SPEAKER_00: We've got an amazing show for you today. We cover Anthony Bourdain's amazing new deepfake voice in this documentary Roadrunner a film about Anthony Bourdain which is in theaters today and I'm going to go see it. I may be in a theater in the next couple of days because I'm a big fan of Anthony Bourdain's and it really opens up a lot of great questions about deepfakes and using AI to recreate

SPEAKER_02: people's likenesses, voices, personalities. And we've got another potential fraud on our hands. Today we're going to cover EV startup Lordstown Motors which is being investigated by the DOJ and the SEC. No revenue, billions of dollars in valuation, exaggerated sales, sound familiar? Nicola, other companies. Well let's talk about that and how you can protect yourself as a retail investor and how you can make decisions on which companies you are going to invest in and how I actually look for fraud in private market companies. Finally we're going to talk about the LA County's mask mandate in the face of the Delta variant and Florida cruise lines putting some extra insurance basically attacks on unvaccinated passengers. Let's do the work. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_02: coming out about Anthony Bourdain and his life it's called Roadrunner a film about Anthony Bourdain and it's in theaters today. As you know he tragically died from suicide in 2018 but he's the narrator through much of this documentary and this documentary is from an Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville who

SPEAKER_00: also did I believe uh 10 feet from stardom I believe that's the name of the documentary about backup singers or 20 feet from stardom great documentary I'm huge into documentary so I cannot wait to see this and I think I'm gonna go to the theaters to see this because I've been going back to movie theaters

SPEAKER_02: and it is glorious. So um what's interesting about this is that they started using AI in order to create deepfakes of Bourdain's voice for key moments in the film where they didn't have him saying something and there's all these great documentary techniques if you've ever seen the kid stays in the picture they might do animations or take pictures and blur them or Ken Burns will pan across an old photo there's all these great techniques to take boring documentaries that are told typically through stock footage or just static images or people basically recounting stories and now we have a new one in the toolkit and it's a little bit concerning to some people but I think I'm falling on uh being delighted by this. So there is a section uh and this comes from a New Yorker profile uh written by Helen Rosner and she asked Neville where the he got the audio from and according to the article there's a moment in the film where a friend of Bourdain's is reading an email sent to him from Bourdain uh and Bourdain was

SPEAKER_16: known as being a great friend to a lot of people and um and that makes the suicide even more tragic if you are thinking of taking this terrible step please call your friends they want you in the world I mean I think losing Anthony Bourdain is just so brutal um he was just such an amazing human being on so many levels

SPEAKER_00: uh but in the email Bourdain writes you are successful and I am successful and I'm wondering are you happy wow I mean that is a deep comment um and I think it speaks to what a lot of people who

SPEAKER_02: are successful go through which is sometimes you're on the journey and climbing the mountain and and trying to get to a certain destination uh whether that's wealth fame uh love happiness you kind of get there and you wonder am I actually happy well here's the quote from the article there were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of Neville explains so he got in touch with the software company gave it about a dozen hours of recordings and he said I created an AI model for his voice oh my god this is amazing and if you've been on tick tock recently and you've seen the person who does imitations of tom cruise we're crossing the uncanny valley if you don't know what the uncanny valley is that's the point at which these AIs and deepfakes uh in in this re referencing uh deepfakes specifically it's when your mind believes you're actually hearing that person in other words you can't tell the uncanny valley is more about AI and sentient lives you can look it up online but in this case it

SPEAKER_00: means did you buy it did you actually think it was Anthony Bourdain uh and so let's listen to the clip

SPEAKER_19: and I'll make some comments about it you were successful and I'm successful and I'm wondering

SPEAKER_00: are you happy okay now I'm just gonna play it again and I'm gonna play it at a lower volume here

SPEAKER_21: while I talk over it wondering are you happy it does sound a little robotic on the margins you can you can hear that tinniness but boy if are you I saw this in a actual trailer and I did watch the

SPEAKER_02: trailer actually and I didn't pick this up but and that is means it crossed the uncanny valley other moments of uncanny valley that may have not crossed for you um Scorsese did the Irishman and they and

SPEAKER_16: they made everybody look younger that was clearly did not cross the valley for me but Luke Skywalker in the mandalorian spoiler alert Luke Skywalker shows up in the return of the jedi kind of format post

SPEAKER_02: return of the jedi um i bought it um maybe i wanted to buy it and so that's part of this but here we go we're now at a point where a dead person could be in a film or a younger version of a person and just

SPEAKER_00: closing the loop on this great article that found this nugget so congratulations to the uh to the

SPEAKER_16: reporter uh who actually figured out that this you know he asked a really good question like where did

