(upbeat music) - Good morning, Brujalee Show, I'm Neil Framin. - And I'm Toby Howell. - Today, AI leaders agree that it's maybe time to slow things down. - Then, what's powering Tesla's surprise UV comeback? It's Monday, September 14th, let's ride. (upbeat music) - If you find yourself wanting to smooch everyone at an upcoming New Year's Eve party, here's one reason why, champagne is getting boozier. Because of this summer's heat wave in France, grapes now have extraordinarily high sugar content, which makes them more alcoholic when turned into wine. As a result, for the first time ever, France has lifted the alcohol limit of champagne to 15% from the current 13% to accommodate producers who might struggle to make champagne under the current cap. - So it sounds fun, but it's probably gonna be bad for business. Jane Anson, a wine columnist and author warned, that higher strength champagne is not a selling point. Telling the times, today, people increasingly prefer low alcohol. Also, don't expect any rowdy wedding toast this year. champagne has to age for at least 15 months, but come 20, 28, watch out. Someone is going to try to crowdsurf after a particularly good father of the bride speech. And now a word from our sponsor, hotels.com. Neil, I think the hotel I just stayed at was haunted. - Oh my God, that's horrifying. - The ghosts were actually pretty chill. - Well, for those who aren't pro ghosts, there's business preferences from hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. - Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays. Why, if I break this gym access and more, then future business trips searches automatically surface matching hotels. - That way, you can book work trips faster. Just set your preferences once and get results tailored to your business travel needs. Plus, get up to 20% off select hotels instantly with member discounts and earn rewards for future travel. - Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every work stay at hotels.com/mortingbrew. That's hotels.com/mortingbrew loyaltymembers18plus. - As fears of an AI apocalypse broke into the public consciousness, the industry's top leaders vowed to hit the brakes in a stunning development over the weekend. In a blog post on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amade called for slowing down progress on the most cutting-edge models, warning that a swarm of AI agents could take over the internet in as little as half a year. He wrote, "Over the last few months, I've become convinced that fully addressing the risk requires even more prudence, not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancements so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." Other leading figures, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX, responded to Amade's post that they agree on the need to slow down. All in even went one step further telling Fortune, he was going to put the company's much-typed IPO on ice, at least for this year. He said, "I actually think that given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public." Though experts have been warning us for years, concerns over AI safety hit a fever pitch last week when Nanthropic employee quit saying these AI companies were, quote, "gambling with people's lives." Others, other insiders chimed in with Doomsday predictions, putting the odds of AI wiping out humanity at over 10% within a decade. And while many agree with this prognosis, there is a sizable contingent who accused AI companies of fear-mongering in order to invite regulation that stifles competition and entrenches their position as industry leaders. Toby, just a head-spending week, a head-spending 48 hours, with Dario's call to take a deep breath and slow things down. So let's dive into some of these skeptics, though. Amongst them is Jensen Huang in video CEO. He is arguing that maybe these AI labs are painting this future of a very dire future where cybersecurity fears are just so big that you're gonna need AI to address them. He says, "Who doesn't want their market to be hysterical about their product and line up around the corner for it?" So he was basically saying that they're playing it this up. And then some other more, I don't know, skeptical takes on this came from Nick Mark on social media on X. He said, "In alternative hypothesis, model performance is plateauing. Compute is getting much more expensive. Data centers are massively unpopular. Slowing down AI development is a way to explain slowing progress, reduce spending, and try to regain some goodwill." And he's conclusion was, this is an effort to save the IPO, not humanity, to put kind of a bow tie on that sort of outlook on this. If you do less training, it boosts your margins. It makes things more attractive from financial perspective while you can dress it up as sort of this saving humanity, saving the earth type of deal. That is what a loud contingent of skeptics are saying about this slowdown. - But if I was Musk, Altman, or Amade, I would say I actually was warning about AI safety, AI Doomsday, AI dangers, before I even had trillion dollar companies. And this is what they were pointing out over the weekend. Elon Musk pointed to a tweet he sent in 2014, which read, "Worthreading superintelligence "by Boston, that's Nick Boston, a philosopher. "We need to be super careful with AI, "potentially more dangerous than nukes." That was 2014. In 2015, Sam Altman wrote a blog post