Morning Brew Daily - Tesla Teases Affordable Car in '25 & Why Meta AI is Everywhere

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Episode 308: Neal and Toby dive into Tesla’s Q1 earnings report which certainly had its ups and downs with the announcement of a new affordable model despite having an abysmal sales performance. Then, the FTC just banned noncompete agreements because it believes it could raise the earnings of Americans. Next, Meta just released its chat bot and wants to make sure everyone knows about it. Meanwhile, there could be a new miracle drug that is a fraction of the cost of Ozempic. Also, a Finnish company wants to solve the world’s coffee supply problem with AI. Lastly, Armand Duplantis breaks his own pole vaulting record and there’s a cash incentive why.  00:00 - Intro 2:45 - Tesla’s optimistic future 7:00 - FTC bans noncompete agreements 10:30 - Meta AI is here 13:45 - Newest miracle drug for cheap? 18:00 - Cup of AI joe 21:00 - Pole vault your incentives Get your Morning Brew Daily Merch HERE: https://shop.morningbrew.com/products/morning-brew-daily-sweatshirt?utm_medium=multimedia&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=mbd&utm_content=shownotes 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

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Good morning, Brew, Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the FTC voted to ban non-compete clauses. So sorry, everyone. I'm off to host a rival podcast. Ben Yohan Must straight up said, if you don't believe in autonomous driving,

don't invest in Tesla. It's Wednesday, April 24th. Let's ride. The TikTok ban took another big step to becoming reality. Last night, the Senate passed a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine and other allies. That contains a measure forcing, TikTok's Chinese parent bite dance to sell it or else face a ban in the U.S. within nine months. President Biden said he would sign the bill into law today and give a public address to the

American people if you're looking for some lunchtime entertainment. But don't expect TikTok to go away quietly. It might be down too oh in the series, but it's vowing to do all it can to stay alive and will challenge the bill on free speech principles. As one of its execs said, this is the beginning, not the end of this long process. There was definitely some political sausage making here, tying it to a foreign aid package, certainly changed the calculus on whether this was going to get passed or not. But as you said, this is a sort of a very long and winding legal road pitting kind of First Amendment rights and free speech rights versus national security concerns. So it should be a fun one. And we're probably going to record about 12 more podcast episodes

about this. I'm taking the over. You're taking the over. Now let's hear. a word from our friends over at Robin Hood. So sleep is something that is very important to both of us hosting a podcast published early in the morning, but some people have higher priorities than sleep. You wouldn't happen to be talking about your money, would you, Toby? That's exactly what I'm talking about, Neil. Luckily, Robin Hood has around the clock investing Sunday through Friday called 24-hour market. Your money doesn't have to get shut-eye when the market closes. Robin Hood, 24-hour market has 917 stocks and ETFs listed. You can invest in, after hours to keep up with anything that happens in the wee hours.

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Trading outside of regular market hours involves additional risks, including the risk of lower liquidity, increased volatility, greater spreads, and pricing uncertainty. The Robin Hood 24-hour market is from Sunday, 8 p.m. Eastern to Friday 8 p.m. Eastern. Robin Hood Financial LLC member SIPC is a registered broker dealer. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill 3-burner gas grill. Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard, then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together.

Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. Tesla, Tesla, the carmaker reported earnings after the bell yesterday, and it was like eating a bag of many flavored jelly beans from Harry Potter, some good things mixed in with some god-awful nuggets. Let's start with the bad first. Q1 profit, revenue and gross margins all misestimates. Revenue fell by 9% its biggest drop since 2012, and net income dropped by 55% from a year prior,

as falling sales and a bevy of price cuts slice into the EV-makers' margins. But the bad makes the good tasting nuggets all the sweeter. Much to investors delight, Tesla said that it will be accelerating the launch of new vehicles, including more affordable models, though no specific timetable is given. but perhaps the most interesting nugget of all was a slide in the investor deck that shows Tesla is coming for both self-driving cars and Uber.

They are currently working on adding a ride hailing to the Tesla app, which, if paired with Robotaxis, is a major unlock. Musk explicitly stated on the call that if you do not believe that Tesla will crack true autonomy, you should not invest in the company.

Neil, after all that, the stock was up as much as 10% after hours. And this is Elon trying to control the narrative, get away from the falling actual auto sales and pivot towards becoming an AI and robotics company. I think that's what Elon really wanted to stress in this earnings call is that Tesla, while it does sell cars, the ultimate end goal is for it to be an AI robotics company that sells self-driving software, not just to itself or uses it in its own cars, but sells it across the auto industry.