SPEAKER_00: you get these clips if you watch the film other than that line you mentioned you probably don't know what the other lines are that were spoken by the ai and you're not going to know neville says we can have a documentary ethics panel about it later and that's one of the things about documentary films because they are you know an interpretation by a filmmaker of a subject they have very loose rules that's why you'll see you know in a narrative film based on a true story kind of gives them a little bit of um ability to wiggle around is this actually this actually happened did these conversations happy happen anyway i i think this is amazing i think bourdain would love the fact that you know they they

SPEAKER_02: did this and you could actually hear his voice say things and it had more resonance of course you could use this in a cheesy way and you could do it in a disrespectful way uh but this is the world right and i think about all the wonderful possibilities here um heath ledger tragically

SPEAKER_16: died early of an overdose taking five or six different pills it was really tragic i don't do that stuff kids um like literally the doctors may give you 10 types of pills that you're not required to take them certainly don't take them uh you know in a cocktail but it would have been amazing to

SPEAKER_00: see heath ledger's joker again now is it disrespectful or is it uh an homage or is it honorable to bring him

SPEAKER_16: back i think it's honorable to bring him back and i would love to uh see philip seymour hoffman you know do a comedic role again i mean talk about a tragedy again another overdose just these artists overdosing is just so tragic um but you know you remember along came polly the amazing ben stiller film uh and he a lot of people say that i play basketball like him and the rain dance scenes amazing maybe we can drop one into the youtube video here uh without getting in copyright trouble put it in a little box and tilt it and zoom in on it and we'll probably get past the youtube sensors uh but wouldn't it be amazing to see him do a spin out of that film i think they were always thinking about having that child actor do another film um and just putting it out there

SPEAKER_13: if somebody out there is an ai specialist and they think that this is as intriguing as i think it is i would love to back a music startup i'm just thinking about music right now i would love to

SPEAKER_00: back a music startup where i could say i want to hear mark knoffler of dire straits cover um wish you

SPEAKER_02: were here by pink floyd i would like to hear pink floyd uh and roger waters cover this dylan track tangled up in blue this could be an amazing unlock for creativity to be able uh an art to be able to do mashups now some people might consider this sacrilegious or you know against some uh human purity test but the way i look at it is we created the ai we should get to benefit from it and what an amazing startup that would be if we could take uh people's voices and uh artwork and ip and reinterpret them even if it was a tool i mean if you came out with a tool that allowed somebody to put in a bunch of videos or a bunch of audio and then let the user you know take ownership of exporting that ip that would take you out of the ip business or you could be in the ip business and create this technology and then go to an estate and say hey elvis presley estate we would like to make these 10 tracks of the elvis ai singing these 10 songs would that be interesting to you of course you could have an impressionist do it but there's something about the ai being able to do this methodically and get better and better at it um and the revenue potential is obviously extraordinary

SPEAKER_25: and you know you see a little mini version of this in ways which is not using ai they're having

SPEAKER_00: somebody record a thousand words and then stitching them together that's why when you have ways

SPEAKER_16: and you know somebody um some character like cookie monster we have cookie monster on ours the kids love

SPEAKER_28: it when cookie monster says make a left turn you're approaching a railroad track you know everybody

SPEAKER_29: laughs but that's somebody actually recording it it's not ai so we live in the future and i love it so

SPEAKER_02: give me some startup ideas people i i i got checks i got money sitting here i want to invest in some

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SPEAKER_02: back to our never-ending obsession with fraud or i should say mine i am obsessed with business frauds

SPEAKER_29: theranos uh madoff perhaps nikola uh perhaps tether you know or people doing things that are not on the

SPEAKER_02: up and up well there's a company called lordstown motors that might be a fraud um and it could be going to zero i i'm using i know how to use the words now uh as having done over a thousand different podcasts i know how to frame this um without getting myself in trouble uh but just this morning cnbc has reported that lordstown motors another pre-revenue ev spac okay so it's pre-revenue that's one thing it's in a really hard space electric vehicles and it's a spac a way to get public

SPEAKER_00: quicker maybe with less scrutiny not in all cases but you do have to buyer beware when you're looking at this category of companies going public they tend to be early uh they confirmed they're being

SPEAKER_29: investigated by the doj for its reporting of pre-orders oh like it's one thing to not even have customers but then to lie about pre-orders oh this is really gnarly so two weeks ago the wall

SPEAKER_00: street journal reported the doj was inquiring with lordstown which cnbc confirmed okay so we got real journalistic outlets wall street journal cnbc confirming that the doj is looking now they're inquiring that doesn't mean they're guilty right just because somebody's looking into something doesn't mean um that there is a crime it just means there's a suspicion and there's enough of suspicion that the doj would take it seriously and they have a large list of things they could look into and they've chosen to look into this one major red flag lordstown motors said in a filing on thursday

