Morning Brew Daily - French retirement protests, Youtube TV $$$ Increase, Octopus Farm Outcry

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Episode 19: Marketing Brew senior reporter Kelsey Sutton is in for Toby! Kelsey and Neal discuss the protests in France over President Macron's efforts to raise the retirement age and take a look at what OpenAI can do for Microsoft Word and Excel. They also share their stock of the week and dog of the week (watch out banks). Plus, the Octopus farm controversy you need to know about. And if you're hitting the links at 3 p.m. on a week day... you're probably not the only one. Learn more about our sponsor, Fidelity: https://fidelity.com/stocksbytheslice Learn more about TaxAct here: https://www.taxact.com/ Listen Here: https://www.mbdailyshow.com/ Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewaI Good morning brew daily show. I am Neil Fryman. And I am Kelsey Sutton. Kelsey, it's so great to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Where is Toby?

Toby is in the Bahamas, I think. Wow. He's an excellent golfer, and he goes on these golf trips sometimes, and he should absolutely play. Whenever I play with him, I'm like, why am I even playing this sport? Yeah, well, I would probably be the same So good for Toby. We wish we were in the Bahamas. Yeah, enough about Toby, though, Kelsey.

It's great to have you. You are a proud university of Maryland alum like I am. We never went to school together. Didn't know each other, but we've kind of had a reunion at Morning Brew, so it's been super cool. We squeaked by West Virginia yesterday in March Madness. That was a tough one. That was stressful.

Well, Maryland never makes it easy. No, no, but we did do it. But two points. We'll take it. It was a squeaker. Now we're playing Alabama Saturday night, So we'll see what happens. But today is not just March Madness or the second day of March Madness.

It's also St. Patrick's Day. So I think this is going to break the bar industry in New York City today. Like if you're a bar and you don't have a line around the block at 2 p.m. on a Friday of St. Paddy's and March Madness, you should, you're doing something very wrong. You have to shut down. Yeah, that's the law. That's the law. That is Mayor Eric Adams's new law.

Speaking of brackets, we are running our own, the greatest logo of all time, tournament, super fun thing we put together to figure out who is the best logo. You can head to Morning at MB Daily Show on our social media platforms, Twitter, and Instagram to vote. So all of the favorites won yesterday in the luxury and retail region except Porsche beat Adidas. Is that a surprise to you? Oh, that's very interesting. Adidas is an iconic logo, but I don't think anyone would say it has a particularly interesting design to it. And Porsche, you know, just it's Porsche.

definitely go vote on our second day. But let's get into some news. Yesterday was really interesting in the news world. The workplace AI battle is heating up. YouTube TV is getting a huge price hike, and we'll talk about a controversial octopus farm. Yes, but first, I want to transport you, Neil, and all of our listeners across the pond to France, where there is a different controversy brewing. French President Emmanuel Macron imposed a very unpopular bill raising the retirement age two years, from 62 years old to 64 years old. And he did this without a parliamentary vote. He invoked a special constitutional power to push it through. Macron has said this is like really essential.

It's due to the fact that France's population is aging. birth rates in the country are low and life expectancy is going up. And so he basically said, you have to withhold full benefits until 64 to be able to like make this solvent, you know, to pay for the amount that it's going to be paying out. Like I said, people are not happy. Lawmakers were shouting. And it's kind of like universally unpopular. So, you know, the right wing, the far.

right parties as well as progressive left-wing parties are saying absolutely not. There are protests around the entire country. And what's going to happen now is there's going to be kind of conversations around passing a no-confidence book, basically, that would, it's an unlikely situation. But if that does pass, which is possible because of the amount of unpopularity that we're seeing, Mr. Macron's prime minister and his cabinet would have to resign, basically just draw a line through the entire government that is, you know, ruling right now. So I want to hear your thoughts on this, Neil, because, you know, the retirement age is such an interesting. It's so country-specific here. It is, I believe, 67. So I want to hear your thoughts on this.

As you were mentioning that, both the right and the left hate it, I was thinking, what is an issue here that has the same amount of antagonism from both sides of the aisle? First thing I thought of was Ticketmaster. So this is the Ticketmaster. So this is the Ticketmaster. of France. The great unifier. And we aren't doing what they're doing yet, but they have done these incredible million-strong protests. They shut down transportation services like planes and trains.

And the thing everyone is talking about is how sanitation workers walked off the job. And now all this garbage is piling up on France on the streets of Paris. Our producer, Emily Milliron, showed us a picture of one of her friends lives in Paris, sent a picture of all this trash that is piled up there. And I got to say, kind of looks like home here in New York City. So they have it nice if they think that's a lot. But so protests are, I think, only are going to continue because what Macron did was kind of very brazen, going against norms, and the unions have vowed to continue protesting this two-year age bump. I got to say, French had it pretty good with 62 retirement age. We have it, yeah, ours is kind of like a sliding scale. And if you tap into Social

Security a little earlier in the later stage of your career, you're going to get a little less than if you wait. I'm really interested in how this is playing around the world, because this is not just a French phenomenon. People are getting older. There's this huge baby boom generation that is going to need to happen to social security funds and pensions all around the world, and there just aren't enough young people working to fund those programs.

So push is going to come to shove at some point. In 1935, when the U.S. created a new year. this Social Security program, there were 10 people working to support one retiree. Now it's four workers per one retiree, and soon it's going to be three. So either have to make more babies who are working and replenish the funds or change the mechanism or push the retirement age back, which is what the UK and China are considering. This is a really big problem that governments are going to have to confront. Yeah, the money has to come from somewhere, and the question is, where? I don't know. McCrott thinks he has an idea, and that's getting a,

getting pushback. I wonder what happened if they tried that here. I think, I think Nikki Haley floated it actually, but I don't know the political appetite for something like that here. Something we'll have to follow. Yeah, definitely. Would you burn down garbage? Well, I'm trying to, I'm trying to retire as soon as I possibly can. As, you know, right? Right? I am too. I am too. I am too. I just been very realistic about it, and then it's not going to happen for a couple decades. So I'm happy I like my job. Yeah, me too. Let's go to the brewing battle over the workplace, which has veered into the AI realm.

So if you use Google's Workplace Suite like we do or Microsoft 365 at your job, odds are you do because those are the giants in the space, you're probably going to start seeing a lot of new AI integrations as the tech giants battle to dominate the office. So yesterday, Microsoft announced it'll be adding what it's calling an AI co-pilot, not Clippy, unfortunately. I guess Clippy has been retired. We have a co-pilot now taking over for Clippy. I know you're a little sad about that. RIPP. So it's adding co-pilot, not Clippy, to apps in its office suite to make your workday

a lot more productive if you know how to use these, and we'll talk about that. Here are a few my favorite things that they announced, because honestly it's pretty cool, at least in my opinion. You can generate a Word doc based on other Word docs that you've created in the past. So if you've created a product launch template or an email template, you can literally just type into Word, make me do that same thing but for this other thing, and it'll just generate it for you so you don't have to write something else on your own. You can create a PowerPoint presentation based on a Word document. So you have this messy Word document where you've been

taking notes, and typically you'd have to put that into PowerPoint and use that text box thing that I hate and do all your stupid animations. And now it will just create one for you, which is honestly pretty cool. And then you can also analyze Excel data by just typing in plain English. A lot of these Excel data queries are complicated and you have to know how to use Excel. Now you can just say, make me a bar chart or create a pivot table into this chat and it'll do it for you. And then finally, we all hate email threads. This AI will summarize email threads for you and Outlook. So what do you think of all this? That was a lot. So I love, I mean, PowerPoint haters everywhere and college students everywhere are delighted. This is like, I think that the idea here is

it's going to be a huge time saver, right? But the question is, it always comes down to the execution, right? And Microsoft has said, sometimes copilot will be right, and other times it will be wrong. And I think that that's going to be kind of that's where, like, that's the sticking point here, right? Because a lot of these tech companies really want to roll out these generative AI tools because not only is it something that consumers are looking for, but it's also something that investors are looking for and are rewarding very richly, right? So it's kind of like they might be putting the cart before the horse a little bit. Like they have to make sure co-pilot is actually useful, is actually functional. But I think the promise of it is one of those things. It's like, you know, what are those

ways that you can make it easier, make it more intuitive? And I think that that's kind of the question here, like generative AI is able to allow someone to say, make me a pivot table and not have to necessarily know all the, you know, the quirks that are part of Microsoft Excel. Right. you know, and not have to make all the text boxes in PowerPoint and get super frustrated. I remember in college I almost deleted an entire economics paper because I couldn't format the essay properly. And I was so frustrated, I was like about to punch a hole through my laptop screen. So like, co-pilot is useful in these scenarios. The question is just, again, how good is it and how fast can they make it good?

I think they'll do these test runs with a few different clients and customers. to weed out the problems and hopefully debug all the bugs. This is just the normal tech thing to do. You do a little sample size, and then you whip it out to the broader population. I'm quite bullish on this. I agree with you that there will be some growing pains, but overall, I think that this push into AI is completely warranted, and they're definitely moving past, and we'll see how many things they break.

That's the final word on that story. Let's go into our Friday second, which is Stock of the Week, and dog of the week in which we talk about stocks that are doing well and stocks that are maybe having a really bad week. And this first one, I think, might be a surprise. So let's hear it. You're right. It is a surprise because I want to say that the stock of the week is meta. Jump scare. The meta. The same company that cut 10,000 jobs this week and 21,000 jobs in just the past four months is getting rewarded by investors a lot right now. Meta stock has jumped more than 13% this week. and its year-to-date stock has jumped 64%.

So investors are really loving this year of efficiency that Zuck has put in place through these job cuts, but there are also a few other things going on, I think, that are giving a tailwind to META. Yeah, definitely. I think the one main one that we're really keeping an eye on is this pressure on TikTok, obviously a huge rival to META,

a place where a lot of people who previously used meta platforms are now spending their time, but the question of this ban is really looming. And we were talking about this before the show, but that pressure is really going to, you know, is having an impact. And we're seeing that impact right now as investors are looking around and are saying, okay, so what's going to happen here? And what does that end up meaning for, you know, meta usage? You know, there are lots of copycat kind of functions that meta has rolled out to try to compete more with TikTok, like reels, for example. So the question really is kind of like that is really, I think, driving some of this.

But like you said, I mean, the question of these cuts, like investors are rewarding that because they're really looking at this and saying, okay, where are you cutting the fat? And they seem to be thinking that meta is doing a good job. They're cutting the right fat. Yeah. And finally, one other thing I think is giving a tailwind to meta is the fact that through to all this banking turmoil that we're about to talk about, the Fed might. cut interest rate or might even hold off on interest rates next meeting when it was sort of a certainty that they were going to raise them. And now it is not anymore because of all this banking turmoil.

And that's really helped lift all big tech stocks. So the Fang Plus index, which has Facebook, Alphabet, Netflix, Google, all the big tech stocks is up 10% this week so far. So this is his best five day stretch in a year. So meta's just getting lifted with all these other big tech stocks that did so well during the pandemic. We got crushed last year when the Fed's interest rate, Fed hiked interest rates. And now that the Fed might cool a little bit, they are being rewarded.

Before we move into the Dog A Week, I know this is Toby's thing, and I feel really bad about taking it, but I have to say this is not investment advice. We are just talking about stocks. Do not take any recommendations from us. Certainly do not take it from me. We are not recommending any things. Okay, let's get into our Dog of the Week, which is a stock that is not doing well. But first of all, the actual dog of the week, we have to say, is the French Bulldog,

which just dethroned the Labrador Retriever as America's best dog for the first time in 31 years. Wow, except for bad news for the French Bulldog, because now he's not going to be able to retire for a couple years, potentially. Poor Frenchie. The actual dog of the week, the stock of the week that is doing quite poorly is First Republic Bank, which probably we hadn't even heard of until two weeks ago, maybe. So this is a mid-sized lender who's been caught up in the blast radio. of Silicon Valley's collapse. Its shares are down 50% this week. It's struggling to stay alive. There are a lot of withdrawals that are being threatened, and people fear there might be another

bank run like we saw at SVB. And investors are just being super jumpy and sensitive to potential bank failures. It did receive a massive lifeline yesterday when 11 of the largest U.S. banks, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, you name it, all got together. And in unprecedented fashion, kind of wired over $30 billion in deposits as a sign that they are confident in the banking system. So they plugged $30 billion into First Republic Bank. There was a little jump, but overall, this stock is going down. And I think it's going down again this morning.

