War Puts Dubai’s Dreams in Jeopardy & Billionaires Sour on The Giving Pledge

0:00Neal Freyman:Managing media plans for multiple clients can feel like herding cats. Disney Campaign Manager is built for fast-moving agencies looking for one simple ad-buying solution to handle all of their streaming TV campaigns across Disney +, Hulu, and ESPN. Set flexible budgets, adjust on the fly, and optimize for total campaign control across every buy all in one platform. Get started today at DisneyCampaignManager.com. That's DisneyCampaignManager.com. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, with war raging in its backyard, is the Dubai Dream over? Then your Pokemon Go data is being used to train delivery robots.

0:44Neal Freyman:It's Tuesday, March 17th. Let's ride.

0:51Good morning and happy St. Patrick's Day. Okay, Toby, I put together a little St. Paddy's Day quiz for you and everyone listening. I'm going to give you the first part of a popular Irish saying, and you have to complete it. Ready?

1:05Neal Freyman:I am ready. This is completely off the cuff, by the way. Neil has not showed this to me, so go ahead. Okay, ready? Number one is the older the fiddle, the sweeter the... Griddle. Not quite. The older the fiddle, the sweeter the tune. Oh, I thought I was going to rhyme. I guess they don't have to rhyme. They don't have to rhyme. No, they just have to be cute. Okay, I'm in there now. Go ahead. And deep. Okay, so question number two, phrase number two, may your home always be too small to hold all your love close friends. Dang it. May your home always be too small to hold all your friends. Number three, you'll never plow a field by sitting on your arse.

1:44That is certainly true. The actual phrase is you'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind. A call to action right there. I like that. And then finally, may misfortune follow you the rest of your life and never catch up. Yeah, Toby. Was it catch up? It is catch up. Let's go. May misfortune follow you the rest of your life and never catch up. Just some words of wisdom from our friends over in Ireland.

2:11Neal Freyman:By the way, neither of us are wearing green right now. So we are pinchable. If anyone finds us on the streets of New York, we are pinchable. Okay. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Toby, what do you search for? deeper meaning in my interpersonal relationships, a sense of belongingness I haven't experienced since childhood, and a really good pretzel bun. Well, that's very deep, Toby, but what I was going to say was, what do you search for in professionals when doing B2B advertising? Because with LinkedIn ads, you can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

2:47Neal Freyman:I see. Well, in that case, it's worth mentioning LinkedIn ads has a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. Plus, LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B, that's business to business, ROAS of all online ad networks. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash MBD. That's linkedin.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions may apply. Wall Street joined in on the St. Patrick's Day festivities with all three indexes closing solidly green yesterday as investors parse every development coming out of the war in Iran.

3:24There was no real good news that sparked the rally. The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to shipping, trapping in one-fifth of the world's oil output in addition to numerous other key commodities. But oil prices fell to$93 a barrel, down from their Sunday highs of over$100 after President Trump signaled he was assembling an international coalition to open up the strait and alleviate an impending global energy crisis. But that effort doesn't seem to be going particularly well since officials in Japan, Australia, and Italy declined to participate, while the UK and France are still in the we're thinking about it stage.

3:57Germany's defense minister was the most blunt in his refusal, saying, this is not our war. We did not start it. Elsewhere in the region, and this is what I want to dive into with you, Toby, Dubai is still under attack. An Iranian drone set a fuel tank on fire at Dubai International Airport, causing even more flag disruptions at one of the world's busiest aviation hubs. For the past few weeks, Iran has been attacking Dubai, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf nations that have become international commercial powerhouses, branding themselves as a low-tech, safe haven for capital, even in a conflict-prone region like the Middle East.

4:32That Dubai brand, which took decades to build, has taken a big blow as drones strike five-star hotels and gleaming office towers, raining debris on the McLarens and Ferraris below. An increasing number of analysts are wondering whether the Dubai dream has gone up in smoke.

4:46Neal Freyman:Yeah, the entire pitch of Dubai was very simple. It was basically like, hey, I know we are situated in a very volatile region, but we're actually above that conflict. That has not been the case recently, because if you look at just cold, hard geography, Iran is 80 miles away from Dubai. That is New York to Philly. Imagine if, you know, Philly was doing stuff like it's right in New York's backyard. Essentially, they are doing stuff. I don't know what is going on in Philly, but they're doing stuff. But Dubai has just been on a massive upward trajectory. We can't ignore that. Its population was less than a million back in 2000.