And it already did, and Elon did mention that they already are in talks, with one major automaker to sell this full-driving, full self-driving software. Yeah, there are two ways you can look at and value Tesla stock right now. One, you can price it based off its ability to sell more EVs and more affordable EVs. That took a little bit of a hit yesterday because that rumored $25,000 EV doesn't look like it's coming anytime soon. But the other way you can price the stock is based off its AI abilities and its ability to ship this Robo Taxi.

and those bowls got a major boost yesterday because Elon was very explicit. The Robotaxi is happening. So, investors do want Tesla to become more than just an auto company, but they also don't want it to stop selling autos in the meantime. So yesterday's earning call was all about threading that needle, and it looks like base off investor reaction, they did just that. They did. And it's so interesting to look at the magnificent seven. I mean, these are big tech stocks, and you got Nvidia in there, and Amazon in there and meta in there. And then also included is Tesla. You're wondering why is Tesla in there? And it's because just like the Amazon's Meta's, NVIDIAs of the world, all of these companies are racing towards this AI future.

And just like those big tech companies, Elon and Tesla also want to say, we are focusing on AI. And this will be a driver of earnings growth in the future. It's just, you know, making a car is hard, but making self-driving cars are even hard. because of all the regulations, and we've seen so many slipups from the cruises of the worlds, the Waymos of the world. There is just a lot of red tape you have to go through, and we're not even close to seeing a bunch of self-driving cars in our road.

So Elon has a long road ahead of him. Tesla's been in the dumps before, you know, they were close to bankruptcy in 2017 and 2019. There have been rises and falls throughout its history. So Elon's hoping that this is – and Tesla investors are hoping that this is at the bottom of where they are now. And just a little quick zoom out as to how the rest of the business is doing. Tesla is not as profitable as it once was. Their gross margins, which is this key measure profitability, came in at 16.4% in the first

quarter. That's smaller than Wall Street expenses and also way down from the 30% margins it had at the beginning of 2022. And then cars just aren't selling like they used to global vehicle inventory, kind of almost doubled in the last quarter, jumped up to 28 days up from 15 days last quarter. So in terms of the full auto business, they are between those growth waves as Elon has as reiterated multiple times. But it looks like people are much more concerned with how the Robo Taxi business is going to

play out. In a landmark ruling that will have an impact on literally every part of the U.S. economy, and I mean literally, the FTC voted yesterday to ban non-compete agreements for most American workers. According to this rule, U.S. companies may no longer include non-compete clauses and employment contracts going forward, and they have to rip up the existing ones. For background, non-competes are clauses included by companies that prevent workers from absconding to another firm in the same industry for a certain time period.

And they're everywhere in every sector at all income levels. Nearly one-fifth of U.S. workers are estimated to be under some form of non-compete. In banning these agreements, the FTC hopes to feed a gallon of prune juice to obstructed labor markets. The agency argues that by not allowing workers to switch jobs, non-competes suppress wages, hinder innovation, and robs them of their economic freedom. They said that a ban could create jobs for 30 million Americans and raise wages by nearly $300 billion per year. It's supposed to go into effect in four months, but it won't.

Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are staunchly opposed and plan to sue to block the ban. They say non-competes are critical to ensuring business secrets stay in-house and that the FTC doesn't even have the authority to take such sweeping action. Still, Toby, a historic decision. It was historic. And when you think of non-competes, my brain immediately goes to the very upper echelons of the C-suite. You don't want these executives taking off and spilling company secrets. But you're right.

It affects a lot of workers. One in five American workers was a lot higher than I expected. And it really goes all the way down to every part of the economy, fast food workers, yoga instructors, hairstylists. They all have non-compete closets. sometimes depending on what a business wants to do. But it was just very interesting to me to see that this is not just something that affects the C-suite.

No, it feels like it's been abused a little bit. I think there was a lot of public outcry over non-competes applying to not just higher-level executives or salespeople. That's another big sector of the workforce that might be under a non-compete for reasonable reasons because salespeople have a book of business. They have the list of customers. And you don't necessarily want someone being able to easily go to a non-competeenable. a rival firm and take their sale, their, their customer base with them. But when you start to hear

stories of workers at Jimmy Johns and security guards at parking lots who are not privy to company secrets, at least as far as I can tell, not being able to switch jobs, then you look at what economists say is a distortion of the market that really clogs up the labor market. Let's look at some of those pushbacks, though. So you mentioned the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Commerce, they are immediately going to sue about this because, right, they want it, they want to encourage companies to invest in their workforce, knowing that they won't just pack up and leave to a competitor. So that's one reason the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is very much against this.

