Are you sucking wind from trying to keep up with AI and its impact? Take a breather and tune in to the Intelligence Shift, Morning Brew's new podcast with PWC. It bridges the gap between big picture AI concepts and what it actually means in practice. Host Dan Priest is joined by expert guest to discuss AI's role in sports, music, HR, and more. Listen to the Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning for daily show, I'm Neil Friman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Apple's foldable iPhone hits stores today, but who's going to buy it? Then an unexpected winner of the data center build out? Gray paint. It's Friday, October 23rd. Let's ride. I'm going to ask a quick favor. Clear your calendars for December 17th, because that night under the bright lights of the Grammar City Theater in New York City, we will be hosting a live show, the M.B.D. holiday spectacular. Last year was the first holiday show, and it was such a blast we're running it back at an even bigger venue. What you can expect, games, trivia, a gift exchange, Toby doing something completely ridiculous and plenty of holiday cheer to go around as we put a bow on 2026. Why are we telling you this now? Well, pre-sale is live today. So snag your ticket now before they're all gone. Oh, the M.B.D. live show, how I've missed you. I think I'm most excited for the bigger theater. Grammar City Theater is iconic. It's in the middle of Manhattan. Last year we had a packed house in Goanis, Brooklyn, because you all are incredible. This year hopefully the commute is a little easier. Yeah, as Neil said, as a reward for everyone who is listening right now today, we're offering up a discount $10 off tickets when you use the code M.B.D. pre-sale. We've linked it in the show description. We give you permission to pause the show right now, buy a ticket and come back. We'll see you in 10 seconds and we'll also see you on December 17th at the Grammar City Theater. And now a word from our sponsor Liberty Mutual. Sorry for this one listeners, but Neil, check out my new shoes. Totally customized just for me. Oh, wow. Did that save you any money? No. In fact, getting something custom cost me a lot of money. Some might say too much money. So much money that, uh, do you think you could spot me for lunch? No. And it sounds like your shoes and Liberty Mutual have nothing in common. Then Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money. They go above and beyond to help you save kind of like how I went above and beyond in the name of fashion. Start your quote at Liberty Mutual.com. That's Liberty Mutual.com. Apple's new, affordable phone is as expensive as a MacBook. Big as an iPad and comes years late to the foldable party. Will customers embrace the big boy? The iPhone duo hits stores today. Early reactions from reviewers paint a picture of a device that has some words, but is mostly worth the weight. As expected, the first thing early access testers did was fold it as many times as possible to stress test the tech at the heart of the duo. Reviewer and friend of the pod Joanna Stern went as far as to build a custom robot to fold it more than 32,000 times. She found a deep increase, but no noticeable deterioration in the hinging mechanism, with the phone feeling nearly the same as it did fresh out of the box, something she described as insanely impressive. But that solid construction comes at a price. One clear theme across reviews is that this thing is heavy, clocking in at 254 grams, bit more than the iPhone Pro Max and 2/3 as much as a full can of soda. Many reviewers pointed out other unpolished quirks she wouldn't expect from Apple like a lack of Face ID, a penchant for heating up way too much, and the fact that a mag safe wallet hangs over the squatty phone's edge. Despite the hefty price tag and some rough edges, customers are excited, and this online order sold out in minutes with delivery timelines stretching into January. Expect to see some lines at stores today, too, with only limited units being distributed for walking customers. Apple doesn't need this thing to sell a billion units, but it does need to show it can still captivate people at their years of marginal iPhone upgrades. I would say the duo is more about replenishing its aura than actually moving the bottom line. I think that's right. Who is going to buy this? And I think the reviewers had a particular consensus is that this is a great product for early adopters. These are the people who bought the first iPhone while the rest of us were still on blackberries, and they showed it to you around. These are the people who are very much diehard Apple fans as well. They always go for the max version, for the pro version, and now they have something that has a little more bells and whistles, so they're going to upgrade from maybe a pro max to the foldable iPhone. And the other segment of people are just iPad guys. We all know iPad guys like they are on the couch every Sunday with their fantasy football lineup on their iPad. While we're here with our smaller iPhones, these people