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Good morning, Bird Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman.
And I'm Toby Howell.
Today, after another day of chaos in the skies, the U.S. aviation system turns to AI for help.
Then the paramount deal for Warner Brothers Discovery might actually get across the finish line.
It's Tuesday, September 22nd. Let's ride.
It's the first day of fall.
The Bears are bulked.
The Bears are backing up ahead of their hibernation.
And you know what that means.
Fat Bear Week is back.
And it's bigger and chunkier than ever.
Starting today and running through next Tuesday, fans will vote on the fattest brown bear in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska.
Now in its 13th year, Fat Bear Week has gone global.
Last year, over 1.7 million votes were cast for more than 100 countries, crowning a bear named 32 Chunk as the People's Champion.
Toby, who do you like in this year?
Before I reveal my pick, I always get a little nervous.
We are hurting the Bears' feelings because we're calling them Fat Bears.
But apparently, the bigger the bear, the healthier the bear, according to Katmai Park Ranger Sarah Bruce.
There is no such thing as too fat of a bear.
The fatter a bear, the healthier that bear is.
We're getting to the point, too, where the contenders for Fat Bear Week are the offspring of other fat bear winners.
This year, Bear 903, Gully, is the son of Grazer, the winner from 2023.
And then Bear No. 89, Backpack, is the offspring of Holly.
This year, Bear No. And lucky for business owners, Roku Ads Manager makes it super easy to get brands on streaming TV.
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Yesterday brought flight chaos around the Northeast when a technical malfunction caused ground stops at New York's three major airports, Philadelphia and beyond, leading to heavy delays and cancellations.
Officials blamed it, I kid you not, on a railroad construction crew in New Jersey that accidentally damaged a Verizon cable.
Causing an outage in the radar and radio system that manages planes during takeoff and landing.
As a result, they needed to repair the cable in a process that would take 13 hours, turning Monday into a nightmare for thousands of travelers.
It was somewhat poetic that the aviation turmoil happened the exact same day the government launched a new AI tool meant to mitigate flight disruptions.
It's just a pilot program for now, no pun intended, covering three airports in the Washington region.
But if successful, they're hoping to expand it nationwide by 2028.
Called SMART for Strategic Management of Airspace Routing and Trajectories, the $875 million initiative hopes to become the money ball of aviation, using predictive analytics to avoid delays and other flight interruptions by seeing problems before they happen.
Under Secretary Sean Duffy, the Transportation Department has poured billions of dollars into modernizing the outdated tech underpinning the country's aviation system.
Most in the industry have applauded the transformation, given just how ancient the existing infrastructure is.
But others are skeptical.
This AI tool will have much of an impact or worse, it'll compromise the safety of the flying public.
Toby, can we chat GPT our way out of flight delays?
I don't know.
It was brutal yesterday, though, because I was flying back to JFK and I opened up Twitter and I see that an Amtrak construction project somehow was going to make my flight delayed.
I go, how the heck is that possible?
But it really was just a series of unfortunate events because the primary circuit failed and the backup line was cut.
And you just shows.
How it can ripple through an entire system like that.
But from a news perspective, like, wow, this does segue very nicely into this AI, a air traffic controller system.
The big question here for a lot of air traffic controllers is how is this going to fit into my existing workflows?
Like, I've been at this job for a while now.
What is this AI going to do?
And basically, it's just a recommendation layer, not an autonomous air traffic controller.
That's what a lot of people kind of jump to.
It's not going to be taking over from a.
Person doing the job, you're just going to see another byline saying like, hey, this is one potential outcome that could happen.
What do you want to do about it?
So at least initially, it's a very small test, but it's it raised some fears about it replacing humans, but it's not going to be replacing any humans anytime soon.
Yeah, we already are seeing some backlash from lawmakers.
Representative Don Beyer, who represents Northern Virginia, said the FAA should not use my constituents as guinea pigs for an unproven AI air traffic control system that is Americans.
Live.
In its hands, I'm calling on the FAA to immediately suspend use of this AI system at Washington area airports until its safety has been established.
Federal officials, including Sean Duffy and the head of the AAA, Brian Bedford, said, Look, this is going to be a predictive system.
As you mentioned, a lot of it has to do with weather and alternative routing, so they didn't explain perhaps an example of what this might look like, but I'm thinking that this AI will tell air traffic control.
That there's a wetter weather pattern coming up in the Midwest in the next couple of days, like major thunderstorms coming down from St.
Louis or whatever.
