Morning Brew Daily - Classified Doc Leak, Tesla Shanghai battery factory, Can AI defame you?

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Episode 35: Neal and Toby take a look at the leaked US classified documents that hit social media over the weekend. They also discuss the opposing rulings from two judges over the weekend on the FDA approval of an abortion pill. Plus, Tesla is opening a mega-pack battery factory in Shanghai, and can ChatGPT be sued for libel? And of course Neal and Toby share their winners of the weekend and what we are watching this upcoming week. Learn more about our sponsor, TaxAct: https://www.taxact.com Learn more about our sponsor, Fidelity: https://fidelity.com/stocksbytheslice Listen Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew Daily's show. I am Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Neil got a big show ahead of us today. Huge. Our top story is on a U.S. intelligence leak that could change the course of the Ukraine war that likely originated on a random Discord server dedicated to a Filipino YouTuber. Yeah, I can understand why you had trouble with that.

It's a mouthful. Crazy story. Then we'll head to China where Elon Musk is doubling down on the big battery game. And then Neil and I will share our winners from the weekend. We're also going to explain this hugely important court ruling Friday night about the abortion pill and what could happen next. And we'll also discuss two really freaky chat GPT stories that sound like they're ripped from the upcoming Black Mirror season. But Neil, the big news is what I'm seeing right now in front of me. You got a pretty tasty little haircut.

It is tasty, but the more important thing that I learned is I finally found my boy, my barber, that I can actually talk to. Because previously I was the very shy and silent type, you know, very awkward. But this guy, we talk, we can talk sports gambling, we can talk as entrepreneurial dreams. We should bring them on one day to the show. Although I did see a San Francisco barber shop just introduced silent mode, which basically means you can let the barber know that you don't want to that. But it sounds like you're a chatter. We'll see.

We'll see. The silent mode, what I thought so funny was the silent mode is for tech guys in San Francisco who are super shy and stoners who take a gum who take a gummy before a haircut and just don't want to talk, which I can definitely relate to. Zoned out. Okay, Neil, we mentioned the crazy top story at the top of the show, but it truly is a crazy, crazy one. So it's about a batch of classified U.S. intelligence documents that have been leaked on social media. These documents appear to be authentic and cover everything from the war in Ukraine to the U.S.'s relationship with the Middle East and China and even some of its allies.

Now, this is obviously an egg-on-the-face moment for the U.S. intelligence community, but even crazier is where these documents first surfaced. So sometime in January, the docs first made the rounds on Discord servers dedicated to Minecraft, and this is the truly bizarre part, but a server dedicated to fans of this Filipino YouTuber. So only when they were more broadly leaked on Telegram and 4chan did the U.S. pick up on them. But now everyone's kind of dealing with the fallout, like how does this affect the war in Ukraine? How real are the documents? And probably most important, who leaked them? It's wild.

I think that the U.S. did, I'm pretty sure that the U.S. didn't know that this happened until the New York Times reported on it on Thursday. And then they were like, oh, these things have been circulating on social media for a month or two. Yeah, it's truly been this, again, I called it an hang on the face moment, but these things leaked on these extremely. Right. You have to be so online. I think Bellingat, which is the investigative consortium that kind of put the pieces together here, said, there's a good chance only a few internet weirdos

saw the hundreds of documents. It's really only something you'd find if you were terminally online. Yeah, and we are terminally online. I'm not that terminally online, though. So yeah, one of the big questions is who leaked them? So no one knows right now,

but we do have some clues, which is kind of exciting. So first clue, they appear to have been folded twice, perhaps to be smuggled out of a secure facility. So you can see the fold on the documents.

And then you can also see a variety of items kind of on the margins of the photographs. So that includes guerrilla glue, gorilla glue, some shoes, and instructions for a Glasshawk HD spotting scope, which is something you use while hunting. So it's this very interesting assortment of items. So it's like a clue game. I think I have a friend who has all of those together. Yeah, interesting. We should talk about what these documents show a little more in detail. And because it's very much real-time information about the war in Ukraine, and that's kind of what is freaking out the U.S. intelligence agencies that this leaked from. Basically, we know, these documents show

that we know everything about Russia's military. We are so deeply embedded. Our spies are absolutely incredible over there. We know exactly when they are going to send a missile strike and where it is. Yeah. We know more about the Russian military based on these documents than the Ukrainian military. Yeah. That's the interesting thing too, is though people are saying how is this affect the war effort. And one of the big news that was coming out this morning is that Ukraine is potentially running low on these surface to air missiles, which could lead to an increase of Russian air activity if we just saw these documents. So there are some ripple effects. We don't know how deep they are. The documents seem to be mostly authentic just from like the level of detail described and just

the general look of them. But then some doctor documents were making the rounds. One in particular was one that was like crudely Photoshop that showed that Russian casualties were lower and Ukrainian casualties were higher. So there is a little bit of misinformation going on, but yeah, parsing through. Do seem real. Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

And it might have started from a little dispute on Discord. That's the crazy part. People were talking about, you know, the war in Ukraine and they had different numbers and then some guy goes, well, I just have a slide deck from the joint piece of staff. Yeah, it's actually truly nuts that this has gotten out.