might spring to go for a device that has the capability of an iPad with that bigger screen, but also folds into a phone that you can put in your pocket. Is it going to move the bottom line? I know I said it's more about the aura than the actual money itself, but JP Morgan does expect the duo to have an impact on iPhone revenue because of its much higher selling price. Again, they're not going to sell a ton of units. Remember, if you look at what the global market is for smartphones, foldable units only make up about 2% of that, but they make up 7% of industry revenue. That's exactly what Apple is targeting here. Maybe the guy who would have gone for the pro max incrementally upgrades to the duo because it costs more money. And then they also think it could create a halo around the rest of the iPhone lineup. Maybe you go in, you want to see the duo, you want to get your hands on it, but then you walk out with a lower price iPhone. That could drive sales as well. Is that classic anchoring effect that they teach you to go shading skills where you put out a device that's $2,000. So all of a sudden, the $1,200 one doesn't seem so bad. It seems like this particular device is pretty good for a V1. I would say the general thought was that the hardware is great. You can fold this 32,000 times and it'll still work just fine. The problem is in the software a little bit. Yes, there's no face ID. There is touch ID. And another thing that reviewers pointed out was that there's a camera downgrade from the iPhone 18 pro models. One at petapixel called it, the camera is the epitome of fine. So you're not going to get an amazing camera. And then the final knock that they had on the duo was that there is not a great app optimization for this particular double screen. Some apps, some third party apps. I don't know if it's like Disney Plus or all these other things that are just separate from the Apple ecosystem haven't made their apps compatible with a foldable iPhone. So you're watching a movie and maybe like Simba is looking all weird and stuff. And that's because just Disney hasn't really made the effort yet to optimize their apps with their iPhone with the iPhone duo. So that is a fixable problem that it's one thing that the reviewers noted. Yeah, a lot of reviewers are saying actually just wait till this ecosystem matures before buying this thing because it's nothing worse. You have this awesome foldable screen. And then there's black bars filling the empty space because most of the apps are still optimized for a normal iPhone screen. I did see some cool use cases. The number one being the Nintendo DS emulation. What is an Nintendo DS? If not a foldable iPhone on, like, you know, hamburger side. So people were going down an nostalgia rabbit hole playing on their iPhones like it was an old DS. So maybe you never know what is going to be the killer use case. Maybe it's something as simple as just bringing back the retro feel of a gaming console on your new iPhone. And he told people to wait. Well, they probably don't have a choice because some of these orders have been, you know, it's been so in demand that these orders have been pushed back to delivery until January. So maybe the apps will be optimized by then. You can create your own little Nintendo DS on your iPhone. I move it on one of the most storied and controversial tourist traditions in the world is coming to an end yesterday. The New York City Council voted to ban horse carriages from Central Park, come June 20, 28, leaving animal rights activists ecstatic, but people who drive those carriages outraged. This has been a long time coming. Campaigners have been criticizing the horses use in the park for literal centuries, citing mistreatment and abuse. And the two most recent New York mayors have pledged to get rid of them only for those efforts to fall by the wayside. This summer, however, the movement was catalyzed when an 18 year old Indian tourist visiting with his family died when he fell after a horse bolted off. Since that incident, enough lawmakers have gone behind the ban to clear it through city hall in a vote of 42 seven. But New York will still have to figure out the thorny question of what do you do with the 200 drivers owners and stable hands who you're about to put out of work? Because when you're the government and you shut down an industry that allows your constituents to pay the bills, you need a plan for what they're going to do after you take away their livelihood. And while that seems to be a work in progress, the bill requires an industry transition plan by next April. But the Union opposing the carriage ban, the transport workers union local 100 says that's merely empty promises. They are pledging to seek a court order to block the ban from going into effect, quote, before the ink dries. That is the big question here is how do you transition this industry? Not just the humans involved in it, but also the horse is involved. A lot of people pointed out, it's going to be difficult to find homes for these animals. One, particularly a question and minded city councilman said, sometimes it takes months to find suitable lifeline and accommodation for even one 26 year old retired horse. Then he estimated the cost of caring for a horse at $25,000 a year. So that is something that you don't necessarily think about when you pass a, I mean you do think about it when you pass.