So if you're flying from the east to the west coast, you might want to take a more southerly route or a more northerly route to avoid those potential disruptions.
One point of concern was how quickly this all came together.
They awarded the contract just three months ago to a Boston area tech company, and then now it's launching on September 22nd.
So just that three month time span worried.
Aviation officials, airline industry CEOs, they had a lot of meetings trying to get up to speed with what exactly this would mean for them.
It seems now they are cautiously on board with this new tool.
Again, it's just a small program for now, but if it works, they'll go nationwide.
It's kind of essential that something does change within the air traffic control, because if you go back to the 1980s, Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking controllers.
And pretty much since then, the agency has been existing in this state of understanding.
And so the FAA is kind of counting on technology to come in and relieve some of that burden from an understaffed air traffic control system.
So they actually, back in May of 2026, they reduced their estimate for how many controllers they would need to hire going forward by roughly 2,000 people, hoping to make up that difference with technology.
So, yes, you may hear some vocal outcries about AI being introduced.
I mean, it's a very high-stakes system, but we do need to innovate in order to make up for the shortfalls that have gripped this agency for the last, you know, 40 to 50 years.
And just look at what happened yesterday.
There was an accident, like an NJ Transit crew accidentally dug up a cable, and then you all the way in Florida were freaking out about getting back to New York.
And, I mean, it was absolutely chaos.
Newark had no commercial flights landing there from 9.38 a.m. to 5.22.
So that is a huge span of time where there are no flights.
There were no flights landing at Newark.
There were flights coming from Europe that I just saw on flight radar.
They just literally turned around because they were never going to make it to New York.
And then you had people in Albany cheering.
They said, we did it.
Albany is now an international airport because you had a lot of flights diverting to Albany that couldn't land in the New York area.
So all these knock-on effects.
All right, let's move on.
It looks like Hollywood's most controversial merger is getting its happily ever after.
Paramount cleared an important hurdle yesterday in its quest to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery.
Reaching a settlement with California and 11 other states to resolve an antitrust lawsuit holding up the $110 billion deal from going through.
The new media giant led by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, is set to control two major movie studios in Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.,
two major streamers in Paramount Plus and HBO Max, and two major news organizations in CBS and CNN.
It was exactly that concentration of power that led the states to bring the antitrust suit in the first place,
fearing reduced compensation.
In order to get the states to drop the suit, Ellison had to promise to release at least 30 theatrical movies a year for the next two years.
If Paramount drops the ball on that number, it can face a $30 million penalty for each missing movie.
Also, to address fears that the merger would mean fewer productions and jobs,
Paramount committed to spending at least $1.5 billion on U.S. production over five years,
and it must operate a fund dedicated to purchasing independent films so we get to see Nathan Filder do,
We are doing it.
stuff still. Finally, an independent board of journalists will oversee the news orgs to ensure
the editorial independence of CNN and CBS. Sounds like a lot, but Paramount doesn't have to cleave
off a movie studio or a news org, which keeps the general shape of the merger intact, a big win for
the company. Neil, this knocks off the biggest remaining legal obstacle for the merger, though
the settlement still needs court approval, and likely helps them avoid a nasty penalty come
October 1st, which, if the deal didn't officially close by then, would mean Paramount would have to
pay Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million a day. This thing might finally get across the finish
line. Fascinating negotiation here. First of all, every single regulator across the world
had approved this merger, and then you had this handful of states led by California.
That was the last bastion, just manning Helms deep there, trying to fight this particular merger.
I'm not sure which side had more leverage, because, as you mentioned, Ellison and Paramount
come October 1st, they were going to have to pay shareholders $7 million a day in these penalties.
So that adds up after a couple days, or after one day, extending a couple months. That is a huge
check you have to write. So his back was against the wall. But then on the other side, you had Rob
Bonta, who's the attorney general of California. Paramount was threatening to leave the state of
California, and they already had talks with Tennessee, probably Nashville, but they were
threatening to leave. That is a huge
job creator and investor in California. So both sides had their weaknesses, and they were trying
to exploit each other. I guess they worked on this compromise that, to a lot of critics of this deal,
didn't extract enough concessions from Paramount to get the deal across. They were not so particularly
happy with Bonta for making this deal. But again, I'm not sure it had more leverage, because both of
them had particular weaknesses when they came to the negotiating table.
