Morning Brew Daily - Bezos Wants Blue Origin to Rocket Past SpaceX & TSA in 30 Seconds?

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

Episode 217: Neal and Toby explain why Jeff Bezos is ready to go all in on Blue Origin to compete with SpaceX. Plus, the Sony hack that exposed how nervous the company is about Microsoft and could Applesauce have been contaminated on purpose? Neal shares his favorite numbers and TSA could be rolling out a self-screening service that could get you through the line in 30 seconds. And finally, why Mercedes-Benz says blue is for self-driving. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many employees can't afford a hefty medical bill that pops up out of the blue. But it happens. And employees who are financially stressed are, understandably, more likely to be distracted at work, costing their employers greatly in lost productivity. Luckily, AFLAQ plans help with out-of-pocket expenses not covered by health insurance and can be offered at no direct cost to businesses. Learn more at aflac.com slash morning brewdaily. That's aflac.com slash morning brewdaily.

Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Jeff Bezos' blue origin launched a rocket for the first time in 15 months. Can he catch Elon in the space race? Then the TSA security line is getting a makeover, and they want you to do more of the work.

It's Wednesday, December 20th. Let's ride. Toby, new renderings were released for a mammoth apartment building that would become the second tallest building in the United States, and you'll never guess where it is. Neil, can I guess? Can I guess? Is it Oklahoma City?

Spot on. Under a developer proposal, Oklahoma City would get a luxury apartment tower, 134 stories tall, dwarfing the current skyline and standing twice as tall as the current tallest building in OKC, Chet Holmgren. If this happens, development wouldn't begin for another year or two, and the building will be constructed in phases, so the height would be contingent on demand. The more people who want to live there, the taller it goes.

Toby, I'm calling it now. in 20 years, Oklahoma City is going to be indistinguishable from Dubai. First of all, the imagery of one of the least dense cities in the entire West Endemicphere, getting the second tallest skyscraper in the USA is surreal and hilarious. It went viral yesterday. I also think that the developer is kind of doing a psychological trick here, and releasing the rendering of the absolute tallest it could ever be, which might help the smaller, less ambitious part of the proposal get approved.

so there's like some psychological trick here. I want to see it happen though. Me too. How funny would that be? Okay, before we jump into the news, quick shout out to our friends over at Yahoo Finance. Neil, I did something really unwise last night. Oh no. Did you try to make Gordon Ramsey's beef Wellington by memory again?

No, although I will do that one day. I accidentally fell down the rabbit hole of seeing how much money I would have made if I invested in certain stocks a few years ago. Such a bad idea. Hopping onto Yahoo Finance and combing through. Tesla's stock chart or even worse, Domino's pizza, you'll have some regrets, Neil. This is the first time I've ever been mad at Yahoo Finance. They just make it so dang easy to get all my financial news and data in one place.

So I can make these little trips down memory lane. It's not a good idea. No, so head to finance.jahoo.com today, but whatever you do, don't look at historical stock chart data, no matter how easy our purple friends make it. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill three-burner gas grill, or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together.

Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th, Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. Jeff Bezos's space company, Blue Origin, sent a rocket to space yesterday for the first time in 15 months. And while the mission was short and didn't carry any humans, it was a much-needed morale boost for a hyped company that is struggling to make up ground to SpaceX, the rocket giant founded by Bezos's billionaire rival, Elon Musk. Blue Origins rocket New Shepard has been grounded since September 2022, which, when one of its uncrewed flight suffered an engine explosion, regulators ordered it to make over 20 fixes before the rocket could launch again, so it spent

2023 getting its ship together. Overall, Bezos is not happy without things are going at Blue Origin. He recently replaced the CEO with one of his long-trusted Amazon lieutenants, Dave Limp, and in a podcast release last weekend, he admitted that they have to move faster and he would devote more time to Blue Origin, which was the main reason he left Amazon in 2021. But in this battle of billionaires, Musk is running laps around Bezos. Despite being founded before SpaceX 23 years ago, Blue Origin has not yet sent a rocket to orbit, while SpaceX's first orbital launch was all the way back in 2008.

He's getting laughed right now, but I think having a Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, mini space race is good for probably humanity at large. There also seems to be this concentrated PR push around Blue Origin right now, specifically Jeff Bezos going on the Lex Freeman podcast, which is kind of Elon's home turf in a way because that's Lex kind of rode Elon to fame. and I think an underrated angle of this is that doing this PR push at a time when Elon Musk has maybe some cracks appearing in the armor. He's going on stage telling Bob Eiger to go F himself. Jeff Bezos is kind of putting himself forward as a more rational option for maybe NASA when they're reconsidering their government contracts.

