We all love connecting over a video call a quick text or that group chat that literally never sleeps. AT&T's got a deal worth texting the group about. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with eligible trade-in. It has the ultimate Pro camera system and big leap in battery life so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Connecting changes everything, requires trade-in of $230 or more an eligible plan. Comments and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Good morning, Brudely Show, I'm Neil Fryman, and I'm Toby Howell. Today, how one startup plans to fix America's shortage of military dogs. Then, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders have pulled off their greatest routine yet, unionizing. It's Monday, October 26th, let's ride! Teams have, mothers day, dads have, fathers day, and sports fans, they've got today what's known as a sports equinox. The stars have aligned with every big four North American men's sports league, MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL in action on the same day for just the 33rd time in history. Sports equinoxes, equinox eye, typically happen in mid to late October because you've got the World Series going on and football NHL and basketball regular seasons underway. Toby, I'd call this the Super Bowl of sports days, but maybe that metaphor isn't perfect. So close, Neil, not actually a sports equinox, though, because the big four men's North American sports leagues are the NFL, NBA, MLB, and MLS, and there's no MLS games today, so close to a sports equinox, but doesn't really count. But if you toss in the WMBA and the Guangzhou Open a WT event, then I'll say that the equinox grows to equini level, so no equinox for you, but maybe next year. And now a word from our sponsor, Liberty Mutual, Neil, is your car insured. Toby, I don't have a car. We both live in New York City. But if you don't have a car, how can Liberty Mutual customize your car and home insurance to save you money? You're missing out on the savings here, Neil. Their team goes above and beyond to save you money. I mean, that's actually a pretty good point. Maybe I should get a car. We could take a road trip or something. Oh, no, I'm busy on all of those days. But I didn't even say a day ranger, look at the car yet. Start your quote at Liberty Mutual.com. That's Liberty Mutual.com. Major Wall Street banks are dealing with a new cybersecurity threat, AI agents meddling with customer accounts. As the internet reeled last week from the news that someone had discovered a vulnerability in the technology that powers 70% of websites, actually was dropped to report straight into that panic saying banks are also going to war against the infiltration of AI agents. These are the popular systems like Meta's Muse that are designed to do things on your behalf like manage your calendar or even make purchases. But banks are struggling to figure out the difference between a human customer and AI assistant doing the bidding of a human or one that's just gone rogue. As it works, do sort out who's who Wall Street is turning off the whole spigot. City recently joined JP Morgan and Bank of America in restricting AI agents from accessing customer funds. To be clear, these are by and large not rogue agents that hacked customer accounts and stole all their money. They are mostly following user instructions, but just because they are authorized does not mean banks like the intrusions with executives describing the situation to Axios as horrifying. We strongly believe there should be a human in the loop to authorize money moving out of your account Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan told CNBC last week, you know, giving an agent the keys to your checking account is certainly a little more complicated than giving it access to your encounter, especially while some are breaking into the car without permission. The banks are calling it horrifying for multiple reasons. One is the cybersecurity threat. And then the other is that these AI agents could be an existential crisis for them. We've talked a lot about how AI is going to change spending patterns. Maybe it's going to find the cheapest hotel for you, et cetera, but could also transform how people save. Torsten Slocke who's a chief economist at Apollo is known for making these very bold predictions, very concisely. And a few weeks ago, he wrote this paper or a small chart that said, is an agent bank run coming? The guy that everyone talking, spoke to a lot of people in finance. He said that using similar AI assistance could sweep household cash automatically into accounts that are paying 3.3%, 3.5%, instead of just sitting there and you're checking account making like 0.1%, then if every household use AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, then banks could lose a large share of their cheap deposits that they have that is making a lot of money for them, which is why you say McKinsey predicting that AI agents could cost banks up to $160 billion in revenue. So you have banks saying, oh, this is