Morning Brew Daily - SCOTUS Takes On Student Debt, Rise of Part-Time Work, AI Beauty Filter

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Episode 6: Toby and Neal break down the Supreme Court hearing arguments over Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness plan on Tuesday. They also explain why burnout is causing millions of Americans to turn to part-time work. And what is happening to the Disney District? Plus, Toby explains the latest TikTok trend to Neal and why he’s never looked better - well, maybe. Listen Here: https://www.mbdailyshow.com/ Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Sources: SCOTUS Student Loan Forgiveness: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/student-debt-forgiveness-scotus Rise of Part-Time Jobs: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/02/27/more-americans-working-part-time DeSantis Takes Control of Disney District: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/27/florida-desantis-walt-disney-world-self-governing-district Trafigura Nickel Fraud: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-27/some-of-trafigura-s-dubious-nickel-was-bought-by-us-firm Snapchat AI Update: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/27/23614959/snapchat-my-ai-chatbot-chatgpt-openai-plus-subscription Toby’s Trends: https://mixed-news.com/en/tiktoks-latest-beauty-ar-filter-is-indistinguishable-from-reality/ Pokemon Sleep: https://www.theverge.com/23616586/pokemon-sleep-trailer-release-mobile-game   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning brew daily show. I have Neil Freyman. And I'm Toby Howell. It's the last day of February. Thank God. Yeah. Thank God. I actually read a pretty interesting fact about February this morning in a little newsletter that you may know called Morning Brew.

I actually genuinely never knew this. February has 28 days in the month. I always just kind of accepted it. It's my birthday month. I'm like, yeah, it's pretty cool. But the top blurb in the newsletter today said that the reason that February has 28 days is because back in the day, it was back in the day. Back in the day, a Roman king, he tweaked the calendar to sink it with a lunar year, which means he had to change every other month to 29 days,

but they still needed one month to have 28 days. Fun fact, too, even numbers were unlucky in Roman culture at the time. And so the one month that they chose to have an even amount of days was February, because that's where they had death rituals. So they're like, ah, there's already bad stuff happening in that month. let's just make it 28 days. And even though there's been so many changes of the calendar since, it's always stuck that February is 28 days.

Yeah, that was in like 700 BC. Yeah. That was a long time ago. And it somehow stuck. Obviously, there's the leap year where February has 29 days. But honestly, when writing that, I was just like, well, I need something to write about. And I just Googled, why does February have 28 days? Yeah.

And it happened. I can't believe I just explained to you why February has 28 days when you explained it to me earlier this morning. That's fair. There you go. I just wanted to preview our show today. We got an awesome show. We're going to talk about the rise of part-time work. We're going to talk about some major nickel fraud. I'm so excited for that. I'm so excited for that. And then finally, we're going to close with a sleepy new Pokemon game that has been in the works for a long time. First, we're going to start in Washington,

D.C., though, because if you've got student loan debt, then you're definitely paying attention to what's going on at the Supreme Court today. The court is hearing two challenges to President Biden's plan that wipes out up to $10,000 in student debt per borrower who makes under $125,000 and up to $20,000 for others. This plan has been blocked by lower courts, so they announced it last year, but it has not gotten into effect. 26 million people have already applied, so they're just waiting in limbo and everyone's sort of paying attention to what's going to go on at the Supreme Court today.

Yeah. And honestly, this is a very interesting Supreme Court case from a legal standpoint. We are both digging into it this morning, but a lot of people are saying that Biden's best chance to win this case is it's a threshold question. Basically, he has to undermine the state's standing to sue, and what that means, he needs to prove that they aren't actually directly being harmed by the forgiveness program. And the analysts are saying that there's a decent chance that this happens, even though Biden and the Supreme Court haven't really gotten along so far in their tenure. For sure. So do you think that this has a chance of being undermined? It seems like a stretch, honestly, from what I've been reading. And I compared this to something an analogy that you would know well, which is the Boston Marathon, which you have to qualify

to race in. And the two challengers, there's two separate cases here. One is a couple Republican-led states and the other is two students. They have to say they were harmed because, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, he died a few years ago. You can't just say that you can't just have purely psychological displeasure, and that gives you standing to bring a case. So they need to say that they were harmed. The GOP state said that their tax revenues would be harmed by this program, and then the two students said that they weren't able to give feedback on the policy. So before this even gets going, they have to prove that these things were detrimental

