(upbeat music) - Good morning, Bridelli Show. I'm Neil Freiman. - And I'm Toby Howell. - Today, the EPA lives power plant emissions limits delighting the coal industry, but in raging environmentalists. - Then, high rocks found itself in a sticky and stinky situation this past week. It's Tuesday, September 15th. Let's ride. (upbeat music) There are more than 8.3 billion people alive today, but you can become the best at one particular skill as long as it's random enough. That's my takeaway from the Guinness World Records, which revealed some fresh records found in its 2027 book. There's the five-year-old from Houston who became the world's youngest female yoga instructor after completing a 200-hour training course or a femoral remy, the most tattooed living person after applying ink to some areas of his body over 100 times or the narrowest drivable car a rebuilt fiat panda measuring less than 20 inches wide. Toby, something tells me to the kind of guy who's tried to break Guinness World Record at some point in your life. - I grew up collecting Guinness book of world records, one, 'cause I just loved how they looked all the different colors lined up. I also loved memorizing mostly the animal facts for whatever reason. I always know that the Hawk Moth is the fastest airborne insect, but it did get me thinking what could Toby Howell set again his book of world record ends. And I think it has to be a vent diagram of two things because it's hard to be the best in one thing, but if you took the fastest marathon and lowest golf round completed in one day, I think I got a shot, 'cause the vent diagram of people who can break three and break par must be small, so that's exactly where my mind went. - Do you know how the application process goes or like how can you just submit literally anything like that? - I think to have it verified, you pay, that's how they make their money. You need someone to come and verify that you did everything properly. So that's one thing, but I think you can also do something and then retroactively submit it as well. It also had me think about you, Neil, any ideas of what you could do. - I'll have to think about it more. Nothing comes to mind. I'm just that, I'm the average Joe at literally everything. - But I was going through some of these and one woman set the record for most frog-related memorabilia. Another one for most my little pony memorabilia. So just start collecting something now in 50, 60 years. You'll have to get us book a world records. And now a word from our sponsor Hotels.com. Neil, don't even ask me about the hotel I stayed at last week for work. - Why? - I said, don't ask me. - Sounds like you could use 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. Wi-Fi, breakfast, 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/morningbrew. That's Hotels.com/morningbrew. Loyaltymembers18plus. - President Trump's EPA wants power plants to let rip carbon emissions be darned. Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would lift a cap on planet warming greenhouse gas emissions spewed by coal and natural gas plants with the goal of saving over $300 billion and unleashing an abundance of American energy. For the two most recent Democratic presidents, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, this is like having all your work wiped out by a computer before you saved it. Their 10 years saw the government tighten emissions requirements from power plants to cars to prevent climate change from spiring out of control. In 2024, the Biden administration finalized a rule that required coal plants to add technology that would collect and trap emissions before they were released to the air while forcing gas plants to operate on cleaner fuels like hydrogen. These rules were opposed by the oil and gas industry and Republicans who accused Biden of regulating the coal, oil, and gas industries out of existence. Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, has pursued an agenda of so-called energy abundance that scrapped dozens of climate-focused policies and promoted fossil fuel production. Critics from the energy, environmental, and public health spaces blasted the move, Zeeland Hoover, a former EPA senior advisor under Biden, told the Washington Post that, quote, "By eliminating the power plant pollution standards, Trump is choosing to allow preventable asthma attacks, heart disease, and even deaths." Former Vice President Al Gore said the EPA's action moves the U.S. in the exact opposite direction of the rest of the world. One thanks for sure. This will be challenged in court immediately. So let's go back to Biden's EPA for a second. He approached this issue by looking through the health benefits that could potentially be accrued by having stricter emission standards. And he's found through 2047, $120 billion would be saved by Americans when it comes to ER visits, when it comes to asthma attacks, when it comes to miss school days, lost work days. That was kind of how he approached and his EPA approached this regulatory environment. The Trump EPA has taken a much different approach, looking more to the regulatory cost benefit analysis. And instead of assigning these public health benefits, he looked instead at emphasizing compliance costs to businesses. So they're both trying to create some sort of economic argument for why they should approach regular regulations in their specific way. But it's very different in how practically you go about it with whatever number it creates. Biden's was $120 billion in saved health costs. Trump will be innumerable billions saved to the energy industry as they try to spin up new power plan. And this is a big question because when it comes to what are the big polluters in the United States around the world? Well, coal, gas and oil fired power plants