SPEAKER_02: that it had to receive two subpoenas from the sec for the production of documents and information including relating to the merger between diamond peak and legacy lordstown and pre-orders of vehicles and we have been informed by the u.s attorney's office for the southern district of new york

SPEAKER_00: that it is investigating this matter and we hear about the southern district of new york all the time that's where rudy giuliani started his career before going absolutely bonkers that's where pre-pahara from the great cafe insider go to cafe.com and subscribe to his amazing podcast or stay tuned with pre which is a free one anyway if the southern district of new york is involved

SPEAKER_02: that is a major red flag they are serious and they are known for having a very independent streak to them um so before we break down lordstown i want to remember uh jason's law jason's law is something i

SPEAKER_29: came up with and i codified it uh i think in september of 2020 i've been talking about it for years but

SPEAKER_02: this is my i called it originally my theranos rule if a startup becomes worth 1 billion before they launch their product they are either going to fail or be a complete fraud examples punch up let's workshop this and i did in fact uh punch it up in december 20. remember jason's law if you invest in a company without a launch product and over a bill at over a billion dollar valuation you will lose all your money and it might turn out to be a fraud so i've been workshopping this concept nicola uh ticker symbol nkla is a private company uh as a private company i said in this tweet would be worth about a hundred million dollars max uh so i expected in this tweet to lose 95 percent we had trevor milton on the pod episode number 1090 it is a classic episode it will be one of the 10 best

SPEAKER_29: episodes of my career because my god this person was delusional and i i think that was like peak trevor and it all came apart shortly thereafter so in march 2021 i made my third version of jason's

SPEAKER_02: rule if a private company reaches a one billion dollar valuation before it launches a product or has customers it's probably going to fail and it might actually be a fraud so be careful retail

SPEAKER_16: investors when you buy fisker or nicola you're taking a big risk and so the reason i refine this is um it's very rare for a private company to reach a billion dollar valuation before it launches

SPEAKER_02: a product or has customers and i i put that caveat in there because you could have people pre-ordering uh things like virgin uh galactic which had a very successful launch this past weekend congratulations to richard branson and when you think about that they did have i think 600 pre-orders of 200k those people actually paid money or you have people pre-ordering cars now whether it's tesla or ford so i could see a situation in where which people pre-order and give their money that those are not letters of intent so keep that in mind but it seems like i'm now reminding people of jason's law every three to four months so consider this your three to four month quarterly reminder and some very important things

SPEAKER_25: to keep in mind about these red flags that we just covered valuations that don't make logical sense

SPEAKER_02: what would this company's valuation be let's take a spacking company be in the private markets well sometimes you know because there's been a private market valuation in other words airbnb before they went public had this private market valuation now they're going public now that's a company airbnb that we all have rented airbnb's or we know somebody so they have a

SPEAKER_25: product in market and tons of customers and tons of revenue so they don't fall under jason's law

SPEAKER_13: but as an example you know the the previous valuation nicola peaked at around 34 billion dollars in june of 2020 with no revenue and basically close to no product as far as anybody can tell

SPEAKER_25: and i mentioned that as a private company ventures investors would have probably invested at them around 100 million max you put in 20 million you get 20 percent of the company that seems you know

SPEAKER_02: like a rich valuation but you know it's reasonable for a hardware company like that that's capital intensive um but but that's a 340x multiple from my valuation and i am an expert on this this is what i do for a living for 10 years i've invested in over 300 early stage private uh market companies i know what i'm talking about and so now they're trading at around 5.5 billion which is about 50 times

SPEAKER_13: too high and so once again if you can't see who's holding the bag check your hands it's probably you

SPEAKER_02: so the people who bought nicola at 34 billion thinking oh well this is a fraction of the valuation of apple or tesla or amazon you're literally comparing the most successful companies in the history of humanity against you know some dip bleep the second half of that word please you get some dip who's never accomplished anything in their life be careful out there and what are the insiders doing this is another thing you have to look at are have they exited or are they cashing out most of the time the people who are running the best companies have inside information that leads them to not want to sell it and 100 of the time the people running a company have inside information like literally in their brains are their plans and their hopes and fears and their assessment of is this a good stock to own if those insiders are cashing out it's a red flag now if they're cashing out modestly that can be reasonable if it's a person's first company if they have to pay their taxes because they got awarded some stock there are some valid reasons that an executive has to sell some shares but trevor milton sold like 70 million dollars in shares before they went public or right as they were going public and he tried to explain it on the podcast and it made no sense that's a big number 70 million if he sold 7 million you would think okay you sold 7 million he's gonna buy a house you pay your taxes you got 4 million left depending on what state you live in 5 million you can buy a house for that you know for a ceo to buy a 4 million dollar house you know they're not buying a 60 million dollar jet or a 30 million dollar jet in three houses so that was a major red flag today many small business

