The Dr. Doug Ramsey Show - 20240729

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The opinions and information expressed and discussed on The Doctor
Doug Ramsey Show or for informational and educational purposes only.
It is not intended to provide, and should not be
relied upon for accounting, legal, tax or investment advice. Please
consult with a professional specializing in these areas regarding the
applicability of this information to your situation.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
All things financing business leading you to success at work,
at home and in live. It's the Doctor Doug Ramsey
Show and now here's your host, Doctor Doug Ramsey.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Welcome to the Doctor Doug Ramsey Show, watch by the
merjor Fimian Network.

Speaker 4 (00:46):
Well, quite a week.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Olympics started a little bit of controversy with those opening ceremonies,
like two sides of that's that one, and this past
week a lot of fraud stories unbelievable and I kind
of parsed them out and slipped into a few other

(01:10):
stories in between.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
But this is going to be pretty interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
So before we get to any weather, this could kind
of be fraud or as they say, puffing in real
estate where the claims are more than the real capabilities.
This first one comes from Gang.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
No Times, Gangno Times and it's.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
About Elon Musk's cyber truck in its boat mode, and
it turns out that the boat mode may not be
so waterproof like Elon was claiming. Says that an official
event Tesla see EO. Elon Musk mention the waterproof function

(02:02):
of Tesla's electric pickup truck and cybertruck. He claimed it
can be used as a boat for a short period
of time and its waterproof function will be strong enough
to cross rivers, lakes and even the sea without rough
or rough waves. The US government has expressed skepticism about

(02:22):
Tesla's cyber truck's waterproof capabilities, issuing a social media warning.

Speaker 4 (02:30):
Against using the vehicle as a boat.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Elon Musk previously claimed that the cyber truck could temporarily
float on water. While many doubt this statement, some individuals
have daringly decided to test this assertion themselves. A driver
from the Czech Republic was curious about the waterproof function

(02:55):
of the cyber truck that Elon must have mentioned.

Speaker 4 (02:58):
We immediately went.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
To slow Vakia to test the cyber truck's wade mode,
which protects the vehicle body from water. He arrived at
a lake in Slovakia, and began driving a cyber truck.
The results were disastrous. The cyber truck got stuck in
a lake with the bottom made of pebbles and could

(03:19):
not move. The driver, who believed that even if he
could not float, he would be able to overcome a
certain depth and drive stably, had no choice but to
receive help from people around him. By digging out the
gravel and placing wooden boards under the wheels, they managed
to get the truck out of the water. The wade

(03:44):
mode installed in Tesla cyber truck allows the truck to
drive on water by applying.

Speaker 4 (03:50):
Pressure to the battery pack.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
It is said to be capable of driving up to
water as high as thirty one inches. Elon must claim
that this feature would allow the cyber truck to function
as a boat and be waterproof enough to cross rivers, but.

Speaker 4 (04:08):
The check driver is showing the results.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Of course, this result may have occurred because the gravel
on the floor made it difficult to secure driving power.
Independently of wade mode, however, is the number of failure cases,
such as the cyber truck geting stuck in the river
in Azula Canyon in the US is increasing. Negative voices
are growing regarding whether cyber trucks.

Speaker 4 (04:32):
Can function as boats.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
Many people wonder whether the cyber truck's performance is as
good as Elon Musk claims. Even before launch, one of
the prototypes got into trouble in shallow mud. Tesla employees
appeared confused as a vehicle did not move even at
this depth. Aside from its shortcomings in wade mode, the

(04:58):
cyber trucks shortcoming to your clear. If the driver lowers
the trucks tono cover, the rearview mirror becomes useless. But
if the driver raises it, the loss of power increases noticeably.

Speaker 4 (05:14):
I don't want to understand that one.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
So you drop that cover and there's no visibility going
out the back. So yeah, your rearview mirror, it's just
looking at a cover and nothing beyond that. But I'm
not sure how the vehicle loses power noticeably after that

(05:39):
top is raised. In addition to the contrary to Tesla's
advertisement that it can run over three hundred and eleven miles,
the driving range of about two hundred ninety two miles
was recorded in the driving test, causing controversy. So there
you go, cyber truck not quite living up to expectations.

