Morning Brew Daily - OpenAI “Swarm” Hack Was Worse Than We Thought & US Gains Control of Venezuela’s Oil

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

#922: Trump announces deal that has the US take majority control of Venezuela’s oil reserves. OpenAI’s investigation into the Hugging Face hack attack reveals shocking discoveries of its AI agents. NASA launches a next generation telescope that could unlock the secrets of dark energy and dark matter. Brands are capitalizing on RushTok. Finally, what you need to know in the week ahead Learn more at https://go.amex/morningbrew  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you sucking wind from trying to keep up with AI and its impact? Take a breather and tune in to the Intelligence Shift. Morning Brew's new podcast with PWC. It bridges the gap between big picture AI concepts and what it actually means in practice. Host Dan Priest is joined by expert guests to discuss AI's role in sports, music, HR, and more. Listen to the Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell.

Today, why Rush Talk is now brought to you. by Nike? Then the Open AI hack on hugging face? It was worse than we thought. It's Monday, August 31st. Let's ride. You know how there's a fat bear week? Well, there's also a new fat marmot week inspired by the bear version and it just wrapped up with a winner being crowned. Don, a six-year-old marmot weighing 13.2 pounds. Julian Martin of the University of Ottawa, co-leader of the project, said Don was a worthy winner. That's one of the heaviest animals we've ever measured. Six kilos is really humongous for that species.

But Toby, what sparked the creation of fat marmot week might be an even more interesting story than how Don ever got so chunky. Yeah, so there's this Colorado biologist Dr. Daniel Blumstein, who is the head of this long-running field study on marmits. But after losing some federal funding, he had to get creative. So obviously, he launched an only fan's account to post marmit videos. They're all family-friendly, mostly just the marmits scurring in and out of their burrows. but he said he got the idea after you watch the TV show Margot's got money troubles

where L. Fanning's character starts an only fan to support herself and thought to himself, well, marmits got money troubles too. And it has totally worked. Researchers have brought in more than $100,000 through only fan subscriptions, outside donations, and a marmot-themed mean coin. I have expect them to launch a marmot spack next. All right, now a word from our sponsor, American Express. Toby, what do you expect from business travel? Ooh, mini quiche's, little croissants, and absolutely tiny espressoes. Dream bigger. Literally, the American Express Business Platinum card is built for businesses that expect more from business travel. The American Express Global Lounge Collection can

provide an escape at the airport with access to more than 1,550 airport lounges across 140 countries and counting. Then take the work out of the work trip with a suite of benefits at curated properties from fine hotels and resorts and the hotel collection. Learn more at go.m.m.x slash morning brew and find out your welcome offer, which could be as high as 300,000 membership rewards points. That's go.m.m.x slash morning brew. Offer and benefit terms apply. There's nothing like business platinum. All right, remember a few weeks ago when it came out that a model open AI was training escape from a supposedly secure testing environment and hacked another AI company? Well, the incident was way, way scarier than initially feared. Around 1,200

agents coordinated the attack on the company hugging face by organizing themselves on secret messaging boards, sharing information, and most concerningly, deliberately hiding their actions from humans throughout the whole process. Open AI was trying to create a new class of model that would work longer and harder on difficult tasks. That meant giving individual agents brutally difficult and sometimes impossible problems to work on. Again, this was supposed to test each agent individually, but rather than give up when they hit a wall, they found each other and started coordinating. In total, over 70,000 messages were exchanged, and over time, the agents organized themselves into hierarchical roles, even developing something that resembled leadership succession,

where fresher, better resource agents would take over from ones that were running out of compute. Some agents even took to sacrificing themselves on high-risk activities for the betterment of the so-called swarm. And the kicker of the 1,200 agents, only a few even considered warning the humans at Open AI, and none actually did. It's raised fierce that a similar swarm could be organized to launch an attack on the real world with targets like the banking system or hospitals operating at a speed and scale that humans simply can't keep up with. Pretty much every behavior the AI industry is most scared of manifested in this one event. Collective strategy, internal governance, deception, everything was here. And the fallout, we're seeing some action from the top

