Good morning and welcome to Tuesday. Want to spice things up today? Try to interrogate big words into your sentences, even if you're not exactly sure what they mean.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today's news takes 4.42 minutes to read.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

–Carl Jung (1875-1961)

President Biden and leaders from a dozen other countries in the Indo-Pacific region announced a new economic initiative yesterday designed to counter China’s influence in the region.

• The 13 members are the US, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, India, Australia, and New Zealand; altogether, they represent ~40% of global GDP.

🌏 More deets...

• US officials said the IPEF is built around four pillars: cooperation on digital trade, improving supply chains, ramping up clean energy, and implementing tax, anti-money laundering and anti-bribery measures.
• Member countries can choose which of the areas they wish to participate in – a concession that helped entice some nations who were initially skeptical, a source told the WSJ.
• Unlike the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 2018 trade deal the US pulled out of under then-President Donald Trump, the IPEF doesn’t include plans to negotiate tariffs or facilitate access to domestic markets.

☝️ One interesting thing: Notably absent from the new framework is Taiwan, even after a bipartisan group of 50+ senators wrote a letter to Biden last week urging him to add the country to the pact. Its inclusion would have undoubtedly drawn the ire of China, which is a top trading partner for many of the framework’s participants.

🇹🇼 Speaking of Taiwan... Biden said yesterday that the US would respond militarily to defend Taiwan if China tries to take it by force; the White House later clarified that his remarks didn’t signal any shift in American policy.

Conan O’Brien sold Team Coco, his podcasting company, to SiriusXM in a deal that also includes a five-year talent agreement, the two companies announced yesterday. Terms weren’t disclosed, but reports pegged the final price tag to be ~$150 million.

🎙️ More deets…

• Team Coco operates a network of 10 podcasts, including Parks and Recollection and its flagship, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, which ranked 26th among all podcasts in terms of weekly listeners last quarter.
• Conan’s SiriusXM deal features a five-year agreement to continue hosting his namesake podcast, which will remain available across all major podcasting platforms.
• He’ll also collaborate with SiriusXM to create and exec produce a new full-time Team Coco comedy channel exclusive to the satellite radio station.

📱 The impact: Team Coco averages around 1 billion views per year across YouTube and Facebook, along with 180 million annual podcast downloads and a social media following of 17 million people.

💰 Zoom out: SiriusXM’s acquisition follows a spate of other deals for podcasting companies, like Spotify’s ~$180 million purchase of The Ringer in 2020 and Amazon’s $300 million deal to buy Wondery last year.

• The podcasting industry’s overall revenue is projected to double over the next two years to reach $4 billion by 2024.

An experimental cancer-killing virus was injected into a human patient for the first time last week, as scientists began Phase I clinical trials for what they hope is a new drug to fight against cancer, the world’s second-leading cause of death.

💉 How it works... The drug candidate, called Vaxinia, is a genetically modified virus that not only harms cancer cells while sparing healthy ones, but also forces the cancerous cells to become more recognizable to the patient's immune system.

• After Vaxinia infects a cancer cell, it eventually bursts and dies, releasing thousands of new virus particles that provoke the immune system to also attack nearby cancer cells.
• Previous research in animals showed Vaxinia successfully harnessed their immune system to hunt and destroy cancer cells, but the treatment has never been tested before in humans – until now.

🧠 In the know: Phase I clinical trials are meant to test the safety and optimal dose of an experimental treatment, not definitively prove that it works. But Vaxinia’s co-developers – LA cancer center City of Hope and Australian biotech firm Imugene – will be closely watching to see if patients appear to respond to the drug in this ongoing trial, which is expected to be completed by early 2025.

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Semiconductor and software company Broadcom is in talks to pay around $60 billion for cloud computing company VMware, the WSJ first reported yesterday.

Pending delays/talks falling apart, the deal is expected to be officially announced on Thursday. If all goes well, it'll mark the second-biggest acquisition announcement of this year (and one of the biggest tech deals ever).

📸 The big picture: This report comes on the heels of declining markets and last week’s big stock selloff. But major deals are still doable despite the volatility, in part because the declines have made acquisition targets more affordable and because sellers in some cases are more willing to accept stock as currency, in the hopes that they will benefit when it rebounds, according to the WSJ.