horrifying because there are people snooping, there are agents snooping in our accounts. But what they won't tell you is that they see this as a potentially huge crisis in the making. Yeah. The financial times looked at three banks, JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. They hold $1.6 trillion of essentially non-interest-sparing deposits. Those are the cheap deposits. If that cash is shifted into accounts paying even just 3%, that would cost them $47 billion a year, which is almost half of their collective annual earnings. So that just paints a picture of how potentially existential to the bottom line it is for the businesses. So yes, they can play the card of, hey, we really care about your safety here. We do not think these agents should met up with your funds, but you are absolutely right that they are protecting their own interests as well. The issue though that these CEOs are dealing with is that, hey, a consumer is going to use an AI agent. We've seen this proliferate. So how do we set ourselves up in the right spot as they are going to use this technology that potentially can threaten our business? The answer right now is probably read-only access where you can see the balance of your funds and you can use information like that to query, like, oh, what are my spending habits? But it can't actually authorize moving money between accounts or doing anything with your actual money. So read-only seems to be where the industry has landed at least for now when it comes to dealing with these agents. And there are plenty of bank bulls as well saying that they can actually use this to their advantage by deploying their own agents and turn what might be, you know, a source spot or a risk into an advantage. Mike May has been covering the banking industry for 30 years says, banks are AI beneficiaries not AI. Roadkill, I've seen this story a million times before where we saw online banking come online and fintech. And these were all supposed to be similarly existential risks for the banking sector. And then they've only grown stronger. So maybe that is a point where if you think banks are going to be just okay, you look at recent history and say that the internet was supposed to be this huge transformation of banks and they're doing just fine. But yes, a little spooky seeing that AI agents are scurrying around to everyone's bank accounts. They're not that effective if you can't let them see your bank accounts and do take and take at least some actions on your behalf. But this whole AI agent and banking sector is a story that we're going to be talking about for a long time coming. Moving on, a new startup has emerged that aims to replenish a startlingly low domestic supply of key components to the US military. That component, war dogs, war hound, which will genetically engineer war dogs on Thursday announced $200 million in funding from big VC names at a $1.2 billion valuation. It's the brainchild of Ben Lamb who helps colossal biosciences and Palmer Lucky, co-founder of Defense Contractor Andrew. If colossal rings a bell, it's because this is the same company trying to use genetic engineering to revive extinct species like the woolly mammoth, dodo, and dire wolf. And that's in the same flavor of what they're attempting to do with war hound. The plan is to take living cells from elite working breeds like the German Shepherd or Belgian Malinois, then edit the genes to create, quote, "a new type of dog for use in the military law enforcement or other arenas that are in need of more white fang types." Because right now, according to war hounds leaders, there's a supply chain crisis. Currently, they say the US gets 80% of its military dogs from Europe and have to make it through training due to inherited dispositions like bad eyesight. Like rare earths or semiconductors, they feel it's a national security issue for the US to establish its own domestic production of super dogs to reduce reliance on the rest of the world. As Lucky says, "Man's best friend deserves man's best tech." Yeah, the quotes coming out of these two guys were very funny. Lam told Wired. Someone said to me, "So it's like the Captain America dog program with the Iron Man tech program on top of it." But it's actually not as exciting as it sounds, at least initially because the gene editing that they are doing to start is getting rid of very benign health issues like poor eyesight or hip dysplasia. A lot of German shepherds have bad hips, so they're just saying what if we could breed that or edit that out of them, but then it does ramp up a little bit. They want to incorporate all factory receptor genes from wolves to enhance the dog's sense of smell. So they do have the grand vision of kind of making them super dogs. But at least initially, let's just fix the hips in the eyesight. I was pretty curious to see what animal activists were saying about this. And apparently, this company is working hand in hand with the American Humane Society, which is the oldest national animal welfare organization in the United States to adopt this particular training program for these new super dogs. The American Humane Society said, "We applaud Warhampton Klausel for inviting the country's first national human organization, which is them grounded in science and ethics to have a seat at the table we look forward to working with them to ensure the animals in their care are treated humanly." What are each of these companies, these guys bringing to the table because it really is a merger of these two big leaders who are making these really big bold bets. And I want to start with Klausel. Now we talked with Colossal about Colossal a bunch because