are a huge one. They're responsible for about one quarter of the country's total climate pollution. Second, only to the transportation sector. If the U.S. power sector were a country, its pollution production would rank fifth globally behind just China, India, Russia, and the entire United States. The Trump administration, this is not the first deregulatory move that they've taken since last year. This EPA has done a ton of cutting of, they would say, of the red tape opponents would say, you're letting fossil fuels flourish. They've eliminated emission standards for cartel pipes, lifted restrictions on chemicals using air conditioners and refrigerators. Perhaps the big Kahuna earlier this year, they repealed the overall scientific determination that gave the EPA the legal authority in the first place to create climate regulations. This is already a big deal and it's only become bigger because power plants are going, the demand on power is only increasing after, because of the AI build out data centers, advanced manufacturing. For decades, demand in the United States for power was literally flat and then all of a sudden, we're seeing this exponential growth. So the question of how power plants are regulated is coming to the fore. - Yeah, the fact that environmental groups are very up in an arms that the EPA has effectively declared, America's second largest individual source of greenhouse commissions, not significant enough to warrant CO2 regulation, one attorney fighting this, or that plan to fight this, David Donnerger said, "It's like saying that over half of a super large pizza has no calories." That's the general kind of position that you're gonna see a lot of people taking against this new regime at the EPA. Moving on, these sudden unity around slowing AI development has hit the AI trade hard, wobbling the foundations that have propped up the stock market. Yesterday, the NASDAQ opened it down more than 1% with chip stocks taking a bruising. As investors digested the dire warnings issued by Dario Amade and echoed it by Sam Altman around the need to hit the brakes on frontier model development. Intel, Micron, and AMD fell around 5%, and video lost 3% and shares of one of OpenAI's largest investors, SoftBank, plummeted nearly 11%. Outside the market, China jumped into the fray to defend itself against Dario Amade's claim that a Chinese lead in AI would pose a grave danger to the world, basing accused the anthropic CEO of fear-mongering and said confrontation will only make global AI governance harder. President Trump, meanwhile, is also resisting calls to slow down saying whoever wins AI wins and made a surprise phone call to Nvidia's Jensen Huang on-states at a tech conference, telling the audience via speakerphone that the anti-AI messaging is, quote, "all a hoax." And somehow, that wasn't even the strangest political move we got yesterday. Bernie Sanders and former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon will appear together today at a pro-human assembly pushing for humans to remain firmly in control of AI. So, Neil, in summary, stocks puked. China doesn't like how they are being portrayed, and we have a political equivalent of pigs flying with Bannon and Bernie teaming up. - Yeah, do you wanna focus on Trump? Because he really is the linchpin on whether the government takes action on this particular issue. If he presses forward, saying we need AI regulation, then you would think that the House would follow in lockstep. He posted at least seven times on this particular issue, more than even tech people saying that, yes, the idea that AI frontier AI models will go rogue was all a hoax and blasted Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, for bringing this issue up in the first place. And then in this truly shocking moment, you can watch video on it. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's on this stage got the all-in summit, which is this very popular tech podcast. And he just gets a call from Trump, puts him on speakerphone, and then Trump says the robots will. not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax. Jensen followed that up by saying he kind of agreed with Trump. Of course, he was a little more measured. He said that predictions that AI could end the world was not grounded in science. So what Trump is saying is echoed by some people in the tech industry, of course, with skin in the game. We saw it in video shares fall yesterday. So maybe that's one reason why Jensen Huang does not believe these predictions that we need to slow down AI development. It's also funny. The other kind of party that is echoing this sentiment that fears around AI safety or hoax or its fear mongering is China. They are aligning themselves with each other. Trump and China weirdly are agreeing upon this one singular issue in addition to Jensen Huang. So that's a very weird triumvirate there. Let's talk a little bit about the stock market, though. The idea of AI development slowing down was not happy for these neocloud, these chip providers. We saw actually the greatest divergence between chip stocks today and software stocks in history. Software stocks remember have been pummeled over the last few months. As everyone was scared that people will be able to spin up replacements for service now, spin up replacements for sales force. That has depressed software stocks. But yesterday we saw service now jump seven percent. We saw sales force rise nearly five percent. It moves in tandem and inversely of how chip stocks are doing. So when you see the AI trade start to wobble, you see software stocks come roaring back, which is what we saw yesterday. But meanwhile, AI wasn't the only thing affecting the market. Oil prices also just kept climbing with Brent crude, trapping $107 a barrel. It comes after