for them, which legal experts say could be a bit of a challenge. Right. And this is obviously just such a hot topic, because if you have student loan debt, you're like, absolutely I want it gone. And there are a few economic stats that show that it does actively harm individuals. So each time consumers' debt to income ratio increases 1%, their consumption declines by as much as 3.7%. So there's obviously some macroeconomic things that happen. If you eliminate individual debt, it is good for the individual. But also, that money has to come from somewhere. If you eliminate $400 billion of student loan debt, someone's going to be on

the hook for that, and it's probably going to be every other taxpayer. Well, it's the American tax payers. And yes, you said that there have been estimates about how much this is going to cost, and it is a really expensive program. It'll cost $400 billion over 30 years, according to estimates. Yeah. But the Biden administration says, like, we have authority to do this, and it's under what's known as the Heroes Act, which was put in place after 9-11 in 2003, and it gives the Secretary of education, broad authority to, you know, make changes to student loan repayments, so to not cause financial harm for people. And, you know, the challengers say, look, we don't have, this is all under the guise of COVID emergency. Right. And the Biden administration is

ending the COVID emergency, I think, in the spring, in May. And so the challenges are like, look, we don't have this emergency anymore. You're overstepping your bounds. A lot of layers to it. I had a lot of fun actually digging in this case. So I'm going to be watching closely People are probably really nervous. What's interesting is that 60 days after this case rules, it's supposed to happen in June. There has been a moratorium on student loan repayments since March 2020. Trump put that into place, and Biden just kept extending it. That's going to go away. So whatever happens in the Supreme Court case, people will have to start making repayments again. It's going to be really intense to see what happens this summer. Let's move on to a cool new trend, actually that a Wall Street Journal article highlighted this past week. The number of Americans working part-time rose by 1.2 million people in December and January, according to the Labor Department.

The biggest increase came from not people who were forced to work part-time, but people who voluntarily chose to work part-time. So this is a big new trend of essentially in the post-COVID landscape. a lot of people are kind of reevaluating their relationship with work and saying, hey, I'd rather maybe not work as much and focus on other things. So we've kind of both encountered this a little bit. You were just down in Florida talking to an Uber driver, right? Yeah, I was telling you the story. But I was in, yeah, I was taking this Uber in Tampa, and this guy moved to Tampa from New York. He retired 20 years ago, and he drove Uber. And he was, and I think he's really emblematic of a lot of people who are volunteering,

volunteering for part-time work. He's like, I don't have a boss. I don't have to answer to anyone. You know, I do this part-time on my own schedule. And he was just loving life. And I think he, you know, a lot of people who are retired have like come back into the workforce to drive Uber and do various other part-time jobs. And they just love the freedom. And you, I mean, I'm literally talking to a part-time employee now is doing it voluntarily. I think it is a, it's almost a psychological shift for a lot of us were taught out of college, like, you get a job, you get a full-time job. And then I actually left a previous job. And for a while, I just kind of looked around and say, like, do I really want another full-time job? Or do I kind of want to, like, pick and choose what I'm doing? And, like,

luckily I'm in a position to do that. But yeah, so I do this podcast. I have a little consulting on the side. So it kind of has freed me up a little bit to look at my relationship with work in a different way. So it's an interesting trend for sure. And yeah, if you're part-time, you're probably loving life a little bit. Part time scares me. I need structure. Right. I need structure.

It's for people who really know, you know, what they want to do, have flexibility. But I just want to, final, quit, you know, I love quizzing you. So how many people, what percentage of the 160 million Americans who are employed in January work part-time hours? I wanted to say 20% initially, but that feels too high, so I'll say like 10%. Okay, somewhere in the middle, 16%. Which is a really big chunk. That's a lot of people, actually.