I'm curious to see if they ever catch. She does it. Yeah, we will follow it along. I have nothing to do with this, I promise. Let's go to our next story. Also, equally as significant and intense. On Friday night, we just had our most significant court ruling on abortion since Roe v. Wade was scrapped last year.

A federal judge in Texas suspended FDA approval of the abortion pill Miffapristone, which is the most common method of abortion in the U.S. The judge ruled that the agency didn't adequately review scientific evidence or follow proper procedure when it approved the drug back in 2000. So I'm going to use this word. We've used it a lot, but unprecedented. This has never happened before. It's the first time that a judge has suspended a drug's approval over the objection of the FDA. The FDA and other medical associations are basically flabbergasted by this. They pointed to repeated studies that show this is safe and effective. It has about the same safety risks as over-the-pill pain relievers. And it's been on the

market for 23 years. Yeah. It does seem like it came out of left field a little bit. bit, which... Except this guy's been, this judge has been anti-abortion. Right. It makes sense based along what the judge has stated in the past, but it is out of left field in the sense that it's been legal for, yeah, over 20 years at this point. And honestly, I think the biggest fallout, if we want to like zoom out to the business perspective a little bit, is that this kind of undermines the authority of the FDA to approve

certain drugs. So if I'm a drug maker and I get an FDA approval and that has a chance to be on. undermined by the courts, suddenly I don't feel very confident in taking any drugs to market or researching any drugs because I don't know when kind of the legs are going to get cut out from underneath it. So that is what has drug makers really riled up and a little nervous, honestly. Yeah, now the FDA may have less authority than David Blatt. I was trying to think of that good analogy, and I'd landed on David Blatt, former coach of the Cavs, which is a deep cut. A couple people will get that. That was solid. But there's so much uncertainties here still.

like less than an hour after the Texas ruling came out, there was this Washington state ruling that kind of undercut it undercutting the FDA. Right. So there's multiple layers here. The Washington state judge said that the 17 states that brought a suit, FDA could not, like, limit restrictions of the abortion pill in those states. It was basically upholding the status quo. Upholding the status quo saying the FDA cannot limit restrictions.

So, or limit access. So you have these two clashing federal judge rulings and everyone's like, well, I don't know who to follow. The most important thing is that this Texas judge gave the federal government seven days to appeal. And it seems like the DOJ and the drugs manufacturer has done that. So this will stay on the market, at least until then. And now it's going to the fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. I don't know if I got all that order correct in Louisiana. Yeah.

It is crazy. It does look like we're on occlusion course towards this. Supreme Court. So this is going to be another protracted legal battle, but we might see it in the Supreme Court coming here shortly. Yeah. Big story. All right, Neil, let's go to another

big story. If you... Big, when I... Great transition. When I mean big, I literally mean the size of what I'm talking about. So Neil, Tesla is betting big on the big battery game. And I'm not talking about double A's. I'm not even talking just about EV batteries for its cars,

but megapacks. So yesterday, Tesla announced that is opening a new megafactory in Shanghai, China that is capable of producing 10,000 megapack batteries a year. So what is a megapak? Basically, it's this really, really big battery that you can put on the side of your house that helps store energy, stabilize the power grid, and potentially power your house in case the normal power grid goes off. So, Neil, I would venture to guess that not many people actually knew Tesla is producing these megapacks. I kind of did. Can I admit that I didn't know a whole lot about it before this story came out?

It's all right. But yeah, no, this thing is completely separate from its car business. It's not even for residential I've read. It's mostly for, you know, huge commercial facilities that when the grid runs out or there's super peak demand. Remember what happened in Texas two years ago when there were massive, almost massive outages because everyone was using their air conditioners at the same time? Then this is sort of a big, Stabilizer, and it's part of Elon Musk's big push around renewable energy ecosystem, from solar to wind to megapacks to electric vehicles. He's devoting, I think, $10 trillion into trying to get the world off of fossil fuels in the next 20 years, and you've got to build energy storage. That's a big part of the renewable energy equation. Because what happens when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, you got to, you have to store this energy somewhere when it's not being generated.