drone attacks shut down a key Saudi pipeline that was helping the country bypass the trade of our moves. And hoody rebels in Yemen captured two more islands in the Red Sea. That shock manifested in the bond market where 10-year treasurer yields hit 5 percent Monday for the first time since 2023. And outside of that brief appearance, it's a level we haven't really seen since 2007. The 10-year is a benchmark for borrowing costs across the economy, which means everything from car loans to mortgage rates will get more expensive, with a standard 30-year mortgage crossing 7 percent yesterday as well. Neil 5 percent treasuries also create a much tougher backdrop for stocks. Investors now get a substantial return from government bonds without taking on the additional risk-founding equities, which means this market itself could get worse before it gets better. I'm always looking for the most drama storyline. And there is one here. This is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent versus Bond Investors, which they should make into a TV show. We're going to talk about what happened at the Emmys last night, but I'm looking forward to this next year. So Bessent came in to the Trump administration wanting to bring down bond yields. That was one of his main goals. And he has pursued that agenda by doing very unusual things that the Treasury has done in recent years, which is like intervening in the yen market and by an increased buybacks of these government bonds, long-gated bonds, that has not worked. And we're seeing bond yields now hit 5 percent for the first time in a couple years. And we're back at levels that we've only seen in the 90s and 2000s. Meanwhile, Scott Bessent has gone to war against Bond Investors in particular media interviews in the past few days. First of all, he said, it's my dream. I have asymmetric information. I am the house now, which is kind of a mic drop moment when talking about his particular interventions. And then recently, he said, if some of the Bloomberg terminal bros aren't happy with what I'm doing, well, that's too bad. So he's trying to do one thing. Bond Investors are pushing yields up, doing the other thing. So we're having quite a war of words between these two groups right now. And the reason why the market is nervous about 5 percent yields is because the average S&P 500 return over the past 50 years is right around 8 percent. You can now lock in effectively 60 percent of that gain via buying 10-year Treasury notes, taking on little to no risk. Again, this is called the risk-free rate of return. That is why you get a little bit of wobbliness in the market because why would you take the risk of investing in something like a chip stock when you couldn't just lock in 60 percent of that for free, for no risk whatsoever? That is one thing. But the other thing is that the market is still somehow up 10 percent this year because a lot of people think that the 5 percent yield doesn't actually mean what it's meant in the past because corporate earnings are so strong. The economy underlying data is actually pretty strong as well, which is why you're seeing a little bit of a divergence between equities in what you would expect given how high the 10-year yield is right now. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a story about malls 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. Toby, you sure seem chipper for someone who stayed up till 4. That's because despite a couple long Island ISTs, I took Zbiotic's pre-alcohol. It produces an enzyme that helps break down the toxic byproduct alcohol creates in your gut that leaves you feeling less than fresh. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. I owe those scientists my life. Head to Zbiotics.com/MBD and use the code "MBD" at checkout for 15% off. That's Zbiotics.com/MBD. September is world Alzheimer's month, but most people never check their brain health until something's feeling off or wrong. That's why we joined Function to check our numbers before brain fog became normal. Your focus and mental stamina leave a data trail in your blood and function tracks it. Like how high homocysteine can be linked to brain fog and cognitive decline risk. Or how magnesium supports nerve signaling and focus under stress. Plus, function members can add on a brain-related add-on test like Alzheimer's detection test. Check your brain and health like us. Function provides over 160 lab tests for $1 a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Join at FunctionHealth.com/Brue and use code Brue25 for a $25 credit. That's functionhealth.com/Brue code Brue25. Things you might not have heard in a while, both the New York Jets and Giants are one to know, and shopping malls are low-key crushing it. According to the Wall Street Journal, mall values are up 13% this year, the best performing of all 10 commercial property sectors after years of slumping along. Simon Property Group, the largest mall owner in the U.S., just hit a new record high on the stock market for the first time since 2016, and its shares have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past year. Part of the reason malls are doing so well from evaluation perspective is that the other commercial real estate sectors are struggling, specifically multi-family and office, so investors looking for return are parking, no pun intended, their money in malls, one of the few bright spots. Another factor is that mall owners have cleverly adapted to the new paradigm, bringing in tenants focused on recreation, like pickleball courts, luxury stores, and buzzy dining spots like Dumbling Giant, Dintai Fung, Toby, meet me at the mall. I think so. It seems pretty fun these days. They did just nail this pivot to experiential content very well. This has been something that we have talked about