They want to de-extinctify the woolly mammoth in these big, bold bets, which is, you know, it's got a lot of headlines, but they're saying that maybe this is where the company's actually going to make its money because it is valued at upwards of like $10, $20 billion. It's going to license its technology, its gene editing technology, for more prosaic uses like this, and then not bringing back the dodo. And then Palmer Lucky, who leads Anderil, which is this new defense contractor that's burst on the scene recently, what they're doing to warhounds is they're going to provide the software and the hardware. And by hardware for dogs, I mean, like protection best, and goggles, and bulletproof vest with data centers, that tell you how the dog is doing. So that's where each of these two partnerships come together to produce this very interesting startup, warhounds. >> Yeah, unfortunately, they're not dog sidewalks, or fortunately, I don't know what I, which side of the offense you stand on there, they're not embedding computer chips inside the dog's bodies, again, at least for now. It is mostly just going to be wearing body armor as canines that work in military zones already have or something like that, but they want to just put the latest and greatest technology on it from Andrew. I will say, I feel like we missed this for our dog of the week, because this fundraising round did come out on Friday, and that's when we do our stock of the week dog of the week. This isn't even a perfect dog of the week, but I'm glad we hit it today. It's one of the weekend time the segment where we pick two stories that had a better weekend than some drunk Milwaukee Brewers fans. I won the pre-show game of Ben Injury's ice cream flavor picking, so I am up first. Am I one of the weekend? Are the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders who just unionize after years of fighting for better pay? The DCCA, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Association, has been recognized by the Cowboys organization, side of the table for meetings where the disconnect between the cheerleaders' global popularity and their low salaries will be front and center. For a long time, no one really knew how much the Cowboys cheerleaders were being paid until a 2018 Federal Fair wage lawsuit revealed that a member of the squad made just $16,000 in her highest earning year with the squad. Even after subsequent pay bumps, most were earning just $75 an hour and still don't receive health insurance from the team. Those numbers were especially shocking considering the Cowboys have long been the NFL's most valuable franchise, worth $17 billion according to Forbes. Seeing how little the cheerleaders make was jarring even for the producers of the Netflix show, America's Sweethearts, which chronicles the cutthroat world, I assume that it was a full-time job that shows producer and director Greg Whiteley told The New York Times. Out of thought, oh my gosh, you're a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, you must make six figures and live in a great house. Now the most famous cheer squad in the world will sit down for collective bargaining talks as they fight for better pay and working conditions. Neil, a big switch kick, double twist basket for everyone involved. - I don't think I could do that. The stat that people were focused on from that original lawsuit back in 2018 filed by Erica Wilkins was that Wilkins made innermost lucrative year $16,000 a year. The Cowboys mascot named Rowdy made near $65,000 and he's not even a good mascot. I don't think you can talk about the labor organizing efforts of the Cowboys without talking about this Netflix show, America's Sweethearts. It's shot to the top 10, it's incredibly popular and I think it's just opened up a lot of people's eyes to the conditions in which these cheerleaders work. The whole first season was about all the jobs that the other, that the women work on the side because this is not a full-time gig and it certainly doesn't pay like one. So you had one working at a dermatology clinic and so they're balancing all of these demands on their lives. The second season was about, partially about these contract negotiations. So you're seeing it play out in real time with the documentary and in real life, it's been very fascinating to watch and the cheerleaders almost considered walking out to put a lot of pressure on management. So this seems like the culmination, not just of a real effort, but