saying, "Development of superhuman machine intelligence "is probably the greatest threat "to the continued existence of humanity." And Daria Amade has been sounding this alarm for years. He has previously said there is a 25% chance, so greater than 10% chance, that things go, quote, really, really badly. So these guys would say, look, this is not just us being opportunistic with our business. We've been warning about AI danger for a very long time. Now you could probably criticize them and by saying, well, you guys go, when and God build the thing, even that you were saying was extremely dangerous. - But also, people within the AI industry think they or fears are still overstated. I look at Yan Likun. He was one of the Godfathers of AI. He worked at Meta for a long time. He said, Daria was already claiming that GPT-2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now. So again, kind of in that camp that they are beating a drum that we are, the end is nigh. And yet it probably, they've been saying the end is nigh for a decade at this point. Maybe the end is actually here, but maybe it's just crying wolf once more. - All right, so the biggest X factor is probably China. And that's what these guys say had been stopping them from slowing down previously. And Daria Amadeh of Anthropics said that this was the toughest dilemma because if they slow down, the idea is that China will not slow down. And this, this technology is so powerful. It confers to their wielders so much benefits when in terms of military and geopolitical dominance that we just simply can't do it. This you hear this from President Trump as well. If China doesn't slow down, then the United States can't also slow down over the weekend. Sam Alman in that interview with Fortune said that Trump and Xi, who's the president of China, would win the Nobel Prize for just a one page AI agreement if they just came together and agreed on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology. Trump was asked over the weekend whether he supported AI regulation because that's becoming all of a sudden in the past few weeks, it's a huge topic in Washington DC. He said, not really, like whoever's gonna win this race wins, we're going at this with China. So that is, that really is the ex-factor and why the many in the AI leadership camps say, look, we really can't slow down. I know Amadeus saying we can slow down a little bit, but they're saying this is a tough decision because of what China presents. - So how is the market reacting to these frontier labs saying that they want to slow the role? It is dumping. I'm looking at the Nasdaq 100 futures right now. They are down more than one and a half percent because when you are calling for that slow down, that raises a lot of questions around demand for AI inputs like memory chips, the things that have been propping up the market for the past year and a half or so. So market does not like when you say slow down because they want full speed ahead when it comes to this AI build out. Moving on, there's a saying when one door closes, another one opens, but when it comes to oil flowing out of the Middle East, all the doors are slamming shut. Saudi Arabia shut down its critically east-west oil pipeline as per caution just before the weekend, after drone attacks likely launched by Iran, damaged it. The pipeline is of critical importance to the region because it's the pressure release valve for the straight of our news. When the straight is blocked, the pipeline can take up to seven million barrels a day around our news out to the Red Sea and onto the global markets. Saudi Aramco, Chairman Yasir Al-Romayan, calls it the lifeline for us as a Saudi economy. That lifeline has since been kinked, making the global supply crunch even worse and sending oil past $100 per barrel for the first time in months. Even before the pipeline was hit though, Iran backed rebels were tightening their hold on the region. The Yemen-based Houthis captured a key island in the Bob-El-Mandab straight, which means even if oil was able to traverse the pipeline, it's not guaranteed it could make it out past the Red Sea. Neil, option A is oil goes through the straight of our moves, but ships are still barely trickling through there. Option B, send it through the east-west pipeline, but now that's out of commission. Option C, send it. You and me in there with a camel back in a can-do attitude. - I'm a fuck of my flake, because things are getting pretty dire over here. Costco, the shining beacon of abundance, buy anything you want in as much quantity as you want, is now placing limits on how much Kirkland motor oil you can buy, and it's also jacking up the price. So stores are now limiting motor oil to two per customer per week. They've jacked up the price to a 10-core box used to cost as low as $30.
