Morning Brew Daily - $10B Wall Street Collapse on Trial & AI Creating Wonder Drugs?

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Episode 319: Neal and Toby discuss the big discovery from Google’s DeepMind using AI to potentially produce new drugs not possible by mere humans. Then, the biggest ‘pump and brag scheme’ that shook Wall Street goes to trial. Next, a new report shows renewable energy sources making progress towards a big clean energy goal. Also, Neal shares his favorite numbers covering FTX refunds, job satisfaction, and Taylor Swift. Lastly, an upheaval is bubbling in Germany over a food staple: doner kebabs Visit https://www.wendys.com/morningbrew for more! 00:00 - Apple ad controversy 3:00 - AI takes on drug industry 7:45 - Archegos goes to trial 11:30 - Renewable energy milestone 15:00 - FTX refund 17:30 - American workers happy-ish 19:15 - Taylor Swift takes over Europe 21:30 - Kebab-flation in Germany Per My Last Email: Spotify, Apple, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts Get your Morning Brew Daily Mug HERE: https://shop.morningbrew.com/products/morning-brew-daily-mug?utm_medium=youtube&utm_source=mbd&utm_campaign=mug Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many employees can't afford a hefty medical bill that pops up out of the blue, but it happens. And employees who are financially stressed are, understandably, more likely to be distracted at work, costing their employers greatly in lost productivity. Luckily, AFLAQ plans help with out-of-pocket expenses not covered by health insurance and can be offered at no direct cost to businesses. Learn more at aflac.com slash morningbrewerdaily. That's aflac.com slash morning brew daily. Good Morning Brew Daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell.

Today, the FTX saga has something no one thought possible, a happy ending. Then why are kebabs suddenly such a hot topic in the German government? It's Thursday, May 9th. Let's ride. Apple is experiencing its worst PR debacle since it forced AU2 album onto everyone. To hype up the release of its new iPads, the company released a minute-long ad, that showed artistic treasures like a trumpet, piano, camera lenses, and turntable, getting smashed to bits by a hydraulic press,

with the end result being a new iPad Pro. A generous interpretation would be that the ad shows how the iPad can be this high-tech tool for creating art of many different forms, but people online were not generous, and they blasted the ad for highlighting the destructive forces of technology. Toby, I would not like to be in the post-mortem meeting for this campaign. No, I would not. the marketing world was up in arms about this.

I would say 90% of people said this was the most anti-Apple ad you could ever make. You're showing these beautiful tools, these symbols of human creativity, being crushed by this soulless industrial press, replaced by this thin piece of technology. It feels antithetical to everything Apple stands for. Yeah, Paul Graham, Big VC was like, Steve Jobs would be turning over in his grave right now. He would never have shipped this ad.

Others were saying, bring back Ridley Scott, who directed the 1984 famed commercial that really brought Apple into the public ethos. So, yeah, this was a rare miss for Apple's marketing department. The best response I saw was a guy who reversed the ad on Imovie and showed the press giving space and kind of recreating the things that it was crushing before. Same ad, just in reverse, works so much better.

You never want an ad to be put in reverse and have it show your message better, but that's what happened. So a lot of discourse, definitely recommend going to check. Check that ad out. Now let's take a moment so I can tell you about the goodness that is the Wendy's Cinebund pull apart. Today I want to talk about the structural marvel that it is. It's the Goldilocks of food engineering. There is enough tensile strength in the bonds that hold the dough together so the whole thing doesn't fall apart.

But you can still pull the individual pieces off, no problem. It really is an incredible feat of confectionary construction. You know how Apple, speaking of Apple, designs its packages so it has that extra little bit of friction as you pull the lid off. I get the same vibes from the pull apart. If it was too easy, it wouldn't be fun. And too hard is also a no-go. Gotta throw the needle. Got to get that perfect amount of stickiness.

They definitely nailed it. You were probably always told not to play with your food, but with the pull-ap-ap-part, you basically have to. Need to put Wendy's and Sinebund's food engineers to work on other parts of the economy. Who knows what wonders they might create? If you want to taste what we're talking about, head to wendies.com slash morning brew

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AI has been predicted to revolutionize everything, from software development to advertising, to Hollywood movies, but one less discussed area where AI can make its biggest mark is in drug discovery. Soon, it might not be far-fetched if the items in your medicine cabinet were all dreamed up by artificial intelligence much faster and much cheaper than humans in a lab can currently achieve. The AI revolution in drug design took a big step forward yesterday when Google DeepMind released the latest model of Alpha Fold, its landmark tool for predicting protein structures. With Alpha Fold discovering drugs, no human could conceive of, Google thinks it can build a business that would top $100 billion.