that people want to get outside and actually do something, and I think the company that kind of sums us up well is Netflix. Netflix was started as a way to watch movies from your couch and inside your own home. Now they are buying up space in malls to create these big Netflix house experiences. You can walk in and experience stranger things alive. You can walk in and experience things like one point. They have these interactive exhibits that are taking place in malls, and that to me just sums up why maybe Americans are returning to the place where you used to congregate as a kid, because shopping in person is a little bit more fun than shopping online. Again, they're not back to their absolute peaks, but it is showing signs of flickering life. Yeah, I think what the big data point here is that 200 malls have closed since 2008, and there's only 900 left. So at one point, there was just so many malls. There was too much real estate. There was too much square footage for what the demand for physical shopping offered. So the reason why this is a tightening real estate market, commercial real estate market for malls, why valuations have increased is just we're kind of normalizing back to levels where we should be here in 2026. We are repurposing spaces like I think it's very telling about what those properties were at Netflix, but they moved into a former Lord and Taylor in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Now it's a Netflix space, and then in Dallas, they moved into a former Belks, and now it's a Netflix space. So these are department stores that created vacant spaces, but now these new tenants are moving in. I just went to my local mall in Holoak, Massachusetts for the first time in a very long time this weekend. I'm driving up, I see Best Buy, and then right next to it is pickleball experience, and I think this is what's happening across malls is they're putting in recreational spaces to fill the void, and people are coming back. Also, if you look at just what else is happening in commercial real estate, you have office buildings that's down 34% since the 2022 peak, self storage units also down. There's not a lot of good places to put your money in commercial real estate right now, and you look at
malls, even though some of them maybe look like these sleeping giants, they occupy really expensive and really good real estate in some places. So maybe this trade of why malls are coming back is just due to the fact that the dirt underneath them is so valuable. And that's why if you're looking for one place to put your money in commercial real estate, you might as well go to the place that owns a lot of land like malls. Moving on, imagine your most marathon-pilled friend combined with your most lifting-pilled friend. Outside of producing the most insufferable small talk imaginable, you've also created a high-rocks athlete, a rising corner of the fitness world that I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. High-rocks has been around for nearly a decade at this point but has grown into a global phenomenon with a hundred races stretching across the globe. It was thrust into the spotlight this week for a rather unfortunate reason, about a fecal incontinence suffered by a top athlete at a recent race in Beijing. High-rocks has apologized for allowing the athlete to continue despite soiling herself, which raise concerns about race hygiene, potential equipment contamination, and how dang hard this race is. High-rocks races all follow the same strict and brutal format. Run one kilometer, complete a workout, then do that eight times in a row. By the end, you will have run 8K, pushed and pulled a weighted sled, rode in ski-erged till your hands bleed, done burpees, lunges, and wall ball tosses with a farmer's carry thrown in for good measure. You can empathize how that might cause one to soil themselves. But it's also catnip for the fitness community with more than 2.4 million participants projected to take part in a race this year. It's angling to become an Olympic sport soon. In the meantime, high-rocks is making a lot of money and entry will cost you between $100 and $200, which doesn't include the race photos for purchase that will inevitably show up on social media. Loyal legions have caught the eye of outside investors with a consumer-focused firm, L-Catteron, set to buy a stake in a deal that values a company close to $700 million. The number two incident is unfortunate, but the number one reason why high-rocks is so big is because it's hard, it's social, and it leads to picks of you looking sweaty and buff on your Instagram. I'm very curious to see how many people are hearing this story and learning about high-rocks for the first time. I've seen it percolate in the background, and unfortunately for high-rocks, maybe this is the first time that people have heard of it. It's trying to clean this up, again, no pun intended. But the cow founder posted on Instagram that there are new rules and procedures in place to prevent situations like this from happening again. Athletes there were kind of up in arms about the fact that they let this go on because they're like, "High-rocks, you have, you penalize spitting and littering." I don't know if you mentioned this, but these are indoor facilities where you are running but also touching equipment, so all the athletes there were saying, "I want a refund, I want my money back. This should not have happened." So high-rocks is hoping to sweep this all under the rug and then continue its quest for world domination because it really has been dominating the world, the fitness world, since it began in 2017. These events draw so many people. London had 40,000 people. That is how many people run the London marathon. New York had 50,000, it's the same amount of people that run