Then there's going to be pushback from the Supreme Court as well, because the word I've been seeing tossed around is it opens a Pandora's box in the sense that gives the FTC a lot more power to almost micromanage the economy, power that the Supreme Court will likely think that Congress hasn't granted to them. So if we look at it in terms of this deep skepticism the court has shown towards agency overreach, it does look like the Supreme Court will have some thoughts on this as well. Some of you likely opened Instagram or WhatsApp in the past few days and found Meta's AI-powered assistant all up in your grill. It's true. Meta-I is suddenly everywhere you look amongst its suite of apps. We were warned last week that the company would be

integrating its AI assistant into Facebook feeds as well as in the search bar of other apps, but actually seeing it on devices has caught some users by surprise. And they are less than thrilled. Now when you click on the search bar of Instagram or Facebook, it opens meta AI instead of a normal search result. A blue arrow will take you into a chat with the assistant where your results will come back augmented by AI. If you want normal results, you can still hit the gray magnifying glass, but still, the new default is throwing people off. Neil, is this a lot of a solution in search of a problem or the natural natural next step for these platforms? This is AI adoption by brute force.

It's classic Zuck. He force feeds billions of people. These new features and you have to use them whether you like it or not. We go back to the days of when Facebook was popular and he introduced the like and everyone complained. Then to the days of Instagram, he's like, yep, we have stories now. Yep, you have reels. And you just have to suck it up and do it because you have no choice.

I'm going to shape your behavior. So this is classic Zuck where I'm going to release a new feature and you can't hide it. Like this is there. There's no way to get rid of it. And he just hopes that this is going to be something that people eventually learn how to use even if they complain about it now. Right. Some of the critiques are if you go on Instagram and you're looking for a recipe for something, you really just want to get taken to a bunch of reels and you can scroll through find a recipe.

But now you are kind of confronted with a wall of text. sometimes in this separate chat with Meta-AI. So it's a bit of a clunky UI experience right now. There's this Facebook group called Middle-aged and Boomers United, where there is a post that went very viral lamenting the changes had over 13,000 likes in one day. But I do just want to take a zoom out here and not sleep on meta's AI efforts in general. They just released their new Lama 3 model that they say can go toe to toe with the very

best AI models out there right now. And I do think that meta does have a massive leg up in AI adoption because you're right. They can force feed it to billions of people. It actually reminds me a little bit of Tesla where Tesla is saying, we are an AI company that has all this data from self-driving cars. It's very hard for Open AI to go and make a self-driving car, but we can make a powerful AI model. Same thing with meta.

It'd be very hard for Open AI to adopt the mass social appeal that Meta apps have. But Meta already has that booked in. So overall, I'm bullish. on their on their AI. Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook. I mean, it has maybe 3 billion users across all of those apps that may be introduced to AI assistance

for the first time because they don't haven't download the chat GPT app or they haven't gone to the chat GPT website or they're not using Microsoft copilot or Google Docs with with those AI features. So it could really be the first time that a lot of people get acquainted

with AI assistance for the first time because of meta's reach. Up next, could this cheap generic drug be the key to anti-aging. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get

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While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.S. College PC. We're the Hartford, with decades of experience ensuring millions of unique small businesses when it comes to your small business insurance. Thank you. One size, absolutely, does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash small business. From Ponce Delion to Peter Pan, humanity has tried four centuries to avoid the effects of aging. But what if aging could be delayed by a diabetes drug that costs just $1 per day?

That's what scientists are trying to find out. According to NPR, they're launching a clinical trial to test whether the drug metformin can prevent age-related diseases and promote a longer lifespan in older adults. If so, calling it a miracle drug would be an understatement. But while metformin might eventually be Superman, right now it's an unassuming Clark Kent. First introduced in the 1950s to treat diabetes in France, it was a problem. approved for use in the U.S. in the 90s, and today it's the world's most common treatment for type 2 diabetes. Along the way, something surprising happened. Researchers started to notice

that metformin might have wider applications than its humble origins suggest. They learned that metformin has anti-inflammatory effects that could help protect against common age-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and cognitive decline. The problem is, these observations suggested an association between the drug and anti-aging outcomes, but not necessarily a cause and effect scenario. So that's what this trial hopes to find out. It's so funny that during the time when biohackers are promoting this range of expensive anti-aging regimens worth thousands of dollars,

change your diet, change your sleep, optimize everything. It was this very humble diabetes drugs that could provide our best look into anti-aging yet. And it's so ironic, too, that's not me if you've heard this before, but you're telling me a diabetes drug has side effects that end up in being almost a miracle drug. It gives a lot of similarities to OZMPIC and that whole class of GLP1 drug. So it is interesting that we keep seeing these diabetes drugs have much wider effects than initially anticipated.

