Technology
OpenAI Inks Massive Deal with AMD & French PM Quits After 27 Days
In this episode, we delve into OpenAI's groundbreaking partnership with AMD, which could reshape the AI landscape, and the political turmoil in France following the resignation of Prime Minister ...
OpenAI Inks Massive Deal with AMD & French PM Quits After 27 Days
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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Good morning, Drew Daly show.
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I'm Neil Fryman and I'm Toby Howell.
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Today, open AI continues to spend more cash than a legacy college freshman with their parents
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credit card.
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Ben France in 2025 is looking less stable than France in 1789.
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After yet another Prime Minister has resigned.
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It's Tuesday, October 7th.
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Let's ride.
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Good morning and happy Tuesday.
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I'll get right to it.
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We're doing another trivia night next Tuesday here in Manhattan and you're going to want
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to be there and bring all your friends.
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Toby and I have been deep in the lab watching hours of game tape on all the greats.
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Trebek, Philbin, Jennings, Barker, Harvey.
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And I've gotten an hour and a half of bar trivia down to a science.
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It's been such a blast meeting all of you during previous trivia nights this year and
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we can't wait to see more of you next week.
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Toby, how do people sign up?
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Oh, to sign up, you must solve Riddles 3 to get an invite from Neil and me.
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First, no, I'm just kidding.
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Head to the link in the show description.
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You are allowed to add one person when you sign up.
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So if you want to roll up with the squad, make sure to toss that sign up link in your group
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chat.
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In the meantime, develop those prefrontal cortexes, gentlemen, ladies, you're good and we'll
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see you all on Tuesday.
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In the artificial intelligence game of thrones, OpenAI is the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and
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Nvidia is the warden of the West.
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But there's an ambitious young prince who wants a spot on the small council.
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And that is the chip maker, AMD.
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Yesterday, OpenAI and AMD announced a massive partnership in which OpenAI committed to buy
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loads of AMD chips and eventually acquire a 10% stake in the company.
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Neither company mentioned dollar amounts specifics, but OpenAI said it would purchase six gigawatts
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worth of AMD chips.
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And one gigawatt of capacity is estimated to cost $50 billion.
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So this is potentially a $300 billion deal.
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AMD stock stored 24% on the day because the agreement was seen as a huge victory as it
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tries to take market share from Nvidia.
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Nvidia has exploded into a $4.6 trillion company, the most valuable in the world because
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it is the dominant supplier of the accelerator chips needed to train and execute AI programs
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like chat GPT.
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AMD has been far less successful in the AI space than Nvidia because its chips aren't
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as good.
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But OpenAI's commitment is a vote of confidence that AMD could become a significant player.
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For OpenAI, wow, it's another astonishingly expensive spending plan that shows how desperate
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it is to lock in the computing infrastructure needed to run its AI systems.
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In an interview about the DLCO Sam Altman said, it's hard to overstate how difficult
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it's become to get sufficient computing power.
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We want it super fast, but it takes some time.
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Toby, help me make sense of this because the AI economy is starting to look like an
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MC Escher painting just two weeks ago in video cloud $100 billion into OpenAI.
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Now OpenAI is plowing billions into its biggest competitor AMD.
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We are going around in circles here.
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Yeah, the circle economy of AI is becoming a real economic risk at this point because
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let's just go through all these deals once more and video invests $100 billion in OpenAI
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OpenAI uses that same capital to buy Nvidia chips.
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AMD gives OpenAI warrants for equity, OpenAI purchases boosts AMD's evaluation and then
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Oracle had this big cloud capacity financing as well that OpenAI wants to rent long term.
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Everyone is looking at this shape of this thing and it really feels circular.
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There's just this financial circularity underpinning the entire AI trade at this point.
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That has a lot of risk because if anyone drops the ball, if anyone can't fulfill their
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side of the bargain, maybe OpenAI doesn't scale revenue like it is expecting to.
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Maybe AMD's chips can't compete with Nvidia like they think they possibly can.
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Things start to get a little bit shaky here.
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This used to be something that financial regulators would look at in the past.
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Now it's underpinning the entire global economy.
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It seems like so.