5:27Neal Freyman:It's nearly 4 million today. So that is a quadrupling in just 25 years based on this singular promise of this is going to be the glitzy hub in a region not necessarily knowing for that. So crazy how it had such a high run up, but now you're facing the realities of just geography itself. Yeah, it doubled its millionaire population to more than 81 ,000 between 2014 and 2024. In 2025 alone, an estimated 9 ,800 millionaires were moving to the UAE. Dubai actually now sits ahead of global cities like Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich, Paris, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and just behind New York and London in its ability to attract global white-collar talent.

6:10That's based on LinkedIn data, according to the urbanist Richard Florida, who wrote this long piece in the New York Times. questioning whether the Dubai dream was over. So geography has been a curse recently, but it has been, had been for the past few decades, a real blessing. And Dubai rose on the prominence and these other places like Qatar rose in Saudi Arabia, rose on their geography because they really are the center of the world. And they've established their airports to be these huge international travel hubs. And a lot of wealth has moved through Dubai and the Gulf because of that. about two-thirds of the global population lives within an eight-hour flight of Dubai.

6:50Dubai Gulf carriers carry about one in three people traveling from Europe to Asia and one in two people from Europe to Australia. So it was this global nexus, and it still remains that way. But as long as you hear about drones setting fire to Dubai International Airport terminals and Emirates, the main carrier there, is operating at such a low, diminished capacity, they need to get this back on track or perhaps people will start leaving yeah nearly nine in ten dubai residents

7:17Neal Freyman:are not from dubai they are non-nationals that is by far the highest percentage of any major city in the world if you just zoom out across the emirates itself 10 million of 11.4 million residents are foreign nationals but the weird thing about dubai is that there's no real path to citizenship there's or in the uae in general too citizenship is based entirely on dissent They make it deliberately difficult to actually become naturalized in this country. That is a feature, not a bug. They want it to be kind of a transient city. A traffic violation can trigger deportation. So it's very interesting.

7:55Neal Freyman:It's almost like city as a platform. This is a concept that they're going for. But the flip side of that is that even though it's very easy to put down roots there, that means it's also very easy to take those roots away because there's nothing tying you to this country and to this city. And the economic hits are already coming. F1, which has multiple races in the region, including a few coming up, has already canceled their races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, which are coming up in the next month or so. So these big global entertainment properties, which had flocked to the Gulf like UFC and F1, are already backing out at least this year because the war is still raging.

8:31Neal Freyman:And then just quick update, even though we said that yesterday was a pretty green day for the market and oil mellowed out a little bit, this morning oil is ticking back up. It's up about 4 % this morning, creeping back towards that$100 barrel margin. And then also stock futures are slightly down right now. It really is kind of tied around if Trump and these countries, NATO countries, can kind of get this coalition to escort ships through the strait, which is the big question mark right now. So a lot of what you're seeing happening in the markets is trading around the sentiment towards that coalition.

9:05Neal Freyman:Moving on, in 2010, billionaires led by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett signed a giving pledge promising to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. But many who signed may have been crossing their fingers behind their back because the giving hasn't quite materialized, signups have slowed to a trickle, and some are backing out altogether. The New York Times did a deep dive into the origin of the pledge and its subsequent fall from grace. Times reporter Teddy Schleifer emphasizes how of the moment it was, signing the pledge was fashionable in the early days, bringing positive media coverage and helping those who gave back earn the label of, quote, good billionaire.

9:42Neal Freyman:Aaron Horvath, a sociologist who has also studied the giving pledge, called it a time capsule of that era. But now it feels old school, he continued. The numbers tell the story. In the first five years, 113 people signed up. Over the next five, 72, then 43, dwindling down until just four families signed the pledge in the entirety of 2024, a steady decline that shows shifting attitudes towards wealth. The shift has been spearheaded by the tech ultra-rich, who are a lot more dismissive of traditional philanthropy than billionaires of the past. Peter Thiel has waged a decades-long campaign against the pledge, saying he has privately encouraged at least a dozen signees to undo their signatures.

