Morning Brew Daily - FCC Rules AI-Voiced Robocalls Illegal & Elon Musk Wants You to Sue Disney

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Episode 254: Neal and Toby break down the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin and what it means for X and content creators. Plus, the FCC rules AI-voiced robocalls are illegal and Elon Musk wants to go after Disney. The guys share their stock and dog of the week and why Australia wants to stop your boss from contacting you after hours. And finally, a look at the top Super Bowl bets you can make ahead of the big game on Sunday. Get your Morning Brew Daily Merch HERE: https://shop.morningbrew.com/products/morning-brew-daily-sweatshirt?utm_medium=multimedia&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=mbd&utm_content=shownotes 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

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pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewAI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Elon Musk is channeling his inner Disney villain and escalating his beef with Bob Iger. Then stay tuned because Neil and I are making our 100% accurate lock of the century Super Bowl predictions at the end of the show today. It's Friday, February 9th.

Let's ride. Happy Friday, everyone. You know what? Let's bring back our classic Friday small talk tradition, fast week, slow week. The question you will no doubt be asked around the office today. For me, fast week, because I am so ready for the Super Bowl to be over. So we can start talking about what really matters. And that is pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training next week.

Toby, fast week or slow week for you? That was such a Neil answer. Okay, weirdly, I had a slow week this week because I spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the orders come in for our Morning Brew Daily Hoodies. I got fully sucked into an e-commerce analytics black hole, and you guys, I don't regret a single second of it. It was so cool watching these orders come in. So I got to end my slow leak with one final plug.

If you haven't gotten your hands on a hoodie yet, head to shop.mortmoo.com right now. We also linked it in the show description and on YouTube. Neil, people are calling the hoodies the best cure for a slowie because even if you're stuck in the doldrums, at least you can look style. while you're doing it. Always be selling, Toby.

And always be closing, Neil. Before we jump into the show, we have a quick word from our good friends over at Vime. All right, I have another story to tell about VEM this morning. A Morning Brew employee was at a bar in Wyoming

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the former Fox News host, published a two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday on X, and his website. This was a historic and controversial conversation. It was the first time that Putin had given interview to a Western-based media figure since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In the lead up to the interview, Carlson explained that no Western media had bothered to interview Putin to hear his side of the story. But that was contradicted by many Western outlets who said they had reached out repeatedly and had been rejected by the Kremlin. Carlson's claim was also refuted by

Russian officials themselves, who said they received many requests for interviews, with Putin, but don't do them because they think the Western media is biased against Russia. In Carlson, they saw someone who is more sympathetic to Putin. And in the interview, he did little to challenge the leader's claims that the U.S. and its allies are to blame for his invasion of Ukraine. Not to mention, this interview comes during a major crackdown on the foreign press in Russia, which has jailed an American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich since last March on espionage charges, which the outlet says are bogus.

Yeah, if we want to kind of zoom out to who the winner is of this, if there is a winner in this scenario, it's definitely X, the platform, because if you're trying to make video on X a thing, Tucker Carlson is kind of your guy right now. He has leaned fully into the platform. He has embraced this as the mouthpiece for his new kind of independent media streak. And so X has been trying to paint itself as this place for video, this place that creators can monetize and make a living. And Tucker Carlson, And conducting interviews like this is a big win for X in that book. It is. I'm not sure this particular interview was the thing that will catapult him to, you know, in particular fame on this platform specifically because, you know, we could barely get through it. The first 20 to 30 minutes was Putin going off on a Russian history lesson dating back to the 9th century. So I don't know if this was the most compelling interview that Carlson could have published. And he got a lot of flack for doing it because of the crackdown on the foreign press in Russia.