How does this work? Well, this is a very crude analogy, but think of Alpha Fold as chat, CBT for biology. Instead of training the model on strings of letters and asking it to come up with new sentences, you train the model on strings of chemicals and ask it to come up with new molecular compounds, the stuff that goes into a drug. and the possibilities are mind-blowing. Right now, all of Big Pharma taken together uses an ingredient list of 10 million molecules to build drugs from. By tagging in AI, you could expand that list to 10 to the 160th power, opening up endless new avenues to treat diseases.

The word gets thrown around a lot, but this would indeed be a revolution. It would be a game changer. Today, on average, it takes more than 10 years in literally billions of dollars to develop a new drug. So the vision is to make AI drug discovery a lot faster and a lot cheaper. Alpha Fold's actually been around since 2021. It has been cited in thousands of times in other people's work. And that's the key unlock here, I think, is that having this easily accessible database that you can access without having a ton of knowledge about computers, that's the big

unlock here because these are biologists. These are not computer engineers. They do not want a system that is very hard to navigate. So Google came in, made this accessible database that you can literally just go on a web page and start playing around with. And that is what has led to this big unlock and why people are so excited for this specific development in the pharma industry. Yeah, developing a drug, you said it costs 10 years on average. It costs billions of dollars. And the main problem is that would be great.

That'll be fine. But if it worked, the problem is it has a 90% failure rate. And you have to go back to the drawing board each time. So they're hoping that AI could better identify. targets and molecules that would work better when you have to put it in a clinical trial. And we said this takes 10 years and billions of dollars because this is what happens when you're developing a new drug, new drug from scratch. You have to pick a target in the body for this drug to interact with. Maybe that's a protein. Then you have to design the molecule that will

manipulate the target, do something to it. And then you have to make that molecule and then test it. And then the final step is you have to go through human clinical trials to make sure that the molecule design does what it was intended to do in a human body. So this is such a long process that costs so much money. And then at the end of it, nine out of ten times, it's going to fail. So AI can really help with every step of that process from identifying the protein in the body that needs to be manipulated, making the molecule. And all the way through the steps through the process, AI seems to be able to help, except for that clinical trial step at the end. There's no substitute for just putting it in humans seeing what happens.

Test tubes are not human bodies. So the one idea that came to my mind when I heard this is that what about hallucinations? Because remember, these are the things that Chatsby T spits out where sometimes it just kind of makes up stuff. They call it the name of the in the business. It is a hallucination. So what happens when you're hallucinating new drug or protein molecules? It's actually a good thing in some cases because, again, it can help humans think outside the box. AI spits out a protein, a folded protein that they've never seen before, sometimes it causes

connections in the biologist's minds and say, wait a second, we haven't thought about it like this. Even though it might be nonsensical, there is something we can take away from it. So hallucinations, as long as they don't make it too far down the steps of the process you mentioned, can be a good thing in this sense. All signs point to this being just a massive market. VCs have poured $18 billion into AI biotech startups in the last decade. and there are currently about two dozen drugs, currently in clinical trials, that were created with the help of AI. So that will take a few years to see, you know, whether those actually work and whether they will come to market or not.

But all signs indicate that this is going to be in a massive revolution in drug development. Yesterday, marked the start of a criminal racketeering trial featuring Bill Huang in the collapse of Arkego's Capital Management. Arkego's Capital is a family office slash hedge fund founded by Bill Hwang. that went through one of the fastest creations, then destructions of wealth in modern financial history. The quick one-sentence synopses of the events that landed Bill Huang in court. He took advantage of light regulatory scrutiny on family offices to amass gigantic levered positions in certain stocks, thanks to generous lines of credit extended by banks who didn't do their due diligence. Eventually, it was a surprise stock sale announced by Viacom, CBS, that caused the unraveling

of Arkegos and Huang. He couldn't meet margin calls from his land. lenders forcing a $20 billion fire shale of the rest of his positions that caused a whole thing to come crumbling down. There are lots more layers to this, but let's get back to the trial real quick. Huang has been charged with 11 counts of security fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy racketeering, and market manipulation and could spend life in prison if he is convicted on all counts, though that seems unlikely. You know, this all went down in 2021.

