Morning Brew Daily - Sam Altman Roasted for “ChatGPT Parenting” & Spider-Man Scores 2nd Best Opening Ever

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

#902: Sam Altman gets roasted on the internet for making a case to use ChatGPT for parenting. “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” opens with a whopping $355 million for its premier weekend. Oil companies report record profits fueled by wartime crude prices. Google rolls back an AI feature on Earth after some misinformation risks. Finally, what you need to know in the week ahead.  Submit your password guess! https://forms.gle/4EdBi3X8N4eMnBd56  Grab tickets to our Performance Revue show! https://www.morningbrew.com/events/brew-performance-revue-2026?utm_campaign=performance_revue_2026&utm_source=mbd Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brutley's show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how Spider-Man defied the superhero slump. Then should you use AI when you parent your kids? Sam Alton certainly thinks so. It's Monday, August 3rd. Let's ride. It's August. Maybe you're dragging a little bit. All your coworkers are on vacation. It's time to spice things up. And in the MBD universe, that means let's play a game.

Back by popular demand, password is a puzzle we ran a few times last year, and we're bringing back this week for a mid-summer pick-me-up. It's the brainchild of Jack Murta, the bruised puzzle creator who has a literal PhD and theoretical computer science from Harvard. Don't get intimidated. This game is very accessible and fun, and Toby is going to explain how it works, and now you can win. So Jack changes his password a lot because he takes his privacy seriously.

your task is to try and crack that password. At the end of each episode this week, we'll give you a hint to help you out. If you guess it right, you'll get a chance to win Morning Brew Daily Swag. But here's the kicker. You only get one guess that you can submit at any time. The earlier you submit,

the more likely your name will be selected for the prize. So if you're feeling especially clairvoyant after today's show and you nail it, your entry is worth five submissions. On Tuesday, we will give you another clue, but entries are only worth four submissions and so on and so forth. By Friday, you should have enough information to pinpoint the password, but your entry is only worth one.

My advice is open up your notes app and record each hint to the password throughout the week, so you have them all in one place. Now, where to submit? We have a Google form linked in the show description. We will also post the hint and a link to submit on our Instagram story each day, so you can head there as well. I think that about covers the logistics, though, Neil, hit them with the first clue. All right, the first clue is the password has to do with one of the five senses.

One more time for me. The password has to do with one of the five senses. I'm playing right alongside you all this week, so good luck, everybody. Want to talk ETS with the people behind them? Join me, it's Jean-Jacqueshaw on the Upside Ticker Talk. We dive into what's moving markets with timely analysis, trends, and answers to ETF questions you've actually been thinking about. Hit play on the upside ticker talk and elevate your ETF investing IQ.

Last week, Sam Altman shared an idea for what he called a cool use case for chat GPT. He suggested connecting your family's calendar to the chat bot then every morning, having it generate a podcast for your kids to listen to on the drive to school. The podcast could focus on things from the kids' lives like the soccer game they were playing later that day or the birthday party coming up. The internet did not take kindly to this suggestion. The top reply from Alex Hirsch, the guy who helped create Gravity Falls, read, What if you just talked to your children?

And it asked about 10 times more likes than Altman's original posts. The small back and forth encapsulates one of the more sensitive debates in the AI world. How much or little should you use the technology when it comes to parenting your kids? Now, the elephant in the room with this debate is the fact that humans have managed to raise children without AI for all of our history. Thus, critics argue AI should not weasel its way. into replacing conversations between parents and children. Altman, unsurprisingly, has been vocally pro-AI when it comes to parenting. Since becoming a father last year, he said he couldn't imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn

without Chachabit, mentioning on Jimmy Fallon that he uses it for everyday child care questions. But even normal people say AI can be valuable when it comes to managing calendars and family logistics. Neil, Altman got dragged and ratioed, but there are certainly regular parents out there that are figuring out in real time the benefits and drawbacks of this technology when it comes to their little ones. Yeah, but I want to start with the AI guys because they certainly have some unorthodox views about parenting. Alexander Wang, who's the founder of Scale AI, which was acquired by Meta, said that he's 29 years old. He said that he's thinking about waiting to have kids until brain computer interfaces like NeurLink become advanced enough. So when his kids are born, they can be hooked up right