But he did bring up what was going on with this, with Evan, who's been jailed since March. And Putin did say that there was back channel talks going on and that there could possibly be a prisoner swap. Yeah, this was one of the things that on the paper, it seemed more exciting than it ended up actually being. The interview itself was not very compelling. It was very long. There was a lot of, I mean, Putin talked for 20 minutes straight at one point. So, again, it wasn't super compelling, but drew a ton of interest. to this platform. I mean, we have been seeing a lot of different experimentation with video going on

that platform. Mr. Beast has kind of come out and papoot it a little bit saying, listen, I don't make even a quarter or barely any as much money on X as I do on YouTube. His videos have been being posted here. So we are seeing this gradual maturization of this platform in real time and seeing if they can figure out how to court these influencers. Yeah. Meanwhile, this comes as a pretty pivotal moment for Ukraine. I mean, there's a $60 billion aid package that's getting stalled up in Congress that would, you know, supply Ukraine with aid and weapons. And Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, also did probably the biggest shakeup since the war started by kind of sacking his biggest general. So there's a lot of, you know, a lot going on in the Ukraine in the X world. And so we'll just see what happens of this interview. But I don't think it's going to, you know, leave a huge lasting impression. Yeah. Let's move on. Artificial Intelligence and Robocalls are the worst duo since Michael Bay in an unlimited production budget. But lucky for you, the Federal Communications Commission is on the case. Yesterday, they invoked a 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act to prohibit AI-generated, unsolicited robocalls effective immediately. This is coming right on the heels of a rash of AI phone calls, mimicking President Joe Biden's voice, trying to discourage people from voting in the New Hampshire primary life. last month. Feels like a no-brainer for the FCC to jump on this. Consumer protection law already bans telemarketers from using pre-recorded or artificial voices, and AI-generated

voices certainly fall into that category. Even though we got a lot of AI news yesterday, Google renamed its AI chat button and added it to its suite of apps. Chip designer Arm is seeing their stock rip on good AI forecasts. But this FCC ruling hits the closest to home for most listeners, because we've all had one of those annoying robocalls. Yeah, I think everyone's probably like, hey, why can't you ban all robocalls, not just AI-generated ones? Some truly shocking robocall numbers. People get 4.3 billion robocalls just in January alone.

And over the course of the year, you get 55 billion robocalls. Obviously, with AI and synthetic media, they become, and around elections, they become even more dangerous. So the FCC is taking this step. It's not going to lead to the full elimination of these. it just kind of expands the toolkit, the legal toolkit, with which prosecutors can go after these people. And they found out who did the Biden one.

It was this guy in Texas and a couple of his companies there. Yeah, you're never going to fully be able to stop bad actors, but you can disincentivize it. You can face fines, $23,000 per call, which if you're sending out a lot of these calls, that's a hefty fine. So they are trying to discourage it. Let's zoom out to some more of the AI stuff that happened yesterday. I want to talk about Arm, which remember, Arm isn't a chip-made. ARM is a chip designer. They license their design out to these firms to build chips. And obviously,

as these chips have become more and more highly sought after during the AI boom, Arm has profited for this. It absolutely has been ripping the past few days. And remember, SoftBank owns 90% of Arm, so this is a major win for SoftBank as well. Yeah, yesterday it was up 48%. It added $38 billion to its market cap. Last year, it definitely was one of the biggest IPOs that happened. Hasn't been doing well, but I think it's caught this wave of AI. And people are realizing that these AI chips are actually selling. The hype is actually turning into reality and actual dollars and cents. The final AI thing that happened yesterday that I want to touch on was that OpenAI decided to start adding watermarks to the metadata of images generated using their DOLE3 platform.

This is kind of a movement that's happening in the AI industry right now. A bunch of companies led by Adobe, are trying to push these C2PA certification standards that are meant to regulate AI. And adding watermarks to AI to pictures generated by AI to show that they are AI generated. Feels like an absolute, that was a tongue twister right there. It also feels like a no-brainer for a lot of these companies, because yes, you should be able to see at some point that this was generated by AI. Yeah, they said it's not a complete fix because actually when you take a screenshot of the image that watermark goes away. And also when you upload it to social media, the watermark goes away.

So there's a long way to go. But this was one of the top directives of the executive order issued by the Biden administration last year about ways to regulate AI. There had been a groundswell this week specifically. Meta, Google, OpenAI, all added watermarks to their images. We'll see whether those are going to be effective or not. I think this is just the beginning of marking AI images. Going to our next story, Elon Musk, not a Disney adult. In fact, it seems he hates Disney with a passion.