(06:06):
All right, I'm sure heard of this by now, about
this crowdstrikeoutage, and I've got several articles. I'm not going
to read each one completely, but I'll pull out the
main points after we get through the main one here.

Speaker 4 (06:25):
This is from Barons.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
And it talks about the effects of the crowd Strike outage.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
Let's dig in.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
It was a mass it outage granted flights and disrupted
stock exchanges on Friday as an overnight content update by
cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crippled Microsoft's PC operating systems. And this
was Friday, a week ago, not this past Friday. Umber

(07:00):
of people flagging problems with Microsoft's three sixty five suite
of apps and as Your Cloud computing products spiked at
about one am Eastern Time, according to data from downdetector
dot com, a website.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
That tracks service issues.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
Microsoft said the later Friday that it had restored az Your.
CrowdStrike confirmed that a content update it had implemented had
caused the crashes, which have left some PC users facing a.

Speaker 4 (07:35):
So called blue screen of death.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect
found in a single update for Windows hosts, A spokesperson
for the company said in an emailed statement to Barons,
adding that Friday's outage wasn't the result of a security
incident or a cyber attack. Mac Linux users haven't been

(08:01):
affected by the glitch. The company's CEO, George Kurtz, apologized
for the global tech outage in an interview with NBC,
adding that while there has been a fix deployed, solving
the problem could take some time. Earlier today, a CrowdStrike
update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT
systems globally. A Microsoft spokesperson said we are actively supporting

(08:27):
customers to assist in the recovery CrowdStrike. Stock, which before
Friday's glitch was up thirty four percent for the year,
fell eleven percent to three hundred and three dollars and
seventy two cents by earlier afternoon. That put it on
pace for its largest percentage decrease since November thirty, twenty

(08:51):
twenty two, when it fell fifteen percent. The stock was
the worst performer in both the sp five hundred and
the Nasdaq one hundred, though even with that decline, it's
nineteen per year to date game beats a fifteen percent
surge in the SB five hundred. Now, let's see, I'm
gonna jump over. Let's see if I can pull this

(09:13):
up pretty quick to a stock page. I want to
see if it's dropped across this past week since the
debacle occurred. Let's see here, We're gonna get over to
the finance page on Yahoo and let's look up.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
Crowd strike. Yep, there it is and it is. Oh yeah,
it's down quite a bit. More so, it's down.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
Let's see the clo on this past variety a week
later to fifty six better, fifty six dollars, So it's
down quite a bit. So if you know the smart play,
let's talk about this a little bit. If there's a crisis,
something goes really haywire, you know, one of the things

(10:23):
you can wind up doing is you can either short stock,
or you can but shorten the stock you've got.

Speaker 4 (10:34):
You've got to.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
Have sufficient coverage or margin to be able to do that,
because if the stock goes the other way, it starts
going up, because you're betting it's going down on the news,
it starts going up.

Speaker 4 (10:48):
It could go up, you know, an infinite amount. So for.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
The typical every day investor, Mom and pop type and investor.
That's probably not a good play, but a great way
to play a bet that a stock's gonna go down
is you buy some put options on it.

Speaker 4 (11:16):
And if you buy those.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
Put options, then you got a whole different story here.
And with the put option, you buy one contract that
covers a hundred years, but you get you buy that
put option at a certain price. And let's just say
you bought it at the price that stock was trading

(11:40):
at when the news is starting to break. Let's say
it was even this closing price three hundred and three
dollars and seventy two cents at early.

Speaker 4 (11:51):
Afternoon on that friday. Let me make surerink at the date, right.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
So if you buy one with a strike price around
three or three or even three hundred dollars, you buy
the put, it's one hundred dollars times whatever the premium is.
Let's say the premiums five bucks a share, so it's

(12:18):
five times one hundred. Because one contract covers one hundred shares,
that'd be five hundred dollars. And now if the stock
drops below three hundred dollars before the expiration, you can
either sell the contract to close it, or you can

(12:39):
wait till expiration, and if it's still down below three
hundred at expiration, you keep the difference between three hundred
and wherever the stock closed below three hundred. So let's
say in this case, I mean we already saw it,
because I just looked up the current price. It's dropped

