is this all powerful thing, but maybe these devastating exploits that you're highlighting are not so devastating and not so pressing as you might have portrayed them to be. Welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where we pick two things from the news that are getting fitted for their green jacket. I won the pre-show triathlon, so I get to go first. And my winner is Artemis II for successfully completing their mission to the moon and back, but maybe more importantly, forgetting people excited about human space travel again. On Friday night, the crew of four astronauts splash down in the Pacific Ocean and have since been reunited with their families. These folks now hold the record for the humans who've traveled furthest from Earth more than a quarter of a million miles away around the backside of the moon. As NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said, it was a mission well accomplished. The goal was to test out the Orion spacecraft ahead of a future lunar landing, and that spacecraft performed remarkably well. There were a few issues that NASA will have to fix ahead of upcoming missions, most notably the malfunctioning toilet. But other than that, things went according to plan, so according to plan in fact, that the astronauts were scheduled to splash down on Earth at 8.07 PM Eastern Friday night and they landed exactly at 8.07 PM. No maps can even get that right when I'm driving 15 minutes away, let alone hurtling back to Earth after 10 days in outer space, piercing the atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour. Toby, it's all smiles in Houston after Artemis II, but now the attention turns to Artemis III and Artemis IV. Can NASA keep up the momentum? It was all smiles in Houston, but there was some tears actually being shed in the living room that I was watching with my fiance's family because there is just something about astronauts returning home that it hits you in the field. They're just so happy they're safe, they went through so much and I just want to read some of the quotes from the crew. Victor Glover said, I have not processed what we just did and I'm afraid to even start trying. Jeremy Hansen said, when you look up here, you're not looking at us, we're a mirror reflecting you. Christina Koch said, Earth is just this lifeboat hanging undisturbedly in the universe. And Reed Weisman, the captain of the mission said, I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one is working right now. The memes from this trip were very funny as was the heartfelt feeling that man, humanity is just this very unique species sitting on a rock in space. They absolutely won the PR battle with this because I mean, NASA is competing for our attention just like Justin Bieber and YouTube, just like TikTok. They want to prove that space flight is cool because they're fighting for dollars from the federal government. They want to build up the political support for going back to the moon because it's a huge endeavor. And the support for space travel had been waning over the past few decades, but I think what they've done is very smart. They actually hired someone called an imagery czar, Zeblin Scoville a couple years ago. And what he did is he put a bunch more communications apparatuses on these particular spacecraft so we can beam down high quality video and they can FaceTime with people. And that sort of communication strategy worked admirably well. And I think it really helped that these poets were not, I said poets, these astronauts were basically poets and they seem like the best people that you could possibly have as emissaries from space. So I think they absolutely had a huge PR victory here as well, which was maybe even more important than the technical aspects of the mission. Not just poets, photographers too, because the Artemis two team did photography training before they went up in the capsule because they said they wanted to tell a story. They wanted to capture the awe and grander. You can't just do that. If I just went up there with my iPhone, I'm not taking the pictures that they did. So that was one awesome thing. And then one final thing I want to leave people with is there is this space simulator game called Kerbal space program. It's it's pretty niche. Honestly, it's about building and flying rockets for a species of green aliens called Kerbal's. But after the Artemis two landed, the player count hit an all time high, which just shows that the next generation is excited about space travel. They want to go build rockets in this weird little space alien game. But that is kind of what a lot of astronauts think about when they land on their mission is how are we inspiring the next generation? I think Artemis two absolutely did that. We did promise to what Artemis three and Artemis four to preview what they're going to do. So Artemis three is set to launch next year and that's going to test whether the Orion spacecraft can dock with the lunar lander. And this is where the private sector comes in because right now we got Jeff Bezos with his blue origin and SpaceX by Elon Musk competing for that lunar lander contract. So it'll be very interesting to see who ends up actually serving as the lunar lander for Artemis four, which is expected to land astronauts back on the moon in 2028. Let's do it. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the weekend right after this. Not working with a financial professional is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Yeah, that and sneaking up on a miniature horse. Not going to ask. Anyway, Northwestern Mutual can match you with a financial professional who can build a plan that will be with you through life's milestones. They'll uncover blind spots and find new opportunities to help you grow your wealth and protect what you've worked so hard for. Find a better way to money at nm.com. That's nm.com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company. I hear we're talking about acting today. No, we're talking about Tax Act. And why did I bring a skull? I have no idea. But the reason we're talking about Tax Act is they help small business owners get their taxes done. 