I do think that this is a concerted push in conjunction with the launch that happened yesterday to Blue Ordin and say, hey, we stumbled a little bit, but we're back and we're here. Yeah, Blue Origin did lose that Lunar Lander contract, which was worth $2.1 billion to SpaceX a couple years ago. But honestly, it has some pretty cool projects cooking up in the lab. It won a $34 million contract from NASA to make solar cells and transmission wire out of moon dust, essentially. It wants to build a commercial space station. And then it also says it wants to build the Amazon Web Services of space, which sounds pretty sexy. I don't know exactly what it means. but I think in practical terms, it is a ship that moves in between orbits and shuttles things around.

So Bezos wants to kind of do what he did best at Amazon, which was make sort of the infrastructure for other companies to flourish. The same thing in space, and we'll see if he can do it. So speaking of Amazon, Amazon has this kind of Starlink-esque project called Kuiper, where they're trying to launch these internet-connected satellites, much like we've seen with Elon Musk's Starlink service. but that is also relying heavily on kind of Blue Origin getting its act together and using Blue Origin rockets to launch that into space. So there's a lot on the line in terms of just monetary gain. You've got to show results in the rocket business.

You can't just talk about these futuristic concepts. You need to launch stuff into space. And right now, SpaceX is just absolutely lapping the field in that category. But maybe you can just talk, especially if you're Blue Origin, because there does not seem to be any financial constraints on this company. Bezos has poured estimated $10 billion to $20 billion into Blue Origin, and it doesn't seem like he has really anything else going on right now. So he will write them a blank check, and they'll keep sending rockets and failing. It seems like they have just unlimited, infinite resources to make this happen.

So maybe with Bezos' checkbook and his bank account, I mean, he's worth $200 billion or something like that, that he could just kind of will Blue Origin to happen, and maybe his attention will help the company make up some ground. A focus, Jeff Bezos, is a scary Jeff Bezos, and right now he seems incredibly focused. All right, video game lovers, listen up. A big hack has finally come for your industry. We've seen casinos, hospital gene sequencing companies all affected, but this time it's Sony-owned video game developer Insomniac games in the crosshairs. The leak contained 1.67 terabytes of data with nuggets about Sony's future game schedule, among the most valuable pieces of info leaked.

The hacker group Rai Sita asked for $2 million in Bitcoin as ransom, but Sony missed the deadline and the info went public. So gamers, get ready for a Wolverine game soon, followed by two more X-Ban games. There was also some pretty juicy gossip leaked as well. Some screenshots showed internal slides dedicated to the activities of Sony's competitor, Microsoft, in his section titled, Industry Major Shift. and threats, but perhaps the most alarming part of this specific hack was just how dang easy it was. A spokesperson for Reseda, the group behind the attack, said in a statement, we knew that developers

making games like this would be an easy target. We were able to get the domain administrator within 20 to 25 minutes of hacking the network, you know, 20 to 25 minutes, and suddenly Sony's gaming hopes and dreams for the next decade are laid bare for the world to see. I kind of want to push back on your assertion that you said the video game industry hasn't suffered some hacks and leaks because it seems like one of the major industries where this happens. I mean, just last year, Take 2 Interactive, which is the studio behind GTA, Grand Theft, Auto, suffered this massive hack in GTA6, which is probably one of the most hype games in recent

memory. That was released on the internet to see. So this has happened before, and I want to call us back to 2014 when Sony's movie studio got hacked because this is a different whole thing. but, you know, it definitely brought back bad memories for Sony because they got hacked by alleged North Korean hackers before the release of the interview starring James Franco and Seth Rogan. And that led to a huge scandal and it made Sony pull back a lot of its theatrical release for

that movie. So I think this sparks really bad memories of what happened nine years ago and what was probably the biggest hack in Hollywood history. And Sony has also experienced two hacks earlier this year, including one in May that compromise a lot of the personal information of thousands of current and former Sony employees. And the funny thing about that hack, well, not funny, I guess, is that in to kind of make up for its Sony offered complimentary Equifax to which is a credit monitoring and identity protection service to its employees. So imagine you get all your data hack and Sony goes, hey,