So we'll see what happens with part-time employment. Very interesting to get your perspective as well as one. Going down to Florida, man, this is just a Florida show. A lot of Florida. Everything is happening in Florida. Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, yesterday, signed a bill that takes control of Disney's special tax district. And this has been a long time coming. This governor has sort of gone to war with Disney over what he says is it's woke corporate

culture. And this, he didn't say this specifically or explicitly, but this is seen as retribution for Disney's criticism of Florida's, like the critics call it, don't say gay bill, which restricts teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms in Florida. So, yeah. Florida and Disney used to be such pals. Right. And this is such an interesting cleavage that's happening. Right. And obviously, like DeSantis is gearing up for a presidential run, Disney has donated to DeSantis in the past. So again, if I'm putting the connecting the strings together, I do think that Disney's like, all right, Ron, you can take our district away. It doesn't effectively change that much of how Disney operates. It doesn't feel like it's going to impact

Disney's finances because I think the shares were up yesterday anyway. But it's really interesting to go back to decades to actually think about how this came about. This was in the 1960s when Walt Disney was looking for a second theme park and is basically a handout from Florida saying, yeah, you can have your own district. And what's crazy is, this is really like, Disney is its own little country. They have their own fire department.

They take care of all their municipal services, infrastructure, and they can issue bonds. So this is like a little Disney paradise in the middle of Florida that really no other theme park had. Yeah. And it was all because Walt Disney didn't like other businesses around Disney. so he did snap up all the land. He tried to build like this futuristic housing community around it.

So the history of Disney is extremely interesting. Disney turns 100 years old this year. Oh, my Lord. It's still in the news, still doing well. Yeah, so Disney's district is gone out the door. Now we get to talk about something that I didn't think we'd ever talk about, which is nickel fraud. So I'm going to break it down for you.

So Trafigura Group. is a nickel kind of buyer and seller and trader. And essentially, it is accusing one of its suppliers for conducting systemic fraud. And what that means in the nickel trading industry is that they were filling cargo containers with a metal that was not nickel, and buying and selling those containers as if they did contain nickel. And it's a big deal because nickel goes for about $25,000 U.S. dollars per ton. and the metal that they were filling it with goes for $1,000. Which was like copper or something?

It was carbon. Oh, carbon steel, which is just kind of like a fool's nickel, if you will. Apparently. So this is kind of really rocking the nickel trading world because... My group chat's blowing up. Exactly. They're a big player in the nickel trading industry. And if this is true that this has been happening over time,

the only way to check how widespread this fraud is is to physically go into all the nickel containers, open them and look if there's nickel in there or not. And I think there was, what, 1,100 containers in this particular shipment? Yeah. So they're not going to do that. And it could have been going on beyond just this particular shipment, too. Yeah. Because Trafigura was taking the nickel and, or the supposed nickel and selling it to other companies.

Other buyers. And that already happened. Yeah. So it could be, it's the type, it's almost like a pandemic. Like there's a pandemic going on in the nickel trading world. But they're taking, it's like a pretty big hit. They're going to take a $577 million charge in the first half of 23 because how expensive nickel is. Yeah, it's crazy.

It's also called the devil's metal, by the way. I saw that. Devil's metal? When it was first discovered, it looked like copper, but it like wasn't. And so they're like, ah, this devil's metal. But now it's very valuable. What's interesting is commodities fraud has been going on for millennia. Yeah.

And did you see this? And there's a British museum. In there, there's a clay tablet from 1750 BC. So, like, when they were deciding February, it has 28 days. A Babylonian merchant, there's this in the museum, a Babylonian merchant is berating a supplier for cheating him on copper ingots. I love the old-school fraud cases going on. Humans haven't changed over time.

They've just gotten more sophisticated. But yeah, I love that. All right, before we go on, I think you have some nickel facts for me, which I've been waiting the entire show for. A nickel fact. So the U.S. 5-cent piece, also known as a nickel, how much nickel do you think that actually contains? I'll say 35%.

That was close, actually. 25% nickel, 75% copper. Everything's copper, right? Yeah, very ironic that it's filled with copper. And then also, I don't know if this is much of a fact, but this is just a little tidbit you can drop. If you add nickel to glass, it gives it its green color. So have you ever seen those kind of greeny-looking glasses?

Maybe. Like in William Sonoma? It's kind of like when you're, turn a mirror sideways, you can, like, see, like, the green reflection. That's from nickel. All right. So there's your nickel facts for the day. Final nickel fact. I'm just, we're just geeking out on nickel right now. It's the fifth most common element on the earth. Okay. It's pretty. Okay, that's the fact. That's pretty good. That is a fact. That is a lot, yeah. Okay. So that's the world of commodities, and let's move into the

world of tech and not physical goods. Yes. Did you see what Snapchat did yesterday, which is that they introduced, obviously, an AI chatbot. It's called My AI. and it'll be pinned to the app's chat tab above conversations with friends. Initially, it'll be only available to Snapchat plus subscribers, which costs $3.99 a month. Are you a Snapchat plus subscriber? No, but apparently there's a ton out there. Over a million, right?