10:23Neal Freyman:As the Times notes, Thiel and others who share his worldview believe that the real way to give back is via business success, a claim echoed by Elon Musk, who says his businesses are, quote, philanthropy, though Musk is a signee of the giving pledge. Neil, we haven't seen a wave of people quitting quite yet, but it's certainly going out of style. Yeah, this is an important conversation to be having. What billionaires do with their money matters a lot because their slice of the pie is growing substantially. The top 1 % of American households now hold about as much wealth as the bottom 90 % combined, which is the highest concentration since the Fed started tracking this in 1989.

11:02And around the world, billionaire wealth has grown 81 % since 2020, up to$18.3 trillion. This is a lot of money that could be thrown around, whether to the giving pledge or back into for-profit businesses or to other avenues of philanthropy or politics. So it's very interesting and important to see how billionaires and ultra-billionaires are throwing around their money.

11:23Neal Freyman:And the issue with signing this pledge is that it doesn't really work. There's no mechanisms for enforcement. Requirements on participation aren't very high. Signees must assent to a news release and typically a letter posted publicly on the foundation website. They, you know, tend annual gatherings of their billionaires, usually held at a luxury resort. But it is very much a moral pledge. That's Buffett's own words. He's saying that there's nothing binding you to this. So if you have no mechanism of enforcement, if the giving pledge does not track whether it's signers make any progress towards their commitments, then obviously it's not going to be something that has a lot of teeth and compels these very rich people to give away their money.

12:04So if billionaires aren't signing up for the giving pledge that much anymore, what are are they doing with their money? Well, you can look at Michael and Susan Dell. They donated$6 billion to seed Trump accounts, which is giving newborns$1 ,000 to put in the stock market. So you can see that they're doing philanthropy, but perhaps in their own more private sector, stock market, free market focused way, or they're giving to politics and political races. A New York Times analysis found that 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated$3 billion, which is 19 % of all contributions to federal elections in 2024.

12:45You just go back five presidential elections ago, and the share of billionaire spending was basically 0.3%. So because of the Supreme Court's ruling in 2010 that lifted campaign finance restrictions, billionaire spending on federal elections went from basically 0 % to almost 20 % of all contributions. Moving on, we got any Pokemon Go players in the house? Well, you might want to know that your quest to catch them all is being used to train sidewalk delivery robots. Last week, MIT Tech Review reported that Niantic Spatial, an AI company affiliated with Pokemon Go, has partnered with a last-mile delivery robot company, Coco Robotics, to use crowdsourced Pokemon Go data to help its robots find their place in the world.

13:25Ever since Pokemon Go burst on the scene in 2016, hundreds of millions of users have taken pictures in urban environments where Pokemon could be found or do battle. At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, they were also giving then-parent company Niantic an unprecedented database of real-world imagery its leverage to create a visual positioning system. The company has 30 billion images you've taken at its disposal, along with important metadata like time of day, weather conditions, and camera angle. It is essentially a richly detailed digital copy of the physical world. And that's incredibly valuable for delivery robots, which, while they never need a bathroom, do need assistance understanding where they are spatially the way humans do, especially in downtown areas where GPS frequently doesn't work.

14:09As Niantic Spatial CEO John Hanke put it, it turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco's robot to safely and accurately move through the world is actually the same problem. Toby, when you're training Pokemon, you're also training robots.

14:22Neal Freyman:This is a industry where very fine margins matter a lot because you're saying, why can't you just use GPS? Well, if you want a burrito delivered to your door and the robot is, you know, five feet away at your neighbor's door, like that is a bad user experience. You need extremely precise data, which is why, you know, Coco is so ecstatic that they have this massive treasure trove of very high quality pictures and videos taken by Pokemon Go players. because not only is it high quality, it's located in good parts of the city. It's often around very busy travel hubs that places where GPS does not perform very well, but also a lot of the data is tagged too because robots are dumb.

15:05Neal Freyman:You see a sidewalk curb, you know it's a sidewalk curb. You shouldn't say that when they take over. I know, sorry. Editors, delete that please for the eventual uprising. But here's the thing. You do need to tell robots what they are. They don't necessarily know what the world around them is, So you need the data to be tagged. You need the metadata to be very rich. And according to reports, Neontic is very good at providing data like that, which is why, you know, it's selling your Pokemon data to robotics companies. What's interesting is they were gathering all this data in the first place because they thought they were going to do augmented reality.

