Morning Brew Daily - Boeing Scores $96B Deal with Qatar & ‘Max’ Gets Its ‘HBO’ Back

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Episode 583: Neal and Toby recap the massive deal between Boeing and Qatar Airways during President Trump’s Gulf trip. Then, students are finding out their professors are starting to use ChatGPT for their coursework. Is it hypocrisy? Plus, HBO is bringing back the ‘HBO’ to its ‘Max’, and the Internet is having a field day. Meanwhile, Neal shares his favorite numbers on international travel to the US, Mt. Everest climbers, and Pope Leo’s trading card.  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Visit endthecampaign.com for more Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note 00:00 - Lead into Gold  02:30 - Boeing’s Biggest Deal  06:45 - College and AI 11:15 - Max is HBO Max... Again 16:30 - Neal’s Numbers 24:00 - Headlines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.wc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning Brew Daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, everyone is using AI to cheat in college,

even the professors. Then Max played an Uno reverse card on itself and is becoming HBO Max. Again. It's Thursday, May 15th. Let's ride. Finally, vindication for Nicholas Flomel.

Alchemists everywhere are Hutton and Hollerin after scientists announced they successfully turned lead into gold. This isn't medieval sorcery or abracadabra unana. It happened at CERN's Large Hadrian Collider, where physicists sent beams of lead whizzing right by each other, creating an electromagnetic field that ejected three protons out of lead atoms, turning them into gold atoms. Unfortunately, no one is getting rich off of this. According to the register, the gold transformation lasted for about a microsecond and weighed less than a fart in a vacuum. You know who the big winner here is? It's CERN because they are trying to build a successor to the large Hajon Collider. And that tunnel is going to be 56 miles long, three times the size of the current Collider.

And you want to know how to get people on board with the project of that size. Turn some lead into gold. But you are right. Maybe people are thinking, oh, lead into gold. Maybe you self-fund this billion-dollar project. No, it's going to take a while because even though the scientists created 86 billion gold atoms, that only weighs up to 29 picograms, which is about 8 trillionth of a gram. So get to colliding, CERD, because you got a lot of gold to make.

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After a brutal year for Boeing filled with door plugs flying off, production halts, and Senate grillings, the skies are finally kind of clearing. It just landed its biggest ever order with Qatar Airways agreeing to purchase up to 210 wide-body aircraft and a deal worth $96 billion, though discounts are expected. The deal comes as President Trump is considering using a luxury Boeing 747 gifted from Qatar to serve as a temporary Air Force One, despite bipartisan concerns that it would pose security risks. Still, it's a major win for most of the parties involved. Qatar, because it helps cement themselves as a major player in air travel, Trump, who wants to secure jobs back at home, and Boeing, who gets a lot of money. It hasn't been all sunshine and free peanut packets for Boeing, though, who has classed with Trump at times, for Boeing. for being elate in providing two new Air Force One presidential jets that they started working on on Trump's first term. But when you combine the historic order praised by Trump with a new trade thaw with China,

Boeing's stock is suddenly up 50% since April, totally erasing losses from its post-liberation day lows. These past few months, Neil, has made it clear that Boeing can thrive under Trump's brand of geopolitics, but they've also shown just how risky it is to be a bargaining chip on the trade war chessboard. So a little bit of a mixed bag of nuts. Boeing has lost money every year since 2019. This was once a manufacturing powerhouse, the gold star of United States production, our biggest exporter, and they just suffered so many crises, one after another. There's a new CEO who came in last year, Kelly Orberg.

He came out of retirement, just like so many other CEOs, turn around, struggling iconic companies. And it seems like he's doing a pretty good job. shares are up their most shares are up at the highest level in 15 months they just landed their biggest order ever orberg sitting there being like i think i'm doing a good job the board is probably happy with him as well let's the deal with this air force one saga though remember boing was awarded this 3.9 billion dollar fixed price contract back in 2018 to deliver these two new air force one jets by 2024 they were going to be upgraded they're going to have new missile system nuclear protection the whole nine yards but now they're at least

three years behind schedule. And they've already lost two and a half a billion dollars on the deal due to cost overruns that they can't pass on to the U.S. government because of the contracts fix price clause. So it's been a variety of things. You know, supply chain chaos. The pandemic happened. There's been a lot of security clearance issues. But that has been kind of emblematic of Boeing's, you know, futility over the past few years. Now it's just these deals are kind of pouring in as it's being used as this trade war chip. where Trump is saying, like, look at this. This is an example that this Build America movement is working because Boeing is still is an iconic American manufacturer.