So solving for the big energy storage battery equation could really unlock a lot of potential and renewable energy. For sure. And then I also see this as a bit of a risky bet on China, too, because it's opening the factory in China. So it is interesting because the U.S. is all geared towards kind of bringing back production of EVs and cars to the U.S. Like you have the EV credit that is part of the Inflation Reduction Act. That stipulates you need to make some parts in the U.S.

to snag the $7,500 credit. You also have the Chipsack that's returning a semiconductor production. And then you have Elon who's saying, we're opening this giant factory in Shanghai. Honestly, though, I looked at the numbers. It's tough to blame him because the last Model 3 production plant that the Tesla opened in the United States,

it was 65% more expensive. Let me rephrase that. The one it opened in China was 65% less expensive than the one it opened in the U.S. And it was built in 10 months. So it is still just way faster, way cheaper to open factories in China. And it's a huge consumer market. I mean, we saw that, what's his name?

I almost said Steve Jobs. Tim Cook was in China last weekend being like Apple and China. I've never had been closer together. So you have this split screen of really deep commercial ties between the R tech companies and the mass consumer market of China. And then you have, you know, this spy balloon, TikTok saga going on. in your other screen and you're like, well, this is kind of weird going on, but there are a lot of business opportunities over there and Elon Musk is not going to give them up. For sure.

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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. All right, I've got a few questions for you for this next story. What do you do when chat GPT accuses you of something really awful and you didn't do it and your reputation is forever tarnished and people think you're evil even though you aren't. How do you correct the record? Who do you take to court? A random open AI engineer? These questions aren't hypothetical anymore

because something like this actually happened twice in the past couple weeks. Okay, I'll take you through the first one. Jonathan Turley, this is a law professor at Georgetown, got a call from another lawyer with some really weird news that other lawyer had asked Chad GPT

to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. I'm not going to ask why they made that maybe for a project. Let's go. And Turley's name was on the list. It cited this Washington. Post story, Chatsyvety did, cited a Washington Post story that said to herly harassed a student

on a trip to Alaska in 2018. The thing is, this Washington Post story did not exist. He was not in Alaska at the time. So Chachybt had made the whole thing up. What the hell? It's honestly, if you're going to defame someone and write untruth about someone, a law professor is the last person who you want to do it about, first of all. But yeah, this is a classic case of Chachabit having a hallucination, as open AI calls it, where they just kind of make up stuff. It sounds plausible. And we've seen it before with like factually incorrect statements,

but now they're literally potentially defaming people in like taking a hit against their character. So it's entered this really interesting legal gray area. Right. And I want to talk about the second case here, which actually could lead to legal action. Turley hasn't suggested he's going to sue Open AI. But this other guy did.

It's an Australian mayor. he's threatening to sue in what would be the first time anyone has sued Open AI for defamation. Chatjapit said that this mayor served time in prison in this mega bribery scandal. But in fact, he was the guy who tipped off authorities about the bribery scandal. So he's given Open AI 28 days to fix the error or whole sue for defamation. Yeah, I do think it is funny that they quite literally did the opposite. That's probably why it got mixed up. It started hallucinating.

I do think opening eye gets way too big, way too much slack, honestly, because they love to say in their kind of information they have on their website that we strive to be as transparent as possible that chatGBT may not always be accurate. So they always put that caveat. And I feel like that caveat carries so much weight where they can basically write off everything and say, hey, we told you guys it might not be accurate. But honestly, the normal person using chat GPT might not know that. And also, when these stories get out, you can see how it can create the snowball effect and lead to defamation. It'll be so interesting to see how this is compared to Section 2230, which is what protects social media companies from all of the content posted on their platforms because a lot of

content is false and leads to hate speech and all of this kind of stuff. And they are protected against it by this shield, this legal shield that is said to have created the internet. And is Open AI going to say, we want that as well? I mean, they probably will say we want that as well. But it seems like it's a little different because they built this machine that's generating something. It's not outside users. So this question of who is accountable, who is liable for real world harms to be defamed in the United States?

There has to be a real world harm. So someone has to look at, you know, this Australian professor or this legal professor and say, oh, my God, he sexually harassed someone. I'm going to do something about it. So there has to be sort of this second order effect. So we'll see if that happens. That's why probably why the guy isn't suing because nothing has happened. So it will have to lead to that for some sort of legal action to be taken. But yeah, the first one of these cases that happens will basically set the precedent going forward.

Yeah. I wonder if we're going to get a section 230 for AI. That was a really good parallel to draw. Well done. Thank you. Wow. I woke up on a Monday morning, get some compliments from Toby. There you go.

Okay. Let's go to the winners and losers of the. weekend. Actually, we're just doing... Yeah, we don't do losers. We're just happy. This is a new segment that Neil came up with last week and we're running it back this week. So I will start off. My winner from the weekend is the Super Mario Bros. movie because it absolutely demolished the box office. So it scored the top opening of all time for an animated film with 377 million in worldwide ticket sales. Now, the animated movie genre has been kind of gaining steam recently. So I have a little quiz for you.

though, Neil. So in North America, Super Mario Bros. Three Day Weekend makes the second best start ever for an animated title, so just in North America. Can you tell me one, the movie it passed and then two, the movie that it's still behind? These are both sequels, by the way.