Now they have raised that to almost double, it now costs $58. That's just how stressed this market is. All these refiners are getting limited amounts of crude and when they turn this crude into various products, like diesel or motor oil and the margins on diesel and other refined products like jet fuel are so much higher than the motor oil you buy at Costco. So there's just a shortage of motor oil and we're seeing that at Costco. I do want to just put some perspective though on what that means, even though it's too per customer per week, that is a five quart two pack. So that is 10 quarts weekly. And so gas buddy Patrick Dahan on X said, unless your hurts, most households don't need to worry, who's going to more symbolic? Right, exactly. It's more symbolic than anything else because everything is bigger at Costco. And then I joked that let's send Neil and I in there 'cause there's no other options. There is actually a third option for geating oil out of the region. Saudi oil can actually go north through the Red Sea and use a pipeline near the Suez Canal to reach the Mediterranean. But that adds a lot of time, adds a lot of money. And then also as I said, the Red Sea is no longer this safe place anymore because of what has been happening with the Houthis there and how they've kind of established themselves in the region. So a lot of people may be taking an optimistic look or saying that this is happening because the economic strangulation that we are trying to do on Iran's economy is coming to pass or losing some of that leverage so they want to get it back by attacking these alternative routes. Again, is that a good thing for the global oil market that they are becoming more aggressive? Probably not, but maybe you can look at and say, it's because they feel the walls closing around them that they are making these more aggressive plays. Quick check on oil prices. They were up 8% last week. This morning they're up to $108 a barrel. That is kind of getting close to the peak a few months ago during the war, which was $120 a barrel diesel is now at $8 a gallon in California. A record, many stations are showing $9.99 a gallon because they just can't add that extra digit on their digital signage. So if this isn't going to seep into inflation, nothing will. All right, welcome to winners of the weekend or Toby and I picked two things that had an even better weekend than Celine Dion. I won the pre-show game of sequence, great board game if you haven't played. So I get to go first and my winner is Tesla, which is making a Minnesota Vikings level comeback in the American EV market. According to the Wall Street Journal, Tesla now accounts for more than half of electric vehicle sales in the US, 52% up from just 43% one year ago. It's a far cry from the 80% share the company once commanded, but it's pretty sizable bump following a year's long slump. It's not that Tesla is doing great in this depressed EV environment, it's just doing less worse than others. So far this year, Tesla's US sales are down 16%. That seems downright stellar when you consider the overall EV market has plummeted 30%. CEO Elon Musk makes many predictions that don't come true, but he pretty much nailed this last year when asked how the elimination of the federal EV tax credit would impact the company. He said it would be painful at first, but over the long run, beneficial since it would hurt his rivals, Mort Den Tesla. Toby, sometimes it pays to be the biggest fish in an ever shrinking pond as verive when Alkraz and Sinner are out of the draw. - You just gave me such a flashback to playing sequence growing up. I haven't played it in probably a decade. - Do it again. - It is a fantastic game. The Tesla story is also just a model-wise story because Tesla technically has multiple models on the market. They have the Model 3, they have the Cybertruck, but one out of every three EV sold in America is a model-wise. Model-wise sales are down just 2% this year. And again, they are falling but against the broader backdrop of what else is happening in the market. Falling just 2% is a massive W. I'm just looking at what is happening to the competition because they are dropping like flies. The Honda Prologue, which is their version of an EV, that's discontinued heading towards discontinuation. The Volkswagen ID4, that's going the same way. The Ford F-150 Lightning never took off. That's going to be discontinued. And even though GM resurrected the Chevy Bolt, they're actually reducing the resurrection, they're making production smaller and they're probably going to phase it out again in 2027. So it really just is the fact that Tesla is standing at all and not falling to the wayside means that it's going to grow its market share. - I think it's also an FSD story. And FSD is full self-driving, which is not full self-driving. There's a parenthesis there that they had to include called Supervised, but people are obsessed with this. Basically, if you buy a Tesla and you get full self-driving Supervised, which is a monthly payment, you can literally put in an address into the GPS in the car and then it just drives you there. And you're supposed to have your eyes on the road and your hands near the steering wheel. You're supposed to be alert, but this is crazy. I mean, I saw someone tweet, I just bought a new model line and can confidently say, cars and Teslas are no longer the same product. A car is like a pony or horse. I still like driving a stick shift. It's fun. Tesla with FSD is a transportation robot. So if you get hooked on this particular software where you can just punch in an address and it takes you there without you having to do anything, then this is going to be the car for you. And as more people get hooked on autonomy, it's like your own personal waymo kind of. So that's, I think, another reason why it's this particular software in this autonomy that's driving Tesla to the front. - Have you never been in a self-driving car yet? Have you experienced it yet? - No. - It is crazy. That is exactly what happens in the air. It is a little bit freaky. The one thing that we haven't mentioned too is gas prices. I mean, for a while, Tesla was losing market share because gas prices were pretty low. And people were just saying, I'd rather have a combustion engine vehicle. Now gas prices are clearly on the rise, so that always feeds into the electric vehicle market, getting a little bit of a tailwind. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the weekend right after this. Capturing value in fixed income is tough. - How tough is it? Toby, that was in a setup. Bond markets are massive and murky. - Well then, I guess it's a good thing Vanguard bonds are institutional quality. Their lineup includes over 80 bond funds. - Vanguard focuses on reliability and consistency. It's not always flashy, but it sets the standard for what dependable investing should look like. - See the record for yourself at vanguard.com/audio. That's vanguard.com/audio. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard marketing corporation distributor. - Meet Amazon ads, Rising Star, Darryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon ads helped him grow. - I walked away from Big Tech to build a luxury brand. In a category that no one was paying attention to, what the help of Amazon ads? I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names and men's grooming. We've scaled to over $500,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com/RisingDashStars. - Hey, Neil. See these socks? - Oh, you mean these socks? - Are those the everyday cotton solid quarter socks from Quince? Sure are. Quince hooked us up both with high quality wardrobe staples. Their clothes are made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and marina wool. The styles are timeless versus tile in design to become the dependable pieces you reach for day after day. We also got matching swim trunks, but I can't show you those for legal reasons. - Find your next fall favorites at quince.com/brue. Or download the Quince app for app exclusive offers. That's quince.com/brue. - My winner of the weekend is America's pastime, which you might think is baseball, but I'd argue is actually taking dietary supplements. A new Pew survey found that eight in 10 U.S. adults take at least one dietary supplement with the highest overall use coming from adults 65 and older. The most popular things Americans are taking are vitamins and minerals with 67% of respondents indulging protein patterns or drinks come next followed by omega-3s like fish oil than herbal supplements like ashwaganda. A potent combination of social media influencers pushing supplements as well as an overall increase and people focused on longevity, health, and wellness has turned to this industry into a 228 billion dollar behemoth. However, the market itself is likely stronger than the evidence backing it up. Yes, there are legitimate use cases for supplements like treating nutrient deficiencies, but experts warn that most consumption doesn't fall into that bucket. Protein in particular is way overuse. Harvard's Dr. Peter Cohen estimates that 80 to 90% of supplement consumption offers no proven benefit to the person taking it with most Americans already getting enough through their diets. Still, Neil, go into any person's medicine cabinet or kitchen right now, you're gonna find some supplements. Yeah, and mine was a kid. Shout out Flintstone vitamins. Those were the absolute best. The reason that there's such sketchiness around this industry is the FDA doesn't need to approve them. They don't approve dietary supplements. There is a workaround, so we just don't know necessarily the health benefits or the health drawbacks, which is why you have so many people taking them. There's this cousin between all the people taking them eight and 10 Americans. I don't think eight and 10 Americans do anything, except maybe tech vitamins together. And the expert consensus would say, look, actually we don't have any evidence to say these will help you, yes, in some minority cases that they could be particularly helpful, but for the mass amount of people that are using them, we just can't say they actually help you. I think GLP1 drugs is part of this equation as well. As you consume less food people have been fixated on getting more protein into their diets as well. And again, I don't need to say the how.
big of a trend protein has been to everything. My coffee is topped with protein code foam. My cereal somehow is protein in it as well. But again, the scientists say that it's probably too much protein, not enough benefit. This has been happening for a while now. This is not just a recent phenomenon. Supplement use has been growing over the past few decades or so. If you go back to 1999, a survey of 63,000 US adults found that 51% were taking supplements. Now, if you believe the Pew survey, which is a smaller sample size, that number is up to 80%. So that is a 30% is point increase in just the last 25 years or so, which just goes to show how big of this ground swell of support has been. And I thought the most interesting point, the most significant point is that among older adults, people take the most supplements. And there's new research that might be a little concerning about how vitamins interact with the aging brain. So the Washington Post wrote this report and said, look, when somebody gets older and we give them medicine, we change the dosage. We change things about it to work with their brain, with