We all love connecting over a video call a quick text or that group chat that literally never sleeps. AT&T's got a deal worth texting the group about. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with eligible trade-in. It has the ultimate Pro camera system and big leap in battery life so you can turn this deal into a long lasting connection. Connecting changes everything. Requires trade-in of $230 or more an eligible plan. Comes and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Good morning, Brudeli Show. I'm Neil Freiman. I'm Toby Howell. Today, Elon Musk wants to give one SpaceX share to every child in America, but how? Then, the internet is obsessed with hot, haunt Halloween sliders. It's Tuesday, October 20th. Let's ride. A brand new baseball champion will be crowned. The Tampa Bay Rays defeated the Guardians last night to reach the World Series where they'll face the Milwaukee Brewers in a battle of the Virgins. Neither of these clubs has ever won a World Series. Toby, congratulations. You grew up in the Tampa area and I know you've been following this race run closely, but I am curious. Can you name three players on the team? OK. This is a business podcast. I'm a sports podcast, Neil. I am just going to go on record though and defend the race honor a little bit. Trump can't have field widely considered the worst ballpark in the MLB and I get it. People say it feels like a dark life was warehouse. It's not even located in Tampa, pitiful attendance, zero atmosphere, but go watch some of these highlights, Neil, and you'll see the crowd pops of a great World Series run and you will see that the drop has some juice. Did I just use that to divert from the fact that it's probably not, but that's not important. It's about the vibes, Neil. I think I have to root for the brewers. Brew crew. Brewers. Oh, it's literally, I'm a company man I get here for almost 10 years, but also, yeah, they just seem like an awesome team. They haven't been the World Series since 1982. They've been really good for a bunch of years now, a really small market. And yeah, their home park is a lot more rocking than tropical field though, every single one pretty much is. So I am putting my stake in the ground and I'm going to say, let's go brewers. All right. I, uh, junior Camenero, you guys in Shane McLaughlin, the clan of hand. All right. Now we're far sponsor Liberty Mutual. Hey, Neil, how come we don't have a mascot here at Morning Brew? What would our mascot even be? What about an Emu who runs around helping people customize their car and home insurance and maybe could have a friend named Doug who helps them out? That's a Liberty Mutual mascot. We can't just do one for one copy and why would Morning Brew not do something coffee-related like a big mug? No one ever takes my bird related suggestions seriously around here. The important thing to remember here is that Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money. Start your quote at LibertyMutual.com. That's LibertyMutual.com. In the past, if you got really rich and wanted to give away your fortune, you'd slap your name on a hospital wing, a university department, or a library, now you give children an equity stake in your rocket company. How do you do it? In fact, Musk's stock pledge came in response to another charity plan outlined by Anthropic earlier on Sunday. Ahead of its upcoming IPO, the AI company said it would dedicate five percent of its shares to a fund that would make donations to nonprofits, including causes that would mitigate labor market disruptions caused by the very technology it's developing. Without a mount potentially totaling $100 billion, it's being called possibly the largest commitment of philanthropic capital ever made. Toby, I was kind of warming up to the sound of the "Frime and Learning" center, but it seems that's not in vogue anymore. This sheer scale of this philanthropic effort is something that it's difficult to wrap your head around. If Anthropic goes public at a $1 trillion valuation, and if OpenAI goes public at a $1 trillion valuation, remember OpenAI has a foundation associated with it as well. Those two together, that's conservative to $1 trillion, that's roughly $460 billion earmarked for philanthropy, that is five Gates foundations worth. This is a scale unlike we've ever seen and why this is noteworthy as one. It's just a lot of money. But two, who controls it? What does it go towards? What does public good mean to a very small group of people who control a lot of this money? That is why people are saying this is a new era in giving because it's just so much money and the people controlling it have so much power over where it goes. Elon Musk's donation or pledge to give a donation was seemingly a direct response to Anthropic, which we should say is arrival because Elon Musk does have a rival AI company, XAI. An Anthropic rolled out this plan to give 5% of its shares to nonprofits, and then Elon Musk replied on X, his platform, "It's better to give stock and money directly to the people seven hours after Anthropic posted than he goes, I'm going to give every kid in America next year a SpaceX share." The question is, how would he do this? How do you give kids SpaceX shares or stock in general? Seems like there's been a new vehicle for billionaires and major shareholders of big companies to give stock to kids, and that is the Trump accounts, which were released earlier this year, and we've seen a bunch of billionaires and big business owners start to do this. Michael and Susan Dell gave $6.2 billion in cash to these accounts to seed many of these accounts. Also, Elon Musk colleague at SpaceX, Gwen