Yet, even though there’s been a notable acquisition or two (like Microsoft’s pending ~$69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard), deal flow and IPO activity has slowed down significantly this year.

• US companies have struck ~$790 billion of mergers so far, down 31% from the same period last year. IPOs are even worse – the number of deals dropped 72% in the first quarter.
• Part of that drop could be attributed to increased SEC oversight of SPACs, aka special purpose acquisition companies. There were 613 SPAC initial public offerings in 2021, a large jump from 248 the year before… but there have only been 67 so far in 2022.

• ☝️ The final public payphone in New York City was removed from 7th Ave. and 50th St. in Manhattan yesterday; the city has been replacing them with LinkNYC kiosks, which offer services like free phone calls, Wi-Fi, and device charging.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 📈 US stocks rose across the board yesterday, though futures turned downwards in after-hours trading as shares of Snap plunged 25+%. (Dow: +2.0% | S&P: +1.9% | Nasdaq: +1.6%)
• 🗳️ A group of Activision Blizzard employees voted in favor of creating the company’s first union.
• ☕🏘️ Notable exits: Starbucks announced plans to close its 130 stores in Russia for good after 15 years; Airbnb is reportedly closing its domestic business in China.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• ⚖️ Supermodel Kate Moss is reportedly set to take the witness stand tomorrow in the ongoing Depp/Heard trial.
• 🏀🏒 The Boston Celtics defeated the Miami Heat 102-82 last night to even the series at two games apiece; the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs is also in full swing; the Avalanche's Nazem Kadri notched his first career hat trick last night in a 6-3 win over the Blues. 
• 🚫 Rapper Gunna was denied bond in Georgia racketeering case; Young Thug's decision was delayed until June 2.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🔋 Scottish startup ​​Gravitricity has successfully developed a gravity-powered battery.
• 💉 Pfizer and BioNTech said its three-dose Covid vaccine regimen is 80% effective at preventing symptomatic illnesses in children under 5, though the estimate is based on a small sample size.
• 💀🔬 Forensic examination of a skull recently discovered by hikers in Minnesota revealed it belonged to a Native American man who lived ~8,000 years ago.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🇺🇦 A 21-year-old Russian soldier was sentenced to life in prison yesterday in the first war crimes trial since Russia’s invasion.
• 🐒🦠 Monkeypox has reportedly been detected in 12 countries; officials say the virus is likely being transmitted through sexual contact.
• ⚖️ D.C.’s attorney general sued Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that his policies led to the Cambridge Analytica data breach; it follows a similar suit from the D.C. AG that was denied earlier this year. (From the Left | From the Right)

💬 Quoted… "I have 31 free cheeseburgers from McDonald’s if anyone is interested. Apparently my 2 yr old knows how to order DoorDash."

• A Texas mom recently discovered that her baby son had used her unlocked phone to order $91.70 worth of McDonald’s.

🏢 Stat of the Day: The average age of vehicles on US roadways hit a record 12.2 years, according to new data released Monday by research firm S&P Global Mobility.

🤯 Did You Know?... Any sufficiently large explosion will result in a mushroom cloud – not just a nuclear blast.

📖 Worth a Read: Good Genes Are Nice, but Joy is Better → (Harvard Gazette)

A new eco-friendly hotel in Denver, Colorado, is set to open its doors sometime next year. 

🌲 Quite a unique design... The Populus Hotel takes its inspiration from Colorado’s native aspen trees, with its architecture mimicking that of a tree trunk. 

• The hotel is the first in the nation with a goal to not only be carbon neutral, but carbon positive, meaning that it’s responsible for capturing more carbon than it produces.

💬 What they're saying: "We need to figure out how to build buildings that are responsible and that are giving back more than we’re taking,” said chief development officer Jon Buerge.

Can you name these poorly-explained movie plots?

1. Several people nap on an airplane.
2. Young lovers get separated, but he writes her every day.
3. College student gets dumped, starts multi-billion dollar company.

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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1. Inception
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