Trump Accounts Are Now Live & Philosophy Majors Find Work in AI

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0:35Good morning for Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, what you need to know about Trump accounts, which are now live. Then scientists created something that resembles a cell from scratch for the very first time. It's Monday, July 6th. Let's ride.

1:04my oh my what a fourth of july weekend scorching heat lightning storms fireworks and i'm still recovering from a wedding i went to on friday night at madison square garden toby you alive barely nil i'm actually recording this from the airport holiday inn express in detroit my flight into new york got canceled yesterday due to all the rain but i'm feeling good and happy to be here. Great. So we thought we'd seen it all at the World Cup, but the drama only cranked up yesterday when FIFA surprised everyone by announcing that USA's star striker Fuller and Balogun would be allowed to play against Belgium tonight.

1:38In the previous game, Balogun received a controversial red card, which per FIFA's rules would bar him from competing in the next match. However, in a highly unusual move, that suspension got suspended and Balogun will be available to the delight of American fans and the disgust of the Belgians. It looks like President Trump may have something to do with this. Yeah, all of FIFA's rules are like, here's a million articles and subsections, but actually every decision is going to be made by some unnamed dudes in a smoky back room. Yes, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lugan and a team of lawyers were involved in this.

2:15Specifically, they looked at how slow motion replay was used improperly to give the first red card out. Trump also called FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who he is close with directly, and Infantino agreed to look into it. So if I was a Belgium fan, I would feel extremely hard done by because a lot of buttons were pressed to get this overturned. But as a U.S. fan, the euphoria I felt when that push notification hit my phone, that was unreal. Balogun hat trick incoming. And now a word from our sponsor, Ultra Running. Hey, Toby, have I mentioned that I am Running the marathon? Yeah, you have. You've mentioned it to everyone.

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3:30That's A-L-T-R-A running.com slash morningbrew. This morning, the world's two largest stock exchanges, New York and the Nasdaq, will bury their rivalry to ring the opening bell together for the first time in a historic Oval Office ceremony. The reason behind all the pomp and circumstance is Trump accounts are now live. It's understandable if you miss this on July 4th, but tax advantage investment accounts for kids, which the president branded Trump accounts, officially launched on Saturday. That means millions of babies are the newest shareholders in America's largest corporations. Beware hostile takeovers.

4:05So here's how this works. Basically, it's a savings account for children under 18 that invests in a low cost index fund tracking the S &P 500. The sweetener is that for babies born between 2025 and 2028, they'll get$1 ,000 in seed money from the Treasury Department. Other children may be eligible for money, too, thanks to a pledge from billionaire Michael Dell and several companies to support the program. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the goal is to get more people invested in the stock market at a very early age so they can reap the rewards of compounding growth. Besant noted that 40 % of Americans have no exposure to U.S.

4:41equities and have no stake in the wealth they helped to create. He said that Trump accounts, quote, represent a profound reimagining of that arrangement. Toby, I am looking forward to seeing little Timmy go full Carl Icahn on the board of directors. Yeah, let's dive into the power of compound interest. If you put$1 ,000 into a Trump account, assuming the historical 10 % S &P 500 returns, you will have$6 ,000 by age 18 and$243 ,000 by age 55. But if you also add on that additional$5 ,000 annual contribution that is allowed under Trump accounts, you would have nearly$13 million by age 55. Those stats always sound unreal, but that is the power of compounding.

5:27So that is why a lot of people who support Trump accounts are saying, hey, this completely changes the financial trajectory of people's lives because of just how big that nest egg can grow if you contribute annually. And if the S &P 500 does actually grow 10 percent or more per year, which it has recently, but who knows how long that will last. And it looks like the Trump administration was also keen on other folks joining in and contributing to Trump accounts. So it's not just their seed money. They were hoping for this multiplier effect. And, you know, Michael Dell came through, who is an ally of the president.

6:01He pledged$6.25 billion, he and his wife, which is considered the largest ever donation to American children. And how that works is that if you were born between 2016 and 2024, you are under 10 years old. You get$250 seed money in your Trump account if you live in a zip code where the median income is$150 ,000 or less. So there is another million, bunch of million children, 25 million with 250 bucks in their Trump account. And then a bunch of other companies have also stepped up and saying, look, if you are an employee here, we will give you a match. Those include SoFi, Charter Communications, BNY, BlackRock, Robinhood, Charles Schwab, and Micron has also pledged$250 million to the Trump account.