So weirdly, it's come out on top of this trade war as, you know, Trump uses it as this example of what he's trying to do. And we'll see what happens with this Air Force One Palace in the Sky, Qatar 747. Boeing might, in a very ironic twist of fate, Boeing might actually want Trump to accept this gift, because estimates are that it would cost over $1 billion to retrofit this plane into an Air Force One because Air Force One is considered the most complicated aircraft on the planet. It needs a mid-air refueling system. It needs all of these communications, whizbang gadgets, because it really is a situation room in the sky. It needs nuclear deterrence.

So there's all these things that need to happen with this plane. Well, guess what? Boeing made the plane and probably they would be tasked with retrofitting. fitting it. There still seems like there's a long way to go to say whether Trump would actually accept this gift as a plane. It would take many years to turn it into Air Force One possibly before they get their other jets ready. So a long way to go with Boeing and this Air Force one. But yes, this order of over 200 planes by Qatar is a big deal and another win for Kelly Orberg. And it is long, long drudging twist to turn around this company. The school year has Oliver wrapped up at most U.S. colleges and universities. and students are headed to their summer lifeguarding jobs and internships after a long semester feeding their assignments into chat GPT, or I mean hitting the books. No, actually I mentioned about chat GPT because new reports out recently highlight just how pervasive AI chatbots have become on college campuses among students, but also their professors. Higher education is in technology-induced chaos and might be slowly devolving into bot-on-bought instruction AI graders analyzing AI-written essays. And in New York magazine piece called Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College,

students acknowledge that they and everyone they know is cheating their way through college by having ChatGPT or other AI tools do their homework for them. One student in Utah summed up the vibe by saying, college is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point. Many predicted this when ChatGBTGPT was released in the fall of 2022. Toby, you labeled it the most powerful cheating tool ever created, and it has lived up to that promise. Usage took a big dip during the summer of 2023 when kids left school, and the same pattern

occurred in 2024. College administrators and professors are miles behind the eight ball, unable to create effective policies around AI usage or enforce them when it's clear someone is cheating. An opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education warned of a quiet disaster unfolding in college classrooms around the country. Toby, this is the Wild West. Yeah, this was very easy to see coming when you have an all-knowing assistant in your your pocket. Of course, students are going to utilize it. But I think what has taken some people

by surprise is how professors are utilizing it as well. I mean, professors have a lot of work to do as, you know, in addition to a student. So maybe the sirens call of AI is something that we should have expected there as well. But this New York Times piece was filled with students noticing that some of their prompts in their lecture series that they're listening to their professor give were filled with distorted images that were clearly AI generated. Some students actually have gone and requested refunds for their tuition because they said, I don't want to come here and be taught by AI, just like you don't want me to submit AI work myself. But then a lot of other teachers are saying, like, hey, it's helped a lot because now I can develop, you know, custom chatbots

to help aid with people who want questions, but don't want to come to office hours. They can help me develop my lesson plan. So it really has been an interesting infiltration at the highest levels of education that professors are adopting, not just students. Their numbers are absolutely growing in a national survey of more than 1,800 higher ed instructors last year. 18% described themselves as frequent users of generative AI tools. They did the survey this year again. That percentage nearly doubled.

So professors are wising up to the fact that they could use AI in addition to students in order to make their lives easier. And I'm just thinking of a, you know, if I was a teacher and I wanted to see whether you read the first couple chapters of Great Gatsby, I'd probably ask Chad GapT to make a quiz that asked whether you read Great Gatsby instead of me making it. Obviously, there is a line to toe that students are, you know, very happily to blow past. And I was kind of rolling my eyes at some of these pieces of students submitting AI work because to me that's just bad at cheating in general. And that New York Mag piece did have students saying like mainly what I'm learning out of college is how to

manipulate these systems to make them not look like they're AI generated. He says you, Eric, who is one of the students interviewed, says you put a prompt into chatch BT, then you put the output into another AI system, then you put it in another one. At that point, if you put it in an AI detection system, it decreases the percentage of AI used every time. So it's just AI all the way down. And I'll leave with this kind of anecdote from a high school teacher. He said, I literally told my class, hey, don't use AI, but if you're going to cheat,

you have to cheat in a way that's intelligent. You can't just copy exactly what it spits out. and I think that just is indicative of where the education system is heading. It's mainly going to teach you how to manipulate AI systems rather than learn the subject matter itself. The only winner here is OpenAI and other AI companies where they're sending marketing materials to students and professors being like, hey, use our AI chatbots and we see usage go way up during the school year.