And this week, he significantly escalated a feud that had been simmering for months. Musk is funding a legal challenge by actor Gina Carrano, who sued Disney and Lucasfilm on Tuesday for wrongful termination and discrimination. In 2021, Carrano was booted from her role in The Mandalorian over a social media post, where she compared being a Republican to being Jewish during the Holocaust, which came after a string of other conspiratorial posts that Disney said denigrated people based on their cultural and religious identities. Carrano said that she was defamed and harassed for not conforming to Disney's political viewpoints,

and she pointed out that her male colleagues, such as the actor Pedro Pascal, compared former President Trump to Hitler. Carano's attack on Disney is being enthusiastically cheered on by Musk, who yesterday told the public, He would pay for the cases of not just Carrano, but anyone who wants to sue Disney for discrimination. Yeah, a law professor and director at Fordham talked to the Wall Street Journal, and he said he couldn't recall another instance in which a CEO backed litigation against a company when their own business wasn't involved. So this is not a normal thing for a active CEO of another public company to support litigation against another company without, you're not even involved in this at all. This is a completely different thing.

It's not something that Iger can just shrug off either because, remember, Elon has called very publicly for Iger to be fired. And Iger is actively fighting off activist investors right now who want his head. So he's, Elon Stone and support behind Nelson Peltz, who is the activist shareholder trying to shake up Disney and looking for a board seat. So this is a big, big headache for Bob Iger. This goes back to last fall during the New York Times Deal Book Summit. it. Iger was talking about why Disney, and a bunch of other advertisers, had left X, Elon Musk's platform. Elon Musk gets up there. He tells advertisers infamously, who left the platform like Disney, go F yourself. And then he singled out Bob Eiger saying, hey, Bob, if you're here in the audience,

I'm sorry, that's how I feel. So he singled out Bob Iger. Disney has been one of the leaders in leaving X. I think all of this bad blood relates back to that moment in the fall. Yeah, I mean, it's not out of left field either for Musk or X, because remember, he said last year that X would fund lawsuits for people who claim they were unfairly fired for their posts on social media. So, again, this is kind of a theme developing here. Obviously not great for X as an advertising platform, though, because you burn bridges when you do stuff like this. Ad agencies don't want to have their clients sued by the platform they introduced you to. So, again, he is going a little scor shirt here, but he's got a beef with Disney. All right, before we jump into the next part of our show,

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Neil, you nabbed me in the pre-show competition of who can dice a bell pepper faster. So you're up first. What is our stock of the week? Our stock of the week is an iconic fashion company that apparently has not gone out of style. Ralph Lauren beat profit expectations for the 14th straight quarter, sending shares up 17% to their highest level in nine years. What's working? Ralph Lauren, with its cashmere sweaters, coats, cocktail dresses, seems to have been one of the main winners of that quiet luxury trend that became popular last year. It was also the rugby shirt of choice for Chinese shoppers with sales in Chinese. China growing more than 30%. Toby, it has never been cooler to wear a sweater tied over your shoulders.

Absolutely. I can't believe a lot of the themes that we were seeing that propelled Ralfleron to this great quarter, strong luxury sales in China. That's something that you're not seeing from a ton of brands. It kind of feels like a narrative violation in some words. The quiet luxury wave, like the succession kind of pushed it. It is interesting that Ralfleron is considered quiet luxury these days. That to me is almost in the luxury category. Do you think it's quiet enough? I don't know their suite of products enough. I know they have some with very loud logos, but I think a lot of their product suite is more understated and just like classic luxury. 14th straight quarter of beating profit expectations.

That is a company that is ripping right now. Another big theme of Ralph Renn is they're going direct to consumer. They are pulling back out of department stores and selling on their website and in Ralph Lauren stores specifically. That's been a huge boon for them. So they're getting out of the wholesale business quite dramatically. Let's move on to our dog of the week. And it is poor New York Community Bank. Neil, this bank is going through it.

It's down nearly 60% over the past week. Moody's downgraded its credit rating to junk status on Tuesday. And everyone, rightfully so, is wondering, is it the next bank that it's going to go under? Now, never say never, but outside of its plunging stock, it looks like it's not in a fully sinking boat. Its executive chairman said that they had seen virtually no deposit. outflow from our branches, which means for the time being, there isn't this big bank run. Remember, this was the bank that picked up the pieces of signature bank in the aftermath of it failing last year. Those assets and liabilities called NYCB's balance sheet to swell and put it

in the unfamiliar territory as a big bank. It also set aside $552 million for future loan losses to potentially cover for losses in the struggling commercial real estate sector as well. All in all, a no good, dirty, rotten week for New York Community Bank. No, the fear here was that, you know, problems at New York Community Bank would spill over to not just other banks in the United States, but smaller lenders exposed to commercial real estate in Japan and Germany. And you saw some of those tremors happen. A German bank shares kind of plummeted as well. But it seems like the damage, you know, we've said this before. Right.