6:48So it looks like a bunch of these companies and a few billionaires are getting in as well. So they sound pretty good on the surface, but what are some arguments against Trump accounts? One is that wealthier families still might end up benefiting the most because even though you mentioned that a lot of children are eligible for this, Families with more disposable income are obviously going to be able to contribute more money each year, which allows those wealthy children to accumulate far larger balances. Again, the difference between$1 ,000 and$5 ,000 a year is millions of dollars when you stretch it out over a long time horizon.

7:24So that's one of the criticisms. The second is it doesn't address people's immediate financial problems because if you're struggling with rent right now, if you're struggling with groceries right now, an investment account is still pretty low on your priority list. And at the end of the day, maybe$1 ,000 over 18 years isn't as transformative as maybe some proponents are making it out to be because, again, from zero years old to 18 years old, that money is only going to turn into$6 ,000. Again, I say only because it's better than nothing, but that is not necessarily a nest egg that allows you to go to college at 18 years old.

8:00So those are some of the arguments against Trump accounts, even though there are some loud voices on both sides of the aisle that are arguing for these type of accounts. Also, it's not the only savings account for kids that are available. A very popular one is a 529 account, which you put in for your kids and then you pay for college or higher education. And financial experts say, actually, this is better than a Trump account when it comes to flexibility and the tax advantages and or there's IRAs as well. So this is just one of a suite of options that you you have available for saving up for your kids later in their life.

8:35If you want to sign up, you know, maybe you maxed out your 529 or your IRA for your kid. Well, go to Trump accounts dot gov. Toby, you love saying that Trump is very good at branding. So he absolutely did it with this. So you can download the Trump accounts app to activate it. Also, if you don't want to do that, there is an IR, there is a form that you attach to your tax return called IRS form 4547, which also allows you to sign up for a Trump account. Let's move on. The add row function in Excel isn't the only way to create new cells these days. Scientists managed to make a spud cell from scratch, a synthetic version of what makes up you and me.

9:16A spud cell is a water droplet stuffed with non-living components to create a cell-like system in a lab setting. It was developed by a synthetic biologist out of Minnesota named Kate Ademala alongside her team. The paper describing the breakthrough is not peer-reviewed as of yet, but researchers are excited that the spud cell was able to feed, grow, replicate its DNA, and divide into other cells. Those are core lifelike functions, which means it's the closest scientists have come to building a functioning cell from scratch. Why are we trying to make fake cells? If synthetic biologists nail this process, theoretically we can create living organs as easily as we can make a car engine.

9:55That can do everything from aid a new drug discovery to help us understand the building blocks of life itself. Despite the breakthrough, spud cell is not technically considered truly alive. Researchers had to manually make it divide. Its DNA is frequently lost during replication. It can't replace its worn out bits. And as a result, it can't really evolve over many generations. We're still a ways off from cooking up a spleen or a kidney, but the spud cell brings us one step closer. Do you think these scientists, when they were in seventh or sixth grade, they heard mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell?

10:29And they were like, that is so exciting. I need to do this for the rest of my life. All the rest of us were like, okay, well, that's good to know. That's the only thing I know about cells going forward. I thought the reason that she named this spud cells was kind of funny. she wanted to remark to evoke Sputnik, which is, you know, the Russian, the Soviet satellite at the dawn of the space age. So that was one reason, Spud, Sputnik. And then the other was, she said she's Polish and she's mostly made of potatoes. And apparently this cell also resembles a potato. So there you go. The USSR satellite and the fact that she's made of potatoes is the reason we're calling this Spud cell.

11:08I was curious as to why we even are attempting this, because like, why do we need to make a cell from scratch? Because by all accounts, it's a pretty wimpy cell. Adamala has described it as a wimpy organism that right now basically does nothing other than eat and occasionally make a daughter cell. It can't build any ribosomes. It can't do much of anything right now. But a lot of people are excited by this path of science because we still don't really know what our cells do. Not what they do, but what goes into making our cells work. Right now, there's just so many components that are just complete mysteries to human scientists.