this horse carriage ban is what comes next for every aspect of this industry? What is the safety record of the horse carriage industry? Because that's really what this all hinges on. Is this abuse? Is this mistreatment of the horses? Does this put horses and humans in danger? Well, according to the Manhattan Borough Presidents Office, since 1982, 40 horses working in Central Park have died and most of them have to do with overheating and collisions in the past 13 months alone, according to the Central Park Conservancy. There have been seven horse-related incidents. However, the opponents of the ban, the people who work in the industry are quick to point out that what happened this summer with the Indian Tourist is the first known death of a carriage passenger in the industry's entire history. And remember, this goes back over 150 years. So it looks like whatever side of the debate is on, you have some ammo to say, yes, this is safe for the horses. They actually like to work. They are working animals or the opposite who say, no, we've had 40 horses. This has died in just the past couple of decades. And this has been raging for decades. In 1866, after Henry Berg witness a beating of a carriage horse, he established the American Society for the Prevention of Guilty Two Animals. That is the ASPCA to protest the horse harassment. So without the carriage horses, we wouldn't have those sad Sarah McLaughlin commercials. There is a direct tie between the ASPCA being formed and the horses in Central Park. As you mentioned, this is going to be legally challenged. The Union's lawyer said one potential avenue for that challenge is that there's nothing to compensate for the many thousand dollars you have to spend to buy a carriage medallion from the city. It works much like a taxidement dallion. There's only 68 of them that go around that can cost up to $400,000. So I think that's going to be the vector for attack you're going to see for this legal defense. It's stock the week, dog the week time, the segment where we pick one stock that is living on a prayer and one stock that showed up to find a levy that was dry. I won the pre-show game of name dropping thanks to an assist from my good friend Tom Brady. So I'm up first and my stock the week is paint, specifically gray paint. Millennial gray might be going out of style in kitchen backsplashes, but it's found another home in data centers, PPG, a 24 billion dollar paint company base in Pittsburgh expects its paint sales to data centers to triple this year. One of its VPs told The New York Times I've never seen a boom as big as this. It costs a lot of money to fill a data center within video chips, but it also costs up to $8 million to paint its guts and exterior in order to protect the expensive brains contained inside. This is not an art project you can prepare for at Michael's Crafts. The coatings used by tech companies are highly engineered to fireproof certain components, reduce static electricity and prevent rust. All told, PPG makes paint for more than 75 individual data center components, including everything from water pipes to security camera housings. The shades of these coats aren't going to make it into architectural digest anytime soon. Since nobody is really there to look at data centers, tech companies are content to pick from an exciting roster of colors from PPG that include light gray, gray, and dark gray. But PPG and competitors like Sherman Williams are happy to ride this gray wave, especially as the overall consumer paint environment remains slow. Neil, what if the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow is actually a bucket of gray paint? Toby, I have to correct you. It's not paint. It's coating. It's industrial coating. This is as close to paint as I am to remember in. And you have to put, you have to give these companies some kudos because when the data center boom began about three years ago, they were ready and they pounced with this all-in-once data center package that they can sell to these data center operators in charge of million or 10 million bucks at a trade show back in April in Washington, PPG rolled out this package for data centers. They're like, we are your all-in-one shop for everything in need. You got paint that will be fire resistant. We have primers that present the steel from rusting. We have flooring for you as well. We have coating. So we got literally everything you need come to shop with us for your data center needs. And I got to talk about this toasted marshmallow paint or coating. It's called Steel Guard 951. It's one of PPG's flagship products and it is fireproofing coating for structural steel and the way that it works is it begins only one millimeter thick. It's just a normal coat of paint. But