15:39Because when you thought this data would plug into augmented reality. And if you're going around in AR glasses and looking at the world, you need to know what you're looking at and gather information on that. That was the original use case. But then what they found that what they called a Cambrian explosion in robotics and pivoted the data set to work with these delivery companies like Coco Robotics. But we should talk about like world models in general, because this is a direction that a lot of the leading AI researchers or I think thinkers are moving toward. They're moving away from large language models like ChatGPT and Claude and saying this is the real future of AI is using AI to help robots or other industrial processes operate in physical space.

16:20So Fei Fei Li, who's one of the top of the AI game, she has a startup called World Labs. Former meta AI chief Yan Le Kun has a new company that builds world models. Jeff Bezos started another company called Project Prometheus, which is focused on bringing AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design, and scientific discovery. So this is maybe the canary in the coal mine.

16:42Neal Freyman:Most people were seeing this story and going, oh, did Pokemon Go players know that their data was going to be used for this? They didn't know it was going to be used to feed into robotics, but they did know that their data was going to be used for something. So a lot, I was cruising through the Reddit forums. The general reaction was not like clutching their pearls and going, how could they? I think everyone was aware that it was going to be used for something where, you know, this headline kind of generated some response was, I didn't know it was going to be for these tiny little delivery robots.

17:10Neal Freyman:It was kind of a mixed reception to that entire, you know, news cycle. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends. Neil, I know you don't take investing seriously. You're right. I keep all my money inside my mattress. Don't be like Neil, whose door is almost always unlocked. Be like public.com users who take investing seriously. You can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and more while accessing industry-leading yields with a suite of fixed-income products. And now with our new generated assets, you can turn any idea into an investable index with AI.

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19:07Neal Freyman:Yet many are held back by structural issues like limited bandwidth and siloed systems. With Twilio's modular solutions, businesses can build, deploy, and scale voice AI agents within their existing tech stack, avoiding costly replatforming. Learn more at twilio.com slash morningbrew. That's T-W-I-L-I-O dot com slash morningbrew. Next time you misspell your in a text, don't sweat it. In fact, your sloppy texting is bringing you closer to the global elite, a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. Poor spelling, uneven spacing, improper capitalization, all are hallmarks of the rich and powerful, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.

19:47Neal Freyman:Just look at Jack Dorsey's recent memo announcing huge layoffs at his company block. He wrote it in all lowercase, like a middle schooler texting his friends. David Ellison, who is working on becoming the next Hollywood baron, misspelled David when corresponding with Warner Brothers CEO David Zlaslav, despite sharing a name with him. But the journal's article mainly focused on the Epstein files, highlighting how nearly every correspondence in them was riddled with awful typing. Business Insider points out that replying to emails immediately, often with just a few words, is a hallmark of emailing like a CEO.

20:21Neal Freyman:Another telltale sign is emailing with just a subject line and no body. Both are meant to convey the idea that when you're the boss, pleasantries or formal email style need not apply. Neil, misspellings are very much a part of the era we live in. We send so many texts and DMs and emails back and forth to each other that casualness has invaded our online writing. Heck, even the president sends out social media posts that feature periodic misspellings. But it seems like it doesn't really matter anymore. There are four words, in my opinion, that open Pandora's box when it comes to typos. And I think they are sent from my iPhone.

20:56And when you're sending an email from your iPhone, it's essentially a text. And that gave a lot of people license to make misspellings or grammatical errors or just basically send an email like you would a text. And it's just been a sea change in how technology has changed our communication. Just go back to CEO communication in 1950s. A CEO would probably, if they wanted to issue a public memorandum or something, they would do something like speak into a dictaphone. And then a secretary would come along, listen to that, and then transcribe it into this beautiful letterhead and make sure everything was perfect.

21:30And if they made a mistake, they would go back and do it again. And our technology mediums have changed so much where we're basically just emailing back and forth. And it's very interesting to see the power dynamic because I think if you are a junior employee listening to this, you're saying, what? I would never make a typo in an email. That would horrify me. But at the top upper echelon, it's seen as you've made it because you are allowed to make a typo and no one can really call you out on it.

21:54Neal Freyman:But then in an odd twist of fate, the rise of AI and LLMs have smoothed overriding to such a degree that now typos are seen as a way to show that you are human. And I think a lot of people who get any inbound email requests from recruiters or from people trying to pitch their services, if they have – if it's clearly written by an LLM, I literally just ignore it because I don't want to talk to someone who can't take the time of day to write something themselves. If they have the hallmarks of human writing, oftentimes it is a spelling error. Oftentimes it's a punctuation error. At least you know it's a human on the other end.