(12:59):
down to two hundred and fifty six dollars, So that
means you would have made forty four dollars. It's three
hundred minus two fifty six. If you closed out your position,
you'd make forty four dollars per share times one hundred shares,
so you make forty four hundred bucks minus what you

(13:23):
paid to get the option in the first place. And
I made up that hypothetical that the contract costs five
hundred dollars, so net net, you would have gained thirty
nine hundred dollars. And you know, under the scenario per contract,
so if you bought ten contracts that thirty nine hundred,

(13:47):
it becomes thirty nine thousand bucks. And you know, you
can do the math and scale up or down. It
just depends on how many contracts you you want to
buy and see if the crisis gets worse. But I
can tell you just generally, when you're talking about anything

(14:11):
that has to do with the Internet and it proliferates
across you know, PCs.

Speaker 4 (14:19):
Globally or you know, has a global.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
Impact, you're probably not going to see the full effect
of the news in those early days. And that's exactly
what happened here. It kept on dropping and kept on dropping,
so we really got a.

Speaker 4 (14:38):
Interesting view of this.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
Where was it at three or three I'm trying to
find this trade. Yeah, so it just ran off a
cliff pretty wild. So anyway, that's the gist of the

(15:06):
impact on the price, and then they've get into more
of the negative IT events. I'm not going to read
the rest of this one, but let's get onto the
next related article.

Speaker 4 (15:19):
And so here's the impact. It's monetarily.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
When we've added up and this was, you know, just
kind of an immediate impact, it's gotten worse.

Speaker 4 (15:31):
Since this article has written.

Speaker 3 (15:33):
This is from the Mirror, says George Kurtz, the co
founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, the company behind the worldwide
Microsoft It meltdown today lost.

Speaker 4 (15:44):
This is when the article came out.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
When they're referring to today lost nearly three hundred and
twenty two million dollars of his personal fortune. The Texas
based cybersecurity firm power some of the world's top companies
and global financial institution, and this financial loss comes after
the firm accepted responsibility for the outage it halted airports

(16:07):
and businesses around the world on Friday, July nineteenth.

Speaker 4 (16:11):
Oh, this is all right. So this is two weeks ago.
Time is flying? What one week ago is two weeks ago?

Speaker 3 (16:18):
The company issued an apology on Friday after a faulty
update affected Windows customers, affecting airlines, airports, hospitals, broadcasters, the NHS,
train services, and investment platforms, but not before the dam
which was done according to Forbes, that led to Georgia's
real time net worth pumpting by three hundred and fifteen

(16:38):
million dollars. Forbes reported on Friday that his net worth
is currently at three point one billion, which is down
approximately three hundred and fifty million this afternoon compared to
the day prior. So crowdstrikes dropping price on that Friday

(17:05):
slash more than twelve and a half billion dollars from
the company's overall value.

Speaker 4 (17:11):
So we just focused on that CEO's loss.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
Company itself had traded down to the point where it
had lost twelve and a half billion in climbing. The
decrease comes as a reaction after that update that caused
the massive IT outage. So huge impacts here financially. So

(17:37):
here's an interesting take. And this is coming right from
their CEO. This is from Fortune, and this is an
article from July twenty third. When you're cybersecurity firm tasked
with guarding against harmful malware, unleash. It's the biggest global
IT outage in history. There's really nowhere to hide. So

(18:01):
Sean Henry cut straight to the chase. On Friday again,
this is the nineteenth of.

Speaker 4 (18:10):
July, that Friday.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
We failed you in for that, I'm deeply sorry, began
the post written by Crowdstrikes chief security officer. An update
pushed out from the cloud just hours before the work
week came to an end, caused Windows based computer systems
to crash, bowed up, and crash again in an endless
loop punctuated only by the so called BSoD or blue

(18:37):
screen of death, which I'm sure most of us have experienced.

Speaker 4 (18:43):
In our lifetime. Key industries around the world that use.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Crowdstrikes Falcon software, the aviation banking and healthcare industries in
particular were paralyzed for hours, if not days. Dealt airlines
are still reeling, canceling hundreds of flights on Monday and
leaving passengers stranded for days on end. The confidence we built,

(19:07):
this is the interesting part, is quoth. The confidence we
built in drips over the years was lost in buckets
within hours, and it was a gut punch. Henry continued,
we'll let down the very people we committed to protect
and to say were devastated.