when you expose it to extreme heat, it swells into a crust that expands to 10 millimeters thick. This expanded layer traps air and insulates the steel underneath just like a trapped marshmallow likes to expand. That's why it's called the toasted marshmallow paint. And it can last up to four hours protecting steel the whole time during a fire. So again, why do you need to spend all this expensive money on paint? You're put in billions of dollars of equipment in there. You don't want something as, you know, benign as an electrical fire to take the whole thing down. It can actually contribute to protecting the things that are within these big data centers. Right. Don't think of it as paint. Think of it as a protective layer of coating. Man, I really am going to work against paint, but I actually don't want to talk about paint right now. I want to talk about all these other companies that are under the radar that are benefiting from the data centers similar to paint. I mean, you have, we just had a bunch of reports this summer from companies that you wouldn't think about are doing well, but are absolutely crushing it like Westco International, which distributes wires and cables, three M, which is that big manufacturing glomerate. They make hard hats and sand paper and industrial adhesives that go into data centers. And then you have Vulcan materials and Martin, Marietta materials. What do they make? Asphalt. So all these things are, all these companies are absolutely booming because of data centers, because of AI, because of chat, GPT, and then my final note on this is if you look at the Pittsburgh headquarters, or the Pittsburgh skyline, which I have numerous times, and you see this Lord Farquad looking building. That is the PPG headquarters. It towers above most of the other buildings. I'm looking up Lord Farquad's headquarters now. Lord Farquad's headquarters is castle, put some respect on his name, but it is weird looking. And then also when I was in Cleveland, I saw this huge skyscraper, which was the Sherman Williams, Sherman Williams headquarters. They are huge rivals. So I'm thinking that the Steelers and the Cleveland Browns should be, their rivalry game should be called the Paintball, but it was got PPG versus Sherman Williams. Oh, wow. It also, I am looking at a do-lock right now, Lord Farquad's castle. You nailed it. It looks exactly like the PPG headquarters right there. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Neal's Dog of the Week 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. We all love connecting over a video call, a quick text, or that group chat that never, ever stops pinging. With AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with eligible trade-in. It has the most advanced iPhone camera ever and a 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 in eligible plan, terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Looking good today, Toby. Thanks, man. My StitchFix box came in, so I'm officially one of the top two most stylist co-hosts of Morning Brew Daily. What a coincidence. I'm also one of the most stylish co-hosts here thanks to my StitchFix stylist, which has been helping me look really good on camera. StitchFix makes it easy to look and feel good. Take a quick quiz to get matched with a human stylist who handles the rest. This is StitchFix.com/MorningBrew. My dog of the week is Fancy Stores, Luxury Emporiums that have been the target of riots in France and the target of Wall Street. Last weekend, as protests across France turned violent, stores of the biggest luxury brands were vandalized and looted, Saline Hermes, Louis Vuitton, thieves smashed in their windows and quickly flooded secondhand marketplaces with the stolen items. The symbolism is not lost. The French citizenry are fed up with inequality and the country's luxury sector. Perhaps what France is most known for around the world is a fitting scapegoat. Exclusivity is the point. They want you to know about the Birkenberg, make it omnipresent in your life, but no, you'll never make enough to afford one. As Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times put it, "Rather than being symbols of artisanship and patrimony, as luxury brands tend to describe themselves in their offerings, they're goods become emblems of excess and capitalist rot." In response, shaken luxury companies are boosting security at stores, adding metal grates to windows and preparing for another wave of protests that are expected to take place tomorrow. If only the trouble stopped there. The entire sector is mired in a three-year slump as consumers, particularly in China, are trimming their purchases of $1,000 designer handbags and shoes. LVMH, the biggest luxury conglomerate in the world and in industry billweather, has seen its stock plunge 40% this year, and that was before its stores were ransacked. Everything is going wrong for this industry right now. You do not want this to happen at any time, but especially as the Christmas shopping season is getting underway, plus Milan, which is another big European luxury destination. They experience looting in the past few days as well, and then if you just zoom out, this is a third attempt.