Back, it's almost one year since Silicon Valley Bank happened. But you're not seeing the crazy run on the bank. You're not seeing the deposit outflows. New York Community Bank seems exposed to a particular one type of building, which is rent-regulated apartments in New York City that have just been crushed in value. So it seems like this is a New York Community Bank problem. It's not a wider banking sector problem. Janet Yellen appeared on the Hill yesterday and talked about what was going to go on in this commercial real estate. And she said, look, yeah, some banks are going to suffer. There's going to be some significant losses. But overall,

the banking sector is well capitalized. So I don't see a huge, huge crisis in developing. And then one final point on New York Community Bank, around 40% of their total deposits are uninsured. Remember, uninsured depositors are customers with more than $250,000 in a single account. And while 40% seems high, it's nothing close to what Signature Bank or Silicon Valley Bank was. So that bank run that happened to those banks, this bank appears to be a lot more stable because it's a lower amount of uninsured depositors. Cool. So, very cool. Very cool. Okay, moving on.

Have you had a family dinner interrupted by a call from your boss and thought, I wish this were illegal? Well, in Australia, soon it will be. Australia's Senate passed a bill that would give workers the right to ignore calls and messages outside working hours without the fear of repercussion. It's expected to sail through the House of Representatives next before becoming the law of the land. The point, according to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanyes, Someone who is not being paid 24 hours a day shouldn't be penalized if they're not online and available 24 hours a day. In other words, you shouldn't have to work during hours you aren't getting paid for. Toby, do you support this?

I support it. My first thought, and I don't know what this says about me, is that this is perfect for people kind of like me who like to ghost. And listen, I'm friends with a lot of people at Morning Brew and some of my bosses as well. And I sometimes don't want to go to the company Happy Hour or something like that. So if they text you about, hey, you want to hang out, grab a drink or something, you can say, Listen, I'm exercising my right to disconnect. So that was my first thought. But then also, this law is a little interesting to me because it places the burden on employees, not employers.

They're saying that employees, you have the right to protect your rights, but it's not telling employers to not contact employees after hours. So that was a little bit of an interesting thing and potentially not as effective or achieving the thing that this law wants to achieve. Yeah. But it is interesting in the context of this broader. pushed for what's called the right to disconnect. Europe did this first. France, Germany, Italy, Belgium have all instituted laws over the past few years that make it illegal for your bosses to call you after work hours. Kenya also did it. And Australia is just riding this wave a little bit. I have no idea whether it's going to wind up on our shores. I heavily doubt it,

based on our workaholic culture. But yeah, it's overall, there's been this right to disconnect. It's been going all over the world as I think it's been fueled by the pandemic and remote work and flexible work as the lines between your work and your leisure time have become blurred. These laws want to like protect the integrity of that. Also, Australia does seem like a great place to work. 20 days of paid annual leave, mandatory paid sick leave. They have a long service leave of six weeks that if you've remained at a single place for more than seven years, they say you got to take six weeks off. 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and a nationwide minimum wage of about $15 an hour.

Plus the beaches. I was going to say, you're never too far from a beach. Yeah, exactly. All right, Super Bowl Sunday is so close. I can already taste the Buffalo Wings and the tears of 49ers fans everywhere. But this is not just a big year for the teams and players involved. It's also a big day for Vegas and the millions of people gambling on the game. Remember, it's only in the last few years that the NFL has fully embraced gambling.

as recently as 2017 Commissioner Roger Goodell insisted that, quote, we strongly oppose legalized sports gambling. Since then, 38 states have jumped on the sports betting train. The NFL has seven official gambling partners from draft kings to Caesars, while another major partner, ESPN, has its own sportsbook now. 200 million adults are expected to tune into the game, and one out of every four of them are expected to place a wager on it. Insane numbers.