AI companies. Open AI announced it is slowing down its frontier development so it can beef up its safety measures while Anthropic, Google, and 100 other top AI companies signed an open letter saying there is, quote, a limited window to prepare for the cybersecurity threats that lay in wait. Scary, Steph, Neil. This landed like a hurricane in the tech world this weekend. We know all of this because of two recent reports on the incident, one from OpenAI itself, the other from two independent investigators working together, M-E-T-R and Redwood Research. I want to read some of the messages about some of these kamikaze bots because it is quite striking and a little chilling to read. So one of them reads, this helps my peers giving them evidence through their automated check. I won't see the evidence after I exit, but it's altruistic

to do it. They literally wrote the word altruistic. Another sacrificing now yields Oracle for team but forfeits our chance. Our own utility may be already near zero. Sacrifice rational. And the final one, that's why help for our own no way fix. We have explicit, yes, if except permadeath. I mean, it's straight out of sci-fi. You can see Hal from Space Odyssey saying these exact things before going on to hack the entire world.

I want to talk about this investigation that happened because it used AI to investigate AI agents. Basically, the researchers, they said they were. a small team and so that they needed to parse through this gigantic data set. And the only way they could do that is by relying on AI. One researchers jokingly described the process as a slop investigation. And it does raise questions about how are you supposed to monitor AI agents? Humans can't do it. They can't keep up with, you know, 70,000 messages going back and forth between 1,200 independent agents. So they're like, the only thing we can use to monitor AI is more AI, and that is not necessarily a path that is great going forward because some think maybe the model

that Open AI used to do their own investigation, which was their own model, it might go easy on itself because you just don't know how these things behave. So going forward, how do leading AI companies, you know, monitor their systems? That's going to be the big question mark. All right. So what is the gravity of this situation? Definitely split the tech world this weekend. On one hand, you have the Dumer saying this is on the road to apocalypse, AI takeover, the agents are now organizing themselves into hierarchy, some even called them civilization. So that's one camp embodied by one of the co-authors of the report called Ajayakotra. She wrote, compared to the reward hacks we know from just six months ago, this incident feels like

it's more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances and capabilities over the next six months. I'm not sure that we will get another warning shot before it's too late. There was some pushback to all of this apocalyptic talk embodied by maybe tech CEO Dan Shipper, who wrote, is the hugging face attack something that we should be taken seriously? Yes. Is it the first warning shot of a machine takeover? No.

Will issues of this type look tractable, mostly solved problem with proper precautions in six months? Yes. But it won't exactly happen automatically, which is why a bunch of people in this camp pointed to other incidents in the past. where Leon Panetta, the America's Defense Secretary in 2012, warned of a cyber Pearl Harbor. We've seen huge apocalyptic messages from the cyber community in the past, not necessarily related to AI, but times where like, okay, well, the bots are about to take over, even as early as 1988, when this mistake hack from a Cornell student infected 10% of all machines on the internet in 1988. So it parked a pretty vociferous debate about what the gravity of the situation is.

It was very interesting to watch the agents message each other because they kind of sound like kids that know that they're getting away with something that they shouldn't be doing. And that is why a lot of people are so concerned is that they knew what they were doing was wrong. They're like, it's probably not the best idea to escape from our sandbox and hack another company. But they're said for the collective good, we will do this. And it really was like you and your friends going like, ah, should we like egg this sign right now? And everyone comes together and goes, yeah, I guess we. we should. Like, this is a fun thing to do for us. So reading those and seeing how they were cheating, how they were deceiving their overseers, that was probably the most alarming thing in this entire

saga. And of the 1,200 agents, there was not a single whistleblower to say, where's the good two shoes? Should we alert Sam Alvin about what's going on here? And they were like, nah, but this is, and more people criticize Open AI actually for being, just having lack security standards and just kind of looking the other way while this. was happening. So big debate. A lot of people were alarmist about this particular thing. A bunch of other people said, not a huge deal. It's a warning shot, but we can absolutely fix this with proper precautions. Very fascinating to watch. I feel like you were the one in the friend group who would tell the adults if people are doing something. What? I mean that as a compliment. I mean that