on the luxury industry in the last eight years, have go back to 2019, Dior and Chanel shops were looted during demonstrations by the yellow vest over fuel taxes and cost living sounds very familiar. And then in 2023, when there were protests against government pension reform, protesters literally stormed the doors of LVMH's headquarters and burnt an effigy of Bernard Arno, the owner of the group. So this has been a lot of pent up rage against, you know, this particular sector of the industry that has heard its bottom line. >> Which is so interesting because France is so proud of its luxury sector, and that is one of their biggest exports to the world, but I thought this quote from the director of emerging brands initiative at this luxury institute said to the New York Times, France has always cultivated a love-hate relationship with luxury, proud of its global influence, suspicious of its morality and blaming its unequal essence. And so they are very proud of their artisanship and the fact that they're giving these beautiful items to the world. But at the same time, they really hate like Bernard Arno who's the one of the richest people in the world, and they burned an effigy of him and looted all of his stores. >> I was also reading this Vogue business piece and it was talking about how China's domestic luxury industry is maturing. Remember, China has only been a consumer of luxury goods for a long point, but now they're actually becoming a producer of it. Their industry only started back in the '90s, but now there are these fashion houses within China that are attracting one great European talent, but also have great domestic talent and they can challenge the old European fashion houses. So there's this generation of brands getting a foothold in the local market, which is also a headwind that European brands are facing over there. France is not just coming to a standstill with these riots. A lot is still going on there. Art Basel Paris is a big event that is attracting foreign tourists. That is going ahead this week. Also on Sunday, the NFL will host the game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New Orleans Saints at the Stod Day France. So the world's attention is going to be back on France again at a very precarious moment. Who knows what will happen, but I looked back actually. The Champions League final was held in 2022 at the same stadium and after that ended, chaos and violence sprung up as locals class with football European football fans. So that was Liverpool, right? It was Liverpool Real Madrid. I remember it was chaos. Misbehaved fans of those Liverpools. Anyway, security is going to be top of mind as the NFL descends upon this city. Let's go to the finish with some final headlines. After showing a seemingly insatiable appetite for risky stocks, the market finally got some indigestion and fled to safety yesterday. Stock sold off as investors ditched bad boy A.I. names and piled into the warm embrace of government bonds. The tech heavy NASDAQ led the charts into the red, falling nearly 3% for its worst day since June. Wall Street continues to be nervous about the hundreds of billions of dollars being borrowed to fund the A.I. boom, headlined by Mehta, who's among the biggest losers after it revealed it had booked $825 billion in future spending commitments. Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions abound. Oil prices jumped, falling fresh strikes on Saudi Arabia and plans for a renewed US attacks on Iran, with Brent crude on track for its highest closing price since May. And perhaps the clearest sign that investors are getting nervous, money poured into treasury bonds, pushing yields back below 5%. Neil, yucky, yucky out there. It was a horrible day. But there was one company that stood out for being a particular disaster, and that company is Moderna. And this is kind of wild. So they had this big data release scheduled for Saturday on their new highly anticipated personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine, which we talked about, came the first results, came out in August, and everyone was so excited for the possibility of these personalized mRNA vaccines, not just for melanoma, but for a bunch of other cancers. However, the new data showed that this was a little bit of a disappointment. The vaccine reduced the risk of cancer recurrence by 42%, which is still substantial, but it wasn't what investors had hoped. So that's why you saw Moderna shares plummet yesterday. It looks like it's still going to get approval from regulators, but analysts were saying, we're not sure this is going to be the blockbuster commercial drug that we expected. And that data leaked, by the way, it wasn't something that they planned to announce yesterday. So it just came out, which is why you saw such a violent movement a little earlier than maybe shareholders were expecting. Next, the Atlanta Falcons are catching heat and even more jokes after they