the New York marathon. So we're seeing some truly staggering growth out of high-rocks is very fascinating to watch its rise. I think the reason why it has caught on so clearly with the fitness community is it so measurable. When you run a marathon, like you just brought up, New York is different than London. The terrain is different. The weather is different. So it's not apples to apples to compare your time in London to your time in New York. First is in a controlled environment. It's the same exercises every time. The only thing that very slightly is the run course. But it's so much, you can see, did I do better at this event to this event? It's the same sort of environment and things going on around you. So that is why, if you're in the fitness, you love measuring your progress. It's so measurable there. Also, it's just so social too. People come and watch you race. They actually charge admission to get in to watch your friends. But that's a big part, you're doing it alongside other people and it's just fun for, I mean, it sounds weird to someone who doesn't, you know, work out, but you're taking all these things that you do already in the gym and just making it in competition with your friends. Of course, that's going to catch on with a lot of different people. Do you think it's going to become an Olympic sport? Like you're on the I.O.C. committee, would you say, would you want high rocks included? I think because it's so measurable and it's so easily repeatable, then I don't see why not, but I think back to like maybe CrossFit, we were probably having the same conversation 10, 15 years ago when CrossFit was on the rise and never quite panned out to be quite as big as you think. I think the biggest difference is that CrossFit, it's always something new, it's always something different. High rocks is the same thing time and time again, which is why I could see it in the Olympics one day. And before we leave high rocks, we have to explain what high rocks stands for, which you think is the cringiest thing possible. It is hybrid rock star. I know. Hybrid rock star. What am I friends? He's like, you will never guess it. I'll give you, I'll give you 40 guesses, hybrid rock star is what high rocks is short for. All right, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Tell me if you've heard of this one before, a Sydney Swini ad is sparking loads of controversy. In a new campaign for the sports prediction market company Novig, the actress is photographed mostly nude, say for various sports equipment where clothes would typically be the tagline just sports. The footage has generated an intense backlash online with many female athletes, including Olympians criticizing it for sexualizing and trivializing women's sports. Four-time gold medal swimmer, Aryan Titmiss, wrote on Instagram, I can't describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this. Swini has seemingly responded to the backlash with a post depicting a series of magazine covers featuring female and male athletes posing mostly naked as if to say, you didn't get mad when they did it. But that Instagram approach might not be working because right after she posted the ad, her Instagram followers went up by about 50,000. This is according to analytics from social blade. By Sunday, she lost 136,000 and then another 68,000 followed her yesterday. So in total, she's lost 200,000 Instagram followers in the wake of this ad. Now, of course, that represents 1% of her 25 million followers. But it's a slight, it's a small data point to support the fact that people aren't liking the tact that she took when promoting this ad. It really is not popular with a lot of former and current female athletes. A UCLA gymnast said, this is what women in sports looks like and just posted her highlights. That's kind of become a trend at this point. But not the first time that Cindy Swini has been embroiled in an ad scandal. I think back to American Eagle and the Jean's ad. This is just the latest version of her kind of provoking a lot of people with her advertising decisions. Finally, at the Emmys last night, Widows Bay made history. With 14 wins, the horror comedy from Apple won the most Emmys of any comedy series ever, including Best Comedy Honors. Matthew Reese, the star of that show, also set a record becoming the first performer to score two lead actor awards in the same show. He also won four starring in the limited series, The Beast and Me. The other big winner of last night was the pit HBO's medical drama that became the first series since Mad Men in 2009 to win Best Drama in two consecutive years. Maybe the biggest winner though is Apple TV. They ended the night with more enemies and maybe more enemies than any other network. It's the first time they have ever done that and actually going back to 2003, only two other studios have ever won the most Emmys in a single year. And that is HBO in Netflix, so very rarefied air there as well, especially because Apple has only been in the entertainment game for less than a decade, so now it is in the elite of the elite. Also, you'd be very proud of me. I started Widows Bay yesterday after everyone told me. But it's hard because Matthew Reese is also in The Beast and Me, which my wife watched, and he's so evil in that. So I'm like, is he good? Is he bad in this? But I'm on The Widows Bay train. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram @ambidaleyshow. Let's roll the credits, Emily Mill iron is our supervising producer, Raymond Lu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Leake, technical direction by Nina Miller, hair and makeup is training for Hirocks, Devon Emory is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great Saturday nail, let's run it back tomorrow.
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