Speaker 4 (19:23):
As a huge understatement, the.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
Genuine contrition expressed differed notably from the message coming from
CEO and founder George Kurtz, whose company stock has already
lost roughly a quarter of its value as investors await
word of possible lawsuits. Kurtz's initial statement on Friday appeared
so sanitized that customers could have been forgiven for thinking

(19:52):
the problem might have laine elsewhere, since there was no
direct acknoledgement of crowdstrikes culpability, that it was not so
much as a curt word of a biology. So you've
got contrasting statements from two of your C level officers,
your CEO and your chief security officer, and so this

(20:15):
is just kind of a pr blunder in terms of
crisis management. And I went through training twice when Boom
Pickens was alive and he was running the United Shareholders Association,
which was a nonprofit grassroot shareholders group. The aim was

(20:40):
to look out for the small shareholders and not let
big companies are entrance management take advantage of the small shareholder. Well,
he offered two people that were managing the organization crisis

(21:04):
management training, and so I went to both of the
training sessions that were held a couple of years apart,
and it was really fascinating on how to respond to
a crisis that a management team may face, and how
you need to be prepared for that, how you're going

(21:25):
to respond, who handles what tasks and activities, and you're
trying to minimize, you know, physical damage if it, you know,
is that type of a crisis. You're trying to minimize
financial damages like in this case. And these guys, when

(21:50):
you have contrasting statements from two C level officers, total blunder.
That's just they missed in how they were up. They
probably didn't have an action plan around handling something like this,
and yeah, it will be interesting to see what the

(22:11):
lawsuits start to shape.

Speaker 4 (22:14):
Up to look like.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
So here's Elon Musk take This is another article related
to it, but I'm giving you just different perspectives.

Speaker 4 (22:23):
Elon Musk he thinks this whole DEI think kind of
led to the blunder.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
So Elon Musk wasted no time in finding a convenient
scapegoat for the global IT outage caused by a botched
software update from cybersecurity from CrowdStrike.

Speaker 4 (22:40):
Not very bright right now, is it?

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Musk wrote on x formerly Twitter Friday morning, and reply
to a more than two years.

Speaker 4 (22:49):
Old post from CrowdStrike.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
In that post, the Austin, Texas based firm said it
was proud to be a gold partner of recruiting company
Bright Networks Panel of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or DEI.
It's an on brand pivot for the Tesla CEO, who
has made diversity initials a frequent target for his criticism.

(23:16):
Tesla dropped language referencing diversity from its annual shareholder report
just weeks after must tweeted that DEI is just another
word for racism. The billionaire has also been criticized for
claiming that Boeing's issues with the seven thirty seven Max
nine were caused by hiring too many non white pilots

(23:38):
and factory workers. In an interview with former CNN host
Don Lemon and marsh Musk accused Duke University of literally
lowering its standards for students to promote more diverse candidates,
although he could not provide any evidence for his assertion.

Speaker 4 (23:55):
Duke has said it has not lowered its standards and.

Speaker 3 (23:57):
Continues to rely on GPA and MCAT scores.

Speaker 4 (24:05):
On Friday morning. Businesses around the world.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
This is two weeks ago again, you know, began reporting
their systems were down.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
And then it gets into the whole deal gain.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
But MUSC goes on on x to say that we
just deleted crowd strike from all our systems.

Speaker 4 (24:27):
So no rollouts at all.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
In reply to another user commenting on the incidents, It's
unclear which of its businesses MUSCU is referring to. In
addition to Tesla and x must leads aerospace firm say
Sex tunneling and construction company, the boring company, brain Chip,

(24:49):
implants startup Neuralink, and an artificial intelligence startup x Ai.
So this whole DEI think it's really of taking a
one point eighty. A lot of firms and institutions universities

(25:12):
that set up these DEI departments and DEI initiatives are
either partially disbanding them or fully disbanding those groups. And
my business colleagues we get into discussions about this periodically.