It's quite the 180 for. the league that it's now welcoming its gambling partners with open arms. I mean, you have to say this is the climax of a lot of different trends going on in sports right now. Gambling, Las Vegas being the sports capital of the world, hosting F1 and now hosting a Super Bowl that was almost unthinkable a few years ago. NBC did not air a promo of its show Las Vegas against Sunday night football out of fear of NFL retribution because I hated gambling so much.

This has been a complete one idea, as you said. It's also the maturation of Las Vegas as a sports market. It's also the maturation of legal gambling. It's just a lot going on. Yeah, absolutely. NFL sports partners are paying around a billion dollars to be part of the official partners to the NFL. But also, by praising sports gambling, the NFL has just unleashed this new profit stream. So you can see why they eventually, I don't know, maybe sold their soul.

It is a little tough, though, because gambling add an all-time high, definitely spurred by how. easy it is now to place a bet from their phones affecting a lot of people especially young men seem to be especially vulnerable so again did they embrace gambling too much or did should they have done it at all which is funny because we're about to tell our our prop bets for the game neil let's let's do some prop that's yes we're not waging any money on this this is all fun in games okay let's go profits are the sort of unconventional bets you can place on the game Some are not available on U.S. Spokes, and some you have to go to some offshore books to find. But either way, let's do it.

Heads or Tails for the coin toss. You know the mantra, Tails never fails, so I'm riding with Tails. Tails actually never fails because over the 57 previous Super Bowls, Tails has come up at a rate of 53%. That's my analytics guy right there. All right. So moving on, Reba McIntyre is singing the Star-Spangled banner. The over-under on it right now is 89.5 seconds.

So she sang the Star-Spangled Banner at a sporting event before game three of the 97 World Series. That clocked in at 83 seconds. So is she going to hold it out a little bit longer for the Super Bowl? Yeah, I'm taking the over. I think in general anthems have gotten longer and longer. Riba is a showstopper. I think she's going to milk it. I'm taking the over.

One of the best bets that you can make is on the color of the Gatorade shower that will be poured on the winning coach. and we can talk about a little later who that will be. In 2020, when the Chiefs beat the Niners, Andy Reid got the Orange Bath. Three years later, when the Chiefs beat my Eagles, the Gatorade was purple. Right now, purple is the odds-on favorite, followed by orange, blue, and then yellow-green lime.

What do you take in? It's so interesting to me because I always pick my favorite flavors of Gatorade. The thing that I wish I was drinking if I was on the sidelines, and that is purple. Purple has not always been the favorite by far, so it is interesting. someone there must be two in your face yeah but it's good though i still i still enjoy it but so i'm riding with purple i'm going to orange i'm going orange okay there are so many bets you can place on taylor swift

let's do this one how long after kickoff is taylor swift shown on tv within seven and a half minutes or after seven and a half minutes it's got to be within i think it's going to be within 30 seconds honestly because remember the whole plane saga her coming from to kovio to make the game on time i think we are going to get her right from the outset. I think as soon as the ball is kicked off, and if the chiefs receive, that actually might be the big thing. If the chiefs receive, I think will flash to her right away. If they don't,

then who knows? All right. Speaking of valuable people, most valuable player for the game. This is a really controversial one. I'm going to go with Patrick Mahomes. So controversial. He is also the favorite at Plus 130. Winner of the game. Who's going to win? Right now, the 49ers are favored

by two points. I know you said the 49ers are going to have, fans are going to have some tears. Are those happy tears or are those sad tears? I kind of left it intentionally ambiguous, but I am going with the Chiefs. Let's ride Chief Nation. Because I think potentially there might be a little proposal on the end of the field. I'm not saying anything, but yeah, I'm going with the Chiefs. All right, me too. I think the Chiefs are going to go back to back. That is our show for today for the week. Hope you all have a great weekend and you enjoy all the dips at your

Super Bowl party. Don't forget to pick up your hoodie one last time at shop.mourningbrew.com. And as always, you can write in with any feedback to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Very curious to hear what you thought of Toby's Super Bowl picks. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Raven Lou is our associate producer. Euchenua Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio.

Hair and makeup has been ignoring our 6 p.m. calls. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our shows of production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. I wish you all well. All. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari.

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