Shotwell, and her husband said they're donating one SpaceX share to more than two million children via Trump accounts. So Elon Musk didn't exactly elaborate on how he would do this, but President Trump later in the day did confirm or seemingly suggest that he would be funneling all this money through Trump accounts, which $60 million have signed up for already. There's lots of skepticism around Silicon Valley becoming kind of the epicenter of charity at this point. A lot of people are just dubious. One, who gets to design what the public good is? Another people say that this is just universal basic income. A lot of tech leaders have always wanted to kind of have this idea of just depositing money directly to people to offset some of the disrupting effects of AI. But then some are just like, this is clearly them trying to curate public favor ahead of big IPOs. How did you get the public on your side, which right now it is decidedly not? You just give away a lot of money. So those are some of the big question marks and skeptics around this large, you know, charitable effort. And especially because anthropic does have ties to the effective altruism movement, which is famously exemplified by Sam Bakeman-Fried, who is now in jail for mega fraud. But this is a movement that uses data logic, cost effectiveness to maximize life saves or suffering reduced per dollar. It's very scientific, very logical. It rubs a lot of people the wrong way of like, for example, Daria Amade, the CEO of Anthropic. Back in 2010 said that an adult death is perhaps two or three times worse than an infant's death. The effective altruist defend this by saying, I'm putting pen to paper, I'm going to the spreadsheet and saying, how can I save the most lives with every dollar that I spent? But then you get, you start putting value on particular people's lives and one is bigger than the other and it gets a little messy. But there are plenty of defenders of effective altruism, still even though it's been tainted with a little SPF. But I think the big picture here is we are a new era of philanthropy because we have all of these AI people now in charge of who gets all this money. The world's most famous museum, closed, luxury stores, shut down, major conferences postponed, spent a violent few days and weeks in major population centers in Europe and the Gulf causing costly disruptions to business as usual. In France, which experience its worse riding and looting in years over the weekend, officials imposed curfews and offered aid to businesses that had their windows smashed in and items looted. An executive at the giant grocer Kerafour estimated that the protests had cost hundreds of millions of euros in damage already. That's not even counting the longer term impact of France's tourism industry, which could see a chill. The Louvre Museum in Paris, the most visited in the world, was shuttered Monday morning and high end hotels in the capital reported cancellations among visitors. Violence or the threat of violence has also interrupted high profile events in the Gulf. Yesterday, Saudi Arabia postponed its premier investing conference known as Davos in the desert that was slated to take place next week. The kingdom has come under sustained misal fire from Yemen's Houthi rebels, creating a too risky situation when you're trying to bring in the most powerful bankers in the world, like JP Morgan's Jamie Diamond and Black Rock's Larry Fink. Toby, geopolitical instability is catching up to the business world. Yeah, let's start with France. The government estimated that more than 3,000 businesses nationwide had been looted, including a lot of the biggest luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Selene. The list goes on and what they are now trying to do is crack down on that merchandise appearing online because you missed the first wave. The stores got looted.
You can't do anything about that, but what you can do is start tracking these goods and make sure that the people who stole them don't reap the rewards. So that is what they're working on right now, but it looks like the French government was just wholly unprepared for the size and scale of these riots. They thought that fewer than 200,000 protesters would hit the streets. The actual number was over 500,000, so it just completely kind of took the security forces within the country by surprise, which is why you're seeing these pretty shocking images spreading across social media, right? Speaking of shocking images, some of the most shocking have been the tourists who are just sitting there at cafes while the while everything kind of burns around them. It's that it's that meme come to life and one of the big cultural events, one of the big tourism events that's happening in France, slated for Sunday is an NFL game. The first ever regular season game to be held in France, the Pittsburgh Steelers are supposed to face the New Orleans Saints at the Stoddiff France and the Saints Twitter posted this tweet that said, we're going to France, as France was kind of burning there, the NFL yesterday came out and said, we still are intending to play this game, but obviously some hairy times over there to stage an event that has 70, 80,000 people attending. And then as for Saudi Arabia, we've spoken about this, but Saudi Arabia is trying to show that it is this country that can attract foreign investment and contract tourists and it wants to diversify away from oil and this Davos in the desert conference is a massive mainstay of that push. The event brought $50 billion in deals last year and has yielded $250 billion in commitment since its inception back in 2017. So it is a major money making and dealing hub. So the fact that it canceled it shows just how serious it is taking its own security issues in that region. Moving on, as we enter midterm season, politicians are not the only ones preparing for a shake-up. Everyday investors are also rethinking their portfolios, trying to jockey into position before elections with young people especially concerned and visiting with their brokerage accounts. Three in four Gen Z investors are changing or thinking about changing their portfolios ahead of November midterms according to a nationwide retirement institute survey conducted by Harris-Paul. That is more than four times rate of baby boomers and by far the most active generation. The biggest move the youths are making is de-risking. 