(25:34):
But to the person, myself and my colleagues all want
the best person that we can find in a particular role.
It's like a draft choice. Okay, whether it's Mister Ed

(25:55):
of Talking Horses best for the role, or Agree Martian
or whoever.

Speaker 4 (26:03):
We want the best person. We don't want to.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
Have to apply policy initiatives to our organization that would
compromise that we're not there to drive out social policies
and and fix problems that are more infrastructure related back

(26:28):
to you know, the community level and.

Speaker 4 (26:34):
Funding education and raising kids the.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
Right way and responsible adults and all that. That social
aspect shouldn't be pushed onto private enterprise. So that's kind
of our view of it, all right, Max Max didn't
get impacted, and Max didn't get impacted because the things

(27:04):
that triggered the outage aren't part of the mac OS system,
So they really kind of dodged the bullet there, and
they seem to have less issues with computer viruses and
software bugs.

Speaker 4 (27:25):
And part of is that they've.

Speaker 3 (27:28):
Got the operating system configured to reduce the likelihood of
the type of what they call kernel panics that cause
the CrowdStrike outage. So Max avoided the issue in this case.
May not be a case you know, in the future,

(27:48):
but definitely dodge.

Speaker 4 (27:50):
A bullet here.

Speaker 3 (27:51):
All right, that's enough on CrowdStrike. The Tissian James finally
found one thing I agree with her about. Otherwise I
don't agree with anything, but le Titia James.

Speaker 4 (28:09):
This is from Newsweek.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
She got a law passed that just went into force.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James. James's new law
establishing deep theft as a crime and giving homeowners more
time to seek justice, came into effect on Friday. What

(28:35):
Friday is this? This is probably July nineteenth as well.
It gives her office power to prosecute scammers and forge
New Yorker's identities and steal the.

Speaker 4 (28:48):
Title to their homes.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
Deep theft happens when someone steals the identity of a
homeowner to appropriate their property's title deed without the person's
approval or knowledge. Usually the criminal forges the true owner's
signature to sell the property off in a second home
of vacation owner, a vacant house to a third party

(29:12):
or themselves. And I should mention something right now. I
don't know if they say anything about it in this article, but.

Speaker 4 (29:25):
I've got it.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
There's probably several services that do this.

Speaker 4 (29:30):
But I've got.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
A app called the Home Title Lock and you pay
you know, X amount of year, forget what the amount is.
But what they do is they monitor, you monitor to
your title, and so if anybody's monkeying around with title

(29:53):
that's recorded on your property, you get an alert right away,
so you can jump in there and see what up.

Speaker 4 (30:01):
It doesn't prevent.

Speaker 3 (30:06):
Something from happening, but as soon as it does, you
know right away, because people don't sit there and check
the title that's recorded, you know, in the County's office.
I can't tell you the last time I ever checked it.
But with that monitoring, I don't have to worry about

(30:28):
it now, right So up in New York, according to
James's office, the crime disproportionately affects New York's elderly population,
those already struggling with their mortgages and homeowners of color,
especially those living in gentrifying neighborhoods where homes have massively

(30:49):
increased in value in recent years. Since twenty fourteen, the
New York City Sheriff's Office has received almost thirty five
hundred complaints in Deep that with more than fifteen hundred
complaints in Brooklyn and a thousand from Queens, as reported
by the Attorney General's Office in April twenty twenty three.

(31:12):
Under the new law, d theft is now legally considered
the grand larcening in the state and can be prosecuted
as such. The crime could be found to be grand
larceny in the first degree when the property targeted is
occupied by at least one person and is owned by
someone who's elderly, incapacitated, or physically disabled, or when the

(31:35):
theft involves three or more residential properties. D theft of
one residential property, one commercial mixed use property with at
least one residential unit, or two or more commercial properties,
regardless of monetary value, would be considered grand larceny in
the second degree.

Speaker 4 (31:54):
D theft of.

Speaker 3 (31:55):
One commercial real property regardless of monetary value, would be.

Speaker 4 (31:59):
Considered grand arsening the third degree.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
According to the law, deep thefts must be prosecuted within
five years of the crime or within two years after
the rifle owner realizes the title to their.

Speaker 4 (32:12):
Property has been stolen, whichever occurs later.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Deep theft is a merciless crime that rob is the
Yorkers of their homes, communities, and financial stability, James said
in the statement. By making deep theft the crime we
know it to be, this law gives my office and
district attorneys more power to stop these scammers from taking
advantage of Hardwick people. These critical reforms will help us

(32:41):
keep New York families where they belong in their homes,
she added. The Attorney General's Office recommends homeowners beware of
companies making guarantees or promises that they'll receive a loan
modification or any other outcome with their mortgage. Property owners

(33:02):
should also avoid paying up front fees for a loan modification,
which is illegal for companies to ask, and never transfer
ownership of the property or mortgage assistance company.

Speaker 4 (33:15):
Holy smokes, that would be a problem, all right.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
And if you've got parents that are getting older, make
sure you keep an eye on what they're doing with
their finances. Because there are more and more scams out there,
especially with the Internet and the.

Speaker 4 (33:37):
Internet's capabilities, and so.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
They're scammers out there trying twenty four to seven to
rip people off. So keep tracking your your family and
make sure they're not getting ripped off. All right, If
you haven't talked to my good friend Tony Vcaro, make
sure you give him a call. He can give you

(34:04):
a complimentary review of your insurance program and state planning.

Speaker 4 (34:10):
Let you know what he likes, what he thinks you
might be able to improve on.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
And he does it all for free, and you can
take his advice if he does have any recommendations, and
take it to anybody you want. So give him a
ring and make sure you tell him doctor Doug sent you. You
can reach him at two and four eight three seven
three five one two.

Speaker 4 (34:33):
It's two one.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
Four eight three seven three five one two, Or go
to his website TRIPLEW dot INDEPENDENTAPG dot com. That's TRIPLEW
dot INDEPENDENTAPG dot com. All right, jumped In the next article,
here's Starbucks. This is just kind of interesting how there's

(34:57):
an article from CNN their Business section from July nineteenth
about how Starbucks is changing at the personality and part
of it has to do with the CEOs that the

(35:17):
company has had, and then its reaction to customer demand
and service capabilities and so forth. But I thought how
it kind of morphed over time was something to take
a look at.

Speaker 4 (35:36):
Years ago, some people.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Would spend hours at Starbucks. Today it's a takeout counter
at many Starbucks locations. You're lucky to find anyone sitting
down under Howard Schultz, Starbucks longtime lead cafes were positioned
as a third place between work and home, where people

(35:58):
could linger for hours on plush purple armchairs, socialize and connect.

Speaker 4 (36:03):
I don't ever remember plush purple armchairs.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
If you look at the landscape of retail and restaurants
in America, there is such a fracturing of places where
people meet. Schultz said in a nineteen ninety five profiles
Starbucks for an industry publication. There's nowhere for people to go,
So we created a place where people can feel comfortable.
The idea of Starbucks is a third place became part

(36:30):
of its corporate mythology. Starbucks aimed to create a welcoming
environment for coffee drinkers and employees, with comfortable seating, jazz
music in the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Employees who
brewed and served Starbucks coffee, whom Starbucks called barista's hand
wrote customers' names on their drink orders. By the time

(36:57):
Michelle Iisen joined Starbucks in twenty ten as an employee
in Buffalo, New York, her store was always packed during
the holidays with people meeting friends and family. She witnessed
first dates and helped the customers propose.

Speaker 4 (37:17):
That is written with bad grammar.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Helped the customer's proposal to his spouse, writing will you
marry me?

Speaker 4 (37:26):
On a cup?

Speaker 3 (37:29):
It was yeah, how would you like to say you're
proposed to a Starbucks? It was a cheerful, amazing thing
to be part of it. She set up working in
Starbucks and forming close relationships customers. That's why so many
employees stayed for so long. Isen has helped lead Starbucks
Workers United, a group unionizing company stores. But Starbucks' business

(37:55):
has transformed and it has struggled to maintain its identity.
Is that third place along the way, Mobile, app and
drive through orders make up more than seventy percent of
Starbucks sales as it's approximately ninety five hundred company operated
stores in the United States.