guys, all we can do is just give you Equifax right now. So Sony has withstood its fair share of hacks. And this is just another one in a string of examples that have happened recently this year. I mean, remember the Bellagio got hacked in 15 minutes via a phone call. 23 and me has been hacked. This has been a year. Solar wins a few years ago got hacked, which is one of the biggest kind of IT protection softwares out there. And so I don't know what's in the water right now, but there seems to be hack after hack affecting industry after industry. budgets might be going up next year. Okay, we've got a major controversy going down in the world of applesauce, after certain cinnamon applesauce brands were found to contain extremely high levels

of lead that has sickened at least 125 children in the U.S. The twist. Food safety officials believe these high lead levels weren't an accident. They were deliberately put into the applesauce in what's officially known as economically motivated adulteration. In other words, Food fraud. Investigators have zeroed in on a single manufacturing facility in Ecuador that produced the applesauce pouches, which were sold under the brand names Wanabana, schnucks, and Weiss. Those pouches were recalled in the fall after the sick kids were linked to the applesauce, but the fallout is just beginning. Who put lead into the applesauce? Why didn't U.S. food regulators catch this? Are other spices imported into the U.S. being contaminated as well?

A lot of questions remain, but we do know that there was an absurd and dangerous. amount of lead in these applesauce pouches, and that's dangerous, especially for kids who consume them. The FDA went to the plant in Ecuador to test cinnamon samples and found levels of lead more than 2,000 times as high as proposed international limits. Food fraud is a lot more common than you think about. Some estimate that this is a $40 billion a year problem. There's been some absolute major scandals in the past. There's this growing problem in some Asian countries of gel-injected shrimp, which you pump them up with gel to make. them look bigger and way more.

One study in China showed that 58% of a certain type of cod samples were actually a completely other type of fish. This is a thing that happens now. It's more common than we want to let on. And this is an especially bad look for the FDA, especially when the food is coming into America. And when it's coming and when it's being consumed by kids, they're saying that kids are the guinea pigs for eating things that you don't know exactly what's in them.

Let's talk about cinnamon specifically. So it seems like cinnamon and other red spices can be infused with lead and other toxic materials to make them heavier. So you get a better price for them if you're a spice trader. Or it also makes the red color more vibrant. And maybe that would also drive up the price because you're like, oh, that cinnamon looks really good. It's super red. A cool part of this case, too, is that the person who kind of blew the lid off this was it seems like it came down to the actions of a single state health. department worker named Alan Honeycut or Unicut. The post wrote that the tainted applesauce may never

have been discovered, if not for the tenacious public health investigation by the North Carolina Department of Health, which managed to solve this mystery about how two toddlers were exposed to high levels of lead, despite living in a home with no significant lead hazards. That must have been... It was crazy. Yeah, it's a very interesting investigation to get to the bottom of how are these kids being affected if nothing around them seems and zeroing in on this apple site. Yeah, there were these two kids in North Carolina that got sick and they found high lead levels and they were like, what the heck is going on? Like, where is the lead coming from? They checked the house. And then the mom called the organization in North Carolina was like, you know what? They love these apples sauces. They love these cinnamon

applesauces. Then they went to test the applesauce. But without that, without that investigation or with the mom being like saying how much they love applesauce, this might still be a mystery. Yeah, who knows what have happened. Have you had those little applesauce packets, by the way? No. I love them. It's something about the actual squeeze bottle that makes it so much better. I've never, are you going to have them after this? Probably not, but it is a genius

food innovation. All right, now before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in a crowd, but too often life gets busy. Or the price holds you back.

Price line is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Welcome to Neal's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that may be the best Christmas presents you'll get this year. Yes, we typically do this segment on a Thursday, but this is my final show of the So I issued an executive order to push it to today as my swan song.

My first number is about the surging number of passports in America. In a new release from the State Department, it noted that in 1990, only 5% of Americans had a passport. Today, the share is 48%, although only 5% actually know where they put it. There are over 160 million valid U.S. passports in circulation, nearly double the amount from 2007. The context for these stats was an announcement that the time to get your passport processed has finally returned to pre-COVID levels. There was an unprecedented spike in demand last year when the State Department issued 24 million passports and faced major delays. But that has now subsided and you should expect to get your passport sent to you in the typical six to eight weeks. I think this is overall a huge win with more Americans traveling abroad.