something that people have been watching on their TVs as well. - Yeah, VCU professor, Victor Chen, who studies labor issues as a sociologist said, they had leveraged since they were such a high profile team and because they had the Netflix show without the TV show, Chen said the team may have just tried to replace the cheerleaders and the reason why I said that is because it has happened before the Cowboys are not the first NFL team to try to form a union in 1995, actually the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the Buffalo Bill's cheerleaders could unionize. Their squad was called the Buffalo Jills. But when the Jills tried to fight for greater workplace protections back in 2014, the entire cheerleading squad was essentially disbanded. The team just put their foot down said, "All right, we'll just replace you." So that is why it is important that it is the Cowboys. It is a team that has this big Netflix show, leading the charge here to fight for better pay and better conditions. - One of the craziest things about the cheerleader squad for the Dallas Cowboys is you have to try out in addition every single year. Everyone is put on a renewable one year contract. So you could be there for a while. You could be a veteran, but you still have to earn your spot every single year. Maybe we should do that with you two. - I was just thinking of that. I thought we have you auditioned every single year. - Wait, just me, that's you as well, what the heck? - I'm just confident I'll make it, but yeah, it seems like absolutely cutthroat that show. I did watch one or two episodes and it was fascinating, especially the people who lead the charge. You don't want to mess with them. - It is brutal. I mean, you go through the panel interview, you go through a 90 second solo where you either have to sing or dance or do gymnastics. And then there is a war room of judges and choreographers who rate the candidates on things like power, dance technique, big screen appeal and trainability. That is too much for my heart to bear. Like you would go put yourself out in the line and say, sorry, you're actually not very trainable or your power was lacking right there. So every big prophecy everyone involved for, you know, being like the highest quality performers yet having very little job security at the same time. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and come back with Niels winner of the weekend right after this. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now, you can easily make your voice heard too. Vanguard investor choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds. In just a few clicks, you can have a say on important shareholder topics like executive pay and director elections. Visit vanguard.com/investorchoice to learn more. It's your shares, it's your voice, it's easy. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard marketing corporation distributor. - Deal, as I'm sure you know, business travel doesn't always go according to plan. - Yeah, don't, I know it. That's how I ended up sleeping on my uncle's tugboat for three nights. - With hotels.com, many hotels offer free cancellation, giving travelers the flexibility to adjust plans when needed. And with 24/7 customer support, help is available whenever travel disruptions arise. - Whether plans are set in stone or still taking shape, find a stay that fits at hotels.com/morningbrew. That's hotels.com/morningbrew. The business landscape in the US feels like it's changing as often as the specials board at a fancy farm to table restaurant. - The upcoming midterm elections are likely only going to bring more change. - Thankfully, PWC can help. Using decades of experience and expertise, they work with leaders to help make sense of the volatility. - PWC starts by identifying how changes in trade, AI, capital, and energy can affect your business. From there, they'll gather insights, model trade-offs, and share perspectives you can use to inform your decisions. - Get support leading through change head to PWC.com/US/2026 midterms. - My winner is Car Free Streets. Today, the busiest shopping thoroughfare in Britain, Oxford Street in London will take the bold step of banning vehicles and buses, bikes, e-bikes, and scooters for that matter. In a bid to once again make it a place, people actually want to stay and hang around. 