Speaker 4 (38:19):
And some stores. Customers complained online.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
That Starbucks pulled out comfortable chairs and replaced them with
hard wooden stools. Starbucks has also built pickup only stores
without seating. Machines that print customers' names have replaced barista's
handwriting on cups. I remember a long time ago McDonald's

(38:46):
supposedly made a strategic change and went to just the
hard plastic bench seating at their tables, so you wouldn't
stay as long and they'd have higher turnover.

Speaker 4 (38:58):
At the tables. I don't know whether that's true or not,
but that was the rumor.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Third place is a broader definition. Current Starbucks CEO Laxman
Mauris Hahn said last year the classic definition of third
place it's a box where I go to meet someone.
It's frankly not relevant anymore in this context. I've never

(39:31):
heard of that phrase being used that way. Starbucks sales
in its home in North America market drop three percent
last quarter. Shultz to step down to Starbucks CEO for
a third time and retired from Starbucks board of directors
last year. Wrote a LinkedIn message on LinkedIn in May

(39:54):
about the company's issues US operations at the primary reason
for the company's fall from grace. The stores require a
maniacal focus on the customer experience, he said. The company
needs the focus on being experiential, not transactional. Starbucks changes

(40:15):
to its sitting down business model came in response to
several trends. Demand from customers for ordering coffee from the
cars and drive through lanes or on their smartphones, the
shift from a business serving hot coffee to one in
which cold coffees, teas, and lemonades make up more than
half of sales. The COVID nineteen pandemic, which forced cafes

(40:39):
to shut into seeding, so those are the primary drivers.
Starbucks shifted to meat wall streets demands too. Starbucks found
it could reduce labor costs, increase or order volume by
running They mostly drive through take away coffee business. Starbucks
also found difficulties with being America's third place and did

(41:01):
not want to become the public space and bathroom for everyone,
including people coming into stores who were homeless or struggling
with mental health challenges.

Speaker 4 (41:11):
On city streets.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Starbucks has closed some stores and restricted bathroom access over
safety concerns, but by prioritizing speed through putting corporate parlance, Starbucks,
hurt the appeal of sitting down for coffee and stores.

Speaker 4 (41:28):
Some critics say.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
So this goes on, but that's the main just the story.
So a retail crime queen pin faces five years in
prisons and millions in restitutions.

Speaker 4 (41:49):
This is from CNBC.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
Says that the ringleader of a nationwide organized retail crime
operation that targeted Alta Beauty and other major retailers is
facing more than five years in the California State prison.
Michelle Mack of Bonsall, California received a delayed sentence of

(42:15):
five years and four months, which will be officially set
in January. It was handed down by a San Diego
County Superior Court judge on Thursday. Her husband, Kenneth, received
the same sentences and is already incarcerated. As part of
his plea deal, he will be released after one year

(42:36):
and then put on probation and community service for the
remainder of his sentence. The judge allowed Mac to serve
as sentence after her husband is released so she can
care for their children. She was ordered not to leave
the state or go near any Altar or Sephora stores.

(42:56):
The couple also must pay about three million dollars in
restitution to Alta and another thirteen thousand dollars to support.
According to a court official, Michelle Mack ran her operation
from her forty five hundred square foot mansion in Bonsell,
which is outside San Diego, where authority say she oversaw

(43:17):
a network of about a dozen people who stole millions
of dollars in merchandise from Alta, to For and other
major retailers. The MAX have pleaded guilty last month of
conspiracy to commit a felling and organized retail theft, petty theft,
and receiving stolen property.

Speaker 4 (43:38):
Attorneys for the Max declined to comments.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
And let's see it's going to be seated an investigation,
investigators began referring to the theft group as the California
Girls and considered to Mac the cruise ring leader. She
made nos reselling the stolen items on Amazon via the
online makeup store to unwitting customers at a fraction of

(44:07):
their typical retail price, investigators said before she and her
husband were arrested in December. Since twenty twelve, Mac had
sold nearly eight million dollars in cosmetics to the store
from before it was shut down, and she brought in
one point eight nine million dollars in twenty twenty two alone.
Amazon sales records provided to investigators show the site was