Yeah, over a million. So they're like one of the subscription services that has actually done well. Which is crazy to me, because, like, who the heck is paying for Snapchat Plus? Anyway, now they have access to this AI chat bot. And Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat, the OG. He's been there forever. He says that the big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we're going to talk to AI every day.

So this is legitimately a chatbot. It's not a search engine like Bing is. It's literally, I've no, you know, instead of talking to you, I'll just be like, well, my AI is maybe a little more interesting and has more nickel facts. You want to know what's so excited to me is that when the chat TVT came out, like, hordes of Reddit people tried to like break it basically and see how far they could push the language model. Now that we have just millions of kids

interacting with the chat AI, I really wonder what's going to come out of it. You know that the kids, the youths, are going to find some way to corrupt this thing in some way. They've tried, okay, but Snapchat, that could have happened, but Snapchat has taken a lot of... They saw what happened with when Big, like Bing went completely off the rails,

so they put a lot of curbs. And in its statement, the company said, please be aware of its many deficiencies and sorry in advance. Is that legally binding? Have you ever heard of a product rollout where they said sorry in advance? I honestly am trying to think of one. Like, what if Elon Musk rolled out, you know, the full self-driving beta and was like, sorry in advance, you might malfunction.

I think Taco Bell said it for the Jeridos Locos Taco. Yeah, when they said, hey, this is not going to be good for your digestive system. Sorry in advance. That's really funny. All right. So obviously, the snap news comes on the heels of so many AI rollouts. and I know you've been really paying attention to a lot of them and have a lot of opinions. So we're going to play a little game.

We're a PG-rated show. So it's going to be called Kiss Mary Destroy. Okay. Okay. I got you. Shout out to all the kids and classrooms listening to this. I'll just list some of the AI chat bots that have been rolled out, and I want you to sort of say which ones you'll kiss, marry, or destroy. So we have Microsoft's AI-juiced Bing, which is powered by a chat GPD3.

BuzzFeeds, Infinity Quizes, Google's Bard, which is powered by Lambda. China's Baidu, China, Baidu has one. Meta has one called the Lama AI. We have Deep Mines Chinchilla AI. So maybe you won't kiss that one. And then we have some of the AI art ones, like Lenza, Stable Defusion, Notion AI. Yeah. So, okay.

Give me your take. I'm kissing Lama, actually, because I just love that meta release one. after all of Google and Microsoft, and then just like, we're naming it Lama, we're going to get made fun of, we're just going to embrace it. So I'm kissing Lama. It's actually performed very well, too, in tests, in comparison to some of the major ones.

So, yeah, Lama's kiss. I'm marrying Chinchilla because I actually know nothing about Defines, but, like, this is the first time I heard researching for the show that it was called Chinchilla. I'm like, how the heck have I not knowing that? Unbelievable. So I'm marrying Chichilla, and then, I am destroying Microsoft's Bing, who I just think has an infiority complex, and is not going to be a good companion.

I don't want to kiss it, so that's my kiss Mary Destroy. All right, we have you on the record. Mine, I would just kiss and Mary Capital One's customer service bot because I lost my card and I got another one sent to me within 45 seconds. There you go. It's freaking incredible. AI really is everywhere. Are you destroying any or?

No. I'm excited for all of these. And I'm going to have other people test them until they get to my laptop. There you go. Okay. It's Tuesday, which means it's Trend Day. Toby's Trends Tuesday. I love an alliteration.

So basically this segment is I spent a lot of time on TikTok. I encounter some of these trends that are blowing up. and I just like explaining them to you in our audience. As a millennial. As a millennial, yes. Not a geriatric millennial. I'm not a geriatric millennial, yeah. Okay, so the thing we're talking about today

is the bold glamour filter on TikTok, and essentially why this filter in particular is blowing up is that it is one of the most impressive uses of, like, AR technology that I've seen. So TikTok has been filled with these beauty filters where you can toss them on. It would make your eyelashes big. your lips bigger. I don't need any of that. Give you some makeup.