Definitely a win. I also just want to revisit your lead to this story. You made it sound like this is your swan song. You're not coming back. He's coming back next year, folks. He's just taking a little winter break here. But yes, this definitely reflects the boom and international travel. It's certainly more of a modern thing.

I just couldn't help but think about how blissful it must have been to travel abroad, maybe to Europe. Back in the 90s where only 5% of Americans have a passport, now everything is so crowded. It made me nostalgic for the good old days of the 90s. There was also an interesting Pew survey that came out recently about how many Americans travel abroad. They found that 76% of... of Americans have visited at least one other country, and 26% have been to five or more. And the more countries you go to, this survey found, the more engaged you are with the world, the more likely you're going to feel kinship with others, the more likely you are like to

say that the U.S. should be involved in foreign affairs. So that was kind of an interesting thing where the more you travel, the more you become aware and interested in the world, which makes sense, but it's still interesting to see on paper. Yeah, that'd be an interesting study long term to just see what the, you know, the globalization means for how we interact with other cultures. For my second number, if you're feeling unproductive at work in 2023, you've got nothing on Congress.

The 118th Congress is on track to be one of the least productive in decades and among the least productive ever. The House has passed just 27 bills that have been signed into law this year. And those bills were either must pass laws like keeping the government funded or not at all that consequential things like minting a coin to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Marines. Historians say perhaps the only less productive Congress in the modern era was the one during the Great Depression in 1931, and they didn't even start their session until December. Why didn't get anything get done? Well, there's a partisan divide with Republicans in charge of

the House and Democrats holding the Senate and the White House, but there was also a ton of infighting among Republicans, too, including a spat over at the House Speaker that paralyzed the chamber for three weeks. I mean, we're trending towards zero laws at this point, which is kind of wild to think about it. You know what solves this, Neil? What? AI. No, I'm just kidding. But can you imagine? If you go and we'll post this graph on our Twitter at MB Daily Show, the graph is just alarming to see. It literally falls off a cliff and it just shows how insanely unproductive Congresses

Well, they better get motivated in 2024 because they only have eight legislative days to pass another bill to keep the government funded. You guys remember we just keep kicking that down the line? It's good for content, but, you know, bad for the nation. For my final number, if there's any one languishing worse than Congress, it's the Detroit Pistons. The NBA team lost its 24th straight game on Monday night, and if it loses three more, it will break the record for the longest losing streak in NBA history. Just to put this in perspective, the Pistons haven't won a game since October 28th when the United Auto Workers were still on strike, and their overall record of 2 and 25 puts them on pace for the lowest win percentage ever. Well, what makes it even more painful is that the Pistons aren't deliberately tanking like other bad NBA teams have in the past.

Case in point, they are paying their coach Monty Williams $13 million a year, which is currently the second highest salary in the league. Toby, we may be looking at the worst season in NBA history. Some of my favorite stats from this Piston streak, there's a player named Marvin Bagley, the third on the Pistons. That means there are more Marvin Bagley's in this world and the Pistons have wins. Also, the Texas Rangers of the Major League Baseball have more wins since Halloween than the Detroit Bistons. The Pistons have played 24 games since then. The Pistons have more top five picks on their roster than wins. They even have more top two picks on their roster than wins.

Just an absolutely abysmal year overall. I was poking around too on the Detroit Piston subreddit. They are currently plus 100,000 to not win another game for this season. So that means if you bet $100, you could potentially win $100,000, feel like it's worth a little of a sprinkle. I can throw $10 on that. Let's just sprinkle some on that. Okay, so you know how supermarkets have those self-checkout stations?

Well, a similar technology is coming to airport soon, and it will hopefully speed up TSA lines. Next month, some passengers at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas will be able to try out a new self-screening system to let you scan your own ID and carry on back. An article on the Department of Homeland Security's website describes the new setup, and it looks like there will be a few different technologies at play. There will be an automated bag screening system that uses a CT scanner so you don't have to take out your liquids or your laptop. Then for the body screening portion, passengers will walk through an eGate

that allows you to keep walking with your arms down by your side, which means none of that weird scarecrow stuff we're currently doing. The goal is to return autonomy to passengers and speed up everything in the process while keeping everyone safe. Neil, some Morning Brew Daily listeners out there might not know this, but I've never been to Vegas. So we just go and try out this new system? I would love to.