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SPEAKER_02: into lordstown motors the company is basically developing ev pickup trucks to compete with the cyber truck remember sound familiar nicola badger literally trevor talked about his competing uh car to the cyber truck um it does make sense why people are very excited about this category in fairness uh the best selling vehicles in the united states were trucks uh 2020 data uh from car and driver uh number one ford f series 787 000 units sold uh the chevy silverado 586 000 units sold and ram pickup 563 000 units sold so those top three are selling close to two million just the top three pickup trucks this is a big prize trucks are also the most profitable products uh in automakers lines that's why um so many startups are going after this that's why elon did the cyber truck he knows if you're going to have a lineup of cars that is a great one to have there's a lot of people who uh love to use trucks both for work and for pleasure and as their personal vehicles so much so that ford who has the f1 series didn't decide to take this uh sitting down they unveiled their ev truck the f-150 lightning they've got a hundred thousand pre-orders cyber truck reportedly has a million reservations and

SPEAKER_00: back in september 2020 elon said they were well over a half million so that number is probably correct that one million uh is according to a crowdsource tracker um and so i think it makes sense so you

SPEAKER_02: look at this you have ford who is the number one player they've already got a hundred thousand pre-orders um and that has a 300 mile range it's got tons of outlets i mean electric pickup trucks are going to be the dominant pickup trucks it doesn't matter you can say people are rednecks or they're dumb or they're laggards when they see the performance that an ev can do and they can start plugging in their tools and charging their drills and taking it on the road and you know having a giant electrical source it's like bringing a power plant with you into the woods or onto your site you don't need to bring a generator with you anymore that's going to be i think one of the most exciting things about

SPEAKER_00: this people who are doing work or you know taking their boats out they're going to love these electric versions lordstown q1 revenue 2020 was zero and their net loss was 125 million their market cap peaked around 5 billion in september 2020 they're now at 1.5 billion after the doj news i would think this is going to zero or will be sold for scrap i could see the 5 billion going down to 50 million in scrap in other

SPEAKER_25: words you lose you know 90 99 of your value as an investor um and i think the equity holders could

SPEAKER_00: get wiped out completely because there could be debt and lawsuits etc they were founded in 2018 by somebody named steve burns who was the former ceo of an electric vehicle manufacturing company workhorse group that i've never heard of uh in november of 2019 lordstown became the owner of a former gm plant in lordstown ohio after signing a sales agreement with the automaker a lot of these automakers have done this in fact elon's um fremont i think was a former toyota plant so these plants trade hands uh

SPEAKER_02: just like stadiums do or or buildings do gm loaned lordstown motors 40 million in order to underwrite a substantial part of the plant purchase so that already is a red flag okay so gm wants to get this plant off their books and they give this new company 40 million dollars in order to do it or underwrites a loan to do it major red flag feels like self-dealing doesn't mean gm's in the wrong but it doesn't come from a position of strength and in total gm invested about 75 million into lordstown motors and joined its board so those would be to uh somebody watching the spacko public somebody thinking about buying into it oh gm's involved well are they really involved and what is 75 million if they're taking this plan off their hands you net out the 40 million okay there's another 35 million

SPEAKER_00: sitting there what exactly is going on here well in march uh of 2020 according to the ohio business journal daily now we always like to give credit to the uh journalists who uh we mention here and who uh give us the data uh with these news stories that i do the analysis on in march 2020 lordstown motors paid workhorse group 12 million for the licensing rights to the intellectual

SPEAKER_02: property of the workhorse w15 pickup truck wait a second so the ceo's new company bought the rights from the old company okay that's self-dealing it's weird it's only for 12 million maybe you could explain it away or maybe it's a red flag right so these things start to pile up it kind of reminds me of what we saw with we work and the self-dealing there remember adam newman was buying buildings and then leasing them back to we work or he claimed he owned the we work ip and domain name or the brand and he was leasing it back to the company people who do this kind of self-dealing are typically not visionary people they're nickel and diming people who are trying to hustle other people it is really really bad form to do this i bought mahalo.com inside.com on my own and i sold them to the company that i run for the cost basis i bought them for even though i bought them low i i think i bought inside.com for sixty thousand dollars that's a million dollar domain i could have tried to sell it to my own company and then my shareholders would be like oh you profited from that why would i want to deal with that why would i want to deal with that what you see is the opposite with baller ceos with vision they do what i do like at inside.com i think i take a one dollar a year salary i haven't taken a salary in six years i don't need the money from the salary i'm trying to build a company and have