Right. But the fact that it's so cheap has actually been an obstacle for researchers here because it is a generic drug. And as we talked about when we talked about the drug shortages, it's really hard to make money on generics drugs, pharmaceutical companies don't invest in them because it doesn't just drive a profit for them. So this study that they're trying to do this, very important study that's going to take six long years, requires about $75 million in funding. And these researchers just can't find it because no one's going to invest in them. So if they do cross the threshold, get the funding to

find this, to fund this research, the idea is to show big pharma companies to say, hey, you should invest in this drug. You should invest in more research around this because we're seeing some crazy things going on here. It's worth taking a look if we can prove cause and effect in not just diabetes patients, but also healthy older adults. And currently, the FDA doesn't recognize aging as a disease to treat, but the researcher are also hoping that this results in kind of a shift in how the FDA does look at aging, a shift from treating age-related conditions to treating them all together and just calling it aging itself. So that is one big thing, too, that this study hopefully tries to institute change within the FDA.

And it does make sense because if you think about aging, all that aging really is is the fact that your cells cannot repair or replenish itself as fast as the forces that are acting on breaking them down. So if you can just slow that effect or reverse that effect in some regards, then yes, aging is something that is to be treated. So it's a very interesting paradigm shift that all comes from this very humble 1950s, 1990s era drug. But you can imagine that there's some.

so much money to be had in this entire industry and this entire longevity industry. As you mentioned, people are going on these day-long vacations, spending thousands of dollars for poolside vitamin IV drips, stem cell therapy, whatever ozone therapy is, it costs $1,200. You can get early detection cancer tests for $1,800. So this is an industry that a lot of people are willing to spend money in, obviously, to extend their lives. There's a lot of these tech bros in Silicon Valley who are very keyed in.

on this trying to extend their lives. Brian Johnson is maybe the poster child of this, who's this tech guy that is doing a lot of really weird things to be able to extend his lifespan. I think it's top of mind for a lot of people. There is a supply and demand problem in the coffee industry right now. Unpredictable weather has left traditional growing countries like Colombia and Brazil with fewer viable crops, yet global demand is only getting stronger.

67% of adults in the U.S. said they had drunk coffee. in the past day and all-time high. So what's the solution? Maybe AI designed coffee. A Finland-based roastery used a collection of AI prompts from ChatGPT and Microsoft's co-pilot to help them come up with a new blend of coffee, combining four different types of beans. By all accounts, it's an unconventional brew, but very good. In general, Finland is no stranger to cutting-edge coffee technology.

A research center in the country has also found a way to grow coffee beans in a lab by soaking cells in the nutrients they need to grow. So whether it's AI or lab growing coffee, Finland seems to be taking the lead here on solving the world's coffee crisis. That's because Finland drinks more coffee per capita than any other country. The average Finn drinks three to five cups a day, and eight or nine is not uncommon. And coffee is everywhere here. I was on deep in Reddit threads about Finland and coffee.

And it's just the social lubricant for literally everything they do. I invite you over and, you know, instead of saying, hey, do you want a tea or do you want a beer, they say, come over for coffee. So they just house coffee. And I guess it's tied to the fact that they have very long days or very long nights in the winter, up, winter or summer up by the Arctic Circle and they need caffeine to stay awake. But they just literally don't, there's never a time where they don't have a coffee cup in their hand.

If you go to a workplace and there's no free, free unlimited coffee, then it's unimaginable. Yeah, 19 hours of daylight, certainly will do that to a population. But I do want to just zoom out a little bit. We've seen some of these AI-inspired products from brands in the past. Nike recently rolled out these products conceptualized using AI for athletes ahead of the Olympics. That was more marketing stunt because a lot of them, even though they looked really cool, probably aren't going to be feasible in terms of mass production. Then remember, Coca-Cola launched its Y-3-000 flavor where they asked AI what Coke from the future might taste like.

That, again, felt like more of a market. But potentially, though, this coffee roastery was truly like, we just wanted to think outside the box here. We gave it a series of prompts. And we just did exactly what the AI told us to do. And the AI said combine these four different bean varieties. And it resulted in this very interesting flavor that no human probably would have come up with. So I do think that we're entering into a world where AI product design is becoming less

of a marketing stunt and more of an actual feasible outcome for these companies. and if it creates cool tasting coffee, then I'm all for it. Yeah, they said they tasted it, and they were like, no notes. Like, this is, this is good. We literally don't have any, any changes to this. So I do, I do agree with you that AI, but the AI will become a more important part of product development for generating ideas as it is for companies as it is for people, but it is really important to have AI in the title.

So people know that's very important. All right, feel free to borrow this final story for a, LinkedIn post about working smarter, not harder. On Saturday, Superstar Polvalter, Mondo Duplantis, broke his own world record for the eighth time by clearing 6.24 meters about 20 feet. His previous record, 6.23 meters last September, then 6.22 meters before that. This incremental strategy is by design. Duplantis gets a bonus check each time he breaks the world record. So as any savvy business person would do, he raises the bar by one centimeter every tournament to maximize his earnings.

It's a clever ploy, but Duplantis didn't invent it. The playbook was written decades ago by the great Ukrainian polevaltar, Sergei Bubka. Bubka was so much better than everyone else in the sport that no sponsor was willing to pay him a big bonus for winning because the outcome was never in doubt. So Nike came along and said, okay, Bubka, instead of paying you when you win, we'll pay you when you break a world record. And Babka said, sounds good to me. probably broke the world record 35 times between 1984 and 1994 using the one centimeter strategy.

Incentives matter, Toby. Incentives do matter, and it does show the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Remember, if intrinsic motivation is always going to be a better system than extrinsic motivation, because when you're giving that extrinsic system, you work towards it or sometimes just decide to game it outright. A lot of people, when they see this system, they think of big tech. the way promotions are scheduled where you get graded as having met or exceeded expectations. And oftentimes what that leads people to do is just do enough to get promoted, but not do their very best. Because if you're only going to get promoted on a set schedule, why would you leap leaps and bounds ahead and really go all in on your project when you can do just enough to get there?

So I do think that this, even though it's an athletic story, it's a pole vaulting story, it does reveal a lot about human psychology and how we are motivated to do the things we do. Yeah, the conversation around Bubka, and I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, is that he, we don't know what his potential could have been because over the nine years that he was breaking all these world records, the bar for the record was raised from six meters to six point one four meters. So over nine years, he only jumped 14 centimeters higher because of this incentive system. So the conversation is, wow, we really don't know how good this guy could have been. And maybe the same thing is happening to do Plantis right now, where he could be going higher. than he is now, but because of the incentive structure, that is created for him. And he's obviously falling because he's a smart dude and he wants to make a lot of money. Then we just don't know what the ultimate achievement could be. And so it's worth thinking about that for yourself and

your own life, where it's like, what are these benchmarks that have been set out for me by myself or other people? And I'm only hitting that by one centimeter more each time or do I have more potential if I redesign the system in some way? By the way, I know this is an incentive story and an economic story, but I did want to look into why his Mono de Plano. It's just so much better than everyone. And apparently he's got unmatched speed on the runway. He also has incredible on pole technique. He does have some interesting wrinkles to his technique too, though. One thing that he does that divides the pole vaulting world a little bit is he drags the pole into the box. Usually you're supposed to just put a clean pull into the box because that reduces friction. But he's been pole vaulting for so

long that it's a leftover from when he wasn't strong enough to carry the pole. So he kind of slide it in there. So now it's become kind of his Scotty Schaeffler foot shuffle thing. It's this very idiosyncratic technique that technically maybe he could over-optimized and get better, but that's just the way he's always done it. So very interesting. All parts of this story is interesting about optimization about what motivates you and about how to clear the bar, literally and figurative. It is the most graceful Olympics for it. It's incredible. It's very scary. That in the summer Olympics and then ski jumping in the winter Olympics, I could just watch. It's ASMR. You could just watch it all day. And let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for listening

and have a wonderful Wednesday. We haven't reached our storage limit on Gmail yet. So please send any and all feedback on the show to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Eugenua Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio. Hair and makeup is more caffeinated than a fin. Devin Emory is our chief content officer and our shows of production of Morning Brew. Great Saturday, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th,

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