Do we remember just how crazy this saga was? It was crazy because we all learned what margin calls were, what, who this guy was. because he was kind of a no name. I mean, he did come out of Tiger Global Management, which is this big hedge fund. And one reason why this case drew a lot of attention is that he's what's known as a Tiger Cub. And people who work in Tiger Global Management,

they were disciples of this founder, Julian Robertson, and they all went on to found their own hedge funds and investment firms. And so he was one of those Tiger Cubs. And the fact that he was doing these ludicrous trades, like literally ludicrous trades, borrowing so much money from all kinds of banks, putting them into very select stocks, artificially pushing the stock price up with no real exit strategy about how he was going to get out of

them. I mean, at one point, this guy was the largest shareholder in Viacom, CBS, which is now Paramount Global, a massive company. He was individually the largest shareholder, and no one knew about it because he was doing it by going to these banks and getting this and levering up. So, I mean, this was kind of an investment debacle that blew everyone's minds. and destroyed a lot of value, $100 billion in a matter of days. And it really sent Credit Suisse. I mean, that got absorbed by UBS after it collapsed. Credit Suisse lost $5.5 billion because of this guy.

And that set it on the course to its collapse. Maybe it wasn't the ultimate reason, but it did lose $5.5 billion because of this one trade. So now that this is going to trial, the question is, why the heck did he do this? He'd already done well managing his own money. Why did he feel the need to lever himself to the absolute maximum and try to, at one point, the assets under management topped $100 billion.

His net worth was $35 billion. And so this is something that the jury is going to consider. It's not actually as a matter of law. Like, you don't technically need to know why someone committed fraud on the scale that they did. But that is something that's going to play a major role here because a lot of lawyers are looking at this case and saying that does pop into jurors' minds of like what is the motivation behind this. And that's still something that we may never know because he's.

He didn't need to do this. He just did it because he wanted to fly close to the sun, I guess. And he wasn't handling other people's money. This also increased scrutiny of what a family office is. When you just manage your own wealth, he didn't have outside investors. So he destroyed a lot of value for these big banks, but not for any investors that gave him money to invest in the market. So, you know, this case has led to calls of increased transparency and filings for this kind of murky world of the financial world, which is these family offices.

Off the top of your head, I want you to think about how much global power comes from renewable energy. Neil Quiz me on this yesterday, and I low-balled it. The answer is renewable sources accounted for a record-breaking 30% of global electricity in 2023.

That's the big takeaway from the annual report from Energy Think Tank, Ember, published this week. Ember called 2020, a crucial turning point toward clean energy that sets us on a path towards a future, much less reliant on fossil fuels. In fact,

2023 might go down in history as the highest carbon-based emissions will ever be again in the power sector. What made this possible? You can probably guess wind and solar have absolutely taken off in recent years. Hydro power typically has been the MVP when it comes to renewable electricity, counting for about a six of the world's electricity in the past two decades. But now the newcomers solar and wind account for 13% of global electricity, double what they were producing in 2017. Like I said, I lowballed this. That's a lot of power coming from renewables.

Yeah, and really the main driver of growth is solar. I mean, it's amazing how much solar has been adopted and is powering a lot of countries now. It accounts for more than 10% of annual electricity generation in 33 countries led by Chile at 30%. And then six countries generate at least a sixth of their electricity from solar, including the fifth largest economy in the world, which is California.

28% of its electricity comes from solar. The Netherlands, which you wouldn't even expect to have a lot of solar generation because it's not exactly the sunniest place and it's in a very northernly climate is number four. So there's a lot of room to grow here because you have countries like Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia that get less than 3% of their energy from solar. So the main focus point that I was reading in this report is that solar is just enjoying a crazy boom led by China.

The growth in solar capacity installed in 2023 was actually insane. Installations broke 200 gigawatts for the first time in 2022. Last year, 444 gigawatts, which was topping virtually every single forecast you saw out there. Just to put a gigawatt in perspective, remember Zuck went on a pod recently, not our pod, a different pod. He said he wants to build a gigawatt single training center to train his AI models. And the interviewer was like, what is a gigawatt? He said that's about one nuclear power plant, like a good size nuclear power plant. So 444 gigawatts of solar were installed last year.

It just is truly crazy. Wind, on the other hand, had a little bit of a down year when it comes to growth. And what's really funny is one of the reasons why wind had a bad year was bad winds in the Midwest, where the wind farms are. So that is funny that it is something that affects wind production like that. But overall wind generation still reached a new record high in 2023. all signs are pointing towards, you know, typical carbon-based emissions are, we've seen the winds, not to say the wins again,

but the winds blowing the industry in a different direction here, and now Ember is calling it, they're saying this is the peak of carbon emissions that we'll ever see again in our lifetime. Up next, oh wait, do you hear that? That's the sound of Neal's numbers coming right up. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd. But too often, life gets busy.

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Welcome back to Neal's numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will give you full body goosebumps. You may not believe my first number, but this is real. Customers of the failed crypto exchange FTX will get all of their money back and then some bankruptcy lawyers said yesterday. That seemed downright impossible 17 months ago when $8 billion in customer funds were wiped out during the collapse of FTX. But in the time since, the miracle workers who took over the exchange went on a treasure hunt

for FDX's assets, sold them off and say they'll deliver 118% of what customers lost when FDX went belly up. New FDX CEO, John Ray, who oversaw the unwinding of Enron, said, in any basis, bankruptcy. This is just an unbelievable result because lower ranking creditors typically just receive pennies on the dollar. So if you want to make bank on your garage sale, give John a call. Bad news for Tom Brady, though. He just can't stop getting roasted. Equity holders like TB12 and Giselle were still getting wiped out. So he's still out $30 million. The joke here was that if Sam Bankman-Fried could have just lasted another few months, crypto would have ripped, Solana would have

ripped one of his biggest crypto holdings, and he probably could have covered up the free wheeling he was doing with customer funds. It is a little bittersweet for customers, though. Yes, you're getting your money back. Yes, in some cases, you're getting a little bit of interest on top of that. But, I mean, if you just look at Slaun, it's up almost 600% in the last year and their money was stuck in FDX. They weren't accruing those gains that the broader crypto world was getting. So, yes, it's a good and bad thing. You want your money back, but you could have gotten a lot more bang for your buck. Yeah, it's pretty interesting to see what SBF actually invested in and where these assets came from because they recovered $16 billion.

One of these investments was in Anthropic in 2021. FDX put $500 million into this AI company. And this was before ChatGPT was released to the world. And Anthropics is now worth billions and billions and billions of dollars because it has a chat GPT competitor. So honestly, SBF pretty good investment there, I got to say. But this is just so rare. John Ray was like, this rarely happens. And it does rarely happen. There's very few times you can count it on a single hand when creditors emerged from

bankruptcy made whole. The last time I can remember was in 2021 with this Hertz bankruptcy. It became a little bit of a meme stock when it went to bankruptcy because people suspected that maybe people would get their money back when it went bankrupt. So they sent the stock way up and everyone was paid out. And it was also a similar thing happened. Crypto ran up and helped make these creditors. whole. Use car prices ran up and helped to make creditors pull for hurt so they could sell

off their used car fleet a little bit. So I guess your Toyota Camry is the same as Solana in this case. My second number might help explain why you aren't totally dreading going to work this morning. When asked how they feel overall about their jobs, 62.7% of U.S. workers say they're satisfied the highest share in a conference board survey going back to 1987. This isn't a huge shock. the labor market is humming right now. Unemployment has hovered below 4% for two years. Many white-collar workers are able to work from home, at least part of the week. Wages have been growing faster than inflation, and chat GPT writes your emails for you. Times are pretty good. And when you dig deeper into the numbers, you find some more interesting results, like how much a

company's culture matters. Of the workers who said they intend to stay at their jobs, more than 75% said they were satisfied with the culture of their employer. Of those who plan to move on, just 22% approved of the culture. That gap of more than 55 percentage points was one of the highest ever reported in this survey. Toby, as someone who seems pretty satisfied with their job, what were your takeaways? My takeaways here is that there is a lot below the surface

of that headline, 62% number. There's this widening gap in job satisfaction between men and women. 65% of men say they're happy compared with just 60% of women. There was also almost a paradox in the results. They pull people in 26 specific categories, Across those 26 specific categories, there were drops in almost all of them.

So if you dig deeper and ask about specific things, people aren't as satisfied as maybe their overall satisfaction. That may be just more about human psychology when you're asked about a specific thing versus overall. So it is interesting that maybe we are feeling more satisfied as a whole. But if you really ask some people, they wouldn't be as satisfied as they're saying they are. For my final number, Taylor Swift's Aeros Tour returns tonight in Paris after a two-month hiatus and odds are someone you know is flying to France for the show. Swift's four-night stand in Paris is expected to draw five times as many Americans as the Paris Olympics later this summer. And according to the concert venue, 20% of the tickets were sold to Americans. When you look

at the ticket prices, the math starts to make sense. Europe has tighter curbs on fees and resales than in North America, leading to much lower prices for concert goers. One American who's going said she paid $650 for seats very close to the stage. Meanwhile, for the upcoming ERISTor stop in Toronto, nosebleeds are going for $2,200. So if you've committed to laying down a couple grand to see Taylor Swift,

might as well get a round-trip flight and three nights with an Eiffel Tower view with it. And the tens of thousands of Americans who are about to drink every last bottle of wine in Paris have made that calculation. Toby, are you ready for the flood of ERISTor videos to hit social media again? Yeah, I've been missing them.