11:45So if we can reverse engineer it, maybe we'll find out what some of those mystery genes do within our cells. So building cells from scratch lets us understand what components are truly essential. So that's reason number one. There's also applications in medicine. I mentioned that you can manufacture new drugs. Maybe you can produce proteins that natural cells are struggling to make that leads to advances in cancer therapies. There's also things like manufacturing industrial chemicals. The ideas are endless when you can build the very building blocks of what makes us and what makes living things tick.

12:26So that is why we're going down this rabbit hole of synthetic cells, because if you know how to build them, then you can build anything out of it. And one of my first thoughts when I heard this, and maybe yours, too, is like, uh-oh, like, is this Dr. Frankenstein all over again? We're making something out of scratch. We're making something living. Obviously, that could be used for good, but it also could be used for bad. It doesn't seem like scientists are especially worried about, say, making a bioweapon from a spud cell or a synthetic cell at the moment because, as you mentioned, it can't make ribosomes.

12:59So it kind of dies out after five to ten generations. It is pretty wimpy. So if you wanted to build a bioweapon, there is just so many easier ways to do it than what Adalama was doing in her lab in Minnesota. So it doesn't seem like this is top of concern. And also they're saying, look, we're building this from scratch. So we can put in safeguards and reminded me of, say, an AI where you're constructing it from first principles, from the very beginning. So you can kind of encode what you want into it. So doesn't seem like, you know, nuclear destruction or the apocalypse is particularly on the menu when it comes to a spud cell, at least for now.

13:38Yeah, the vision for Adamala and some of her colleagues is to create an open sourced system for biology, similar to what Linux did for computers. So that is the future that they envision where you can program cells to do exactly what you want them to do. It is a fascinating, if maybe a little bit frightening future if you go down that rabbit hole, but a very cool development to come out of the science community in Minnesota. Shout out Kyle Hagee. Let's move on to our winners of the weekend, the segment where we pick two stories from the weekend that emerged from the holidays without a sunburn.

14:14I won the pre-show game of who got stuck in the Detroit airport for the longest, so I'm up first. And my winner of the weekend is Bending Spoons, the secretive Italian Berkshire Hathaway tube that went public on the NASDAQ recently. Bending Spoons specializes in buying discarded internet companies like Eventbrite, AOL, and Evernote, rebuilding them from the inside out and reaping the rewards. Unlike private equity firms, it doesn't flip companies for a profit. Instead, it works on improving operations, usually by firing old employees and installing its own spooners, then collecting earnings over time.

14:49It's been around since 2013, but has made three quarters of its acquisitions in the past three years, giving Wall Street an intriguing but untested business to gnaw on. And gnaw they did. Betting spoons went public just before the long weekend and shares popped as much as 40 % before closing up about 24 % above its IPO price, valuing the company at just under$23 billion. Neil, the name is in reference to that scene from The Matrix where Neil learns to open his mind to some reality-bending truths. Looks like investors were open to the idea of some Italians turning AOL into a money-making business again.

15:25First of all, win for the Italians. They're not in the World Cup. They must have so much FOMO watching all of us have so much fun, but they may not be in the tournament. They did raise a couple billion dollars on the stock market. One of Europe's biggest, European companies' biggest IPOs in America recently. I think it's pretty interesting to see how they're zagging where Wall Street and the rest of the tech industry is zigging. I mean, what was the biggest IPO before that was SpaceX who wants to build space data centers and humanoid robots and all this futuristic stuff that's laden with AI. And those have really been the biggest winners on the stock market.

16:03And here comes an Italian company bending spoons that buys up AOL and these, you know, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 companies and tries to fix them. And they're betting that people still have an attachment to these brands and that they'll pay a subscription fee. 84 % of their revenue comes from subscriptions. And so they think that even if they jack up the price, people still have loyalty to Eventbrite and Evernote and all these companies or subscriptions that you might have had 10 years ago. They want you to take a second look. They think that they have two secret weapons. The first secret weapon is the fact that they are just in a niche of the market that is so overlooked right now.

16:44Because as AI, the boom has attracted so much money because venture capital dollars are looking at opportunity costs and saying, for every dollar that doesn't go into an AI company, that means every dollar is potentially not multiplying in the way that I want it to. That leaves these older forgotten businesses sitting around at pretty attractive prices, at least if you are a Bending Spoons who believes that they can do their other secret weapon, which is just bring in their kind of super team of spooners, their engineering workforce that is one, cheaper because it's located over in Europe. And And then two, it is extremely selective.