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That is the word to know.
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It's like financial circularity, the circle economy that seems to be dominating the AI
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trade.
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Sam Altman is perfectly fine with this or at least seems to acknowledge it.
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He said that we are in a phase of the build out where the entire industry has got to come
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together and everybody is going to do super well.
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You're going to see this on chips.
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You're going to see this on data centers.
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You're going to see this lower down the supply chain.
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So far, OpenAI has signed about $1 trillion in deals this year for computing power.
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When you compare this to the build outs in history, I'm thinking railroads or electric
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grids.
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This dwarfs all of those in terms of its scale and size and how many few players are
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concentrated at the top spending trillions of dollars to build data centers.
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But you heard this from Mark Zuckerberg at Metta and you're hearing this from OpenAI as
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well.
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They say they are far more worried about failing because of too little compute than too
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much and that's why they're opening up their checkbooks and spending an astonishing amount
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of money amongst each other to build data centers to power chat GPT.
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You kind of have to say that because what else are you supposed to say when to justify
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this amount of spend?
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I also want to look at OpenAI as the so-called Kingmaker, not just in the AI industry, but
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just in public markets.
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In general, I go back to last week when they unveiled this instant buy option in chat GPT.
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What did that do?
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That sent shares of Shopify and Etsy jumping.
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These are public companies.
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OpenAI is a private company and then obviously yesterday when the steel was announced AMD
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is a very large multi-hundred billion dollar company and yet here is a private company
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announcing a deal and sending their share price soaring.
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So it really is.
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Investors are now looking more closely at a single company in the moves they are making
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to react to in the public markets, which is just not something we've ever seen.
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Even in you go back to the biggest startups of all time, the Google, the Facebook days,
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they weren't moving public equity markets like OpenAI is right now.
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So we're kind of entering uncharted territory when it comes to one company's influence over
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the market in general.
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And more and more leaders are saying, you know what?
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Maybe this is the B word, a bubble last week, last Friday.
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was speaking on a panel and he called it AI, a kind of industrial
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bubble that will mint winners and losers and he predicted sort of shake down in the public
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markets when a lot of this capital that's deployed, we know it's trillions of dollars
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at this point.
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So it doesn't have the returns that many investors are expecting Goldman Sachsio, David
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Solomon said something similar.
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He said there's going to be some sort of drawdown in the public markets in the next one
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to two years because the scale of AI spending is just truly hard to wrap your head around.
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Some estimates suggest that AI CapEx may reach 2% of GDP in 2025, which would be the equivalent
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of about $1,800 per person in America will be invested this year on AI.
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Let's move on.
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Modern France is making a laym is seem like a stable time in the country after their latest
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prime minister Sebastian Lekornu resigned after less a month in office.
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That gives Lekornu the honor of being the shortest serving prime minister in modern
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French history and the third to fall in just a year.
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He pieced out less than a day after naming his cabinet, which was full of many of the
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same ministers from the government that collapsed last month.
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The SNAP resignation was surprising, but the problems plaguing France's government are
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not.
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It has been running deficits above EU limits for years currently at 5.8% of GDP, but any
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attempts to tighten its budget have failed and usually ended up toppling whatever leadership
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was trying to do the tightening.
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Yesterday's decision spilled into the financial markets almost immediately with the country's
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biggest index home to companies like LVMH and Airbus falling more than 1.4%.
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Bond yields also spiked as investors demand higher returns after seeing more risk in
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lending to France.
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It also led to some existential questions for President Emmanuel Macron, who accepted
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Lekornu's resignation without comment, offering only a one-line statement.
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He now faces pressure to either resign himself or dissolve Parliament and call another SNAP
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election.
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Neil so far every attempt to rein in France's ballooning deficit in social spending has
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been met with fierce resistance both from the left who are defending welfare programs
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and from the right who oppose tax hikes.
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It's more of a disaster than trying to fast cook a beef version.
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One of Macron's most loyal supporters, the ecology minister who was appointed less than
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24 hours before he had to quit because the prime minister resigned said, I despair of
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this circus and another lawmaker said we are witnessing an unprecedented political crisis.