And there's still a lot of critics out there about this merger, but there is a lot of both-sides-ism
at this point, because the main concern from a lot of people was that when you consolidate in
this industry, you're going to create a lot of redundant entertainment jobs that are just going
to go away when you have two studios and two production companies coming together. But the
counterargument from that is that a lot of people in this industry have felt very ill at ease over
the last couple of years. There's been strikes, there's been writer strikes, director strikes,
acting strikes, and they see this as bringing
a degree of stability to the industry. The Directors Guild of America actually backed the
settlement, binding production commitments by saying that they provide greater stability during
a period of declining production. So the fact that they have to make 30 movies a year or else face
penalties, that actually is music to the ears of a lot of these people saying that now it seems
like there's a more steady force in the industry rather than all the upheaval we've seen over the
past couple of years. And a counterweight to all the tech companies coming in. Who won the most
Emmys last week? It was Apple. And now you have at least companies people know that have been around
Hollywood for decades, which is Paramount and Warner Brothers saying, okay, we're going to
combine to take on the encroaching tech companies, Apple, Amazon, et cetera, who have encroached on
our turf from the Bay Area and now coming down to Los Angeles. So maybe that is heartening to
some of those people. What it does do is crown David Ellison, the prince of Hollywood. He's one
of the most powerful people in that industry. Now, just a few years ago, he was the owner of this
small, uh, the small production company called Skydance. And then he just Pac-Man his way up the
food chain, ate a Paramount and then just ate Warner Brothers. A lot of that had to be some
help from his dad, Larry, Larry Ellison, one of the richest people in the world. Moving on. We
haven't seen a TV news showdown like this since brick through a Trident in seventies era San Diego
yesterday, three news outlets, CNN, MSNOW and Politico sued the Trump administration to regain
access to the white house after they were banned from the grounds by president Trump on Friday.
To regulate the battle even further major TV networks known as the pool, which take turns
providing television coverage of the president's public events said they would stop doing that in
a historic move of solidarity with the band outlets tensions between Trump and the press
flared up last week when at, when the president surprised even his own AIDS by confiscating the
badges of CNN, MSNOW and Politico at the white house complex, citing their unfavorable coverage
of him. Trump elaborated in a post Monday morning, the white house is not instituting an assault on
the free press, something which I cherish.
It is instituting an assault on the fake news, something that has grown like cancer in our
beloved United States of America. Many others do see this as an assault on the free press with the
three networks filing their lawsuit under first amendment grounds. They wrote in a statement
without notice or process, the white house revoked our journalists credentials because it objected to
our reporting left unchallenged. This threatens press freedom and the public's right to independent
journalism free from government interference. So it'd be with the pool banding together to not
cover the most powerful person alive.
We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation in modern media history.
What is the pool? It sounds like this very, something I spent a lot of time in this summer.
Exactly. That's what most people would think the pool is, but the pool exists actually mostly
as a space saving mechanism, because when you are the president, you're giving addresses in
the oval office, for instance, and that is a newsworthy. So a lot of news organizations want
access to that footage, to that coverage. And yet the oval office can't fit every single news organization
in the world who wants access. And so what they do is a, this rotating group of news organizations
are the designated pool person for that day. They go in, they film Trump's addresses,
and then they distribute that to everyone else in the news ecosystem. The fact that it's kind of an
unofficial alliance, but the fact that they are now banding together again to do a blackout on
everything that Trump does shows that it does have leverage and it is a powerful organization because
it's basically, you know, it's a powerful organization. And so it's kind of an unofficial
the eyes, ears, and mouth of the president out to the rest of the world. But yes, essentially,
it's a space-saving mechanism to make sure that there's not too many cameras from too many
different cooks in the kitchen covering everything the president does. The five networks are ABC News,
CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News. What basically happened yesterday, the show of
solidarity was CNN was banned. So all of the other four said, we are not going to take our
replacement cameras, putting them in the room, or just have them trailing the president wherever
he goes, because that's what they do. And they said, this is what we do in solidarity. More so,
all the photojournalists from a bunch of media outlets like The Washington Post and New York
Times said, we are not going to publish our photos of the president's daily activities until
midnight, also in solidarity. You had this veep-level type of humorous situation earlier
in the day that arose from
the lack of a TV pool, which shows why it's so important. Trump was doing this big unveiling
of a new helipad that he wants to release to the public before President Xi Jinping comes
from China to the White House later this week. You watch the video. It's literally nothing but
static for this eight minutes and nine minutes. He's talking in front of a bunch of people trying
to introduce this entire new helipad, and you just can't hear anything because there's no
microphone, there's no equipment that CNN would typically use. So it's a very, very,
very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,
pretty humorous moment. Yeah, they were trying to go direct. The White House was saying,
we don't need the pool. We can go to our own feed. And yet it mostly picked up the helicopter's
blades, which is funny. But it also comes during a big week because this is, the UN is in town.