24% say they moved money into more conservative investments ahead of the election. That's compared to just 13% of boomers who did the same showing that if you already have gray hairs, you're less worried about an election cycle creating new ones. Perhaps nowhere is this midterm meddling more apparent than in defense stocks, as traders confront the possibility of Democrats winning one or both of the House and Senate. They are selling off defense stocks since a good showing by Democrats could complicate Trump's desire to raise defense spending by half a trillion dollars. Names like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grunman are both down more than 20% since their March peaks. The advice from most financial advisors is "do nothing" but clearly young people are feeling election anxiety and are making some strategic or emotional moves to prepare for a potential switch-up. Same survey, two-thirds of advisors and financial professionals said, "Literally don't touch anything and here's why it's that pretty much every single time there is a midterm election, then stocks will go up after." The S&P 500 has delivered positive returns in the 12 months after a midterm election and every midterm going back to 1950 does not matter which party is in control is in power. Stocks will go up 12 months after a midterm election and not just a little bit, a lot of bit. The market's average return during that year after a midterm is 15% compared to the long-term historical average annual return of about 10%. So that's why you're seeing professionals in this space saying, "You're getting too emotional, you're getting caught up in the election hype, you're scared that things will break one way or the other, you're getting all defensive, but the real thing to do is just set it and forget it." Not that other generations don't feel anxiety around the election because they clearly do. More than half of all investors said that the midterms are making them more anxious and roughly three-quarters believe the outcome could affect their long-term financial plans, but Gen Z are just much more likely to act on those feelings than older generations. And part of it is just truly what stage of life you're in. Young people are always probably going to react more to micro cycles than older people because older people have just seen more. They've been through a lot of these midterm elections. So it's not just that Gen Z is uniquely anxious about the state of the economy and what these elections might do to it. It's just that they are much more likely to click sell or click buy on different stocks in their brokerage accounts. And you mentioned defense stocks, not defensive stocks. That's kind of another term, but defense stocks, it's been super interesting because if you're talking about a correlation that is so direct, then it is the Democrats' chances of taking both the House and the Senate with defense stocks going down. So we've seen the U.S. aerospace and defense ETF fall 16 percent between the beginning of July and mid-October. That's compared to a 3.5 percent rise in S&P. Over that same period where defense was falling 16 percent, we saw expectations, according to Kowshi, that Democrats will retake both chambers, rise 20 percent. So if you chart that, it will literally look like an X on your axis, on your X and Y axis. No, it's very interesting to see that literally anything that has the name Trump or golden in it will probably get next if the Democrats win it right now in Kowshi. It's north of 60 percent, about 64 percent that Democrats will take the House and the Senate. So the golden fleet of Trump-class battleships, the golden dome missile protection system, all those things that Trump has branded by himself, Democrats are going to come in and kill and that's why investors are responding by selling off defense shares. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. What's the best thing you've ever gotten out of a work trip, Neil? The friends I made along the way? Oh, that's not good at all. You should try getting better things like rewards. With Hotels.com, business days can help fund the next getaway. Members save up to 20 percent earn rewards on workstays and can redeem them on future travel making every work trip more valuable. Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every workstay at Hotels.com/MorningBrew. That's Hotels.com/MorningBrew. LoyaltyMembers, 18 Plus. A new genre of hunks are knee-sliding straight into social media's heart this Halloween season. Hunt Sliders, a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. Now here at NBD, we do not judge what people are attracted to, some are into here and make-up jokes, others a well-executed good morning. But if you go on TikTok during spooky season, you will likely stumble across a ravenous fanbase, positively thirsting after a group of stunt performers at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania called The Decade Brigade. The two biggest stars, Freiboy and Archer, are known for dropping to the ground and sliding across the pavement in modified metal knee pads and gloves to pop up in surprise unsuspecting guests. They are sliders and the internet is hot under the collar for them. I'm going to read some of these comments posted under their TikTok videos that business insider reporter Katie Natopoulos dug up, but I warn you skip this part if you have young children around. Under one Freiboy and Archer video from last fall, a comment with over 18,000 likes reads, Freiboy looks like he talks you through it. Archer looks like he knows how to do that thing your ex couldn't do. One with 160,000 likes reads that make up stays on with a capital on. Under a video of Valkyrie, a slider who's a woman, another woman wrote, "Me and my husband aren't that serious. The thirst knows no bounds, which is helping Hershey Park's bottom line attendants to their dark nights Halloween event has increased year after year since the sliders first debuted back in 2021 and is now double that of the pre-slider days." Neil, this was totally new to you, both the concept of sliders and the fact that people were losing their minds over them. I applaud you for avoiding horny Halloween TikTok, but now that you've seen them in action, do you get it? This is a proper Toby's Trends in the sense that I've never heard of this before. Can't fathom why people are traveling literally from Australia to Hershey, Pennsylvania to get slid up on. So, I'm just going to ask you questions. My first question is, what is the athletic component of sliding? Are they doing anything particularly interesting from an athletic perspective? We can hit the horny stuff later on. Absolutely they are. There's actually a big training regime that goes along with getting these stunt actors up to date on how to become a slider. First, it started out very basic. This started back in Notsbury farm a couple of years ago. It was 1973. 1973, very basic skills and roles, but now they started jumping over other people, four bodies at a time, so they've really taken it to a next level, but you have to train. You have to learn how to creep and move like a monster. You need to learn how to walk in character. You need to know how to growl and make frightening noises. I was thinking about this. Try to growl and don't do it on air, but it is difficult to know what is scary and what is not. Absolutely, the training is more serious than you might expect and they are athletes. Yeah, I assume that. Also, I said a lot to do with, obviously, their costumes, but also their knee pads and elbow pads. They put metal on them so they can slide, so that is important and just haunted stuff in general is such a booming business for theme parks. You have six flags universal and Disney all moving their haunted areas up.
to August. That's where they start because this is the only growing section of the theme park sector is their haunted sections. So they're just like, "Why don't we extend this season? We're going to go away." And we're seeing this with Halloween in general. It's just so booming right now. It's a multi-billion dollar business from costumes to candy to everything else and now theme parks. But they're just extending this period where you can get spooked now, but with sliders from August and it's going well into November. So this is becoming a huge part of their business. And we're seeing it with Hershey Park who's saying, "Yeah, we're seeing people from Australia come and want to meet the sliders. We're seeing people come from Europe. We're seeing people come from South America not to mention other parts of the United States. People driving eight hours to Hershey, Pennsylvania. I didn't even know people went to Hershey, Pennsylvania from two hours away and now they're flying to it. So that's the power of these sliders. I do love to that other theme parks have realized that, oh, people love this kind of stuff and have tried to create their own sort of dark romance themed scare zone sea world Orlando did this, but the internet was like, no, you're trying too hard. The reason why everyone loves these Hershey Park guys is because it was so organic. They didn't set out to be, you know, these sex symbols. They just set out to be who they are and they just happened into this versus if you tried to engineer that, it doesn't work. So it has to be organic. You can't try to force the attraction of these people thirsting over these scare sliders. All right, let's put into the finish with some final headlines. Like me, after a particularly epic bachelor party in Montreal about a decade ago, Alberta does not want to leave Canada. In a referendum yesterday, voters in the oil rich western province rejected a plan that would tee up another vote to leave Canada. It wasn't particularly close either. 