(44:33):
closed down after the December arrest. Earlier this year, All
the Beauty CEO Dave Kimball told CNBC in an interview
about organized retail crime that the financial impact is real,
but way more important is the human impact, the impact

(44:54):
it has to our associates, the impact it has to
our guests. The Max and seven members of the crew
were originally charged with one hundred and forty felonies. One
of the defendants has received a three year and four
month sentence, while cases against the others are pending. All right,

(45:14):
so they're catching a few of these groups, which is good.
Here's the crazy story. So rare Earth elements. I haven't
heard much about them, and now I'm starting to see
more and more written about rare Earth elements. There's a

(45:36):
Wall Street bank Or. This is from Bazinga from July
twenty fourth. Wall Street bank Or bought a coal mine
for two million bucks.

Speaker 4 (45:48):
So it starts off, it says.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
In twenty eleven, former Wall Street banker Randall Atkins made
a bold move. He bought an old coal mine outside Sheridan,
Wyoming for about two million bucks without every seen. At first,
he hoped it might make a small profit, but what
he found was extraordinarily instead extraordinary, As The Wall Street

(46:14):
Journal reported, Atkins recently discovered that his Brook mine contains
one of the largest unconventional rare earth deposits in the US,
potentially worth a staggering thirty seven billion dollars. After government
researchers tested the ground found significant amounts of rare earth elements.

(46:39):
When I bought the mine, I didn't know the difference
between rare earth and rare coins, Atkins admitted. The test
results revealed the mind holds rare earth like neodymium, dysprosium, terbium,
and praise so the demium essential for modern technologies like

(47:06):
electric vehicles and wind turbines. Ramicico Resources Atkins company is
now extracting larger samples for further analysis. If successful, this
could be the first new rare earth mine in the
US since nineteen fifty two, in a big shift for Ramico,
which has traditionally focused on mining coal used in steelmaking.

(47:30):
The US is racing to catch up with China in
the supply of these critical minerals. China recently restricted the
export of minerals like gallium and germanium, which are used
in semiconductors and missile systems.

Speaker 4 (47:49):
Yeah, this goes on about.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
More that story on the mine itself, but pretty interesting.
Guy's probably gonna make fortune. Scam alerts watch out for
this one. Warn your parents, Warn your grandparents from.

Speaker 4 (48:10):
I can't tell where this is.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
From backfirenews dot com, July twentieth. Scammers of connars are
always dreaming up new ways of getting you to turn
over your hard earned money. One of the latest games
involved showing up to a person's house, usually someone elderly,
imposing as a police officer, telling them a relative was

(48:33):
involved in a fatal car crash. That kind of shocking
news is enough to get the victim worked up, who
then is relieved and learn the relative, usually a child
and a grandchild, didn't die in the crash.

Speaker 4 (48:45):
However, there's a catch.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
Their loved one has supposed even arrested and is being
held in jail. That's when the full trap is sprung,
as the scammer asks for the money so the jailed
relative can be set free. Under normal circumstances, a person
wouldn't fall for this scheme in a million years. But
when first presented with shocking information which at first sounds

(49:07):
like a relative might have died violently presented by someone
posing as an authority figure, the victim is primed to
hand over whatever is necessary they help the relative.

Speaker 4 (49:17):
Supposedly in distress.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
We've seen this scam before, but recently surfaced again, this
time in Michigan. Sadly, the elderly woman who was targeted
went to the bank and we drew the bail money
for the scammer who showed.

Speaker 4 (49:32):
Up at her house to pick up the cash in person.

Speaker 3 (49:35):
The Monroe County Sheriff's Offices identified the scammer in this case.

Speaker 4 (49:40):
Is Juan Romero of Berwin, Illinois.

Speaker 3 (49:43):
However, he's still on the run with authorities asking in
public for help finding him. That means the elderly woman
he target is still missing her money, which we know
is between one and twenty thousand dollars thanks to criminal
charges filed against Romero.

Speaker 4 (50:01):
Yeah, and this is this is pretty obvious.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
You would think, please will never show up at your
house and ask you for money either cash we're using
a credit card reader. I mean, come on, people, all right,
that's it for this week.

Speaker 4 (50:18):
You've been listening to Doctor Doug Ramsey Show. Remember to
Do without Doubt.