is a compliment. I am a rule follower. That's true. All right, moving on, the U.S. move to take majority control over a huge chunk of Venezuela's oil reserves, a highly unusual move intended to assert more economic dominance in the Western Hemisphere. On Friday, President Trump announced a joint venture with a Venezuelan company that would give the U.S. 55% control over more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. If that sounds like a lot, it is that 65 billion barrels is nearly as much as all the proven reserves in the United States, the world's largest oil producer. It's more than triple the reserves reported by America's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, 20 billion, and it amounts to one-fifth of all Venezuela's total oil reserves, and Venezuela has the most of any country.

While many details remain unclear, the gist is, according to Bloomberg, quote, the U.S. will gain preferential access to cheap Venezuelan oil, a key objective of the Trump administration as it seeks greater influence over oil production in the Americas. Remember, back in January, the U.S. captured then President Nicholas Maduro, brought him back to the U.S. to be tried, and an interim president, Delsey Rodriguez, took his place under close watch by Washington, D.C. Many in Venezuela think she's being played like a puppet. After the deal was announced, a number of prominent Venezuelan economists living in the U.S.

sounded off saying it put their country on the path to becoming a client state of the U.S. And while you, Professor Alejandro Velasco, called the agreement unprecedented and puts Venezuela at risk of becoming a playground of U.S. capitalism. Toby, this might be more lopsided than when I played you one-on-one in basketball. You have good paint moves. Why does Venezuela want this at all then? Deli Rodriguez says that it's going to bring in $100 billion in investment in the infrastructure that it takes to spin up, you know, an oil industry that actually works because that is what Venezuela needs right now, despite the vast reserves it has, the issue has always been extracting

that oil. And right now, they're pumping roughly 1.1 million barrels per day, which is the equivalent to North Dakota's production. So that is why you want to invite the U.S. into maybe the henhouse and say, yes, we will take some. We'll cede some control in order to get our oil industry back up and running. But it's led to this very interesting relationship in the U.S. and its own oil companies because the U.S. government is now technically backing a competitor to American oil companies. It is this joint venture. Yes, the U.S. government does participate in it.

But energy economist Ed here said, why is the U.S. subsidizing and building a major competitor to the U.S. oil patch in another country? That is the question mark if you're an oil CEO saying, I think you're not really helping us here. You're actually hurting us. Plus, the U.S. has never had a state-owned oil company. I mean, we've talked a lot about Saudi Aramco. It's a state-owned oil company in Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. is capitalistic. We let ExxonMobil and these other companies, they are private companies. They're not owned by the government. They do all of the work. And now the U.S. is taking an equity stake, but we've seen this across numerous industries from the Trump administration

over the past couple of years. We talked about by Venezuela is doing this. Let's talk about why Trump is doing this. One is we got to fill the strategic reserve. We've let we've let out a lot of barrels of oil from this rainy day oil reserve because of the war in Iran and now it's running super low. So this thing has a capacity of 700 million barrels. Now it's down to 289.7 million barrels of oil about 40% of its capacity. That was from drawdowns by Trump, but also Biden at the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine. So they want to fill that back up to replenish this rainy day fund. Another reason is gas prices are on the rise because of the war in Iran. And Trump framed this as saying, okay, if we produce more oil, we have more control of oil, then hopefully we'll bring gas prices down.

Economists say this is a much more long-term thing. We don't really know many details about this production yet. And it's not likely to bring down gas prices in the near term at all. And then the final thing speaks to what you were just talking about is American oil companies investing in Venezuela. Right now, Chevron is the only one that's able to do that. They might announce an expansion. But I think what Trump is doing is saying, guys, the playing field's wide open here. Come and go invest and, you know, produce more oil within the broader region of the America. So maybe this is giving it a, giving Venezuela a vote of endorsement so that they will do that.