their changing body. But we don't with vitamins. It's just the same thing that a 35-year-old might take. But there has been a wave of research Washington Post points out. In January, researchers found a link between vitamin D supplements and faster cognitive decline among older adults. Then in April, another study found that adults 55 and older taking omega-3 supplements displayed greater cognitive deterioration over time than those who didn't take them. And then finally, in June, there was other research that found that people taking glucose to mean for joint pain. They had a much higher likelihood of progressing from mild cognitive impairment to dementia over five years. Causing these studies are observational. They don't prove causation. But it's kind of a worrying trend to see these studies come out this year to throw some cold water and maybe even point to a more concerning trend about how vitamins interact with the aging brain. - Yeah, people just want it to become more of a nuanced conversation rather than just saying, is vitamin D good for you? It should be, is vitamin D good for you at what dosage and at what age? - It's Monday, so here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. Federal Reserve meets on Wednesday and seems poised to raise interest rates for the first time in three years. The most recent inflation report on Friday showed prices climbing at 3.4% far above the central banks target, putting pressure on Chair Kevin Warsh to take action. While Warsh is famously tight-lipped about his plans, traders believe there's a 90% chance the Fed will announce a rate hike. - Yeah, we didn't get to talk about that inflation report, but energy was obviously the bigger striver of headline inflation. Gasoline was up 3.9% in August. Energy prices are now up 16% year over year, but technically you can look past that if you are the Fed because you are thinking that this is a one-time shock, the war in Iran is not necessarily indicative of what's going on with the broader economy, but you look underneath that and you see that we are seeing some inflation beyond just energy shelter, rose 0.3% transportation services, up 0.5%. Those are the stuff that make you as the Fed Chair a little worried because if you are seeing inflation the economy beyond just energy, that means core inflation is rising and you probably need to do something about it. - If you have an iPhone and an hour where you don't need to use it, a big new software update is available today, IOS 27. The biggest new feature of the operating system is Siri AI, an actually helpful conversational Siri that's powered by Google's Gemini. It's compatible with every iPhone model 11 or later. - I feel like we've been talking about this for so long and I am excited. We've talked a lot about these personal assistants that just recently came out from Meta, from the startup Instinct. Now this is Apple's chance to finally show that Siri isn't completely useless anymore. - And finally in the world of television, the Emmy Awards are tonight hosted by SVU star Mariska Hargote. HBO's The Pit leads the way with 25 nominations followed by Hacks with 24 and Apple's Widows Bay with 19. Then on Wednesday, South Park returns for its new season, though I should say South America, ahead of the premiere, the show said it changed its name to South America to make fun of President Trump trying to rename everything on the map. - Every time we get to the Emmys, I realize that I haven't watched the show completely all the way through since Game of Thrones. So I guess put it out there, people send me some good recommendations 'cause I just genuinely don't know it to watch and haven't watched anything for so long that I'm feeling outside of the loop of entertainment culture. - Have you chose a college football team? Because the last time you asked for audience participation, they sent in college football teams. Now you're asking for TV shows. I'm just hoping that you're able to handle all of the inbound that you're getting. - Well, here's what I'll say. The two top teams that were recommended were one Texas, which felt too obvious to pick Texas, although it would have been good to hop on the band while I'm before what happened this weekend. And the other one was Iowa State. Actually, I got so many Iowa State submissions. So I would love to say that the cyclones is where I'm taking my talents, but I'm sticking with Utah. I just feel good about the youths this year. I feel good about what's going on with that program, so Utah is my team. - Back to TV, I think you should watch Widows Bay. - That's what I've heard. - That's what everyone in our office just talked about Widows Bay all the time, or they did a few months ago. It got the third most Emmy nominations, feels a little bit up your alley. - Utah Utes and Widows Bay sounds like a pretty good weekend to me. - All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful start to the week to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else. Send an email to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram @mbdailyshow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron 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, hair and makeup took off, blaming a bad first fantasy week. Devon Emery is our president and our shows are production of Morning Brew. - Great, so today, Neil, let's run it back tomorrow.
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