SPEAKER_08: it hit 10 million in revenue and we're 30 percent of the way there so we're getting there remember

SPEAKER_02: workhorse group ceo was steve burns and that's his previous company so this is self-dealing and yeah you know you could sit it out but anytime you have to explain yourself and things go wrong that's when there's a problem now if we work went public and became worth 100 billion dollars you know the the adam newman behavior would have been like okay that was weird but we all made money so it's forgivable right so keep that in mind when you do something that has the appearance of impropriety like sometimes the founder will want to give themselves more shares in their own company well if everybody makes a ton of money it didn't feel that bad that the founder awarded themselves five percent more of the company and the board approved it because we all got rich but if the company gets sold and the founder gave themselves 50 more of the company or whatever it is that's when you start to have problems so be very careful as leaders out there who are listening the appearance

SPEAKER_25: of impropriety is impropriety uh that's what i learned early early in my career from dave johnson who

SPEAKER_16: was my first boss at sony music uh he was the general counsel a great boss and so uh as part of the

SPEAKER_02: business deal warcross group was given 10 equity stake in lordstown so then does steve burns still own lordstown i mean it just becomes so much self-dealing that you have to wonder what are these people thinking in august of 2020 lordstown announced they were merging with the spac diamond peak holdings their shares peaked at 29 to share a five billion dollar market cap they officially

SPEAKER_25: listed as dollar sign ride that's a great ticker symbol in october 2020 fast forward to march 2021

SPEAKER_02: short sellers hindenburg research hindenburg research the same people who covered nicola

SPEAKER_29: these are very serious it's a small firm i talked to the guy on the phone once i don't know much about them but i can tell you when they get their hooks into something you know meat is on the menu like these these guys know how to chum the water these are the big these are the big sharks uh they may be a small firm but man they take a big bite out of companies when they release a report and they

SPEAKER_02: released a report the lordstown motors mirage fake orders undisclosed production hurdles and a prototype inferno in the report they claim that lordstown had misled investors on both its demand and production capabilities the company has consistently pointed to its book of a hundred

SPEAKER_25: thousand pre-orders as proof of deep demand for its proposed ev truck our conversations with former employees business partners and an extensive document review show the company's orders are largely fictitious and used as a prop to raise capital and confer legitimacy let that sink in for example i'm quoting again from the hindenburg report lordstown recently announced a 14 000 truck deal from e squared energy supposedly representing 735 million in sales e squared is based out of a small residential

SPEAKER_29: apartment in texas that does not operate a vehicle fleet what i mean literally sometimes journalists

SPEAKER_02: just write these stories and they never knock on the door or they never look into the company and then somebody like hindenburg research even though they have the term research they're actually investors and i think in this case they're shorting the company therefore man if if they find any kind of fraud they're going to put it out there now there is a debate to be had here about using the technique of fear uncertainty and doubt fud to try to make a company lose value and short it and sometimes it's

SPEAKER_00: legit uh that you're actually finding fraud and sometimes you're spreading fear and uncertainty and doubt ultimately you as a retail investor which i think a lot of us are here we own shares in companies some of us play the market some of us buy long some of us like to trade daily you really need to look

SPEAKER_25: at the totality of what's happening and what milestones are completed because these are private companies essentially that are now going public well what do i do to avoid this as a private company investor i will look at the company and i do diligence and i look at the original contracts and

SPEAKER_02: i talk to the customers in this case if i was doing my diligence on this company we would say show us the contract with e squared and who signed the order show okay whose signature is on the order great we'll we'll talk to that customer and ask them why did you order 14 instead of 140 or 4 000 why 14 000 that simple question is going to get a really telling answer and if you can't get that person on the phone well then you don't do the investment so um and this is what i tell my team when we do

SPEAKER_25: diligence if the if the company takes a long time to get us the diligence and there are three four

SPEAKER_02: five red flags and they can't explain them quickly boy we're probably going to pass on that deal so for people who are in a private company who are raising money keep your diligence tight never ever

SPEAKER_16: exaggerate i talk about this in my book angel where a company told me they had facebook and google as

SPEAKER_00: customers and when we asked to see the contracts they told us they had an oral agreement when they asked them to who the people were that they had the oral agreement with they said the person at google they had the deal with they met at a party and they don't remember their name and i was like okay

SPEAKER_32: you're committing securities fraud you're literally telling us that certain things are true getting us to buy shares the sec takes this seriously in business it's important to be memorable and sending