away and learn alongside the technology. And I think what people may have been responding to about Sam Altman's post is not that necessarily he was using AI, which we can talk about. People are very interested in how AI can help them parent. But he said, use the calendar to create a podcast to give to your kids instead of maybe just, you know, use AI to make a calendar and make things easier for you. Yeah, that was why people were so mad as because they were inserting AI in what could be a human moment. And that's probably the worst use case for AI. a lot of even proponents say. The broader pitch when it comes to AI in parenting is that think about how much

cognitive labor, not just like labor, labor goes into running a household. You have to remember when the soccer games are. You have to remember deadlines. You've got to coordinate schedules. And there is kind of this utopian idea that offload all of that work onto an AI that has insight into your life. Imagine the free time that you could have. Imagine the brain space that you would free up.

And there's a lot of companies that are kind of marketing themselves. now, a lot of startups saying the world's first AI family assistant that runs your entire household. So that is the pitch, whether that actually manifest, whether you actually get that time back, whether, you know, specifically moms in general, reduce some of that cognitive load that they've been bearing maybe silently for generations. That remains to be seen. But at least that is the pitch.

Yeah, this is a huge mark, especially targeting moms because study after study shows that mothers in heterosexual relationships take on way much. more of the cognitive load than the men. And this is, yes, a massive market. 85 million mothers make 85% of household purchases and control about $2.4 trillion in annual consumer spending in the United States. So company after company is trying to crack this market, sell AI to parents and specifically moms to take off some of that cognitive load. We're seeing a lot of startups in the space get into this and also much of the bigger players like OpenAI and meta. Where do they end up falling short?

because there are limits to, you know, offloading your entire household to AI. One researcher tried to connect Claude to, you know, meal prep for them. Write out a list for me that when I go to the grocery store, I can just buy that. But they would often forget, Claude would forget ingredients. And she was basically like, if I had a smart pantry or a smart refrigerator and it had insight into my life, it would probably be better. But that's the privacy tradeoff that it comes to integrating AI. Do you want an AI to have insight into your email, your calendars, your travel plans?

Some people say that they want to keep their family and especially their children away from the prying eyes of AI. So that's kind of the catch 22 here. More data makes AI better, but people are not willing to fork over that data. It looks like parents are already dipping their toes into AI to help them with their kids. There's this new study from the Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, not affiliated with an AI company. More than four and five parents have used AI to help. with parenting tasks. 43% do so weekly.

And 9 and 10 believe AI makes parenting easier overall. 91% said it boosts their confidence as a parent. Welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where Toby and I pick two things that remember to reapply sunscreen. I won the pre-show disc golf round, so I get to go first. And my winner is Spider-Man,

which made nearly a billion dollars in one weekend. Spider-Man brand-new day, starring Tom Holland, just made $927 million at the global box office in its debut weekend, including $335 million in North America. That's the second biggest movie opening of all time, a mere 2 million behind Avengers Endgame in 2019, and when everything's counted up, it could eclipse Endgame. This is just a staggering outcome and blew away all expectations because superhero movies, not exactly in right now. Marvel's cinematic universe has sputtered with convoluted storylines and minor characters

no one cares about. DC just epically bombed with Supergirl. But when it comes to Spidey, there's no such thing as superhero fatigue. Audiences were slamming cinemas to find out what would happen after the previous installment, No Way Home, ended on a major cliffhanger. Some theaters were showing this movie every 15 minutes from sunup till sundown to accommodate the web-slinging hordes. Toby, we thought the Odyssey was big, but this isn't a fair fight. Christopher Nolan's epic brought in $124 million domestically in its opening weekend. man almost tripled that with 335. In fact, after endgame and this Spider-Man, there's not a single movie that's come close to topping 300 in its debut. What the heck just happened? Why is

Spider-Man such a box office juggernaut? I mean, everyone loves Spider-Man. Everyone loves Spider-Man abroad as well. We are seeing shares in India's largest movie chain rising almost 20% over the past month after the Odyssey came out. After Spider-Man came out, China's also propelling it to a massive global number. If you take out Zootopia too, Hollywood has been struggling over in China. No Hollywood release has broken into the top 10 box office before Spider-Man new day came out. So it really is just this global appear of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. I also think, though, you mentioned the Odyssey. The Odyssey is kind of rising tide floats all boats at this point because, I mean, we literally just saw combined movie ticket sales across the weekend, reached 430 million.