unveiled a new logo that resembles imagery from Nazi Germany. On Wednesday, the Falcons posted a logo on X with the caption, new PFP or profile picture, featuring their classic bird image overlaid on a black, red, gold, and white background. Social media users were quick to point out that the Falcons logo looked strangely familiar to Nazi logos from the 1930s. And the post went insanely viral, racking up more than 37 million views as of this morning. If you want to get a sense of the commentary, and there was a lot of commentary, one reply went, I'll give this a nine out of 10 and EIN. And another wrote, I must say, I was not expecting to wake up this morning to see that the Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland. Surprisingly, the poster remains up and the Falcons haven't really responded to the backlash. - Yeah, people have started calling it the bird rike. Another said that the designer was an Austrian art school dropout. You get the picture, but I am always fascinated by how seemingly overtly poor decisions make it through ostensibly credible, large organizations. I just think about the amount of eyeballs that saw this logo not a single person made this connection. I need an oral history of how this logo came to be. I need an oral history of how the Cracker Barrel redesigned went. These logo redesigns are just so fascinating with how big they explode on social media, often for the wrong reasons. - And finally, Rebecca Black would be so disappointed in us because no one is getting down on Fridays. New research from the University of North Carolina found that in terms of the time Americans spend with friends, Friday, tonight, is no different than a standard Tuesday. Sociologists Neil Karen, the author of the paper, put it this way, Friday night in America has become just another weeknight. Didn't used to be this way. If you look at a historic chart of friend time, say around the early 2000s, you see two big spikes on Friday and Saturday night, doubling up weekday levels. But sometime around the mid 2010s, something changed specifically on Friday when socializing with friends collapsed. Saturday saw a slight drop off too, but not nearly as much as the night before. Toby, I don't want Friday to feel like every other weeknight. This is a national emergency. - It's so depressing to see data that shows Americans are spending more of their waking lives at home and less time out of it. You can blame COVID, you can blame phones, but this has been gradually building since the 1970s. Color TVs came out in the 1970s, so maybe you can place the blame there. But it looks like people just like staying at home these days. A 2020 Gallup poll found that Americans favorite way to spend an evening was staying at home with family. The runner up was watching television or a movie at home. And then in a 2026 Harris poll on Gen Z, 73% said staying home was their default weekend plan. I think we just need to rebrand a new day as Friday now. - But why is it Friday specifically? I mean, some have pointed to the fact that a lot more people work from home now and particularly work from home on Fridays, so they're not going to work. They're maybe not catching a happy hour with our co-workers after the work week ends, which you know, you've been to a couple of happy hours. They'd evolve and it could go all night to see what people do. Then all of a sudden you're going to the club at 2 a.m. But it's pretty interesting to see what's happening specifically on Friday nights. And I think the refrain you hear is I'm so tired, right? Like, I mean, I'm tired on Fridays, that's for sure. But I'm like, I just Friday, I got to go, but it's pretty depressing. - I think it's just the pull of the home. I mean, yes, Fridays are going down, but everybody is spending more time at home and just people clearly enjoy it. Like, it is their preferred thing to do is just cozy up and watch a movie. And again, I'm not like faulting people are doing that. I love that as much as the next person, but you are seeing it creep further and further in two days where you used to hang out with friends and hopefully the trend does reverse. - That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Friday, maybe your home, maybe you're going out and an even better weekend. Quick shout out to the UChicago football team who's going for their conference championship tomorrow. After our segment on UChicago earlier this week, we heard from a bunch of players on the team that they all listened to MBD must be the reason they're five and one. So good luck out there, boys. 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 Mill iron is our supervising producer. Raymond Loot is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham. And our associate producer is Olivia Lake, Technical Direction by Nina Miller. Heron makeup can't wait to see you all at the holiday show. Don't forget to grab your ticket today and our show is a production of MorningBrew. - Great show day, Neil. I wish you all well. (upbeat music)
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