'Cause right now, Oxford Street is not that. As the Guardian writes, its primary associations are crowd, stress, dirt, noise, the tackiest incarnations of consumer capitalism, and crime. Flagship retailers have left dodge while vape shops and souvenir stores have moved in. The pandemic was not kind. Vacancy rates surged from 4.5% in 2019 to almost 17% by early 2023. Rents on the western section fell from a peak of 1,100 pounds per square foot in 2016 to just 600 in 2021. London Mayor City Conn believes pedestrianizing Oxford can make it great again. It's not the entire length, but half, 0.6 miles of the 1.2 miles span. In an experiment, the city hopes to build on over time. Early signs are looking promising. In the past year, 39 retailers have signed deals for stores according to the financial times, including Zara, Nike, Warner Brothers, and major Chinese brands like Labubu Maker, Popmart. But it'll take time to determine whether going car-free is ultimately a success. Toby, first congestion pricing in New York, now pedestrianizing in London, cities are taking big swings to make neighborhoods more livable for people. - Yeah, my question is why now? Because many mayors have wanted to clean up Oxford and make it nicer for pedestrian literally for decades. And there's two reasons really. One is that the car is no longer the king of the modern city by enter means. There are other ways to get around there are bikes and e-bikes and the subway, the tube. And the second is actually that shopping is no longer the central focus of a lot of these streets. I know you said that a lot of retailers are returning, but maximal spending is no longer the city's main concern because you don't shop in person as much anymore. You can get things delivered to you and that has kind of rewritten the calculus around making these main shopping thoroughfares not fully geared towards shopping, you can
take a few shops out to make it nicer for pedestrian. So those are kind of like the two things of this current moment that made Oxford open to trying these new changes out. - And there are plenty of detractors who mostly say that if you take traffic away from a particular street, then all it does is move the traffic to outer neighborhoods or the surrounding neighborhoods. The cabbys union is upset about this. They say this is just going to cause so much more congestion than also the neighborhood association of nearby neighborhoods like Marielbone, which is a very nice neighborhood. They have probably the best-- - Marielbone? - Marielbone, it has probably the best bookstore in the world dump bookstore in Marielbone. So definitely check that out. But the good people of Marielbone who live in their very fancy houses and streets are saying, you're just going to push all the traffic into our neighborhood, which is exactly the same argument. You heard from people living in the outer boroughs of New York City and New Jersey about congestion pricing, is that if you limit all the car traffic in downtown Manhattan, then you're just going to push it out for the rest of us. So apparently all those criticisms did not weigh on the mayor's decision and the city's decision to fully pedestrianize part of Oxford Street. - But maybe to still the hearts of the good people of Marielbone, private cars have been restricted from Oxford Street since 1971, it was actually because so many pedestrians were coming out of overcrowded pubs and getting hit by cars that they said, we have to start rerouting some of these private vehicles. So that is not going to be the biggest shift. It is mostly these buses and the cabs as well. This is a data collection experiment for now, like they are in a testing phase. And the testing phase is actually very interesting to me because they are looking at everything. There's going to be a lot of people with clipboards kind of monitoring the floats of how people walk and where people linger. But they are also installing sensors in picnic benches that will measure how many people sit down for how long and the ambient temperature at the time of sitting. And when I heard that, I can think of a way to raise the ambient temperature of a picnic seat while you are sitting down. But that's neither here nor there. - I don't know if that's an ambient temperature. - Yeah, that's a very specific temperature. But yeah, they are taking a data-driven approach. - It got me thinking about some of my favorite pedestrian-only walkways and streets here in the United States. Pearl Street and Boulder, very famous one. That one's great. Downtown Mall and Charlottesville, Virginia. Also great. So I'd love to hear what are your favorite pedestrian malls or streets in the United States? I'm sure I missed a bunch. But Times Square is something that they did pedestrian-ice. Recently, I still. - I love that place. - I don't know if that many. You know, when they were talking about Oxford Street being filled with so many people and these kind of souvenir shops, obviously my mind went to Times Square and it's like a place where Londoners, you can't be caught there because you just don't wanna be there. But maybe through these pedestrianizing efforts, they're going to put thermo benches and greenery, I think that's a big initiative. - Yeah, greenery. - It's pretty cool. It's a flavor of urban planning, pioneered by this guy, the Stanish guy, Jan Gelware. You don't do a top-down approach where you're saying, this is what we want our city to look like. You observe how people move through a city and they're saying, oh, they're standing there and they're congregating in that area. Maybe that's a place where we should put benches or they're walking through really quickly on a hot day. Maybe it's a place where we should put some tree cover for shade. So it's a big win for him in terms of making