Altria ($MO) podcast mentions

1. It has no practical impact on anything, inflation or growth, but Warsh's calculus could be exactly that. I showed them I'm willing to do it and it will have limited or no impact on growth, they said. The earnings calendar is very light this week. Dave& Buster's reports Monday. Lennar weighs in on Wednesday. Carnival reports Thursday. In the news this weekend, AI creators are hitting the brakes as worries about rogue agents have rapidly evolved into existential alarm. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the progress of improving AI model capabilities should be slowed down. Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence, not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up, he wrote Saturday. This comes on the heels of AI scientists assigning a better than 10% probability that AI could wipe out humanity as companies hurdle towards AGI and recursive learning. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman then posted, "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same." Altman also told Fortune that with current safety concerns, this year would not be a good time for OpenAI to go public. Tech analyst Dan Ives said this is an important step for the industry around more self-regulation on the AI model pace, but the reality is China is not slowing down anytime soon. The pace of innovation will be a focus of the tech industry/beltway with sovereign AI key, he said. And for income investors, FedEx and UnitedHealth go ex-dividend on Monday. FedEx pays out on October 1st and UNH pays out on September 22nd. Altria and Coca-Cola go ex-dividend Tuesday. Altria pays out on October 9th and Coke pays out on October 1st. That's all for today's Wall Street Brunch. Look for links to stories in the show notes section. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at seekingalpha.com/wsb. And join the elite community of real investors to unearth great investing ideas. Just head to seekingalpha.com/subscriptions.

   Kim Kahn · Wall Street Breakfast · Fed faces a rate hike reckoning · 2026-09-13

2. But imagine if I responded by deploying publicists and lobbyists to smear them, conceal our culpability, promise to do better, and engineer legislative paralysis such that ProfG Media operated with impunity. How big would the fine have to be to deter my behavior. ProfG Media generates $20 million in annual revenue with an operating margin of 60%. Its valuation is around $100 million. Meta's 2025 revenue was $200 billion with an operating margin of 41%. Its market cap is $1.4 $1.5 trillion. A $17 billion fine scaled down to Prop G Media and spread out over 10 years would equal a $256,000 annual hit to our operating profit. That's not a deterrent, but a green light to move faster and break more things. The 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement levied a fine of $206 $420 billion adjusted for inflation, payable over 25 years against the 4 largest cigarette makers. 2 of those companies, Philip Morris, now Altria, and R.J. Reynolds, are still selling cancer sticks. The other 2, Brown Williamson and Lorillard, are now owned by R.J. Reynolds. Regulatory friction catalyzes consolidation. Since 1998, federal taxes on cigarettes have increased fourfold, while state taxes on average have increased by 6x. Smoking rates among adults dropped 73% between 1965 and 2022, and rates for teens fell by 86% from 1997 to 2021. But The tobacco companies didn't stand still. They innovated. In 2019, 1 in 3 American teens reported using e-cigarettes, which are taxed at lower rates than the analog version. The numbers have fallen thanks to some states banning flavored e-cigs, but curbing the negative externalities of tobacco is a game of whack-a-mole. As Stanford historian Robert Proctor told the New York Times, Today is not the beginning of the end for social media, any more than 1998 was the beginning of the end of big tobacco. Americans still smoke more than 170 billion cigarettes every year and inhale tons of additional nicotine from electronic variants. The picture is even grimmer if you widen the lens. Globally, 1 out of every 5 adults is a customer, and 80% of them live in low- and middle-income countries. This is by design, as tobacco companies pivoted to developing nations with a continued emphasis on targeting young customers. Big Tobacco is still killing it, i.e., others. The media business is built on the back of an attention-to-profits arbitrage.

   George Hahn · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · No Mercy / No Malice: Little Tobacco Moment · 2026-09-05