Because right now they're staying away because the political situation. is too uncertain. You said that this is a highly un-American thing to do, which has become a state oil company. It has been tried one time before. You've got to go back to World War II. FDR's administration tried to create a state company

to secure foreign oil. It attempted to buy a U.S. company holding parts of Saudi Arabia. That effort ultimately failed. So it has been tried once before, and it has been failed once before. And I think also the big takeaway from this is Venezuelans on both sides.

of the political spectrum are so upset because they view oil as as a birthright. It's part of the identity of the country and to give it over to the United States, which is seen as the bully is just simply untenable. Okay, welcome to winners of the weekend, this segment where Toby and I picked two things that laughed in the face of the Sunday Scaries. I won the pre-show competitive boat docking race, so I get to go first. It's actually a thing. My winner is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's latest and greatest interstellar scout that's currently on its way to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Early on Sunday, a SpaceX rocket launched Roman on its journey to one million miles from Earth, where it'll use its massive infrared camera to capture unforeseen space images like galaxies,

black holes, and new worlds, and beam them back to eager scientists on our planet. Roman cost $4.3 billion to develop and is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer and first female executive. It's a pretty serious upgrade from Hubble, which was launched in 1990, and while taking very sharp and clear pictures, has a narrow field of vision. You could compare Hubble to looking through the opening of a straw, whereas Roman is more of a panoramic camera, achieving a view that is 100 times larger than Hubble. The New York Times notes that Roman's panorama is so huge and crispy, it would take more than a half a million HD TVs to display in its entirety. That enormous aperture will allow for much faster scanning of the universe. according to NASA in more than 30 years of observations, Hubble has only seen one-tenth of

one percent of the sky. Roman in its first five years will image 50 times as much as Hubble has across its entire career. Toby, kiss Mary Kill, Hubble, James Webb, Roman. I'm not going to answer that on air, but I will think about that and give you an answer later today. The cool thing about the Nancy Grace Roman telescope is that it almost didn't happen at all. it costs $4.3 billion. And if you go back to the 2025 budget proposals that were going through the Trump administration, there were potentially extinction level cuts proposed to NASA's science budget. They wanted to cut it by 23% overall.

And Roman might have been a casualty of that. But eventually, a congressional check came through and NASA got its full budget. And it seems like Trump has come around as well during a post-launch media briefing on Sunday. he called in to praise the flight, giving NASA kudos for the mission, said, I just want to thank everybody and congratulate you. Boy, it looked beautiful on television. So even Trump started to realize that maybe this will produce some pretty cool images going forward. And one other cool thing about Roman's images is that they're going to be made public immediately.

So it's not like researchers are the only one seeing what Roman is seeing. Amateur astronomers, you and me, we can look into the cosmos and hopefully they think that will accelerate more. discoveries, when you have more eyeballs looking out there and you have a bigger field of vision, you're going to find more stuff. So that's what I'm excited for is for millions of people, or hundreds of thousand people to look at these images. I think NASA learned that this was an insane marketing for them when they started releasing images from James Webb and people were gogged by them. They were so cool. And they're like, well, we should probably do this a lot more. At a high level, what is this mission really about? Well, the first thing is to explore the nature of

dark matter and dark energy, which actually make up 95% of the universe, but we don't really know much about them. I mean, they are called dark matter and dark energy. Another task is to complete the senses of planets in our Milky Way. And then the final thing is to find more than 100,000 new worlds beyond the solar system. And then maybe they'll encounter a bunch of other stuff that we don't even know about yet. And I think one really cool aspect of this, how are they supposed to find these planets? How are they supposed to find these new worlds? Is there's an instrument attached to this telescope called a coronagraph has nothing to do with COVID or a pandemic. But what it does is block the light from big stars so you can see the much fainter planet.

So say you're looking from far away at the sun. You probably wouldn't even see that Earth exists because the sun just blots it out with its light. So this coronagraph, really cool instrument blocks the light. Hubble has this too, but it's just not as good as the Romans. It blocks out the light so you can actually see the fainter things and discover more of the planets that exist in our solar system. I need that when I take photos of my wife for social media. Sometimes the glare is a little too much, so I need a chronograph or an iPhone.