I know. Well, you didn't let me sound smart by saying it was a sequel. Because inflation, it's going to be a more recent. It's going to be a more recent one. They are both. One's from Pixar. Actually, no, they're both from Pixar. Let's go with Toy Story 4 Good guess

Is it right? No Let's go with It's about superheroes The one that's Incredibles too Incredibles too Is still the top dog

And it passed Finding Dory I don't think you're ever good That was deep cut right there But yeah it's basically It's a long It's continuing the trend Of these video game adaptations Doing super well

Following on Last of Us And then it's also continuing the trend of this nostalgia area that we were talking about with the Barbie movie. So there's a lot of factors that went into this dominating the box office, and that's what made it my winner of the weekend. Good pick. I'm going to go with, for my winner, the state of Connecticut, which is the most nilth thing. Otherwise known as the Delaware of New England, I like to call it.

All Connecticut really is known for his high taxes, New Haven pizza, and being the only state I got kicked out of a bar in. Oh, wow. But it's now on top of the college sports world on Saturday, Quintipiac University, won the men's National Championship for ice hockey in overtime. Of course, this comes one week after Yukon won the men's basketball title, and they are celebrating so hard in Hartford, okay? Senator Richard Blumenthal, one of the senators from Connecticut, broke his leg at a Yukon parade, and he's about to have surgery. Oh, gosh. So most people don't know Quinnipiac. I grew up kind of near it. I grew up five minutes

from the Connecticut border in Massachusetts. And Quinnipiac, you may know, you'll hear about it a lot going forward because it has this nationally famous public opinion. poll. Oh, yeah. So you might have heard the Quinnianpiac poll has Biden for four points ahead of Trump and a bunch of stuff around the election. So I'm just putting it out there. You're going to hear Quinnipiac a lot over the coming year and a half and now you have a little information to know what it is. I actually played Quinnipiac twice in soccer in college. So I am. How did you do? We won. Actually, I think we won in Tide. But that's why I always know Quinnipiac because, yeah, we played on my junior and senior year. Yeah. And then final fun fact about Connecticut is that

WWE is headquartered in Stanford. And that's where this recent deal got hushed out with Endeavor. Dubs all around. So many Connecticut facts. Let's go to the week ahead where we just kind of preview what to expect. President Biden's going to Ireland. He's heading to Ireland for the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the conflict on Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.

Biden's like great, great, great grandfather, whatever is from Ireland, and he's known as the most Irish president since JFK. So they're rolling out the red carpet over there. Or the red hash. I don't know what to eat. The green carpet. The green carpet. That's very good.

We got this inflation report dropping Wednesday. It's why we get up in the morning for that inflation report, that consumer price index. Prices are not expected to go down. They're only expected to continue, which could complicate the things because the Fed still says it's going to end interest rate hikes. I can't wait to talk about the soft landing and the Goldilocks again. We're going to mention it. So I'm looking forward to that. Love that soft landing.

earnings are back. We haven't had, we haven't been on the air when earnings have happened. So I don't know. At least not any spicy one. Not any spicy one. So there's a compact season where a bunch of the companies report their Q1 results and they say things like how they're doing and, you know, the risks that are present and comment on macro economic things.

So the banks start off on Friday. And that should really actually shape the direction of the stock market for the next couple of months. Finally, you know this well. Coachella's beginning. So it's the beginning of the summer music festival. All the hot people in the world, they're heading at the Palm Springs International Airport. I hope that's what it's called. Bad Bunny, K-pop group Black Pink and Frank Ocean. Coming out of nowhere. Might be our last time we hear them in public. So it's actually going to be an exciting show.

Yeah. So that's happening over there. Then the final couple things is that on Wednesday, the White House is going to announce super strict auto emission rules in order to boost EV production. So that report kind of leaked over the weekend. We should expect that on Wednesday. The Thai New Year is on Thursday and they staged the biggest water fight in the world called Songkron, I think. And definitely a bucket list item. If you ever seen pictures or videos from it. I have. It looks like an absolute blast. Speaking of absolute blast, an NFT summit is on Wednesday here in New York City. I remember it was kind of a circus last year when NFT was almost at its peak and now it's coming back. And I saw some people being like literally the least coolest thing you can be doing is going to an NFT.

I know. It's probably, it's going to be an AI conference next year for being totally honest. All right. That is our show. We are off and running on a Monday. You can always reach us at Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let us roll the credits. The show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. Our technical director on his first day, Yucheno Waogu. Welcome. Our supervising producer is Bryce Belloff. Raymond Lewis is our associate producer, Dan Bousa, Master of Sound. Hara makeup has deleted their Discord profile and can't be reached. I wonder what's up with that? I don't know.

Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morningbrough. Great Monday show, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Aw. 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.

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