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So they understand the dire straits that they are in and the key financial market to watch
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here are bonds and bond yields because when investors get a little scared of what's going
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on in your country, it becomes ungovernable and if people say this is a circus, we can't
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get anything done.
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We need to pass this budget, but they can't because each side is so entrenched.
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Then you're going to see a little bit of a bond market freak out and that seems to be
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what's happening in France.
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The yield on France's 10 year bonds have risen above grises at this point and Greece
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is not exactly known for its fiscal getting its fiscal house in order, but it has compared
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to France which has let these deficits and debts balloon and they're not doing anything
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to cut it because each side won't give a, won't give an inch.
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Yeah, the difference between French and German bond yields which is usually a proxy for
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how risky investors believe one country in the EU's debt to be rose to one of the highest
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levels it's been in several years and it's never good to be in the same sentence as Greek
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bonds when you're trading at the same level as Greece right now.
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But any attempts to rein in this current budget situation has toppled literally three
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governments in 12 months.
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Remember the most recent, or I guess the second most recent PM, Francois Byruh, was
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ousted over a plan.
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He wanted to try to rein in spending by getting rid of two national holidays which to him
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was this big austerity move.
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He wanted to say, hey, we're serious about doing this, but it just shows how deeply
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unpopular any of these measures actually are.
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So right now investors are looking at France and they go, hey, there's a lot of instability
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here.
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Like these people cannot get their coalition together.
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There is no government that wants to see eye to eye which is a very big flag for the
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eurozone's second biggest economy.
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And so Macron now faces three choices.
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He could name a new prime minister which would need to propose a new cabinet, but that
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has sort of failed in the past 12 months.
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He's tried that four different times.
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He could call another snap election to get a new parliament in there.
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This is sort of what sparked the entire chaos in 2024 when he called a new election.
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They got a new parliament and then it was so fractured that they can't get anything
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done.
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Or he could resign himself.
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He said he's not going to do that, but a number of his most loyal supporters have come
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out this morning and say, Macron, I think you got to resign because what we're doing here
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isn't working in the bond markets are starting to freak out.
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What does the gigantic multinational consultancy Deloitte and your high school freshman cousin
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Ethan have in common?
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They both got napped for using AI to cheat on their homework.
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Yesterday, the Australian government announced that Deloitte will partially refund a contract
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for nearly $300,000 after it acknowledged it was partially made using AI.
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Deloitte admitted that some of the footnotes and references that included in the document
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were false, referencing studies from universities in Sydney and Sweden that simply didn't exist.
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The contract was for a, quote, independent assurance review that tasked Deloitte with
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uncovering problems with an automated welfare system, those perhaps too aggressive in punishing
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job seekers.
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Deloitte published a review back in July, but after it was found to contain AI-induced
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errors, it was taken down and a corrected version was uploaded on Friday.
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The Australian government said that conclusions drawn by the report still stood,
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AI hallucinations, notwithstanding, but lawmakers lit into Deloitte for taking shortcuts.
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Labour-Senator Deborah O'Neill said, quote,
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Deloitte has a human intelligence problem.
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This would be laughable if it wasn't so lamentable.
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A partial refund looks like a partial apology for substandard work.
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She added, perhaps instead of a big consulting firm, procurers would be better off signing up
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for a chat GPT subscription.
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And that suggestion strikes at the heart of the existential crisis facing consulting
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giants as AI gained steam.
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On the one hand, they see the generative AI revolution as a huge opportunity for them to help
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companies integrate new technology, their bread and butter.
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On the other, if they're using AI to craft their reports,
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why shouldn't clients cut them out altogether and use AI to save a boatload of money?
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Toby, it's an interesting time to be a consultant.
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Yeah, one of the first confirmed cases of a big four consultancy using generative AI
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in official government work.
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That is just a lot of flashpoint issues in a one single issue.
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And it is created a lot of discourse around it because even though technically the AI
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that they use, chat GPT 40, was licensed and it was approved and it was safe,
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because they failed to mention it in the original report.
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It's leading to a lot of these question marks of, hey, it is very opaque how professionals are
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using AI to do work that they are supposedly supposed to be using their minds for.