Again, this is actually relates to our previous story about the air traffic controller situation.
A lot of people were trying to come to New York this week. And the fact that, one,
it's blacked out, the president's normal coverage is blacked out, is unprecedented. And then,
two, the fact that no one could land their flights in JFK was also unprecedented. So it's
been a rocky week here in New York City for a lot of different reasons. All right,
we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this.
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bagel shop started to sell suspiciously trendy merch is your favorite neighborhood coffee
spot starting to post Instagram videos with a little too curated of a vibe.
It could be a sign that private equity has moved in on your favorite eateries,
a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends.
The PE-ification of food places is causing an open rebellion amongst consumers
who are tired of funds coming in to try and squeeze out every last dime out of their favorite spots.
The most recent example comes here in New York City,
where Los Tacos No. 1 looks to a fallen victim to an undisclosed investment from the PE firm TSG Consumer.
Despite its founders promising that they are definitely not messing with the tacos,
most people immediately joked how it was the beginning of the end,
where juicy al pastor would give way to juicy profits.
Oftentimes, private equity is wielded as an insult regardless of if a fund is involved or not,
meant to evoke a lack of charm or soullessness.
It has now become a kind of meme where everything gets worse as soon as it's bought by private equity.
Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company, Private Equity, and the Death of the American Dream, told The Guardian.
Greenwell says she teaches high schoolers,
who can't even really articulate what private equity is,
and yet tell her they'd never eat at a place owned by it.
Neil, everyone's had food from one of these places, crumble cookies, blank street coffee.
They all just have this vibe to them.
Trust me here, I don't mind some of them, but I can see why they rub people the wrong way.
They all kind of look the same, and you feel like they just don't have any soul.
But if you're a restaurant owner, and you're seeing a line down the block for your cookies or your ice cream
or your bagels or your tacos, and you want to expand,
what are you supposed to do?
This is a brutal business.
Cost of labor is super high.
You have to pay insurance.
You have to pay rent in New York City.
The margins are very low when it comes to the food industry.
So if you want to expand, sometimes it's impossible not to take outside capital,
which we know the young people have branded private equity,
no matter what kind of outside capital it is.
Those are the people with the money.
And if you're Papa Bagels, and you're seeing so much success in southern Connecticut,
and you want to expand in New York and all these other places that now have,
like Papa Bagels, that's just one example,
you kind of have to go to get somebody to write a check to you,
and then you will be branded as selling out to P.E. by Gen Z.
But they're definitely in a pickle when it comes to expanding.
You can grind it out with low margins for a lot of time.
And you know what?
A lot of restaurant chains have done that.
But if you do want to plot your nationwide expansion,
then you do have to kind of go to private equity and say,
please, I want some of your money.
There also is just this vibe to a lot of them.
And a lot of them,
you just kind of know upon walking in that it is owned by private equity.
A lot of that has to do with the food itself.
They all seem to be the similar vein of cuisine.
It's cookies, it's bagels, it's ice cream.
And there's a reason for that.
Those are very simple and repeatable products.
You don't need highly trained staff.
You don't need a big chef to come in.
Production can be standardized across a lot of different locations.
So it is not an accident that, you know,
you're seeing crumbled cookies, you're seeing blank street coffee,
you're seeing all the same ilk of restaurant taking money from private equity
because they love this place.
They put a lot of money into it, actually.
PD firms invested almost $100 billion in bars and restaurants
between 2014 and 2024, according to CNBC.
However, almost half of the bars and restaurants that filed for bankruptcy
just two years ago in 2024 were backed by private equity.
I'm thinking things like California Pizza Kitchen, RIP, I love CPK.
See, I love it.
Red Lobster in 2024, they were seen as PE being the death knell of them
because you often saddle these companies with a lot of debt
and maybe make them do an endless shrimp promotion
to pad your bottom line or pad your supplier.
So it does come with a lot of strings attached
when these companies go to private equity and say,
I want you to help me expand.
Half of all the bankruptcies two years ago were backed by private equity.
I just think it's so funny, too, that it's just become this insult
that you throw around, regardless of if it's true or not.
Some people are saying, if I see a place with more than two locations,
I get suspicious.
I'm like, well, come on.
Can we not have ambition anymore?