That was the highest grossing weekend in box office history. And I thought this was interesting. This ex-user Jonathan M.B32 said only nine other movies have ever opened above 200 million. And only one of them had another movie that same weekend make over 20 million. So basically, when there's one big movie, there's only one big movie. It cannibalizes all the ticket sales. That changed. Odyssey made 51 million alongside Spider-Man, which made 300 million.

And so there's clearly enough demand to go around that two big movies are being propped up at the box office right now. But it's just so interesting why Spider-Man has succeeded where a bunch of other superheroes have flailed in. We've heard so much about superhero fatigue. People don't care about superheroes anymore. Marvel Cinematic Universe has floundered. But then Spider-Man comes along, and these movies just make a ton of money, not just a ton of money, like historic amount of money. One of the reasons is that Spider-Man was originally created in 19. 1962 to just be relatable. It's a young person who's going through a lot of

troubles and tribulations like the rest of us. He's socially awkward. He has problems with his dating life. Things are just going well for him. He's not this larger than life character. Like say, an Iron Man that is just completely unrelated, unrelatable. And then also Sony has done some very smart and savvy things after it purchased Spider-Man. Just so much variety to keep it fresh. It has 11 movies, but two of them have been animated. It has recast the role three times from Toby McGuire to Andrew Garfield to now Tom Holland. And so just keep spicing things up with new plot lines, fresh stuff. And then the core of Spider-Man is just always going to be relatable because it's this young guy going through life just like the rest of them. Although I'm seeing

a little discourse online. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I'm going to just preface with that of like how is Tom Holland Spider-Man affording this apartment in New York City? In Toby McGuire, Spider-Man, you know, he was hustling, he was delivering pizzas, he was taking photos, and now suddenly Tom Hollagist has unlimited money, and so maybe that part of the Spider-Man experience has been lost a little bit, because if you actually really drill into it, Toby McGuire Spider-Man was selling photos to a newspaper, that business does not exist anymore. There's a wide amount of people in modern-day New York with a cell phone. Newspapers aren't really paying top dollar, so you need a different backstory for kind of Spider-Man being on the

struggle bus financially. So again, haven't seen the movie yet, but maybe not as relatable as Spider-Man's of Days Gone By. Let's move on to My Winner the Weekend, which is oil companies who are raking in record profits as the Iran War stretches on. When I say record, I mean record. Chevron just had its highest quarterly net profit in company history. Sell lagged behind by only posting its second highest quarterly profit ever. ExxonMobil too saw its profits double from a year. year ago. Even Saudi Aramco, whose operations are most exposed because they are located in Saudi Arabia near the heart of the conflict, is still expecting to post a 27% increase in earnings when it reports. The extra cash is not coming in, in spite of the Strait of Hormuz being closed, but because of the closure.

If ships can only trickle out to reach the global market, profits flood in because supplies are squeezed. Similarly, Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries have made the business of turning raw crude into gasoline and other fuels even more lucrative. But rather than expanding production while the getting is good and prices are high, oil companies are doing the opposite. According to the New York Times, companies are on track to spend less on producing oil and gas this year than they did in 2025, choosing to stash that cash away for a rainy day in the hopes that the conflict ends soon.

Neil, while consumers are getting pinched at the pump, the companies that fill the pump are pumped at the prices they get to charge. Well done, Toby. The three companies that reported last week, Chevron, Exxon, and Shell, combined, they made on average about $404 million in profits every single day for the last three months. And that's because oil prices internationally were up to $96 a barrel in the second quarter, which was a rise of 45% from the same period last year. So they are making money hand over fist. And whenever you do that and you are an oil company and that raises prices for consumers, you're going to get a political target at your back. And a couple of Democratic senators led by Sheldon White House of Rhode Island, they proposed a windfall tax on oil profits. And you also hear these rumblings in Europe as well, which is when a company does make so

much money because of factors outside of their control, they should fork over some of the profits to help out consumers. Republicans and some other Democrats have pushed back against us. obviously the oil company CEOs went one by one up on their earnings calls and explained why they thought this was a bad idea because they're penalizing them for just, you know, working hard and being in the right place at the right time. We're already hearing political rummings. Donald Trump has also been taking a target to oil companies as well.

So they're finding themselves in the political crosshairs even as they're making record profits. What I thought was interesting is that even in the face of record profits, the stocks aren't going gangbusters. I mean, I was looking at ExxonMobil's stock chart this year, and it is up 26%, but it's traded mostly flat since February. And part of the reason is investors are weighing the tradeoffs between the dangbusters earnings you're seeing right now and the profits that they are clearly bringing in and the fact that oil companies are still exposed to the Middle East tension. There's not, this isn't going away anytime soon. So you have to kind of weigh each company's Middle East exposure, see if it's worth investing in, which is kind of why you're seeing. these companies be cagey with the amount of drilling that they're doing. They do not want to make the mistake of thinking that these profits will continue into the future that they'll be

reaping record profits every single quarter going forward. They're playing it close to the vest. They're saying we want to strengthen our balance sheet. We want to pay down some debt rather than invest in drilling more right now because who knows how long the conditions are going to last when it comes to the Iran war. Yeah, they're saying both investors and the oil companies are saying this is temporary. Like with this oil, the straight of Hormuz is too important. Oil is too important of a commodity for this waterway to be closed for that much longer. We're just seeing this morning. Oil prices have slid 5% after President Trump called off strikes on Iran over the weekend. So both Wall Street and the CEOs say this is temporary. That's why we're not going to

invest more. But the fact is they are stashing a lot of money away for a rainy day, not just because of crude prices, but because of refined product prices. Those have become way more expensive over just crude prices because that supply has been knocked offline. So if you look at the energy companies that are into refining like Chevron and Valero, they're doing way better than those without who don't own refineries because those products that turns crude into things like jet fuel and diesel. That's been a way bigger supply crunch there than just in the crude market. All right. We're going to take a quick break. and come back with a story about Google Earth right after this.

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Neil, how are you doing today, buddy? Because I feel amazing. Please keep your voice down. We drank the same amount last night. How do you have this much energy? I took Zbiotics pre-alcohol. It produces an enzyme that helps break down the toxic byproduct alcohol creates in your gut

that leaves you feeling less than fresh. Mondays don't move for anyone. Pre-alcohol works overnight so you can have a real weekend and still show up sharp. Head to Zbiotics.com slash MBD and use the code MBD at checkout. for 15% off. That's zbiotics.com slash MBD. Google tried to add AI to one of the most trusted sources of information in the world,

and it failed spectacularly. Last Thursday, Google said it was infusing its nanobanata 2 image generator into Google Earth, allowing anyone to create made-up images overlaid on satellite imagery. Maybe you want to see what Pompeii may have looked like before the eruption of Vesuvius, or how many Dodger stadiums could fit into Disney World. It could be anything. The world literally was your oyster. Seems fun on the surface, but open source researchers were quick to blast the move. They said they couldn't possibly understand what Google was thinking, given how easy the company just made it to spread fake information

about events like wars and natural disasters. Initially, Google responded that its watermark system, synth ID, which indicates an image was generated by AI, would help clarify to users what was a real satellite visual and what was Toby procrastinating work. But critics replied that synth ID was insufficient. For instance, you could just take a picture of the doctored image with your iPhone, then spread it online with no watermark. It didn't take long for Google to realize this wasn't going to fly. Friday, one day after it released a feature, Google removed it.

I was surprised that every article talked about how researchers were alarmed at the developments and at this update, because I wasn't familiar how much researchers use Google Earth and rely on Google Earth, but it absolutely is a source. source of truth when it comes to what you are seeing on the earth if you want to track deforestation if you want to monitor events in conflict zones you know how a bombing campaign is affecting a certain area a lot of journalists and researchers independent researchers go to google earth and actually look for themselves to see so that is why a lot of people were warning that this new new tool could absolutely just fabricate very real looking things in a place that a lot of people

were relying on Google to be the source of truth there. So yeah, you mentioned the safeguards too because it was just so inconsistent. Yes, they're saying that they have this synth idea. Yes, you can obviously get around that by just screenshoting an image. But also, Nanobanana itself had inconsistent safeguards

because nanobanana just in its own silo refused to edit some of the things that you could immediately insert into Google Earth as well. So lots of people and lots of people, and lots of journalists were warning that, hey, this is one of the things that we need to be truthful. We can't have AI infiltrating it, and that's why you saw it walked back so quickly. Yeah, one of the loudest voices was an independent investigator whose name is Hank Van S. He wrote this long article talking about how he manipulated Google Earth after they rolled out this update.