What is Dead May Never Die is an iconic line from the HBO series Game of Thrones, which originally aired on HBO Go, but then made its way over to HBO Max after the Plathes. platform rebranded. Then you could find it on Simply Max a year later. That's Max with a purple icon, of course. But if purple wasn't your thing, a blue icon was waiting just around the corner before in black and white one debuted this past year. But yeah, the line seems pretty applicable to Warner Bros. Discovery's branding process because yesterday the streaming service resurrected the HBO brand once more and is now once again known as HBO Max.

The whole point of launching Max in the first place was to shed some HBO Associated. which, while prestigious, made it hard for Warner Bros. Discovery to market the platform as a home for family-friendly discovery content post-merger. Once you put HBO in the name, it's tough to convince parents that a platform that airs euphoria is also the place their kids should go to watch Animal Planet. But yesterday's press released contained a line that helps explain the decision to bring back HBO. No consumer today is saying they want more content, but most consumers are saying they want better content. And where does better content live? Well, if you're a fan of the Sopranos, The Wire, House of Dragon, White Lotus, industry, The Last of Us are righteous gemstones, that content lives on HBO.

So it seems like this reintroduction of HBO is an admission by Warner Bros Discovery that maybe they shouldn't have dropped it in order to let 90-day fiancé live side by side with Tony Soprano. Sure, it took a while to get there, Neil, but probably the right move. If I was interviewing a comms person for my company, I'd probably use this as a case. case study, I'd say, okay, you know, you're made the decision to go from HBO, from Max, back to HBO. You know you're going to get roasted all around the internet. What is your game plan? How are it developed, develop a comprehensive strategy from a corporate comms perspective to make this, you know, the least embarrassing it could be. I think HBO Warner Brothers did a pretty good job at this.

They released the ultimate spin zone corporate statement to get ahead of this. They called the decision a testament to Warner Bros. Discovery's willingness to keep boldly iterating its strategy and approach leaning heavily on consumer data and insights to best position itself for success. And then on social media, they went in the complete other direction, kind of roasting themselves in multiple, multiple posts on X, you know, sort of acknowledging just how ridiculous this name-changing branding exercise has become. Yeah, they definitely threaded the needle. They just got out ahead of it all on social media. They made all the jokes that we were going to make. We still made the jokes because it is a very funny process.

But I do think this all kind of stems back to Netflix in a way because Netflix has been the clear winner of the streaming wars. We've known that for a while now. It's sitting at over 300 million global subscribers. And it was part of the reason why Warner Brothers and Discovery merged in the first place is that they were trying to compete with this end-all, be-all streaming platform and make some gains and try to catch up to Netflix's subscriber numbers. And so in terms of pure output, it was a smart decision to bring it all under one.

Unified brand. Call it Max, ditch the HBO, try to get the family, the kids to come watch on this platform. But as they've kind of gone through this process, they realized that it didn't make sense to ditch their most iconic brand. It didn't make sense to, you know, try to not draw attention to your best performing content. And maybe Dr. Pimple Popper and 90-day Fiancee wasn't ever meant to be on the same platform as, you know, these high prestige TV shows. So I do think that it was a roundabout way. Sometimes you pivot so hard you end up exactly back where you start. but it's probably the right place for them to be. Up next, we got some Neal's numbers coming your way.

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Heat makes it last. So when the rest of the world settles because of a setback, icy hot accelerates your comeback with fast-acting, powerful, pain relief. I see hot. You're so back. Welcome to Neil's numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will help you turn any lead conversation into golden banter. My first number is $12.5 billion, which is how much the U.S. is projected to lose in international travel spending this year. The World Travel and Tourism Council, which represents the global tourism industry, warned that foreign travel spend in the U.S. is set to drop from $181 billion

in 2024 to $169 billion this year. The only country among the 184 analyzed that is forecast to see an international visitor decline this year. The council attributed the drop to people staying away from the states due to the Trump administration's policies such as tariffs in seemingly random tourist detentions. But the downward shift in tourism has been happening for years. If this year's numbers bear out, it'd mark a 22.5% decline from the peak of U.S. international spending in 2019. COVID obviously throttled foreign travel in the subsequent years, then a strong

dollar made coming to America far more expensive than it had been. The council warns that a $12.5 billion gap could have serious and negative consequences for the broader economy, given the outsized role tourism plays. Direct and indirect travel represents 9% of the American economy while employing 20 million people in generating 7% of all tax revenue collected by the U.S. government. Toby, grumbling about tourists is one of New York's favorite pastimes. What are we going to do instead? I mean, grumble about the fact that there's no tourists. That's what New Yorkers do.