Can you not say, oh, people love my delicious tacos here.
I'm going to open another shop.
So it's certainly in the lexicon of Gen Z in particular right now.
They love tossing it out as an insult.
All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines.
The stock market closed out summer with a bang.
Soaring tech stocks lifted the Nasdaq a ginormous 2.3%.
And the $1 trillion market clap club,
welcomed a new member, the chip maker, AMD and NVIDIA rival,
who's been on a tear rising more than 180% year to date.
Yesterday's rally appears to be linked to Meta's ultra popular Muse AI agent,
which has topped the app store and fueled optimism over demand for the CPUs
needed to run agentic AI.
Meta, for instance, is AMD's second biggest customer,
making up 5.5% of its revenue.
Bloomberg notes, Meta shares had their best day since April, 2025, up 11.4%.
Whenever we get.
A big day in the market like this,
people start to point out that it's a very bifurcated market because literally just
muses adoption percentages and numbers brought the market to all time highs,
but that's not actually indicative of the entire health of the market under the surface.
More stocks fell to new 52 week lows on Monday that rose to 52 week highs.
Also right now, the technology sector is making up 51% of the S&P 500 market cap.
This is supposed to be a big day for the market.
It's supposed to be the diversified cross section of every industry in America.
And yet over half of that is coming from one sector alone.
So anytime you are seeing these all time highs look under the surface,
you might not see quite as robust of an, not economy, but as robust of a market as,
you know, in years past when the market reaches all time highs.
Moving on, Seattle is adding a new protected class people whose relationship status requires a shared Google calendar.
The city council unanimously approved a measure to ban a polyamorous and non-monogamous relationship from discrimination,
meaning businesses will have to make sure decisions about hiring or serving customers aren't based on someone having multiple partners.
Sounds like a niche law, but the dating pool here is bigger than you think.
Research cited by the city shows roughly 5% of Americans are currently in consensually non-monogamous relationships,
while estimates put the share of people who have tried one at about 20%.
Seattle also isn't going about.
This solo Portland, Oakland and Berkeley have adopted similar protections.
Neil, big week for throuples.
And I got to give you credit for a great joke.
When I shared this link last night, I said, I think people will be into this.
And you replied, multiple people will be into this.
And I literally laughed out loud when I read that.
So good job, Toby.
To me, it always strikes me that whenever you see a more progressive law like this coming at the city level, it is always the same cities.
There's always Oakland.
It's always Berkeley.
It's always Cambridge.
It's always Somerville in Massachusetts.
And it's always Seattle.
They've always been on the vanguard of these things that you might raise your eyebrows about,
but maybe become more normalized in the subsequent decades.
For example, Seattle residents were the first in the U.S. to vote in favor of legal protections for LGBTQ plus people back in the 1970s.
Now they're doing it for polyamory.
Finally, if you find yourself in Los Angeles today, then you'll be in town for one of the most hyped museum openings of the year.
Star Wars creator George Lucas's Museum of Narrative Art.
The gigantic, curvaceous $1 billion building, instantaneously an architectural landmark, features the massive collection of Lucas and his wife, Melody Hobson, with more than 1,300 works on view, including Norman Rockwell paintings, manga art, and yes, of course, a Star Wars display highlighted by a Naboo and one star fighter.
Lucas has said the museum was created to honor humanity's stories and the artists who illustrate them.
I encourage you to look up a picture of this thing.
Because it is awesome.
I don't even know what I'm looking at.
It is curvaceous, as you put it.
Also, it's been in the works for a long time.
And George Lucas proposed this idea 15 years ago.
He broke ground for it in 2018.
And it was set to open in 2021, but officially opened to the public today.
So a long time coming.
Also, it wasn't always going to be in Los Angeles.
It was originally he wanted to be in San Francisco.
But then they kind of rejected his plans more than a decade ago.
He then considered.
Chicago eventually Los Angeles won the the project and last night, Samuel L.
Jackson, who plays Mace Windu in Star Wars, was not diplomatic about the cities that missed out.
He said it could have been Chicago could have been Frisco, but everybody they blew it.
We have it now.
It is ours.
Definitely go there.
It's going to become a big tourist attraction and it looks really cool too.
That is all the time we have.
Thanks 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 at MB Daily Show.
Let's roll the credits.
Emily Milliron is our supervising producer.
Raymond Liu is our senior producer.
Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake.
Technical direction by Nina Miller.
Hair and makeup sold out to private equity.
Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
Great show, Daniel.
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