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SPEAKER_02: the hindenburg yet another firm that is supposedly set to buy 500 trucks from lordstown told us the letters of interest are non-binding it's not like you'd obligate yourself to a pre-order or that you would contractually bind yourself to buying this truck that's not what they are so basic diligence the public who's buying you know ten thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars in shares in the company or maybe you know a robin hood trader or somebody on e-trade buying a thousand dollars as a flyer they're certainly not going to take the time to to do this kind of diligence but here we go hindenburg does basic diligence letters of intent and pipeline are words that people who don't have real businesses use let me say it again letters of intent and pipeline are complete and utter

SPEAKER_25: when i am talking to a company or i invest in a company and then they start putting in their board

SPEAKER_02: decks or when they're raising money their pipeline i'm like okay enough with the pipeline i get it there's a pipeline report it's great internally to know these are the hundred advertisers who might advertise on this week in startups i i don't care i care about the signed contracts i don't care about the pipeline oh the pipeline's growing great nine times out of ten pipeline and people who are focused on that metric are people who can't close sales i know people disagree with me on this issue but get focused on actual real customers the hindenburg report also led to the sec requesting information from lordstown motors regarding the short sales claims of misleading investors so a great way to think about what hindenburg does is the anti-deal memo here's why you shouldn't invest and uh you

SPEAKER_00: know it's different than my business which is here's what could go right this is like you know really really great filter and it's great that people like hindenburg are out there now we have other examples where people were spreading fear and uncertainty and doubt about maybe amc uh or gamestop or even the tesla q movement where you know you you had one set of reality which is

SPEAKER_02: people taking deliveries of the model 3 or buying plaid and people using self-driving and you have this tesla q group saying that you know there's all these teslas in remember all those drone videos of teslas in parking lots and they're like oh my god tesla has no sales and then you go to the mall and you see everybody parking teslas everywhere and you're like wait a second you you just need to go on twitter and say i got my tesla today and see all the people who are sharing their new tesla or go to the pickup line at school and see all the model x's i mean it's crazy so when you see the

SPEAKER_00: product in the real world that's when i tend to think you know the the chances of it being a fraud

SPEAKER_02: uh are kind of gone if people are using the product and i think this actually happened with a bunch of fear and certainty and doubt about a multi-level marketing company called herbalife and you had two giant headphones it's a it's a really sorted story but you should do a google search on the herbalife back and forth because it might have been a smarmy business i hate that multi-level marketing level marketing nonsense but there were people who were selling and buying herbalife and so you could say i don't like that business and it's feel scammy or smarmy whatever the worst interpretation is of it but there were people who had herbalife vitamins on their shelves who were taking them and there were there were orders being placed um so there's a range of what could happen here and i think the true north is always the customers uh later in june an independent investigation commission by the board found that pre-order agreements were overstated in number and in

SPEAKER_00: seriousness in order to generate press there it is the board figured this out in june 2021 both the ceo steve burns and cfo julio rodriguez resigned from their positions this is sketchy stuff folks uh and these people could be going to jail uh and every time we have a boom cycle you have the world comms the enrons the madoffs that's when um these type of scams manifest themselves is in a boom market when people stop doing diligence and people get greedy because they got a lot of poker chips you ever see somebody you know run the poker table or they're doing incredible at blackjack and they're just got tons of chips everywhere and then their play gets a little loosey-goosey and maybe they start drinking and they feel invincible that's kind of the market we're in right now people are starting to feel a bit invincible and they're starting to splashy cashy just make bets without doing their own research buyer beware and if you just compare that to nicola both the founders left the company after the spac um you had trevor cashing out 70 million there's no word if steve burns has cashed out uh but at least two exec cashed out millions before reporting that disappointing q1 earnings

SPEAKER_02: according to the wall street journal the head of loristown's propulsion unit sold 99.3 percent of his vested shares for more than 2.5 million it's a small amount of money but the percentage is meaningful

SPEAKER_00: and lord sounds president rich schmidt sold 39 of his vested shares over a two-day period to pocket 4.6 million both exaggerated claims of pre-orders as revenue both were producing an ev pickup truck and

SPEAKER_29: cyber truck competitor so uh are nicola and lordstown both frauds um this is sketchy stuff uh and i

SPEAKER_16: would advise anybody who's a shareholder to get out now and not be the bag holder and put your money into disney tesla uber which i own shares in robin hood which i own shares is going public uh airbnb

SPEAKER_29: microsoft google facebook anybody amazon with a real product in the world that you use and love if you use and love the product man how can you go wrong uh having a fraud like this it's i'm trying to think of a situation in which i loved a product or service and owning the shares resulted in a fraud

SPEAKER_16: is that even possible like was there somebody who got their blood done by theranos who was a shareholder who who then was uh you know tricked into buying shares okay so let's wrap up here flag

SPEAKER_02: number one crazy high valuation flag number two no real customers flag number three self-dealing flag