They grumble about everything. But I do think that I was, first of all, surprised that travel makes up 9% of the U.S. economy. That was a larger portion than I expected. But then you look at what foreign travelers do when they come to America and they spend an average of $4,000 per trip. That is eight times more than domestic travelers. So as you're going on your Memorial Day weekend trips, you're not spending as much as someone who flew in from, you know, the UK or Korea or something like that, which, by the way, we are seeing lower numbers from pretty much all countries. Arrivals from the UK and South Korea both dropped 15%. Germany arrivals dropped 28%.

And then other, you know, staple markets for the United States like Spain and Ireland fell between 24 and 33%. So it's not just one country, which you're probably thinking that one country is maybe Canada, which is, which is, is. New York is getting wrecked by Canada as well. They expect a 17% decline in tourism, but it's not just our neighbors to the north. It really is our neighbors all over the world that are not coming to the United States. For my next number, Pope Leo the 14th

has sold more commemorative trading cards than LeBron James, Victor Wimbunyama, and Paul Skeens. The trading card company Top said that its run of trading cards marking the first U.S.-born Pope has set an all-time record for any non-sports card under the brand, selling 133,535 units during a limited time release from Thursday through Sunday. That's far more than LeBron's card when he topped 40,000 points, when Manyama's Rookie of the Year win,

and pitcher Paul Skeens when he won NL Rookie of the Year. And that's a fair chunk of change for tops. These cards are priced at $9 a pop, a pope, with some discounts if you went bulk. Toby, this is another example of just how enthusiastic people have been over the first American Pope. it spawned its own cottage industry. I don't think people have really come to terms of what it means for not only the Pope to be American, but be an American sports fan.

We are seeing Chicago embrace him in a way that, you know, you just don't get with an international Pope potentially. And I do love that Tops also included some variations on each card, so of the backgrounds. So obviously the main is Pope Leo, but then the backgrounds include deep dish pizza, Chicago hot dogs, snow and skyline variations. So I wonder which one of those is going to be in 100 years, the most valuable card. But great move from Tops, by the way, to seize on this moment because it is just such a unique once-in-generation opportunity. And they made some nice money off of it.

My final number is one week, which is how long, door-to-door, a group of four friends will take to Summit Mount Everest. Well, at least that's the goal. Later this month, these four ex-military Brits will try to speed run the Everest climbing process. process, hoping to accomplish something that typically takes six to eight weeks in just one. The way they're going to do it has never been attempted on Everest before, the Noble Gas Xenon. In January, a tour operator named Lucas Furttnbach said he could take paying customers up and down Everest in just one week if they inhaled xenon gas prior to their journey. The idea is that inhaling xenon triggers production of red blood cells in your body, mimicking the acclimatization process to the high altitude, that usually takes weeks.

However long it takes, you cannot even begin to climb Everest, which towers more than 29,000 feet above sea level until your body has adapted to the low levels of oxygen. This super-fast, xenon-aided attempt has caused quite a stir in the mountaineering community since Furttnbach announced it a few months ago. Some support it under the banner of innovation, but others say it's too risky and erodes the purity of the sport. The International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation has forcibly come out

against the climb, saying according to current literature, there is no evidence that breathing in Xenon improves performance in the mountains and inappropriate use can be dangerous. Yeah, there's two camps of naysayers here. There's one that's saying that Xenon doesn't really help. It could be dangerous. But then there's the other camp saying that it does kind of remove from the purity of climbing Everest. But that debate has been happening since people started climbing Everest because 7,269 people have reached the summit of Mount Everest. Only 230 have done it without the aid of supplemental oxygen. So there is a faction of the community that says even using oxygen at all kind of defeats the whole purpose of climbing it. And you see that just very small number of