Yeah, you're perfect just the way you are. But those filters were always a little glitchy. Like if you put your hand in front of your face, they would kind of go on and off. But this bold glamour, I don't know how TikTok's figured out, but if you literally wipe your face, put your hand over it, we're playing a video right now, it does not budge. So it literally makes you, it's kind of the uncanny valley thing where you're seeing yourself, but it's not you. and it's like really, really creepy.

And so it's blowing up on TikTok. Some of the funnier usages of it that I've seen is that people make a joke of like, here's what you went home with and they have the filter on. And then when you wake up the next morning and you take the filter off. So it's been used tongue and cheekly, but a lot of people are nervous about it because if we thought like Instagram was bad for like teenagers' mental health because like you can touch up your pictures, what is bold glamour and these beauty filters going to do when you literally are

taking a video of yourself and you don't look anything like yourself and you're a more beautiful, a tised version of yourself. So yeah, it's a scary but also like crazy trend that's blowing up. I actually used this filter and unfortunately our video team has a video of me using it. So this is me in real life and that's me. That's me using the bold glamour. Is it hot in here? Oh, good Lord. Yeah. Oh, my God. So that's me using bold glamour. And yeah, that's your trend for the week now.

It just looks like a sanitized version of you. Like no wrinkles, perfect hair. Man, I'm not going to do this. So we're comparing myself to it right now for our podcast listeners. And I don't know. I hope I don't look as good as that on the daily basis. What's crazy about all these trends, the first thing I think of, is that we're just in the early stages of all this.

Right. So this is just the first, you know, this is just the first couple that have come out in the past few years. Imagine what these are going to, where these are going to take us in five years. We have, like, the ramifications are huge. Right.

I'm genuinely nervous for it because deep fakes are already becoming a thing, but, like, medium fakes are also going to become a thing. And I think it's really going to mess with, like, kids' perception of themselves. So we'll see. All right. Well, I tease at the beginning of the show

that we're going to end on Pokemon. Let's go. And so we are obviously going to do that. So yesterday was National Pokemon Day. So happy belated National Pokemon Day. Thank you. I was waiting for you to wish me that. Yes.

The brand finally revealed more details about Pokemon Sleep, which the verge called its most highly anticipated product. I didn't know. Yeah, I didn't know. But this thing was announced back in 2019, and the hype has been through the roof. For four years. So do you know what Pokemon Sleep is? It's literally a game that you play while you're sleeping.

and it's a sleep tracker, and you go through different cycles of your sleep, I think there's dozing, snoozing, and slumbering, and you attract Pokemon based on what particular type of sleep cycle you're in right now. It's extremely interesting. It doesn't sound fun on the surface, but I think we were joking. Pokemon is almost a health company at this point because Pokemon Go came out in 2016, and it incentivized walking because you had to walk to hatch your Pokemon. so boom, it was making us healthier then. Now it's encouraging us to sleep better.

So is Pokemon the actual biggest health company in the world, or is it? Possibly. I mean, we were talking about who should buy Peloton. Everyone was like Apple or Amazon, but now I'm thinking Pokemon could easily buy Peloton. This is actually... Cody Rigsby. Extremely interesting to me, yeah. As Ash Ketchum.

I'm definitely hype for this. We looked at some of the videos and the screen grabs, and this looks like the most fun sleep tracker you could ever have. And Pokemon is so good at monetizing their IP. We've discussed this on the show before, but essentially they're selling a button that looks like a Pokemon ball that you press before you go to sleep and then you press it again when you wake up. How much do you think that button would cost, Neil?

It's literally just a button. $15.99. It's $55. It's almost as much as the actual Pokemon game that's coming out on Switch. That's crazy, and they're going to make a lot of money off. They really are. Yeah. So we're excited for a Pokemon sleep that's coming out later this year.

Yep. Sweet. All right, that's all the time we have for today. Tuesday in the books. Not really because it's just the morning. I wanted to shout out our great crew. Behind the scenes, our show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. Show's technical director is Justin Orlando.

Our supervising producer is Bryce Belloff. Dan Bousa is our VP of Technical and Production Operations. hair and makeup got stuck on the subway. They're part-time. They're part-time. They're part-time. For sure. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. From Toby and myself, we'll run it back tomorrow. All. Pay off your home. Travel for Life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Bucks slot machine by Aristocrat Gaming,

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