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And they are in this awkward spot because obviously every one of these consultancies want to show
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that they are a leader on AI, that they know how to be your Sherpa when it comes to adopting AI
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in your own businesses. But one, they are proving that they're using it far more than they're
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probably telling you. And two, they're using it very sloppyly.
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Like AI hallucinations are something that probably humans should step into the loop and correct.
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So just a big egg on the face moment right now, even though the dollar amount is probably pennies
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when it comes to a big firm like Deloitte, but the public perception of it is going to have an
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outsize impact. Yeah, they want a slice of this market that's going to be huge spending
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by companies on consulting for generative AI is projected to hit $3.75 billion last year,
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which is up from $1.3 billion from the year before in 2023. And they want to show that they are
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adept at AI themselves internally so that they can go to your company and say, hey, we're really
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good at AI. We want to go to your company and help you integrate AI like we've done and it's
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working so seamlessly. And Deloitte clearly doesn't have its ducks in order here. So there was a
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Wall Street Journal report a few weeks ago that said that a lot of companies that have hired Deloitte,
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PWC, these other big four consultancies are actually not seeing returns that they want because
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these companies don't really know how to integrate AI. It's still such a new technology. So you have
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the CIO of Merck saying we love our partners, but oftentimes they're learning on our dime. So they
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don't have this playbook in order that maybe they have for legacy technology that they're much more
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adept at working with companies with obviously that's even still a question about whether they're
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worth the money, but they seem to have their playbook for those other types of technologies,
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but are still working it out when it comes to AI. Because a big part of the industry's business
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model is trust. You need to be able to show like, hey, we have done this before. We know what works
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and then we will bring our learnings to you. But when you are a guinea pig as well as a, I'm using
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the word Sherpa, we are supposed to usher you into the age of AI, but we're figuring it out ourselves.
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That is a very awkward attention right there. So it really is interesting to see consultancy be
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this bell weather of how AI is going to be a top adopted in corporate America in stumbling along the
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way. Up next, it's Tuesday, which means Toby Strins. What does the future hold for business?
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Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. It's a bull market. It's a bear market. Rates will rise
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or fall. Inflations up or down. Can someone invent a crystal ball? Until someone does over 43,000
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Toby and I don't work in accounting, so we're shielded from handling company ledgers, bank
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accurate and on time. You can do more than imagine all that head to fispan.com to transform how
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your firm manages money. That's fispan.com. Welcome back to another edition of Toby's Trans,
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the segment right take a deep dive into the business world to emerge with a trend that will
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expand your ability to conversationaly woo a partner. And today's trend is about the beginning of the
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end for craft beer craft beer sales fell 4% last year according to the Brewers Association. The
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first decline in recent history, while more breweries have closed than opened over the last 18 months,
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also a first for the once red hot industry as demand falls for craft beers that taste like
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cardboard smells. Big players like mulsinkors are offloading their entire craft beer divisions
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signaling how quickly you can go from cultural movement to over hyped. A variety of factors have
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led to craft beer falling flat, drinking in tap rooms and brew pubs never quite recovered after
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covid. Office workers in craft beer hotspots like sf and dc didn't return in full,
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killing a weekday bar traffic, but more than anything it's just been a classic oversupply story.