cities more livable for people. It's Monday, so here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. It's a big, big week on Wall Street with a Fed meeting AI earnings and some key economic data reports. Let's start with the Fed, which is holding its final meeting before the midterms on Wednesday. Despite inflation ripping higher, the central bank is expected to hold interest rates steady after raising them in September, which would continue the historic trend of not messing with rates right before an election. However, the Fed is projected to resume its rate hiking at least once in meetings later this year. - Yeah, the market is pricing in a less than 10% chance of a hike at this meeting, but closer to 80% in December. So Wednesday meeting is likely going to be more about whether Fed shared Kevin Wars tips his hand at all or says anything about December. In other words, we are already over Halloween and onto Christmas when it comes to four days. - Oh, don't say that. All right, Wednesday's going to be a consequential day because not only will the Fed decision drop, but alphabet and Microsoft are reporting earnings followed by Amazon the next day. Herman's a little bit jittery about big tech after Meta freaked out the market with its heavy AI spending plans last week, but you'll probably hear about other companies too, because one third of the S&B 500, I can't do that math in my head, is reporting earnings this week, including Intel, Eli Lilly, and Exxon. Rounding out the busy economics late is another inflation report in the first estimate of US GDP in the third quarter. So far, it's been a very solid earnings lineup, 100 companies have posted results so far, and S&P 500 earnings are on pace to a climb more than 32% from a year ago, so it's kind of that story that we've been telling that. Lots of things seem to be breaking out the edges of the economy, oil prices are very high, and yet the corporate machine, corporate America, is just powering along, reporting great earnings. This is its biggest test yet. - But don't tell that to Meta last week, which plunge after theirs, and for those counting at home, one third of 500 is, 166.67. So that's how many companies are reporting earnings this week. All right, the US midterm elections are just eight days away, but plenty of other countries are already holding high stakes, votes, Benjamin Netanyahu's political future is up for grabs in Israel's election on Tuesday, where his party is pulling neck and neck with the opposition, and in Brazil yesterday, the incumbent leftist president, Lula, earned a surprise come from behind victory over a right-wing challenger, securing his record fourth term as the country's leader. - Yeah, it's going to be an ugly day in the markets for Brazil, because they are dealing with one, that shock come back, and two, the candidate that won is perceived as worse for the markets as well. And then actually, I guess, three, Bolsonaro called for the vault to be an old as well. That's the losing candidate. Remember, no one who came second in the first round of voting had pulled off a runoff victory sense. Brazil returned to democracy in 1989. So this was extremely unexpected, and I'm looking at the polymarket chart as well. Bolsonaro was almost 95% to win, and then it completely dropped off a cliff. So a massive, you know, egg on the face moment for prediction markets as well, which has usually done pretty well with figuring out who is going to win an election, not this time. - And finally, it's Halloween week, Halloween week, with the spooky holiday falling on Saturday night. Time to finalize your costume, watch scary movies, and load up on candy to hand out, or let's be real, eat yourself. - Okay, so I saw you can see everything this weekend, so it's very hard to imagine anyone dressing up as anything other than either Nathan Fielder or Elizabeth Holmes or Billy Evans while he's brushing the teeth in the shower. Those are all on the table for Halloween this year. - Please don't be that particular here. - Let's stop my list right now. - Costume. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful start to the week. Our friends at Brew Markets are hosting an awesome event tomorrow called the Unshaken Investor, which is bringing together some top people in the finance world to talk about how to invest in these shaky times. The speaker list looks very fun. Tech analyst Dan Ives, top leaders at Raymond James, Betterman, Elvis, a bunch of our friends at Morning Brew. So definitely check out the details at the link in the show description. Share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram @&BDailyShow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Mill iron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lue is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham. And our associate producer is Olivia Lake, Technical Direction by Nina Miller. Her makeup is taken off for the Equinox jealous. And our show is a production of Morning Brew. - Great, so Daniel, let's run it back tomorrow. (upbeat music)
PodcastTranscript AI