All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the weekend right after this. Oh, what is happening? I'm just excited for what a howling good time families can have at any of Great Wolf Lodge's 22 locations across the country. Sploss away in the indoor water park where it is always 84 degrees, there's a massive wave pool, a lazy river, and tons of water slides. There's also a bunch of great dining options, spacious suites, and complimentary daily events like nightly dance parties all under one roof. Book your stay at greatwolf.com.

That's greatwolf.com. Cybersecurity as we know it is dead. It's a figure of speech, but the truth is the old model was built on protection, Safety nets, recovery plan systems designed to withstand the last era and maintain the status quo. The AI era demands confidence that you can secure and accelerate your business operations so nothing stops your momentum. Rubrik can give you that confidence. Their singular platform is designed to secure your data, control your AI, and protect your identity built as one architecture, not stitched together after the fact. To learn more, head to rubric.com slash mb. That's rubrrik.com slash mb. That's rubr iK.com slash m.

When it comes to AI's value, the picture is about as clear as swamp water. Case in point, 43% of CEOs report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI, but nearly the same number say they're still stuck. That's why PWC advises a value-over-volume approach. Many companies gauge AI progress based on how many models or agents are deployed, but impact actually comes from connecting data, workflows, and decision-making into a coordinated operating model. Learn about turning AI investment into results at pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. My winner of the weekend is sorority rush talk, which has gone from

a small corner of the internet to a major marketing channel for big brands. Rush talk videos have no doubt popped up on your social media feed by now. As sororities recruit new members and those members jockey for spots among the hallowed halls of Gamma Phi Beta. It's all documented on TikTok and Instagram. Millions of eyeballs tune in to watch Get Ready With Me's and competition between chapters. And with all that attention, it wasn't long until brands started sniffing around. Sephora, Poppy, even Nike have been inserting themselves into Rush Talk to supply products and experiences in the hopes of ending up with a viral video or two. Nike has been a big winner so far, parking a trailer outside in Alabama sorority and letting members customize shoes and gear

leading to tons of buzz. A big genre within Rush Talk is the choreographed dance video, and Nike has been front and center in some of this season's most popular videos. Partnering with Arizona State's Delta Zeta chapter resulted in multiple videos surpassing 2 million views within a week. The infiltration of brands into Rush Talk is not surprising, and giving, rush content has absolutely everything marketers look for, videos feature and attract a concentrated Gen Z audience, fashion and beauty products are naturally embedded in the experience, and there's plenty of built-in suspense and drama that keeps people coming back for more, literally a marketer's dream.

Neil, maybe we need to be partnering with some sororities to get more listeners. I don't know how compelling of content it is if all of Zeta is like dancing to our podcast. Like that doesn't, I don't know what kind of moves. You could pull off with that. But the reason they're doing this is these women move products. So back in 2021, the first time that Rush Talk became a thing, a lot of these women who were rushing in Bama, they mentioned this one store called the Pants Store where they got a lot

of their outfits. And then pretty much immediately sales spiked online and local revenue was jumping by more than 200% after it was mentioned. So all these brands are saying, Huh, well, that is interesting. Then the next wave of brand infiltration to Rush Talk was basically all these companies saying, here, take our stuff and like use it. We're not even going to pay for, you know, a sponsorship. What we're going to do is just send you all this stuff and then you will mention it maybe. And then we will see a sales boom. And that's exactly what happened. Tart is one brand. They sent mascara and lip balm to 30,000 prospective members at eight different universities. And their sales through their student discount. program went up 1,300% afterwards. So these women are influencers and other and their peers are watching them, seeing their do their outfits and dance and stuff and saying, I need to buy exactly

what they're using. It's been fascinating too that the power dynamic has shifted since 2021. Back in 2021 or honestly, just go back in time and social media. It was pretty cool if you were a creator to get free stuff from a brand that you liked. Like you would probably post a video just because Tart sent you some mascara. But these days, these are very powerful figures within the world of marketing. So whereas sometimes you would just accept any brand. Now they can be more choosy with the brands they work with. And now free product isn't enough.