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Everyone and their mother joined the boom in the last decade to the point where a stroll down
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the beer aisle started to feel overwhelming rather than exciting. They all too much beer,
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not enough drinkers, a good problem to have when you're in a frat, not so good when you're trying
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to run a business. Yeah, I call this the fro yo effect. I don't know if you remember 20 years ago
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and people started to like fro yo and then they're decided to be a fro yo store on every single
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block and then eventually there was retrenchment, there was a market correction because how many people
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could possibly eat fro yo. I think we're at the same thing here with super hoppy beer 10 years
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ago. There were 4800 craft breweries in the United States today. There are nearly 10,000 so the number
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of craft breweries has jumped and demand for super hoppy beer and sours and different types of
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you know, more specialty beer has declined at the same time. Smaller breweries are facing higher
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costs across the board, whether it's for ingredients or labor or real estate and so you're starting to
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see a serious market correction here. I do think that it is the worst of all worlds when you're
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kind of this mid size player where you're too big to just focus very locally and just be you know,
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your local brew pub or something like that. But you're also not big enough to have the economies of
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scale that most in cores that these giant brew conglomerates have and so you get squeezed when
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things like aluminum prices go up when tariffs come into play. So you're in the worst of all worlds
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right there. And then also just a lot of cultural shifts have been happening. We're kind of
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entering into a wellness era where alcohol consumption is on the decline. A lot of young people are
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opting either not to drink or going for non-alcoholic options, THC options, even kombucha was eating
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in at one point a very similar kind of crowd right there. And it is funny. We started the show
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talking about a bubble potentially brewing in open AI but it seems like the bubble already brewed
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and then was burst in this particular industry because there's just too many brands chasing too
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niche of an audience. Yeah, I mean, these are so caloric too. It doesn't seem to fit in with what
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people want these days when you get this very big IPA you're you know, drinking a meal essentially
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and what's the number one beer in the United States now. Mick Loeb Ultra which really hangs its
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hat on being lower calorie and lower carb. And if you look, you mentioned these deals of selling
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the breweries at the beginning and you can kind of see the boom and bust here because Tille Ray
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which is a cannabis company bought the four breweries from Moulson Cours, Terrapin,
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Hop Valley Revolver and Atwater for $23 million which was a fraction of what they paid for it.
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And then if you go back a couple years or 10 years ago, independent breweries were selling for so much
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money ballast point which is a grape rey out of San Diego sold for $1 billion in 2015 to a
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constellation brands. A sign of the times is that they just got rid of their biggest manufacturing
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facility in San Diego to who athletic brewing which is a non-alcoholic beer brand. And Dogfish
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head, the pride of Delaware sold to Boston beer for $300 million almost a decade ago. So the times
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they've gotten a little tough for craft breweries and I'm a little worried about certain local
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economies. But if you go to smaller towns all around the United States, a lot of them have grown a
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huge brewery base and that runs their local economy. And if these things start to go out of the
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business, it could have some knock on effects there. So go to your local brew pub and have a few
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pints to save this struggling industry. Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines.
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The impact of the government shutdown is beginning to spread far beyond Washington, D.C.
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Several airports including Newark, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas and Burbank are experiencing delays
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after an uptick in air traffic controllers calling in sick the FAA said. On Monday more than 4,000
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flights were delayed, including 29% arriving flights at Denver, 19% at Newark and 15% at Las Vegas.
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During shutdowns, air traffic controllers and TSA agents are not paid but still must show up for work.
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Their first paycheck post shutdown is scheduled for October 14th, but that won't show up in their
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bank account if the government fails to open in time. Toby, the longer this goes on, the worse it's
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going to get for American travelers. Yeah, I think back to the last big government shutdown we had
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2018, 2019. That was a 35 day shutdown. The longest we've had and the part of the reason why that
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ended was just 10 air traffic controllers didn't show up for work which caused this cascading
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effect with delayed flights. We all have been there whenever there is air traffic control issues.
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It does balloon into a much larger issue. So that essentially helped us with the end of that
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particular government shutdown. So it just shows how important these people are in the
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cogs of the aviation system because it is a publicly managed program but it has such large
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private market effects. I mean the air traffic, air industry underpins a large part of our economy.
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It's a huge part of the private markets as well. So fascinating that even a minor absence
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in crippling an entire system that can have much larger cascading effects. The banks they are
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emerging. Yesterday, fifth third bank agreed to buy a Comerica for $10.9 billion a tie-up of
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regional lenders that would become the ninth largest bank in the United States. It's the largest
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banking deal of the year so far and it's no coincidence it's happening now. Bank CEOs think it's
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a more hospitable time to consolidate with the deregulatory air of the Trump administration.