I mean, I can understand that there might be some unease around having people be responsible for their own security. But I think this is overall a great thing. TSA is so annoying, especially for people who do travel a lot. And there is a sense among certain experts that post 9-11, we kind of went super overboard, terms of airport security, and at this point, it's become performance theater, essentially. So I think that, you know, using the technology we have to speed up the process,

have people not take off their shoes, have people not take out their liquids, things that may not be necessary in the first place, just to speed up the process, seems like a huge win for air travel in the United States. This industry, to me, almost resembles the space industry in a way, because there is money to spend on funding new research, but the TSA itself doesn't have the capability. to carry out this kind of new research to develop new technology. So there's all these private companies that are kind of fighting for market share in what like the new TSA system might look like.

There's one called MicroX where they're developing this system where travelers enter into rows of booths big enough for two people. You put your bag in this tiny little chamber. It does the screen of it, see what's going on. And then you cameras are looking at your body and scanning you. So that one doesn't even require going through the typical security line or anything like That one is literally you just walk in and everything is scanned for you and then walk out. So there are plenty of different innovations happening in the space right now.

And obviously, it's good for travelers because anything that can speed it up is good for us. I mean, also what happens in Vegas is probably not going to happen. Probably not going to stay in Vegas. They're hoping to roll this out after the test happens in January 2024 in conjunction when 100,000 people come in for CES, which is the biggest consumer electronics show. Let's ride, Neil. Let's get out there. A new light color for your car just dropped, and it's turquoise. Mercedes is the first automaker to be approved to use a bluish exterior light in the U.S.

to signal that its autonomous driving system is activated. Everyone knows that white lights mean headlights, red equals brake lights, and amber is a turn signal. But the idea behind the turquoise is to get people more comfortable with the idea of sharing the road with self-driving cars. It will also let police officers know when you've got your hands off the wheel and when your hands on. Mercedes will be the first one to roll out the new color, and they're kind of writing the rulebook on this because there is not one universal standard yet. They say they picked turquoise partly because the color doesn't already have a fixed meaning in driver's minds, and it's different enough from, say, a copse lights, so hopefully no one is getting confused.

You know, this feels like one of those common sense evolutions that will make everyone safer. Plus, I kind of dig the color. Beautiful. People may not know this, but Mercedes is leading the pack when it comes to partial driving automation in the U.S. Every other self-driving system that you know of or I've heard of maybe Tesla's autopilot in full self-driving, Ford's Blue Cruise, GM, Super Cruise, those are all at level two where you need to keep your hands ready to kind of take over at any given moment. Mercedes is level three, which means you can theoretically, in certain circumstances, when this is activated, you do not need to be looking at the road. You can literally be on the infotainment screen, playing video games, taking emails, doing everything. Like, you do not need to have your eyes on the road for this. And so sneakily, Mercedes has leaped frog the field and

becoming the leader in partial self-driving. Yeah, definitely sneaky. That being said, there are some very specific conditions necessary for the system to work. You can't use it at night or in rain and you can only use it on road conditions with reasonable markings and lines. So it's not like you can just take your your Mercedes out of the garage and just not look at where you're going. But still, it is impressive to see. And yeah, no one really associates Mercedes with leading the self-driving car. Let's talk about maybe, is this going to be the unlock that makes people comfortable with

self-driving cars? Because, you know, there's a lot of criticism that, you know, GM's cruise has been rolled back. But maybe it's this single light color that could. could really change things here because it's not just about having cars on the road that can drive. It's about really communicating with the external world and the external environment about what your car is and how it's driving and who's driving it. So maybe a single blue light with when police officers pass by and when other passengers pass by and they see that you're texting or something and they don't freak out or if a car's going slow or doing something a little weird that a human driver may not do. maybe that simple communication from that light will do wonders for acceptance in self-driving. I think it's a genius innovation.

My one pushback is, I'm a curious guy. And so if I see a Mercedes cruising by with those blue lights on, I would want to pull up next and see whatever the person driving is doing or not doing. So that's my one pushback. Curiosity might take this down. All right, that is a wrap on our show. This is my final sign-off of the year. So I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Happy holidays.

Happy New Year, all of it. I will miss you. As always, you can send your thoughts on the show or say chow at our email address, Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Vela's and Raymond Lue are associate producers. Eugenio is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio.

Hair and makeup shows up less often than the Pistons. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back with you in the new year, but with me. tomorrow. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale

May 29. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion.