Morning Brew Daily - Mexican Medical Tourism, DOJ vs JetBlue & Spirit, ChatGPT meets Slack

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Episode 12: Neal and Toby take a look at the economics behind Mexican medical tourism after two Americans were killed in a Cartel mix up after traveling to the country for a plastic surgery procedure. Also they breakdown why the DOJ wants to block JetBlue's takeover of Spirit airlines. And, hate talking to your co-workers? Well Slack wants ChatGPT to do it for you. Plus, why everything is awesome for Legos right now. Learn more about our sponsor, Grasshopper: https://www.grasshopper.bank/thedailyshow Listen Here: https://www.mbdailyshow.com/ Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Sources:  Mexican Medical Tourism: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/health/medical-tourism-mexico-trend-wellness/index.html DOJ vs Airline Takeover: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/spirit-jetblue-DOJ-antitrust-lawsuit Powell: Interest Rates will increase: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/07/fed-chair-powell-says-interest-rates-are-likely-to-be-higher-than-previously-anticipated.html  Slack adding ChatGPT: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/slack-introducing-ai-assistant Are Sugar Substitutes good for you? https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/03/07/study-finds-a-popular-sugar-substitute-might-be-bad-for-your-heart Lego’s Success: https://www.wsj.com/articles/artificial-sweetener-erythritol-linked-to-strokes-heart-attacks-2795ee46?mod=hp_featst_pos3 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 Freyman. And I'm Toby Howell. And Neil, it's Wednesday.

It's also a day of a lot of celebrations. I really appreciated the top blurb in the morning brew newsletter today. I'm actually just going to quickly read it for everyone who hasn't read the newsletter yet. You guys said, happy holy, happy international women's day and happy belated porum. Whoever you run into today, just give them a thumbs up and a smile. Odds are they're celebrating something. I laughed at that a little bit. Yeah, I want to thank Maddie, R-Writer, for helping me craft that with the great joke at the end.

Beautiful top blur, but I also actually had not heard of PORUM before this, and I was hoping you could just describe it to me real quick. Yeah, I'll give it 20-second synopsis. It's compared often to Halloween because you dress up and you go in costumes. There are some tricks and there are some treats. And it's a Jewish holiday, right? Yes, it is a Jewish holiday. Sorry.

Yeah, I'm Jewish. And basically, it's very similar to many other Jewish holidays where we celebrate being able to still be here after a person tried to kill us and wipe us out, and we fought them off, and so we all get drunk because of it. Interesting. Well, you learn something new every day. Yeah, I'm sorry, Mom, I didn't do anything for,

forum this year. I will go to a party next year, I promise. We got a really interesting show for you covering a lot of different topics. I want to run through a few of them. The U.S. government is trying to block an airline mega merger. We'll get into that. We'll also talk about why J-POW spooked markets yesterday, why everything was read. And then finally, Slack is getting in is getting chat GPT? AI tools. Everyone's getting AI these days. But first, to start off the show, I actually want to take us to Mexico. So, last week, some news broke that four Americans were kidnapped in Mexico. And then yesterday, it came out that two of them were found dead and two of them were found alive.

So I'll quickly kind of run through the details of this tragedy and kind of why we're talking about it. So shortly after crossing into the border city of Matamoros, the minivan, the Americans were traveling in, crashed and was fired upon by a drug cartel that's kind of active in the region. police think that the cartel actually mistook the American minivan for drug smugglers, which is what prompted the attack in their eyes. But we now know that at least one of the Americans had traveled to Mexico to receive a cosmetic surgery. And so, Neil, that's kind of what I want to touch on today, is the rise of medical tourism, especially in Mexico.

Yeah. They estimate that nearly one million Americans traveled to Mexico for health care each year. And that's because it's a lot cheaper. I think we have the stat that it's 40 to 60% cheaper for a wide variety of medical services down there. The most common are elective surgeries that aren't covered by insurance here. So cosmetic surgeries, I think the tourists there were going for tummy tuck. Yeah, tummy tuck. And then another really popular one is dental procedures and getting your teeth whitened.

Yeah. It is interesting that these kind of border towns especially, actually, it's a huge, huge industry for them. And so the southernmost point of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, is actually considered to be a medically underserved area. So that's why you see these border towns. A lot of Americans cross over from kind of this poor medical environment and go into Mexico in order to have affordable surgeries. Right. So people were like, well, this is dangerous? Because the border towns have a lot of cartel activity.

Right. But in reading, experts were like, this is very rare for, medical tourists to be targeted by gangs and cartels like this. The far more dangerous thing is the actual medical procedures or botched surgeries, and people not doing their due diligence in finding, you know, healthcare practitioners that can actually do the job. Right. Yeah. And Mexico, this is only a growing industry. Mexico is the second most popular destination for medical tourism globally right now.

Almost an estimated 1.4 to 3 million people go down every year. That's a lot of people. What do you think is number one? I know. We were kind of doing some data. It was rather hard to find data, so if any listeners are listening to this and can find number one. I guess my first guess was the United States because I know people come here, but then we were thinking, well, it's really expensive health care here. That's why people leave to get procedures elsewhere.

So maybe it's more specialty things. So, yeah, if you have any ideas about what the number one medical tourist destination is, let us know. We'll take any guesses. We'll be interesting to find out. But what I found most interesting is medical tourism is a global phenomenon. One of the most famous examples of this is people traveling from Western Europe, UK, to Eastern Europe, places like Hungary, Croatia, and Turkey for kind of the same things, cosmetic surgery, and dental work. Yeah, absolutely.

It's a growing industry, which sounds odd to say, but yeah. Yeah, they're actually just opened a 33-story medical facility. facility in Tijuana. You see that? Yeah, it's like state of the art. They're branding it the best medical tourism facility in the world and I don't know if you've been to... They're leaning into it. Oh, totally. They're saying, come to us. Have you been to Tijuana? It's literally right over the border from San Diego. People shuttle in and out all the time. I have not. Maybe I'll give it a go. Okay. So that's all about medical tourism, something we maybe hadn't focused on before, but this tragedy definitely put in the spotlight. I want to take us to the airline industry. The DOJ yesterday sued to block Jep blues 3.8 billion takeover of spirit, saying it would raise

prices for travelers and leave them with fewer air options. It's really aggressive tacked by the Biden administration. We've seen this as a pattern by antitrust officials, particularly in this administration. It is the first time in more than 20 years that the U.S. government has even tried to block an airline merger. Right. I was conflicted on this because it was odd to see, yeah, the DOJ kind of dropped the hammer on this particular merger.

When we dug into who controls the airline market, there's the Big Four, which is American, Southwest, Delta, and United. They all control right around 17% of the market. So I was like, wouldn't a merger between Spirit and JetBlue actually challenge the supremacy of the Big Four? But it turns out that JetBlue snapping up Spirit would probably drive up prices. And I'll give a couple of stats that stood out to me. So when Spirit starts flying any given route, average fares fall by 17%.

Because Spirit is this ultra-low-cost airline, so others have to kind of react to them flying a route. And then JetBlue estimates that when Spirit stops flying a route, average fares shoot up by 30%. So they definitely move the markets whenever they jump into a route. And it's kind of funny that Spirit, I don't know if you remember the origins of this deal, but Spirit was kind of fending multiple offers from JetBlue and Frontier. Right. And I think they agreed to Frontier originally, and what's really kind of funny is that they didn't want to be scooped up by JetBlue originally. And they argued that JetBlue buying Spirit would raise a lot of regulatory hurdles as their prediction came true, and that it would raise prices.

So even Spirit in its own internal company documents said that JetBlue scooping it up would raise price. Honestly, the merger with Frontier made a ton more sense to be, because that is where you, it felt like it would lower prices, truly, because those are the two biggest budget airlines. And so combining them and, like, leveraging the operational efficiencies of a bigger organization, I thought that one made a ton of sense. So, yeah, it is, the airline market's interesting, very interesting to me, because there's been very little disruption over the last 20 years. There hasn't been a new airline startup in,

It's like Southwest, basically. There have been a couple recently, like Breeze Airways, I think, during the pandemic. Do you remember that? And their goal was to serve, you know, the secondary cities that may be overlooked by the deltas and the Americans. You know, I grew up in Western Mass, and we had Bradley Airport. Hartford. Never heard of it. Yeah, and my dad was just flying to Phoenix.

And he was like, yeah, I got to stop over. I was like, oh, it's a quick red eye back. And he's like, no, dude, you forgot. I don't live in New York City. I have to fly to a hub and then fly back home to my little regional airport. So they're having a couple startups serving those markets. Yeah. All right. Well, that was actually a fun conversation about the airline industry in America. Always fun to talk about. Let's zoom out a little bit.

So Jerome Powell talked to U.S. lawmakers yesterday. There's always some big quotes from that. So I just want to kind of highlight some of the key takeaways of his testimony. The big takeaway is that interest rates are likely to head higher than the central break had initially expected. I'll actually read you his exact quote from yesterday. The latest economic data have come in stronger than expected, which suggests that the ultimate level of interest rates is likely to be higher than previously anticipated. So it was kind of we all saw this coming.

It is odd because he's basically saying the economy is doing a little too well, it's overheating a little bit, we're probably going to have to raise interest rates a little bit more, a little bit faster in order to calm down this inflation. It raises the prospect of hard landing. So it increases the chances of a recession. And if we can just do a quick timeline over the past year about the Fed and the economy, it's last year they hiked interest rates by 75 basis points a bunch of times in a row, which was a historic amount to quell inflation.

And then early this year, we were like, okay, I think. think it's working. Inflation's coming down, and the economy is holding up strong. That is the so-called soft landing scenario, the Goldilocks situation. So everyone was super hyped. The market went up in February because of that. But there have been new economic data releases and inflation reports that suggest that inflation is not coming down as fast as we had hoped, and that the economy is really holding up stronger than expected, and that can fuel inflation more. So, the Fed let last meeting, the Fed only raised interest rates by 25 basis points. And now, because of Powell's testimony, which is considered hawkish, they think that in the Fed's next meeting,

they're going to re-raise interest rates by 50 basis points. So we took our foot off the gas pedal, and now we're putting it back on again. And, you know, it's just, you know, raises the prospect of a recession. And that's why markets, you saw a lot of red in the markets yesterday. Right. And just one final point on that, a lot of good analogies in that, as always, Neil. I mean, the gas. That's a classic, though.

That's not that creative. But so he actually got into it with Senator Elizabeth Warren a little bit in this testimony. Elizabeth Warren's like, every time that you raise interest rates, unemployment spikes a little bit, too. So she was basically saying, are you okay with putting two million people out of jobs? And then Jerome Powell was like, listen, higher inflation affects everybody, like every single worker in America. So, yes, I am almost okay with, I mean, he didn't explicitly endorse people losing their jobs, but saying, like, if we can get the inflation rate under control, it's actually going to benefit a lot more people than the $2 million.

He's sounded that pattern a lot over the past few years, because raising rates is unpopular. Because it hits the economy and it gets people out of jobs. But he's basically been saying the risks of letting inflation run hot for longer are way, way, way, way, great. greater than a small hit in unemployment. And speaking of unemployment, it hasn't gone up. Right. It's at 3.4%, or 4.3% or something like that. It is absolutely minuscule.

And it's actually a good preview of what's happening on Friday, which is the Jobs Report, which will be another huge key economic indicator that will help us understand the path of future rate hikes. For sure. Well, there's Jerome's Powell testimony. But before we jump into the next story, we're 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 at $179, like the next grill 3-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 homedebo.com slash price match for details. All right, I want to move to AI. We haven't talked about it yet, so we have to. But there's actually big news. ChatGBTGBT is coming to the workplace. Salesforce is integrating chat GPT into Slack to help you become your most productive worker self.

So it says there are three main use cases for it. One is to summarize conversations instantly. Second is to find answers to questions quickly. Okay, I guess that's just search, but in Slack. And then it is to draft messages and reply to people. and just kind of create emails. Yeah. When I heard this news, I feel like the central question comes back to the questions we've had

about all the AI advance since recently is how accurate it's going to be. Is the time-saving benefits that you accrue from this tool going to outweigh the inaccuracies that are inevitably going to pop up? So, I don't know. Honestly, people are saying they're very bullish on this because, yeah, you could potentially save a lot of time by having the Slack. kind of get out ahead of the messages you're going to send to your coworkers. But the tool that this reminded me of was, you know, in Gmail where you're typing email

and it tries to finish the sentence for you, this is that on steroids. And I hate that feature. Really? It never really says what I wanted to say. I think I use it. You hit tab and let it completely. Yeah, sometimes. Yeah.

But I think this is good. You know, this could be a workplace revolution. Who knows? Kind of like Excel, we were talking about earlier. Like, was this? Are we having the same conversation as people? did when Microsoft Office first released Excel. Yeah.

I could see it where you're like, ah, this will never replace the pen and paper. This is the bad method. So maybe I am shaking my fist at the sky. You seem to be a little bit. I'm pretty bullish. I think this is like a great use case application for AI. I think it will really benefit people that spend time and learn how to use it.

I think there might be a lot of people who are intimidated by it and just kind of don't want to learn about it. But I think if people, a few enterprising workers can really use it to their advantage, they'll just become the most productive people on the planet, and people will love to employ them. So I think this could be, like, on your resume, it could be, I mean, this is completely plausible. On your resume, you'll have proficient at Excel, expert at chat GPT querying. And I, you know, I'm looking at your resume. I'm like, damn, this guy can probably reply to six emails in 30 seconds.

Like, that's pretty good. Well, I'll ask you, Neil, because fun fact, Neil is actually the top slacker in the entire morning crew organization. He sends the most messages on a yearly basis. Do you think that you would utilize this in your Slack habits? Well, I'm not so tech forward. So the people I'm talking about who I said are extremely employable doesn't really apply to me. Yeah, but you're a power user.

Wouldn't you find some? I don't know if I use it for what people in other industries use it for. I'm a writer. We're just kind of talking about things. But talking about news stories and what to write and making jokes, it's kind of like a writer's room in our Slack, which is not really chat GPT friendly, in my opinion. But I can see people with a lot of meetings every day just asking chat GPT to summarize the meeting and five key takeaways, list all the action items, and then send it out to everyone in a draft email that it creates. I mean, that would be incredible use case. And all of this misinformation stuff that you're talking about, I feel like in a workplace setting, it's really narrow.

Right. Like, you're not asking it to tell the history of World War II or, you know, give political opinions. It's really simple tasks. Like, summarize what we just talked about in this meeting, because I don't really feel like it, and then send it out in a very commonplace work email. You're saying that this podcast could have been a summarized Slack GPT message? I'm sure if we thought about it, we could probably have ChatGBT, summarize the podcast,

and put it up on our website. Interesting. That's a good idea. Producers in the culture. Producers will do that. Let's talk about that. No, but yes, overall, I think this is going to be a workplace revolution. I think that people should really learn how to use the tech

and they'll just become employable as anything. Yeah. That could be totally wrong. I'm sold. I'm sold. I could be totally wrong. That's my thought. All right, Toby.

Next story. I know you have a big sweet tooth. I have a huge sweet tooth. It's horrible. And I don't, which is crazy. But I do want to talk about artificial sweeteners, which are those sugar substitutes that are put into food that made. that make them sweet without using sugar, which people are increasingly avoiding.

There's new research out about one of those substitutes, which is called erythritol. It's one of the most popular artificial sweeteners. The study shows that erythritol is closely associated with risk for major adverse cardiovascular events, making them more prone to heart attacks, strokes, and even death. So basically, if you have more erythritol in your blood, you're at elevated risk of major heart problems. This story had a lot of interesting layers for me. First of all, I loved how the doctors conducted this study where they took 4,000 people across U.S. and Europe

and just who were at elevated risks for cardiovascular events and looked for compounds in their blood that kept popping up. And erythrititol was, like, one, that really, really stood out. So I love they kind of reverse-engineered it and found this substance. And then, two, the reason why erythritol is so buzzworthy is because it's a naturally found compound in our bodies already. It is a sugar alcohol that we make. And so a lot of food scientists and researchers thought that it was safe because,

hey, it's already in our body. But obviously, when you make it in a lab, you make it artificially and you have elevated levels, it does bad stuff for your body. So there were some criticisms to that point that you were just talking about that erythrital is naturally made in our body. So this one guy, this one physician wrote in a Montreal Gazette, a pushback to this research. He criticized that he poked a bunch of holes in it and said that, look, you shouldn't say it's an artificial thing because we do produce it. And then he says, I just want to quote him because it's kind of like a mic drop.

It is easy to say, as the authors of this paper do, that more research is needed. But I would argue we don't need more research. We need better research. Yeah, it is kind of savage, honestly. So it's kind of savage. And there are some caveats that the researchers did make in this erythrotol study, and it's this classic correlation does not equal causation. So they found that high arithritol in your blood is associated with heart attacks and strokes,

but it doesn't necessarily cause them. Yeah, I love a good old scientific discourse. I love when studies come out and people refute it. It is kind of the scientific method at work, I think. It's true. But it kind of belies the rise in artificial sweeteners. I think they used to just be in Diet Coke. And now it's in...

Aspartame and stuff like that. Now it's in a ton as sugar... People don't want to consume added sugars anymore, and so food companies are decreasing their use of sugars. It says the number of new food products containing sucrose has fallen by 16% in the past five years. Right. It makes a lot of sense. This is why this is such a big issue if erythotrol does actually lead to adverse health outcomes,

is because most of the people who are targeting these products, they see no sugar, they see low sugar, and they think healthier, and those people are probably already at risk for a pre-existing condition. So now you're combining a less-than-healthy population, also maybe drinking or eating something that has bad health outcomes. You can see how that's very alarming to, like, the medical community. I just thank God every day I don't have a sweet tooth. Or should I? It's fun.

No, it's the worst. I pass a bakery, and I'm just like, oh, literally. Last night, I ate an entire bag of Pop-Tart minis. I didn't even know this was a thing, but I feel horrible after it. So, no, you do not. Much more savory. Like, I'll eat anchovies while you eat muffins. That's disgusting.

Okay, let's take us into our final story of the day. It's about Lego. Basically, Neil, Lego is on fire right now. Sales rose 17% last year to $9.2 billion, compared to the previous year. Net profit was up 4%. Just an awesome year. And just to put in perspective, Barbie maker Mattel, their 2022 sales were flat at $5.4 billion. And then Hasbro, another big toy maker, declined by 9% to $5.9 billion. So Lego is not only almost double the size of both of those, but it's also still growing. And it was only became the largest toy maker less than a decade ago.

It had the same revenue as Mattel less than 10 years ago, and now it's doubled it. Right. So, Lego is just executing on another level right now. Yeah, and so I actually want to talk about kind of their strategy that led to this growth. So Lego's CEO, Nealz Christensen, attributes it. I thought you were just saying something to me. No, Neal's with an S on the end. He attributes it to a few main things.

First off, store expansion, especially in China. They've opened a ton more stores. They've also bolstered their e-commerce presence. But also, he attributes it to, one, the increase of new products that they have released, and two, digital engagement. On that first point, 48% of LEGO's products last year released were brand new. So they're not kind of resting on their laurels. They're not just releasing the same bionical figures year after year.

They really, really have this diverse product line, which consumers love, obviously. And then on the digital engagement piece, this is where I think Lego is crushing it. First of all, the Lego movies have been smashing success. Everything is awesome just popped into my head right now, as we're saying that. The Lego's Star Wars and Harry Potter video games have also crushed. And then the kind of headline news is they are releasing this massive metaverse within Fortnite, which they've also invested a billion dollars into Epic Games. So they're really, really betting and hanging their hat on this digital engagement piece.

It's kind of funny because when another brand said they're getting into the Metaverse, everyone kind of rolls their eyes. And then when Lego says it, you're like, oh, this is going to be incredible. Well, it's also going to be. I think it just speaks to their brand. I mean, they're just such beasts. Yeah. And also, it makes sense. They bet on Epic, like a billion-dollar investment, so they know that Epic is probably the leading.

I don't even like calling Fortnite or Epic a Metaverse. It is just, it's like an immersive game. I think it gets a bad rap when it's associated with Metaverse, but it shows Lego is extremely savvy. They know what they're doing. They know where the kids are hanging out. And so I'm actually, me, genuinely, as a person, is excited for this to come out because I'll check it out. And I know during the pandemic, we consumed a lot of Lego content. Toby would come over and we'd watch Lego Masters that show on Fox.

Which, yeah, it pits people building, like, these absurd. Yeah, the best Lego builders in the world, and they have to build really crazy builds. I got tired after five episodes. Give your other Lego fact about the precision of it. Final Lego Facts. If you just Google, Lego Fax, I highly encourage you to do it because it's just a really interesting company that's built about bricks. But a brick you play with now will fit into a brick made in 1958

that they have such precise manufacturing and they just haven't changed anything. I love that. Whenever we talk about semiconductors, I actually think about Lego bricks because semiconductors need these highly, highly precise machines in order to make them. And I'm thinking, someone leveraged LEGO's machines because those things are just as precise. They are precise. Yeah. All right, that is all the show we got for you today.

It is Wednesday. I hope you have some awesome celebrations, whatever you're celebrating, especially International Women's Day. Remember, you can always reach us at Morningbrood Daily at morningbrew.com. Hit us with what you think the number one medical tourism destination is, because we are lost. And a few shout-outs to our amazing crew behind the scenes. The show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. The show's technical director is Yun Cho. Our supervising producer is Bruce Bryce Belloff. Sorry, Bryce. The show's audio ninja is Dan Bousa. Hair and makeup got blocked by the DOJ. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of

Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th.

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