He goes, tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google's own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing? Yeah. You used to have to work to spread misinformation. I mean, before AI, you would have to Photoshop things,

but now all you need to do is enter a single prompt. And the fact that you could do it so easily, so natively within Google Earth itself, that's also a giant red flag. All right. So just because Google walked this back doesn't mean that it's, not going to release it again with new safeguards. Google's statement said we've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes. However, we've also seen people

sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. I can't help but think that this joins a long list of AI releases, SORA video generator, meta's recent Muse image tool that lets people manipulate your profile picture with AI that maybe seems a cool idea on the surface, at least initially, but when you start thinking about when bad actors would use that, then it gets a little dangerous. And that's why you have researchers and critics saying, guys, why don't you think through these before you release these dangerous, potentially dangerous products into the wild?

Your executives are the ones who warn that AI could, you know, disrupt humanity and send civilization down a very dangerous rabbit hole. and yet you release these products that if bad actors get their hands on them, which is very easy, could do just that. I'm just trying to figure out, one, what is a geospatial professional? And then two, how could I become one right there? I studied it in college a little bit. I got a minor in GIS. Wait, so is that just like urban-plan?

It's using satellite imagery to create, I mean, in part, to create maps, you use software to map things. And a lot of it has to do with satellite images about, you know, like mapping land use and what goes where. Is this commercial use? Is this a forest and things like that? So there's a lot of geospatial professionals, and I hope they're listening, and they put you in your place, Doby. Little Neil Lordrop right there. Neil is a geospatial professional. Okay, it's Monday.

So here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. Well, this should be interesting. SpaceX will deliver its first earnings report as a publicly traded company on Tuesday. After a brief pop, shares have been clobbered down 50% from its peak after pulling off the biggest IPO of all time. That's not all investors will be watching. The jobs report for July will drop on Friday, expected to show an increase of 91,000 jobs and an unemployment rate of 4.3%. It comes at a time of great uncertainty as to how the Fed will act following Chairman Kevin Warsh's evasive press conference last week. One thing to note about Space X is part of the reason why shares have been getting

slammed is because the insider lockup expiration period is beginning later this week on August 6. And around 20 to 30% of locked up shares will become eligible for sale. So people can finally cash in. Insiders can cash in on that, which is why maybe we've seen this big sell-off amongst a variety of reasons. But that's maybe one of the reasons why shares have been under pressure. In politics, the Democratic Socialists will look to continue their summer surge in Tuesday's Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The closely watched race pits two millennials, Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist who's run on a left-wing platform like Medicare for. all against the more moderate Haley Stevens, a congresswoman who's earned the backing of the

Democratic moderates. Michigan is win or go home for the Dems. If they want to take back the Senate in November, they'll need to bank Michigan. And finally, in sports, Major League Baseball's trade deadline hits at 6 p.m. today, but the season's blockbuster deal has already been clinched. Over the weekend, two-time defending champ Dodgers traded for superstar pitcher Tarek's scubal from the Tigers, leaving the rest of baseball once again wondering, how do they keep getting away with this?

then our long national nightmare is over NFL football is back kind of the 2026 preseason begins with the Panthers versus the Cardinals in the Hall of Fame game in Ohio if you are someone who watches this game you are a sicko I might be a sicko it's been a long time without football somehow I've been roped into four fantasy leagues already that we haven't even had the first preseason game but you know what I have room for a fifth so if anyone needs someone else to donate money, you know, hit me up. You know where to find me. It's early August. I still can't think about football.

I'm locking in on a baseball. This scooball trade was absolutely cragies. This is the mega-rich getting even richer. Dodgers are going for their third straight world series. And yet, they just got swept by the Red Sox this weekend. There you go. All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful start to the week.

To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew. or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lute is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham, and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller.

Hair and makeup somehow already knows the password. Okay, so submit it at the Google Form at the link. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great. Show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level? This is Fidelity.

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