This is a really tough spot that this company just got caught up in all this bank turmoil. Yeah. I kind of, I know this is a simplification, but it's really sort of like this big domino effect. and there's kind of the littler, these smaller banks are kind of getting caught first in the blast radius. But this effort from these 11 banks to try to stop this is kind of like sticking your hand in between like a falling dominoes. But, you know, we should also mention that there was some news this morning, which is that Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group, SBB, who started all of this, filed for Chapter 11. and bankruptcy protection. So, you know, we're going to continue to be following that story. But really, like, there is a big effort to try to get people to not, you know, to trust in the

system and keep their money there because, of course, you know, as we're seeing, like, the dominoes will keep falling. And there's this huge effort to say, no, no, no, no, it's okay. It's okay. Everybody's fine. Keep your money there. Banking is a total confidence game. If you have confidence, then you are going to keep depositing and banks will be fine. if you have no confidence in the system for whatever reason, maybe it's irrational. But that's what happens in a bank run. You have no confidence in your particular financial institution that you'll get your money back. And everyone kind of takes their money out.

So you see the Biden administration and top finance officials just kind of pushing the confidence message. Before we get into the next story, we are going to take a quick break. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills, starting. $179 like the next grill three-burner gas grill or get $50 off the 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

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All right, Neil, I want to get into our next story, which is if you are a fan of TV, if you're a fan of streaming TV, It's about to get a little bit more expensive. YouTube TV has hiked its prices by 12%. It's going to be $8 more for existing customers up to $73 a month. That is effective immediately for new subscribers. So if you were not a YouTube TV. I'm not getting YouTube TV. I can say that.

This isn't a – you know, you're not like, oh, my gosh, $73 a month? $8 more? Sign me up. But so new subscribers is going to be $73 a month. Existing members will see the person. price hike in April, mid-April. This is really coming down to the rising cost of content, which we're seeing across the streaming industry, across the TV industry, and particularly sports content is really expensive. And partially it's expensive because everybody wants it.

People know that Lise Sports does really well. It does really well for advertisers. It does really well for viewers. Those things are sort of one and the same. And so YouTube TV recently struck a very kind of a first of its kind deal with the NFL for NFL Sunday ticket. So in December, Google closed that deal. It's seven years long, and I believe it's about $2 billion a year for the rights to provide that to YouTube TV subscribers. That is a lot of money. But I want to kind of take a step back, and I want to kind of paint this picture for you.

When YouTube TV came onto the market in 2017, it cost $35 a month, which was, wild because again, like the whole idea of these services is you don't have to have a cable package. You can get it, you know, over the top through your internet. And you can get all the things that you would normally get through a cable package for $35 a month. That's a huge, that's a great deal. You know, of course, now we here we are six years later and it's more than double that price. This is not a YouTube TV problem alone. We are seeing competitors of YouTube. TV also raising their prices. Hulu has raised its prices a number of times over the years. So has Fubo TV. So has Sling. Content is really expensive to make. And so, you know, the people who make the content want to recoup that costs. And that goes to these services that provide it to you. And at the end of the day, that's what the consumer is paying for. Neil, I want to hear your thoughts about this, especially because there's kind of, there's this question of, you know, how, what's going to happen, you know, next, especially when we think about these legacy cable companies that.

that were too expensive maybe in 2017, and now maybe it's more at, you know, it's a little bit more even, you know, if you're looking at your options from a consumer, like as a consumer. Yeah, I have two reactions to this. The first is that I could have sworn it was YouTube TV Plus. That's a good guess. I just assumed it was a streaming service, so there was a plus at the end, and I think Apple TV has Apple TV Plus, so why wouldn't this be YouTube TV plus? So it was wild to learn that this was just YouTube TV. And the first thing I thought of when I heard this news was, this is absolutely insanity, how much this has risen from $35 in 2017, and then it was only $50 in 2020.

We know inflation has been a lot, but this is far outpacing normal inflation. I think these companies kind of lowballed it for so many years to order to get all these subscribers, and then now in this new economic era, it's not going to cut it anymore to sort of take a loss on these streaming services, and now they're all jacking up prices because they're paying boatloads for live sports, which is the only thing that people watch on linear TV anymore. So my question for you, I know you follow this closely. Do you think this stops some of the bleeding from all the cable cutting? Because I was reading these stories about this YouTube TV price hike in the comments.

The most universal theme was, like, screw it. I'm just going back to cable or like, I'm not canceling cable anymore. At this point, it's too much of a headache to go to YouTube TV, and I'm not even paying that much less. Yeah, I mean, you bring up a really good. point, which is obviously, like, the cable companies couldn't compete with $35 a month. They make, you know, they make their money charging you, you know, a subscription and then also maybe a set-top box, whatever. But if you're a consumer and you're looking at the breakdown, like, these are mostly,

they're kind of similar price points. And so then the question is like, what's, you know, what, why would I pick one over the other? I think that these streaming services still say, like, well, we don't have a, you know, a big contract that you have to sign and you have to stay in. for a year or what have you. So there is still a little bit more flexibility, but I think you're right, right? Like it's kind of a, you know, useful for the cable company.

It's not going to necessarily stop the fact that there is this shift over to streaming that will continue, but it may slow some of the departures or maybe even bounce back a little. And somebody says, I cut the cord. I'm uncutting the cord. I've just never seen this before that YouTube in its announcement for this price hike, in the Twitter thread, they gave a link to. for people to cancel. They were like, we know it's going to be too expensive for you.

So if you want to cancel, go ahead right here. So maybe they're just trying to squeeze more, a little bit more money out of their most loyal subscribers. For our final story, I want to go to the world of aquaculture, really fascinating development over in the Canary Islands. So scientists and animal welfare activists are raising alarms over what would be the first ever octopus farm for food. There's this Spanish seafood company called Nueva Pescanova, and it aims to open an october

octopus farm in the Canary Islands, which would be the world's first. So this is the controversial part. It plans to slaughter octopus for food by placing them in super freezing, slushy water, negative 3 degrees Celsius. And experts say this is extremely cruel. It'll lead to a distressing death. And the plan to even house the octopus where it plans to do them in these communal tanks that are lit up, doesn't replicate their natural environment because these are solitary creatures that live in the dark.

and they might end up kind of eating each other. But this has been super controversial, the idea of octopus farming in general, because of just how smart octopuses are. And when you look into it, there is some truly crazy things you learn about octopuses. Yeah, one octopus is smarter than me and you combined. I'm pretty sure. I'm not surprised. I'm not awake yet, yeah.

And I think the thing that's really interesting here is like the kind of this ongoing conversation about like what is, what is cruel, what is. is not. I believe that there is, you know, cognitive neuroscientists who are basically saying, like, this would be just incredibly, incredibly cruel. There was that, I believe it's 2020, that Netflix documentary, my octopus teacher, you know, they're really, really intelligent animals. I believe that they're as intelligence as cats. And so kind of, I mean, there's this ongoing question, I think in food, in meat production, I suppose, or fishing production as like what is, what is too smart, you know, what is not. And I feel like that's a fraught conversation for another time.

But I really do think that there is, you know, it's going to be interesting to see what ends up happening here because I, is it in Britain or where is it that in the UK that their, that octopus are designated as sentient? Yeah. So they can experience pleasure and pain, so the UK has called them sentient creatures. I'm a very adventurous eater. I'll eat eyeballs and liver and brains and kidneys and intestines or whatever. But after watching my octopus teacher, which I think was an okay movie, and just learning more about octopuses, I just can't bring myself to eat octopus anymore. Again, I don't really know where I draw the line personally. I haven't reflected so much. But it does seem like these are really brilliant creatures. And it just gives me the, I guess, what is the, Gen Z say gives me the ick to eat. To eat them these days. The octopus, thank you. I'm also a vegetarian. I'm like the worst person. I can kind of sense. I don't know you that well, but from your little

diatribe there, I could. I'm waiting for Beyond Octopus. Oh, my gosh. Sign me up. I think zero people would have to eat Beyond Octopus. I'm the single customer. I'm the single customer. You would eat Beyond Octopus? Yeah. People don't even eat Beyond Hamburger. So, yeah. Well, I do. Neal. All right, Kelsey, that's all we have for. today. Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone, and happy second day of March Madness. Go Terps tomorrow. Make sure to email us at MorningBrewdaily.com. Hit us with your feedback. Also, shout-outs to our amazing crew in the back. Our show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. Show's technical director is Joe Hampton. Our supervising producer is Bryce Belloff. Master of All Things Audio is Dan Bousa.

Toby took hair and makeup to him with the Bahamas to him. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. Have a great weekend. Happy St. Patty's Day. All. Pay off your home, travel for life. Drive a Ferrari.

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