SPEAKER_29: number four cashing out executives major flag number five hindenburg investigation and then flag number six up against tesla and ford this is roadkill get out of the way folks do not buy the stock if you

SPEAKER_00: own the stock i would admit defeat i would lose 90 cents on the dollar 99 cents on the dollar all money has value take whatever remaining money you have if it's 10 cents on the dollar and put it on something that could 10x from here if you believe that's coinbase if you believe it's robinhood if you believe it's airbnb whatever it is all money has value chip in a chair get that 10 percent that you have left and put it in something that doesn't have these kind of red flags now i know some of you like spax because you can buy a share for ten dollars you have to be very careful with facts some of

SPEAKER_02: them are very early stage companies that are very unproven other ones are later stage companies that have great customers and you may use their product but i know that sometimes retail investors were interested in them because well they were priced at ten dollars and buying a ten dollar share is

SPEAKER_00: easier than buying a share that's in the hundreds or thousands of dollars whether it's apple or amazon or whatever is trading you know at a higher amount and you're just making small little bets

SPEAKER_02: well you can now buy fractions of shares on services like robinhood and e-trade so i'd rather see

SPEAKER_00: you buy a fraction of a share of apple than to buy some of these or if you do insist on buying these really look at them like buying lottery tickets or worse like scratch offs and then buy some actual real

SPEAKER_83: equities in companies where you've used and love the product all right everybody uh we talked about this

SPEAKER_06: on episode 40 of the all in podcast last night where one of my besties got the delta variant we are now

SPEAKER_00: going to have a big giant debate about the reopening which in california here started on june 15th i thought i would share some of my thoughts and maybe talk about some of these data points i believe that if you are vaccinated you are able to make your own decision of how much risk you want to take but i also believe that businesses get to make their own decisions um and that even local uh communities can uh work on standards they want and here we go we have a bunch of people debating the risk assessment and the actual cost of another lockdown whether this would be the third or fourth lockdown depends on which city you're in uh but california which just celebrated this reopening and they

SPEAKER_02: were the last to reopen on june 15th due to the rising cases and the delta variant in la specifically and how much more contagious it is they've reinstated the indoor mass policy for all residents not just

SPEAKER_00: fully vaccinated ones so here we go again if you go into a store in la you got to put your mask on and do a lot of this mask theater because maybe when you go into a restaurant they're not shutting down in door dining so you're going to walk to your table in a mass but then take it off to eat or you're supposed to take it off in between bites i'm going to be traveling on a commercial airline over the summer and i was reading that you in this one airline they said in between bites or sips you

SPEAKER_02: can take your mask off but during the entire meal you can't take your mask off so i i was on a flight

SPEAKER_16: and i was sipping my tea and i noticed the person next to me had no mask on almost the whole flight and he had a bottle of water and sand the whole flight and i was like that's a hack i get what you're doing uh but obviously he was vaccinated and i actually had to talk to him about him being vaccinated and we actually talked about his hack um but i don't want to get him in trouble so for the seven

SPEAKER_02: day period that ended in wednesday la's average was a thousand new cases a day and on thursday la reported 1500 additional cases of covet so yeah it's definitely ramping up but deaths or not hospitalizations will and 99 percent of people going into the hospital uh seems to be people who are unvaccinated so what i think is the delta variant will be the motivating factor for people who have been dragging their feet or unsure if they want to get the vaccine between december 7th and june 7th the unvaccinated accounted for 99.6 of la county's coronavirus cases 98.7 of covid 19 hospitalizations and 99.8 percent of deaths in other words and really that 0.2 percent that were people who are

SPEAKER_00: vaccinated and died i would love to see that number of cases it might be dozens of cases and if they died from covid or with covid or that really difficult statistic which is you know how many days of life did they lose because maybe this was a person who was you know a smoker who had compromised lungs who was obese and had a bad liver and they were going to die in the next 60 days and instead they died six days you know earlier uh and so you know it's really hard with these statistics to actually

SPEAKER_16: understand uh or make policy but the policy i've made is i am um not going to change my behavior i'm fully vaccinated um and i'm willing to take a little bit of risk in regards to catching the delta variant because i don't think that i'll get long haul covet i hope not knock on wood or i don't think i'm certainly going to die uh so i've chosen to focus on my health i'm eating healthier i'm losing

SPEAKER_00: weight i'm working out and i had asthma when i was a kid so i'm actually looking at this as an opportunity for myself to maybe work on other issues as a 50 year old man i turned 50 this past year during covid so i want to work on my health and be stronger in case i do get something like

SPEAKER_02: this in the future but florida's taking a unique strategy you know florida was uh you know didn't