76% opted to remain. Well, just 23% wanted the ability to vote on separating. It's a win for Prime Minister Mark Carney who's been on a big push to keep Canada united as it faces aggression from its southern neighbor, the US. Despite separatists, best efforts, Alberta still trails Quebec and the comes close to leaving Canada department. Quebec has held two official referendums on separating from Canada, which were defeated both times in 1980 and 1995. Cardi got to lean on his bank of England days. He had called this referendum a dangerous bluff and pointed to Brexit to argue that separation would come with a lot of bad economic consequences. He also has some cred because he was raised in the province and has been easing some environmental measures and is backing a new oil pipeline. Some of their major gripes there. So it looks like he positioned himself well to keep Canada united at a time where it's trying to bat above its world. It's wait on the world stage. And imagine you go to Edmonton Oilers or Cogrey Flames game and they have to play three different national anthems before. I mean the game would start at 730 got the United States one, Canada and then whatever the Republic of Alberta would be. All right, let's move on. It didn't know this but your friend who makes craft beers in his garage totally legal if not a little behind the times but your friend who tries to distill some whiskey federal criminal. The line between those two friends is up for debate after the Supreme Court agreed yesterday to hear a challenge to a nearly 106 year old federal law that makes it illegal for Americans to distill liquor in their own homes. Right now if you produce your own whiskey vodka or gin, it could land you five years in prison and in $10,000 fine. The law dates back to 1868 when Congress cracked down on moonshiners who were dodging federal alcohol taxes but to appeals court recently disagreed over whether the government has the constitutional authority to ban home distilling as a way to collect those taxes. Home distillers argue that Americans should have the freedom to make their own spirits and thanks to the course decision have their chance to make their case. You know, the era of DIY booze could yield horrors that make prime for locosy mild. Yeah, the player for the plaintiff said in a statement our country's founders would be rolling over in their graves to learn that a pastime in which even George Washington Park took which is as American as apple pie and certainly a lot older has quite absurdly been turned into a federal crime. I don't know if that's the best argument because George water did a bunch of other stuff that you probably we would not do now, but anyway, that's the sort of their claim. Have you had moonshin? Because if you go to the south, moonshin cherries, which is dangerous. Everything's dangerous about it. Yeah, yes, but continue. No, but like if you go to the south or North Carolina, they sell legal moonshine. They just call it moonshine. It's just corn whiskey that's made by licensed distillers and they usually like spice it with apple pie fruit, things like that. So is it good or is it just no? No, it's really, really sweet. It's really, really alcoholic and your face just puckers. So I kind of think that people doing at their home can make it better than what's on the market now. Remember how many people used to make craft beer in their home? That has completely died out. So maybe the next spiritual wave is just bringing back spirit distilling, just skipping IPAs in general and just going straight to the hard stuff. My uncle and my cousin make wine in their basement. There we go. It actually tastes pretty good. All right, imagine traveling to a remote Pacific island filled with giant crabs in the belief you've uncovered a 90 year old mystery only to find out what you thought you had discovered was actually a clump of trees. That was a reality for a 17 member US expedition on the hunt for Amelia Earhart's long lost plane. Yesterday, the Purdue University funded team acknowledged that the white object they suspected of being the aviators Lockheed Electra 10E was an actuality a couple of trees. This mystery has been ongoing for 90 years and the mystery continues. Crew member Rick Pettigrew said from an adult in Kira Bhatti about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. It's going to be a long journey home. You can't bring 17 people to investigate this. You got to send one guy or one girl to just see if this is actually something. If you roll up with a squad of 17, that is just so awkward when it doesn't end up being true. This team of 17 couldn't even sleep on the island or the atel where they were looking for this potential plane piece because it was home to gigantic coconut crabs. If you haven't looked up what a coconut crab looks like, please do it. They are straight out of Halloween Horror Nights. They are gigantic land dwelling crabs. You had never heard of them, but they're often referred to as a robber crabs crabs because they take potential food. Not only did you fly halfway around the world with 17 people and not find a plane, but you also were going toe-to-toe with these gigantic robber crabs. If they take my food, that's the least of my words. I'd be happy here. You're taken. Let me never see you again. Did you look them up? There's so big. It is the largest living terrestrial arthropod. It can grow up to these crabs can grow up to three feet across and weigh up to nine pounds. I'm telling you, pair them with the sliders and you got yourself a heck of a Halloween attraction. Okay, 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 @NBDailyShow. 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 Leak, technical direction by Nina Miller, hair and makeup is looking for Amelia and her show is a production of MorningBrew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Contentful in partnership with The Atlantic released their latest report that maps out the five questions marketing leaders need to answer to succeed in the agentic web era. The report helps marketing leaders figure out what they need to decide when it comes to defining AI's role within their team, the risk of deferral if no one makes a call, what success looks like and the review cadence needed to stay on top. To see all the findings go to contentful.com/morningbrew.
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