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Fifth third bank based in Cincinnati has a strong presence in the Midwest while Comerica,
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based in Dallas, could be its gateway to the booming southeast whose population is growing the fastest
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by far of any region in the country. Toby, for regional banks who want to compete with the
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giants, it's bulking season. Yeah, after the mini-baking crisis of 2023, it feels like years ago at
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this point when Silicon Valley banks signature first republic all kind of imploded. A lot of these
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smaller and midsize lenders are teaming up trying to reach those scale of the larger players in
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the industry and it's a good time to do it right now because that's the 500's bank index is up 21
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percent year to date which inflates stock price a little bit. A lot of these deals are happening
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as stock transactions so your currency to carry out these deals is higher right now so it gives them
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a better bank to fund these acquisitions which were why we might see a couple more of these tie-ups
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going forward. Tesla appears to finally be giving fans what they've waited for for years a low-cost
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EV model if your interpretation of a pair of cryptic hype videos posted on social media
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yesterday proved to be correct. The first video posted by Tesla shows a spinning wheel or a turbine
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of sorts winding up to full velocity alongside today's date hinting at a reveal. The second shows
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two narrow headlights streaming through the darkness which eagle-eyed viewers noted differ from any
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current Tesla light bar designs. The conclusion is that a new stripped down version of Tesla's
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extremely popular model Y SUV is coming featuring cheaper materials different motors in a smaller
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battery pack. The hype cycle also comes out their Tesla execs have hinted at plans for affordable EV
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models with target prices in the $30,000 range that come right on the heels of the federal EV
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tax credits expiring. Also it's Tesla so maybe it's a flying car and we read the whole thing wrong.
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I'm not sure Neil but we'll find out in a few hours. Other suggestions say that it could be the
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next generation roadster car that Elon Musk has been promising for years and for years I'm saying
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that he introduced this concept back in an event in November 2017 and also in June 2018 but yes it
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looks like it's going to be this mass market lower cost model line. It's very crucial for Tesla to
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hit that $25,000 or $30,000 mark for a price tag because Chinese companies are coming in to Europe
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and absolutely eating its lunch with EVs and you know Tesla had a really good quarter last quarter
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but investors thought that was only because of the pull forward in demand with the EV tax credit
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ending and Elon Musk even warned of a few rough months ahead. Someone was like maybe it's a GPU like
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an Nvidia GPU because the fan in there in video GPUs looked a little bit like kind of like the
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turbine thing that was it teased yesterday so it's Tesla so you literally never know what it could
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possibly be but it's most likely an affordable EV. Finally Tesla didn't make the only teaser video
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yesterday. LeBron James also posted a short video hinting that he was releasing a low-cost EV model
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just getting he posted a cryptic clip titled the second decision teasing a major announcement coming
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today at 12 p.m. Eastern. Immediately everyone's mind jumped to his possible retirement LeBron after
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all it's turning 41 in December and has already the only player in NBA history to reach a 23rd season.
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The short video had an effect on his team the Los Angeles Lakers too with ticket prices for the
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Lakers final regular season game soaring soon after the video dropped but others were quick to point
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out that this is LeBron we're talking about after all a man whose business acumen rivals his
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on court prowess and more cynical fans noted that today is also the start of Amazon Prime which LeBron
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has done ads for in the past. Neil what do you think the end of one of the most storied careers
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in athletic history or a plug for free next day toilet paper delivery? Well it's 2025 so what did I do
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after hearing this I went to Polly Market to find out what the money is saying and 73% say it's a
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marketing stunt for Amazon 34% say it's going he's going to announce his final season 3% say that
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he's retiring this season 1% said that he's returning to the Cavaliers but it's an interesting choice
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by LeBron no matter what this is to conjure up the decision again because that was you know considered
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one of the more embarrassing episodes of his career very you know self inflating thing that he did
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back in 2018 to have this huge special to announce that he was going from Cleveland to Miami and
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was seen as you know one of the more ego boosting moments of his career but we'll see what happens
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when is it new in Eastern happening the same time as the Tesla vehicle reveal so I will have dual monitors
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that is all the time we have thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday
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if you have any feedback on today's episode send a note to morning brew daily at morning brew.com
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let's roll the credits Emily Mill iron is our executive producer Raymond Lue is our producer our
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associate producers our Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake here and makeup is also making an
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announcement at noon Eastern time tune in Devon Emory is our president and our shows a production
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of morning brew great show day nail let's run it back tomorrow