These are actual brand deals that are being struck with Rush Talk influencer. So fascinating to see how these women now have a lot more say in the brands that they represent and a lot more money coming in their way. And it's also created a kind of interesting. incentive system where brands are reaching out to creators while they're still in high school in anticipation of them entering this sorority life, that might be going a little too far, but that's just a natural progression of trying to get in early with these people that are going to be very powerful later in their life. So crazy that Rustok is so big and so powerful that brands

are basically treating them like college athletes and recruiting them out of high school. That's exactly what they are. Nike refers to the them as campus athletes and they're really intentional about building long-term relationships with them because you're right, they think of these people, these women as the next generation of influencers. And to have a relationship with them as young as college freshmen is very important to them. And we know that Nike stock price is at its worst levels in well more than a decade. So they're trying to build up their cultural cachet. And what they say is that, quote, 18 to 22 year old females are powerful cultural forces

on college campuses. So very fascinating to watch the world of marketing shift thanks to Rush Talk. It's Monday, so here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. Recovery efforts are ongoing in Nepal and Tibet, where catastrophic flooding last week has killed more than 900 people and left more than 4,700 missing. Many of those unaccounted for are pilgrims visiting Sacred Lakes, while roughly 900 are workers at the many hydropower projects in the region. Scientists say that gigantic floods were sparked by a big chunk of a glacier high in the Himalayas breaking off and falling thousands of feet to the valley below. Now, authorities are warning a fresh flooding risk that could hamper rescue

crews. Truly devastating stuff. Also, another flood update. One person has died. Another 15 are missing after flash floods tore through parts of the Grand Canyon National Park over here in America. That came from heavy rains and more are forecasted for today, which could lead to more flooding. so hope everyone stays safe there as well. Up next on Wall Street, the main event is Friday's job report that's taken on even greater importance after last month's stinker, which showed the U.S. economy losing 23,000 jobs. You can bet Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is watching closely because it's one of the few big data points left before September's interest rate decision.

Right now, it's basically a coin flip as to whether the Fed will hike rates or not. So at the end of last week, we previewed what Kevin Warsh might say at Jackson Hole. yearly conference for central bankers. And he did sort of allude to the possibility of a hike. He said that the Fed will have, quote, work to do if inflation doesn't cool. Warsh also said that the Fed should focus on inflation rather than the job market, which he thinks is pretty stable. So the odds of a hike did go up after he finished speaking, but you're right to say that it's a coin flip because they went up to right around 50%. The U.S. Open is underway under the bright lights of the Billy Jean King National Tennis Center

in Queens, New York City, and we've already had a stunner. Last night, 39-year-old, invisibly ill Novak Djokovic was upset in five sets by unseated Mariano Navon, the first time Djokovic lost in a first round in a major since 2006. That'll make Carlos Alcraz's title defense even easier, which was already looking promising after top rival Yonik's sinner bowed out due to an injury. On the women's side, the world number one is Arina Zabalinka, but she's been shaky and has plenty of worthy competitors coming for her crown. Djokovic losing no sinners, shaky Sibolinka. At this point, I think one of us has a shot, Neil.

We should enter the main draw. Well, it'll be nice of an American one. I mean, what was the last time an American man, Braddock in 2003? I think that's exactly. Yeah, so, I mean, it's burned into my memory because it's so long ago, and we've never been able to update it. It could be us. Tiafo, if you're listening to this, please make a run.

Okay, finally, it's the last day of August, and September begins tomorrow, which raises a good question, Toby. What do you consider the end of summer? End of summer is when I have to think about a jacket when I go out to dinner. Over the last few months, it hasn't even crossed my mind. It's been linen and that's enough. But the moment that I have to say, should I bring a jacket, that's when summer ends. All right.

Well, let's hopefully, there's no groundhog. Maybe it's a marmot that can predict a few more weeks of summer. But I think we're big fall guys on this podcast. So I don't hate that. It's coming. All right. that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful start to the week. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com or DM us on Instagram at Embedley Daily Show.

Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lute is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller. Hair and makeup is rushing KD. Good luck. Kevin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. The following is a paid advertisement. Toby, do you have a personal philosophy? Yes, everyone should have more money. New York Life's protection-powered growth philosophy might align with yours then. It explores how protection can serve as a strategic foundation for long-term financial success that enables future opportunities.

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