17:22They had 800 ,000 applications and only made 286 hires last year. So around 700 of these Spooners run the businesses, run multiple of these businesses from the inside out. So they think that if they can find these attractive businesses at attractive prices and use the best workforce possible to make them more profitable, make them stickier for users, then you have a functioning business that, you know, could potentially become the next Berkshire Hathaway for a generation of, you know, tech obsessed people. Yeah. The the CEO, whose last name is Ferrari, of course, said that it was like if Google and a PE company had a baby, the bearish argument against against bending spoons is that we just don't know much about how these acquisitions are performing.

18:14They're so recent. They completed six acquisitions last year, five the year before. That's 11 out of the 50 that they've made total, and their finances have been pretty opaque before they went public. And so they weren't really disclosing. Sure, we went in, we cut the entire staff, and we jacked up prices, and people are paying a lot of money for AOL and Eventbrite now. We've had to take their word for it because we just haven't seen this on a long enough time scale to see how they're actually performing. So that'll be the one one of the many big questions that Bending Spoons will have to answer.

18:48And, you know, that's exactly what its stock price will probably track is as as they are public company and they report quarterly earnings and everything becomes a little more transparent. Sure. It sounds great to buy up all these flailing old businesses and turn them around. But we just don't know whether that's been successful yet. I mean, you can't put a number on how cool a name is, though. So Bending Spoons, that's got to command at least some sort of multiple in the stock market. So that's a$23 billion company, if you ask me. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neal's winner of the weekend right after this.

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21:25My winner is philosophy majors who are finding their deep thinking services surprisingly in demand in the age of AI. You know the jokes about philosophy majors employability. How do you get a philosophy major off your front porch? You pay them for pizza. But maybe the joke's on us because a number of AI companies have been hiring people with backgrounds in philosophy as moral and ethical concerns become top of mind when constructing their models. David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at NYU, told the New York Times, I think the demand for philosophers with AI training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now.

22:00It's an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with AI will be front and center for a good while. On a podcast last year, the co-founder of Google DeepMind said, I think we're going to need that, talking about philosophers, to help navigate society to that next step because I think artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence are going to change humanity and the human condition. The numbers back him up. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that American philosophy graduates are more likely to have jobs than peers who studied computer science. In 2024, 7 % of computer science grads were looking for work compared to just 5.1 % who studied philosophy.

22:39Toby, I think, therefore, I am employed. These philosophy majors are being treated like all-star investment bankers receiving job offers before graduating. They used to not receive any job offers after graduation, but things have clearly changed. What are these philosophers actually doing inside of these AI labs? They are no longer just sitting on the sidelines and maybe putting together window dressing for tech companies. They are helping build the models themselves because when you are crafting an AI model, you have to do things like define behavioral rules. You have to define the values that the AI model exhibits.

23:21And to do that, it's helpful to have people who have studied something like that. If you want to improve a model's reasoning, which are what these high-end models are described as, as reasoning models, why don't you hire the very people who studied reasoning for a living? So once you start digging into why this is happening, it does make a lot of sense that philosophy majors are not just being paraded around as a figurehead for, you know, a philosophical movement. They are actually in the nitty gritty helping guide the creation and training of these models. Yeah. Perhaps the best example of this is maybe the superstar of the field right now, Amanda Askell, who is the in-house philosopher at Anthropic.

24:02And Anthropic, back before they became a$1 trillion company that's about to go public and was fighting with the White House, was known for their safety for their AI models. And they even wrote a constitution, a 23 ,000 word constitution that forms Claude's quote, moral formation. And Amanda Askell was integral. She actually wrote, it's gone through a couple different iterations, but they borrow from Aristotle and these other philosophical principles to create a moral code for Claude. And that has likely brought her untold riches ever known to philosophers. You can ask Claude how much she's making.

24:43And Claude says that Amanda Askel is very likely a centimillionaire and plausibly a paper billionaire because of how Anthropic is doing in the private markets and it's about to go public. So she could very well be the first billionaire philosopher. I thought a very fascinating way that corporate America is using philosophy is that IBM has a model that they make that has settings that allow businesses to change outputs towards different philosophical priorities. So maybe you're a business that is really big on social harmony within the company. So you want your outputs to reflect something like that.