What can I say? So these concerts are drawing five times as many Americans as the Olympics. They should do a torch lighting ceremony for the Ares Tour. And I was thinking, what would a Swifty Torch be? I think it would maybe be the scarf from all too well. You light that on fire. You pass it from stadium to stadium. I say we make this.

I'm very deep in the lore right now. And I also was just thinking seeing these prices that these Parisians are paying, and these Americans going abroad are paying, and just thinking about what you and I paid to go see it here in, at MetLife. No comment. No comment on that. But this Paris shows honestly are going to pale in comparison to Stockholm.

Stockholm, where she's going to after Paris, they're expecting 120,000 out of towners from 130 countries. They've jacked up the amount of flights coming in from Denmark, Finland, and Norway. It's going to be insane there. I think every Scandinavian person alive is going to be in Stockholm when she's there. So it's going to be an absolute huge boon to everyone there. It's going to be such a party. They're going to add $46 million to the economy.

So I'm looking beyond Paris to Stockholm to see with actual craziness. I think it's going to drive inflation again in that region. Absolutely, like Beyonce did. Right. Beyonce did it. So I think Taylor Swift will do it as well. How far are you willing to go to protect your favorite food? Germans are prepared to go all the way to parliament.

There have been growing calls in Deutsche Land to do something about the soaring cost of donor kebabs. Finely sliced meat treats wrapped in a flat. bread and one of the country's favorite dishes. It's become such an issue that there are calls for the government to launch a subsidy program to make the inflation hit dish more affordable. It started off as kind of a joke with German Chancellor Olaf Schultz saying it's all young people ask them about, but now Germany's far left party has seized on the topic and is trying to enact a donor kebab price cap. The kebabs are pushing $11 USD in some parts of the country up from $4 a few years ago. So politicians are looking to institute a $5.30 price cap or $3.15 cap for young people,

especially from lower income backgrounds. Neil, I've had a dinner kebab and I would 100% pay over $10 for it. So I support this initiative, even though it's got its hurdles. Man, Germany just can't buy a win right now. I mean, Bayern Munich lost around Madrid and absolute heartbreaking fashion. And now their national dish, their symbolic dish that everyone eats all the time is really huge. suffering from inflation here. But this, I was just looking at the numbers about how many of these things people eat. They're sold 1.3 billion of them are sold every single year.

400,000 of them are consumed in Berlin. They were brought over by Turkish immigrants in the 60s and became this national symbol. But this made me think of all of the inflation freakouts that happened over the past few years with these national dishes around the world in Europe. In Italy, there was this pasta freakout where pasta prices were growing twice at the rate of normal inflation, and this consumer group tried to boycott pasta

for our entire week. And then in France, you go there, there was a baguette freakout, and Macron had to negotiate energy prices with these bakeries. And then here, the main thing that had everyone talking about inflation was a $16 big Mac meal. I guess that's our national dishware.

Someone went to McDonald's and said, wow, I just paid $16 for a Big Mac meal. That video went viral. So this is not unique to Germany where our national foods are getting so much more expensive and it's causing a political crisis. I know. I was trying to think, what would this be in America? I was thinking like apple pie. I was trying to think of national dishes. And then I remembered it is the Big Mac.

And it got me a little sad. But yes, just to kind of put in perspective, just how expensive this program would be, you mentioned that $1.3 billion donor are concerned. zoom to the country every year. A subsidy program would then cost around 4 billion euros annually. So it doesn't look like that. It's not going to happen. It's not going to actually happen. But the conversation is real and that politicians are saying, listen, it's pretty much all young people come up to us and talk to us about. I mean, Germany's chancellor was heckled at a recent event saying like, speak to Putin. I want to pay four euros per donor. So it is something that young people have kind of glommed onto.

So if you have a politician, you have a responsibility to listen, even if the actual numbers probably don't work out. Yeah, I don't think you're going to put a price cap on food. Let's wrap it up there. Any more kebab talk, and I'm going to drool all over this studio. Thanks so much for listening and have a wonderful Thursday. If you want to get in touch, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Your emails are like mini dopamine hits that get us through the day.

Let's roll the credits. Raymond Lou is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate. producer. Yuchinawa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Manino is on audio. Hair and makeup wants everyone to check out our YouTube channel to see what Toby's done with his hair. You will not be disappointed. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.