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My winner of the weekend is a guy named Adam Jacobs who has secretly recorded over 10,000 concerts spanning four decades, creating a heck of a music archive in the process. This story went viral over the weekend. Jacobs started this side project in Chicago back in 1984 and a few years later snuck a Sony cassette recorder in to go see a little band from Seattle play their debut show. His surreptitious recording of Nirvana predated their global breakthrough and set Jacobs on a path towards becoming an unexpected music folk hero. Over the ensuing years, Jacobs amassed an enviable archive of indie and punk rock, recording concerts from R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Stereo Lab, Sonic Youth, and more. Along the way, he became known in the scene. In the beginning, some venue owners gave him a hard time for sneaking in increasingly complex recording devices, but after a while, seeing that his intentions were that of a pure music lover, he became the taper guy and venue started letting him in for free. Now his archive is being digitized and hosted for free on the internet archive, preserving the giant catalog of his live shows for future generations to enjoy. Neil, so far about 5,500 tapes have been digitized with thousands more to go. Volunteers across the world are still hard at work doing just that. There's something in the way that this is bringing the music community together. Yes, further evidence that you can just do things. You can go to over 10,000 shows over 40 years and record them for your own edification and leave the world with one of the most important musical archives in history because this hobbyist project turned into an absolutely historical behemoth with over 10,000 recordings and he is known, Jacobs is known around Chicago. So he's taken on this mythic status. There was a documentary about him in 2023 WBZ, the public radio station there did a story about him in 2019. So he is known around Chicago as the as the taper guy. And I think more people will know him now that this is being helped on by other volunteers and being digitized because he has all these good set tapes for everyone to listen. There needs to be a huge project around digitizing them. So the internet archive, which is this nonprofit that preserves sort of digital artifacts has helped him with this huge push to digitize them. And so we're all going to be richer for it. It is very interesting. This capes that he got the concerts that he got on tape. There's a 1990 fish show that was unreleased to everyone. And now that it's on the line, like fish devotees are going crazy for it. There is a 1988 concert from Boogie Down Productions that people had never heard before. So people are literally going crazy for the findings that are unearthed in this collection. Also I found the equipment that he used to be an interesting evolution to how recording has changed over the years. He started with a tiny dictaphone recorder that he borrowed from his grandmother. He went through all the ensuing technological innovations that followed Sony Walkman style tape recorder, home console cassette machine that he put in his backpack at one point. And then eventually he's moved to more digital mediums. But it was fascinating that it's not just a archive of music history. It's an archive of recording history as well. My first time when I read this honestly was maybe it's just the business news aspect. I was like, so what do artists think? Like is this bootlegging? Yeah. Are they going after him? What do they think? He said that most of them are just very happy to have their early concerts preserved. He just said that two of the bands requested that he take it down. I guess it's technically legal that because these artists do own the original composition and the live recordings of what they're playing, but he's not profiting from it. So it seems like they just don't care. And they look the other way. And even one band, the replacements incorporated audio from one of his tapes of a 1986 show to a 2023 live album that they released. So it seems like the artists are loving that they're, this is being preserved as well. That was my first thought as well, Neil. But yeah, since he is not profiting, there's unlikely to be lawsuits and Jacobs, this is words to live by. I think I think that the general consensus is it's easier to say I'm sorry than to ask for mission. Always ask forgiveness, not for permission. So this archive is being updated by the day because there are volunteers literally driving to his house and then hauling trucks of cassettes to play them and then digitize them on the internet archive. You can just go to Adam Jacobs, just Google Adam Jacobs collection. And one interesting quirk about his name is that his name Adam is spelled AADAM gets him to the top of the dictionary. Three A's. It's Monday. So here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. Coming up on Wall Street this week, the return of earning season. I know how desperately you guys missed hearing about revenue projections and operating margins. Big banks kicked things off early in the week with reports from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan City and Wells Fargo. So everyone in that meeting. The past quarter was pretty epic for them with all the market volatility. So expect booming profits. Some other companies to watch Netflix, Pepsi and Johnson and Johnson. Yeah, just as a reminder, outside of the energy crisis that we are facing, corporate America is doing pretty well. If you take the overall performance of all the S&P 500 companies, earnings are expected to rise by 14% compared to last year. If that does happen, that would be the sixth straight quarter of double digit earnings growth. A streak like that since 2011. Again, it comes against a very shaky backdrop, but still as of now, corporate America is doing pretty dang well. And banks specifically, they're expected to bring in over $40 billion in trading revenue because while you're watching the stock market go up and down, they're actually making money off of it. In sports, the slog of an NBA regular season has mercifully come to an end and the play in tournament gets going tomorrow and runs through Friday. The actual playoffs will start on Saturday. The NHL is also wrapping up its regular season this week and the chase for the Stanley Cup begins on Saturday. I will refrain from giving out any more predictions because my master's prediction, John Rom, had an invisible performance and it looks like the Tobi Jinx is well and truly back. So again, submit the team that you want to lose in the playoffs and then I will shout them out on the show and they will inevitably lose. The inverse Tobi is going strong. And finally, Wednesday is tax day. April 15th, the deadline for individual tax return submissions. I didn't realize this, but a bunch of restaurants typically do food deals and discounts for tax day. So make sure you look those up before your celebratory burgers and fries for filling out your taxes on time. What's tax day? Is that when taxes end? Yeah. I'm joking. I actually did get you there. Yeah, get your taxes in. You haven't already. You believed you had. I don't believe you didn't. Come on. Okay, let's end it there. That is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful start to the week. If you'd like to reach us, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com or DMS on Instagram at mvdailyshow. That's good acting. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Yuchenna Waogu is our technical director. Hair and makeup is browsing the Adam Jacobs Collection. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.