SPEAKER_00: really shut down all that much and they've taken uh keeping the place open and it's really hard for us to know if these closures actually did anything obviously masks do work i'd have to be crazy think masks don't work but in which settings do they work and now we have to start this whole

SPEAKER_02: process again to what extent do masks work with the delta variant what if the delta variant is so contagious that masks don't actually help it we don't know but florida is the cruise capital of the world everybody knows that all the cruises go out there and florida took a strategy of saying hey listen uh you cannot as a cruise company require people to be vaccinated so they actually did their

SPEAKER_00: own mandate which is kind of like over the top so what cruise ships decided to do was they decided

SPEAKER_02: to require people who were not vaccinated to pay for insurance here is a clip from my friend

SPEAKER_89: seema modi the cruise lines also implementing some new policies for unvaccinated passengers seema modi has all the details on that hi seema hey mike and remember this is only an issue in florida

SPEAKER_90: the cruise capital of the world where cruise lines cannot mandate the vaccine everywhere else the cruise ships require that 95 percent of crew and passengers are vaccinated now one strategy the cruise lines are using unvaccinated passengers now must first buy travel insurance policies worth at least ten thousand dollars to cover medical treatment and insurance worth at least thirty thousand for emergency evacuation from ship to land should a passenger need it they'll also be responsible to cover the cost of routine pcr testing trip advisor estimates that a family of four could spend about an additional seven hundred dollars on these mandatory costs it's seen as a way to discourage unvaccinated travelers from cruising several cruise ships in the past few days have cut trips short or delayed operations due to a few coveted ships on board wednesday in singapore nearly three thousand passengers and crew confined to their rooms after one passenger tested positive for covet it's one of the reasons norwegian cruise line remains adamant on sailing a hundred percent vaccinated ships earlier this week launching a lawsuit against florida which does forbid businesses from checking proof of vaccination that hearing is now set for august 6th lawyers i have been speaking with overnight uh saying that the company has a good chance at being granted an injunction but uh it could potentially delay when norwegian gets its ships back to sea perhaps that's what's driving shares on region lower this week the worst performing stock on the s p 500 week to date uh but this ruling could have a significant impact guys on the broader travel and hospitality

SPEAKER_91: sector as they try to operate in this environment at a time when this delta variant is becoming a bigger

SPEAKER_02: concern all right so they have it for a family for 700 bucks to go on the cruise that might be enough to dissuade people who are not vaccinated from going on the cruise which is good for the people on the cruise and for the cruise lines they don't want unvaccinated people there and it might actually motivate some number of people to say you know what if i'm going to incur extra expense

SPEAKER_29: then i will go get the free vaccination so uh you know fines and taxes which is what this is it's kind

SPEAKER_00: of a tax or a fine depending on how you want to look at it that doesn't send behavior i remember in

SPEAKER_02: new york as they kept adding to the cost of a pack of cigarettes i think when i was a kid it was a buck 50. i remember when it was 75 cents because i used to run and get the mafiosas um cigarettes at my dad's

SPEAKER_16: restaurant they would send me out they give me 10 bucks they say keep the change get me two packs of marlboro lights it was a pretty good racket you make seven bucks on two buck fifty dollar packs of

SPEAKER_02: cigarettes but then it became 255 10 i don't know where a pack of cigarettes is now but i think it's well over 10 bucks in some cities and so smoking went down people would be less bumming cigarettes

SPEAKER_00: because people would say oh i'm out of cigarettes or i've only got one left because they were so expensive i could see this going into other industries so if you're going to college and the college says you know what everybody has to be vaccinated private institution whatever um feels

SPEAKER_02: fair to me or they could say you have to pay a tax on this i think this is something that could actually work with gun control i'm a believer that people should be able to be reasonable gun owners but you know maybe your fifth gun or your tenth gun you have to start paying tax on it maybe you pay tax on ammunition just to you know keep some control over the number of guns and if you had to register your guns and you had to pay tax on them i think we now it's not going to lower gun debts it might lower the number of guns out there and make them more traceable so here is this going to solve covid no but it might steer society in the right direction are people going to stop smoking cigarettes because of the tax no but it might make people smoke less it's just so obvious so you show me the incentive i'll show you the outcome is the classic saying and that's what we're seeing here all right hope you enjoyed this news program if you did enjoy it feel free to email me at any time any topics you think we should cover uh or if we're doing one of these investigations like tether or looking into these companies that we think might be frauds go ahead and dm the twi startups account on twitter or dme at jason on twitter uh let me know if you like the show if you did like the show go ahead and tweet the episode uh write a review whatever you know all the stuff you

SPEAKER_16: can do and if you're on that youtube channel go ahead and turn on the alert button and subscribe okay we'll see you all next time bye bye