people who do it without any outside aid. So Xenon is maybe just another evolution of that debate. It's another gas. It's another aid that will help you climb the mountain easier than just going up completely without any aids at all. So just a fascinating debate. I am very curious to see how they do hope it succeeds honestly because if you can if you it makes it safer too if you climb it quicker because your less time spent on the mountain means less time things can go wrong weather can come in so maybe it's a huge training aid for Sherpas who can zip up and down much much more quickly so there is a potential part of the community who does want to see it succeed because of the safety implications that it could have to make things more safe and you also don't want to think about what would

happen if it doesn't succeed yeah but either way if you're thinking of wanting to go on a trip with Zenon. It'll cost you. These guys are paying more than $150,000 each for a one week trip up and down Everest. Good luck. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Starbucks baristas

are mad at the company again. More than 1,000 have walked out at 75 U.S. stores this week in protest of a new dress code that went into effect on Monday. The new dress code requires baristas to wear a solid black top and khaki black or blue denim bottoms, an outfit

that the company says will help those green aprons stand out and create a more welcoming environment for customers going into stores. Previously, baristas could wear a much broader range of shirts, including those with patterns. The employees who walked out say Starbucks is focusing on all the wrong things in its turnaround effort. As one in Hanover, Maryland noted, customers don't care what color our clothes are when they're waiting 30 minutes for a latte. Yeah, Starbucks used to have a much stricter dress code back in 2016 and prior. They only allowed baristas to wear black and a white shirts, but then they relaxed that and let them do different colors. And it became a key part of just the expressions of these individual workers.

But now, I mean, Brian Nicol wants to, has a game pan literally called back to Starbucks. So of course, he's looking back into the history to some of its more successful period. So you can see the allure of just saying, hey, we want the coffee to be front and center. Just take out every other variable. Let's make the shirt to black. but then you start getting into the nitty-gritty of what this dress code actually means. They only gave two free shirts to employees so if they have multiple shifts, they're going to go out and buy clothes, and then you take a step back and go, is this actually the most important thing? But maybe everything adds up on the margin, so you can see it both ways here.

But yeah, clearly it's rubbing a certain group of employees the wrong way. Well, yesterday was a holiday for a lot of Americans as the NFL finally released the full schedules of all 32 teams. As always, the defending Super Bowl champions kick the season off with Neals, Philadelphia Eagles, playing a game against a charity team. I mean, it's rivals the Dallas Cowboys on September 4th. There are a record seven international games this year as the NFL continues its slow expansion towards worldwide domination. Sao Paulo Brazil will be treated to a Chargers Kansas City game,

while the remaining six take place across England, Ireland, Germany, and Spain. Apologies to our friends across the pond in London, though, who are being subjected to watching the Jaguars take on the Rams in Wembley this October. Neil, it's only May, and yet here we are talking about football again. What are you looking forward to? Well, the first thing I look at with this NFL release schedule, which has become an insane event in its own right

and just speaks to the takeover the NFL, not just in the fall, but over the course of the year, the fact that we're talking about the NFL here, it's May 15th. But the first thing you want to look at is the standalone games because it shows which teams the NFL thinks that will draw the most eyeballs when there's nothing else on the standalone games I'm talking about Thursday night games

Sunday night, Monday night, holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and there's three teams that get eight standalone games each. They are the Kansas City Chiefs, I know you're probably bored of watching them but they're coming back with eight standalone games and tied with them are the Washington commanders and the tried and true

Dallas Cowboys charity team. They are the biggest brand in the NFL and maybe perhaps in sports. But the interesting to see the Washington commanders, you know, get the same amount of stand-alone prime time special games as the Chiefs and the Cowboys. They just got this new stadium deal in D.C. They had a really remarkable season last year. They're doing the NFL draft in D.C. So maybe they're just hyping up the commanders ahead of those big events. And then you just mentioned that it's a fun day on social media,

too, because East team puts a ton of effort into their releases, into their announcements. And the gold standard was the charges who released a full anime movie. The last, year. They backed it up with a Minecraft theme launch that got over 70 million likes on or not 70 million, 70,000 likes on X. The Falcons did a Mario Kart themed one. The Ravens

went Severance themed, which was actually interesting. And then the Jaguars, who I kind of beat up upon earlier, got Ashton Hall, the morning routine influencer dude who dunks his head in Saratoga Water to do their release. That one was also very popular. Let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a

wonderful Thursday, the weekend, is coming up, folks. Start making plans now. If you have any thoughts on the show, send an email with questions, comments, or feedback to Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer.

Raymond Loo is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Garrett Peck is on audio. Hair and makeup is out with altitude sickness. Should have inhaled that xenon. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil.

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