US $1.8 Trillion Deficit Keeps Growing & HBO Doc Reveals Bitcoin Creator?
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the U.S. deficit numbers came in, and I don't think I can even count that high. Then, did an HBO documentary really unmask the elusive creator of Bitcoin? It's Wednesday, October 9th. Let's ride. ♪

We are officially counting down the hours until one of the strongest storms in Gulf of Mexico history makes landfall tonight in the Tampa Bay area. Hurricane Milton is expected to bring dangerous 15-foot storm surge and wind speeds exceeding 100 miles an hour to the west coast of Florida still battered

from the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago. Nearly 6 million Floridians across 11 counties are under mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders, and more than 1,500 flights have already been canceled as of yesterday. Neal, models are forecasting that Milton should weaken from a Category 5 storm to a Category 3 before it makes landfall tonight, but still...

Experts warn it will have devastating effects. Absolutely. And Florida is taking this very seriously, so much so that Disney World is closing, and it does not do that often. Since it opened in 1971, more than 53 years ago, Disney World has closed just

10 times, mostly due to hurricanes, and today makes 11. Disney said it would close its Orlando theme parks in phases later this afternoon, joining its neighbors Universal and SeaWorld that are also shutting things down ahead of the storm. And yes, just want to give a quick shout out to my hometown, Bradenton, Florida, which is right in Milton's Path, so I hope everyone there stays safe.

Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Wise Business, the app for doing things in other currencies. Neil, people might not know this about you, but you're quite the foodie. I just get bored of eating the same stuff. I'm always trying new things from different places. Yes, I've actually been keeping track. You've already had sushi.

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The United States government has continued to spend like a couple with dual incomes and no kids. There's just one problem. There's less income coming in and it has nearly 350 million kids. A report yesterday from the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the government ran up a deficit of $1.8 trillion last fiscal year. It's the biggest annual deficit in three years and assigned lawmakers have largely ignored the widening budget gap ahead of a

So what drove the nearly $2 trillion annual deficit? Greater spending on programs for older Americans, Social Security and Medicare, and higher interest payments thanks to the Fed's rate hikes. The U.S. spent $950 billion paying back loans last fiscal year. That's a 34% spike from the previous year and more than the Pentagon's entire budget.

This isn't the largest deficit we've ever run, both in dollars and as a share of GDP. Deficits tend to balloon during wars, recessions, and most recently pandemics when the government spends big to prop up the economy. However, the U.S. is running a deficit this big when the economy is kicking butt like it is now is unprecedented. And it worries budget hawks who claim government spending is out of control. Toby, the national debt, which is the sum of

all deficits, $35.7 trillion. Yeah, you can just keep throwing these numbers out. It's hard to fathom just how big it is. I mean, just the fact that our interest payments alone surpass military spending should just be the headline stat here. That is insane. If there's

One thing or two things the U.S. does is run a deficit and spend a lot on military. But right now, just interest alone is surpassing the Pentagon's entire budget. But yeah, the latest deficit reading is around 6.4% of gross domestic product. That is not something that you want to see when you have an economy humming along on all cylinders like it has. The U.S. has technically run larger budget deficits before, but they are in those times higher.

around wars or coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic or economic crises. It's not supposed to happen in a period today with low unemployment and solid growth. So this is just not something you necessarily want to see, but it is sort of the new normal of the way the government currently operates. Yeah. Go back to the early 1990s. We had a really good

economy. Budget was often talked about like it isn't now as much. Federal debt then was one third of U.S. GDP. And then now we have projections for 2027. Debt is projected to top 106 percent of GDP. And that would be a new record. So we have two presidential candidates coming up for this election in less than 30 days. You know, are they talking about the deficit? What are they going to do to bring down the deficit? Well,

not really that much at all. They both have released very heavy spending plans and a new report from the Nonpartisan Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, which you can tell by their name what their sort of mission is. They released this report that showed that both

Both candidates would add trillions to the deficit, one more than the other. President Trump's plans would add up to $15 trillion to the U.S. debt pile, while Harris's plans would add just over half that on the top end, which is as much as $8 trillion.

So it looks like whichever administration comes into the White House, this deficit is not going to get any less. So what are you supposed to do? Are we going to go down a path where we can eventually limit spending by federal agencies? And the answer is it's not looking likely just because of what you said, but also just

to really cut this deficit down, you need to make cuts to Medicare or make Medicare more efficient or make Social Security benefits less generous. And those are two kind of political minefields that neither candidate wants to go down and neither party wants to address either. So until you make a move around those two things, you're not going to see a big budget reduction anytime soon. Well, or you raise taxes. Or you raise taxes. Yeah. That's the only other way because, yeah, 45% of the federal budget goes to Social

Social Security and health insurance programs like Medicare, and those are untouchable, 45% of the budget. So you need to raise money to close the deficit. There is an opportunity to do that next year when Trump's 2017 tax cuts expire. He has proposed extending them for more years,

And Harris wants to extend most of them as well. But she does want to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but keep taxes the same for people, those tax cuts for people making under $400,000. And they both released some vague plans of ways to raise more money outside of tax increases. Trump has proposed tariffs and says that if the economy grows, then our

revenues will grow as well. Harris has other, you know, wants to raise taxes on companies and on wealthy individuals. So we'll see. This deficit does not seem like it's going to shrink anytime soon.

It's Nobel Prize season, and one of the first awards was handed out in the physics category to the Godfather. No, Vito Corleone didn't suddenly figure out how to reconcile quantum mechanics. It was the so-called Godfather of AI, Jeffrey Hinton, who snagged the award alongside John Hopfield for their work developing neural networks.

Put in English, they built computer systems inspired by how the human brain works, which helped lay the foundation for a lot of the AI models you use today, like ChatGPT. If that name Hinton and his label as the godfather of AI sounds familiar, you also might remember him for dramatically quitting Google last year, issuing a very public and very dire warning about the risks of the technology he helped create. He even went as far as to say he regretted his life's work

And now he's just won a Nobel Prize for it. He did. And that is an offer he can't refuse because that comes with a $1 million prize. And he said he was flabbergasted by it. And he was just in this cheap hotel room in California, didn't expect it, especially for physics, because the links linking physics to what these guys won the Nobel Prize for is perhaps

a little tenuous and that was maybe the talk on social media yesterday where it was like, I don't know whether these guys deserve the physics Nobel Prize. Yes, it is very amazing what they did with neural networks, but the fact that Nobel Prize for physics went to them was at least a little curious. So yeah, reporters got on the phone with Hinton and of course the only thing they asked about after the Nobel Prize was,

What do you think of AI? Do you think it's going to be destructive? Do you think it's going to be helpful? Because, of course, he did make this big splash quitting Google last year. And he sounded pretty much the same notes. He said it's going to be a huge deal comparable with the Industrial Revolution. Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, these bots are going to exceed people in intellectual ability. And so he does see down the line that these artificial intelligence systems will become smarter than humans. And he said...

In some respects, that will be a good thing. He pointed to healthcare as one area that will benefit greatly from AI, but he also warned that it could be severely destructive as he's warned in the past. And one of his other soundbites too is when reporters called him and asked him about this, they're like, hey, are you using AI? What tools

tools are using kind of in the AI world. And he says he uses chat GPT for one of the more recent models from open AI whenever he wants to know the answer to anything. So it's not like he's a Luddite. He's not refusing to engage in this technology. He's called the godfather of this technology for a reason. But you are totally right. Social media did kind of have a little hissy fit over this. One of the top posts in the rPhysics Reddit was saying like,

Come on, guys. Like the link to physics is tenuous at bed. There's already too much proper physics that still has to be rewarded over this. The link that they tried to draw was the fact that you can apply neural networks and apply this technology to things relating to physics.

But also, I think what we're reading between the lines here, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who awards the Nobel Prize, doesn't have a computer science category or doesn't have an AI sector at all. So they kind of shoehorned it into this physics-related sort of award category.

regardless, this is the defining technology of our era right now. So no one's that upset to see it rewarded like this. And Hinton did win the Turing Award, which is the computer science's top prize back in 2019. So he has certain accolades. So yeah, the Nobel Prize week rolls on. We have the Peace Prize coming up on Friday, which Toby, I know, just stand by your phone that morning. You might get it. And then on Monday is economics.

The most notorious short seller in the game has locked in on a new target, Roblox. Hindenburg Research, a company that digs up dirt on companies and bets on their stock prices to fall, issued a scathing report yesterday on Roblox, a fast-growing video game platform popular with kids. Hindenburg accused Roblox of significantly inflating how many users it

It has and prioritizing growth over child safety, putting Roblox on the defensive to prove otherwise. Here are Hindenburg specific claims. It says Roblox inflates the number of people on its platform by up to 42 percent, while it overstates engagement hours by over 100 percent. These stats are frequently used by Roblox in its pitch to investors because it is unprofitable and needs to show Wall Street it's capturing more eyeballs and growing quickly to keep its share price up.

In response to Hindenburg's report, Roblox said it totally rejects the claims and accused the short seller of trying to make a quick buck on its fall in share price. It wrote, the authors are admittedly short sellers and have an agenda irrespective of the substance of Roblox's business model and results. Toby, Hindenburg versus Roblox in a bare knuckle Wall Street ball brawl. Who you got? Yeah, the two big sins in Hindenburg's eyes is those one, inflated user metrics and then two, favoring

Prioritizing growth over child safety. Let's start with the inflated metrics. Over the past few years, the platform has been painting this picture of massive growth. It has this public goal to reach 1 billion daily active users. Currently, it's around 80 million active users. But Hindenburg, what they did is they went and hired a bunch of people to just play and monitor the top 7,000 or so Roblox games.

They found, instead of that 80 million number of reports, that only around 30.4 million daily active users were really using the platform. What they think is happening is that a lot of people are creating these alternative accounts or using bots to kind of enhance their gameplay. So for instance, someone might operate as many as 100 accounts

it's only one person, but they have 100 accounts. So they think their metrics are being inflated by these secondary accounts, these so-called zombie engagement hours too. It'd be like if someone played Morning Brew Daily on repeat 24 hours a day, and then we went to investors and say, hey, our average listening time is 45 minutes an episode, even though our episodes are only about 25 minutes long. So these are some of the reasons and are some of the ways that Hindenburg thinks Roblox is inflating those engagement and user numbers. And then

On to the topic of child safety. I mean, Roblox is so popular with kids, probably a lot of parents listening to this or people with younger cousins are like, yeah, they're on Roblox all the time because it is a video game platform. It's not a video game. Users build games into it. So there's just an infinite amount of worlds and places to explore. But since 2018, police in the United States have arrested at least two dozen people accused of abuse.

abusing or abducting kids they met on Roblox. So it is rife, critics say, with child predators. And Hindenburg interviewed former employees at Roblox who said, compared to other platforms, there just aren't as many safeguards here. When you create an account, you don't have to put in that information that screens you like in other places. So there are a lot of concerns that kids are sort of

getting abused on this platform. And it's a perfect place for, you know, people, nefarious people to do nefarious things. Up next, did HBO really unmask the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin?

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Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? The identity of the creator of Bitcoin has long been one of the great enigmas in the financial world, but it's an enigma no longer. That is, if you believe the findings of an HBO documentary that dropped last night. Money Electric, the Bitcoin mystery, thinks Satoshi, the creator of the $1.2 trillion asset class whose identity has remained a mystery for over a decade, is…

Peter Todd, a Canadian programmer who worked on Bitcoin in its early days. The strongest piece of evidence the show points to is an obscure message board from 2010 that highlights a post from Satoshi, followed up by a post from Peter Todd, seemingly continuing to Satoshi's train of thought.

The documentarians think it's an example where Todd slipped up, forgot to switch accounts, and accidentally revealed his true colors. Others are a little more skeptical, given that there was a span of 13 hours between posts, an odd interval for someone supposedly continuing their train of thought.

For what it's worth, Todd himself denied it when confronted on camera and later on X. But Neil, did HBO crack a code that internet nerds have been trying to unravel for over 10 years now? Well, there was a lot of hype about this particular documentary, and obviously he is not the first to try to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, but the guy who made the documentary, Colin Hoback,

has quite a resume because he exposed the authors of the QAnon conspiracy theory in a previous documentary, "Q into the Storm," which was highly regarded for what it did to unmask QAnon. So they were kind of anticipating that, okay, maybe if no one else could crack

who Satoshi was. And he's been a not, or that he, they, whoever has been anonymous for more than a decade since they went dark in 2011. It could be this guy Hoback because he's done this before, but the mystery of Satoshi continues because he didn't, Peter Todd denied it. Uh,

there weren't any other accusations or there weren't any other identifications going around. So we're never going to know because, first of all, the person who actually is a person or group that is Satoshi is never going to acknowledge it because this person has one million Bitcoin in their wallet somewhere. And that amounts to over 60 billion dollars at current prices. They're going to be they are one of the richest people in the world. And they would draw a lot of, first of all, a

Yeah, and people are criticizing this documentary too because they say putting forth this idea that Todd is Satoshi is a mystery.

puts him in literal danger because, like you said, if he is Satoshi, then he is one of the richest persons in the world. So immediately his safety becomes compromised. So there were definitely some pushback to that, especially because they're not sure if the evidence presented was as compelling as maybe the documentary thought it would be. I mean, there is this...

to create this tidy conclusions and point out one person and say that person is Satoshi. But in order to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Todd is Satoshi, you just need him to do one thing and that is access that private wallet, that Satoshi's Bitcoin wallet, the Genesis wallet as it's known as. And Satoshi,

either transfer in or transfer out money to that wallet. And without that, we will never definitively know. That being said, there were some fun aspects to this documentary dropping as well. If you went to the IMBD page of the documentary before it came out, they listed every single person associated with the show as Satoshi Nakamoto. So they're saying, we are all Satoshi. That's

It was interesting. The community was buzzing about it. I texted some of my crypto friends like, hey, what are we thinking about this? And their response was generally, crypto is filled with some of the more online, some of the nerdier people in the entire world. Do you really think that a documentarian podcast

beat that entire community to the punch who's been searching for 10 plus years now for the identity of Satoshi? Probably not. But still, it was a compelling watch. And we're never going to know. That's my opinion. In further evidence that time is a flat circle, Uber, after disrupting the taxi industry, just invented...

A bus. And New Yorkers, your ears might perk up when you hear where it's going. Starting yesterday, the ride-hailing company began offering rides to New York's LaGuardia Airport for $18, far lower than the up to $100 it probably costs you for a normal Uber from Manhattan to the northern reaches of Queens.

Of course, there is a catch. You won't be riding in a car, but instead a 14-passenger van, and it won't stop by your apartment. You'll have to catch this van at either Port Authority, Grand Central, or Penn Station. You may roll your eyes. Wow, Uber, so innovative. You know that airport shuttles exist, right?

But there's a chance this could catch on. First of all, people are more familiar with opening up the Uber app than reading up on a shuttle service. So booking an airport van would be a seamless experience. Second is the intriguing price. And Uber is also trying to hook users by offering discounted $9 rides in the first month.

Third, people are also accustomed to opening up the Uber app before heading to the airport specifically. Last year, 15% of Uber's total ride bookings came from trips to the airport. For those of you not in New York, you should still pay attention because if this succeeds, Uber said it wants to expand its airport van to multiple cities. Yeah, and I think Uber is also trying to show that this speaks to its broader goals as a company to reduce its climate footprint as well. I mean, Uber announced these new shuttles at

a climate event in London has these very big climate goals to reach by 2040 it sees ride sharing absolutely

sharing a ride with other people as a big step towards achieving some of those climate goals. So yeah, Uber share there. It used to be Uber pool. Now it's Uber share saves money, reduces car ride. You know, it's even better than sharing a car with one person. It's sharing a Uber shuttle with a lot of people. So it definitely has that angle as well. But I think you're totally right. People rolled their eyes on this. Like we tweeted this from the morning brew account and it just got so

meme after meme, like, wow, you guys invented a bus. But that familiarity with the Uber app, a lot of people, imagine you land in New York City for the first time. Do you want to try to navigate all the stairs, figure out where the bus comes? Those stairs. Those stairs are so annoying. I'm just trying to put yourself in someone who is traveling to New York for the first time. It is scary to go find the bus. It is a lot less scary to have the Uber app open to

track the shuttle in real time. So I do think that is a relatively big unlock here. Yeah. And Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, was actually on the show. And one of the main things that he talked about was this van service, the shuttle service that they rolled out in Egypt, Brazil, India, and Mexico, countries that are more accustomed to sharing rides with others than we are in the United States. We love our private cars, but they're trying to, uh,

to add this to their arsenal here in the United States because they have been accused of increasing greenhouse gas emissions because the number one factor here is transportation and cars and that without a doubt they are getting people away from public transportation and towards cars. So they are trying to bring it back into balance just a little bit. But also LaGuardia is just

impossible to get to via mass transit. There's a couple buses that go there, but most people don't take those. So it could be a compelling pitch, especially if they expand it to other New York City airports, which are also very tough to get via mass transit. And then the leader of this initiative was like, yeah, I want to make this at a lot of airports around the United States. So this could be happening to an airport near you. I just run to LaGuardia. I just hoof it there. It's much quicker, much more greenhouse gas efficient as well.

I know you probably haven't even fully picked out your Halloween costume yet, though I'm sure your Grimace-Mu-Dang combo fit will go hard, but you better do it quickly because Spirit Halloween, everyone's favorite pop-up costume shop, is already making plans for its stores once spooky season comes to an end. Convert them into Christmas-themed locations.

The retailer, which spawns into strip malls as soon as the burr months begin, is converting 10 locations in the Northeast to spirit Christmas stores to keep the holiday season going with the earliest opening October 18th. They plan to offer festive items like decorations, inflatables, and even a life-sized gingerbread village complete with a chance to get your picture with Santa Claus.

Why make the leap from scarecrows into snowmen? Well, because people spend a lot of money around Christmas time and Spirit wants to trick or treat their way into the more lucrative winter holiday period. Yeah, Spirit Halloween is Spirit Halloweening itself once its stores are going to go vacant because they don't really sell anything after.

after October 31st or November 1st, they're saying, okay, we got 10 of these stores. Let's try to go into the Christmas market, which you said is a much bigger than the Halloween market. I mean, this year, Americans are expected to spend $11.6 billion on Halloween, which yeah, sounds like a lot. But then when you look at holidays and Christmas, that number balloons to $964 billion. And they do want a slice of that.

I'm a little doubtful that it'll work because there's so much competition for Christmas decorations and holiday gifts because every single retailer is getting into that. I mean, even the mass market ones, Target, Walmart, et cetera, they basically convert to spirit Christmases.

over the course of the Burr months. And so Spirit Halloween, Spirit Christmas might not have the same cultural attache as it does for Halloween. And it's become a force in Halloween, absolutely. Can we please just mire the elegance of the Spirit business model a little bit though? The joke is how they pop up like a ghost...

immediately as you feel that chill in the air, they just spawn out of nowhere. That's because Real Estate Team actually spends most of the year scanning the country for vacant buildings, bankrupt retailers, empty storefronts, so they can prepare to jump in when the season strikes.

The company seeks out these temporary leases around three months. What they do is include a kick-out clause as well. So if the landlord does find a permanent tenant by June, they'll say, all right, you can have this. So there are very attractive leases for these landlords. And then also just the fact that it has very low overhead costs. They can slide in and out without much to do. It keeps those kind of real estate expenses low. And then finally, they have this non-perishable inventory. You can

put a Christmas or you can put a princess Halloween costume on display this year, but then also next year and the year after that and year after that. So just truly this beautiful business model that they are now trying to apply to a different season. And when all of it's more than 1500 locations have set up, that is the same real estate footprint about as Target and bigger than Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. So it is a force to be reckoned with. And I will be visiting it to see what I can

scrounge together for the Halloween costume, which is coming up very quickly. Okay, let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your day with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. For any feedback, questions, or comments on the show, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrewdaily.

brew.com and please spread morning brew daily far and wide to your friends family and co-workers for anyone having trouble coming up with a sharing buddy Toby has an idea I want you to share today's podcast with someone you want to do a couple's Halloween costume with I suggested mood dang and grimace but maybe Toby and Neil could be the duo that you dress up as this year well I

Yeah, then you can tell me how to dress. Okay, let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Uchenna Waogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. You can all stop looking. Hair and makeup is Satoshi Nakamoto. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. And our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow.