Morning Brew Daily - SpaceX Explosion Lawsuit, Hollywood Writers' Strike & 'Godfather of AI' Quits

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Episode 51: Neal and Toby discuss the impact the Hollywood writers strike will have on the movie, television and streaming industries. They also explain why environmental groups are suing the FAA over the failed SpaceX Starship launch. And why is the 'Godfather' of AI is leaving Google? Plus, the NYPD is telling people to put Apple AirTags in their cars... Good idea? Toby shares a new cinematic trend that may or may not be illegal and here's what Uber's lost and found looks like. Learn more about our sponsor, Fidelity: https://fidelity.com/stocksbytheslice Listen Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.c.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning Brew Daily show. I am Neil Freyman.

And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, Hollywood writers put down their typewriters and pick up their picket signs. The godfather of AI goes against the family and we break down

James Hardin's 45 point masterpiece against the Celtics last night. We're not actually going to do that but that was sweet. RIP Celtics. Then SpaceX is in trouble with some environmental

groups for blowing chunks of concrete thousands of feet into the air and potentially endangering some of the local wildlife. Then we'll finish up with some highlights from Uber's annual loss and found report. Mercury is in retrograde, so people are forgetting stuff. Neil, it's Tuesday, May 2nd. Let's ride. All right, Toby, what were your takeaways from the Met Gallo last night? I was honestly shocked by how short Kim Kardashian is.

It happens every year where she emerges on a certain red carpet. She stands next to one of her sisters, and you realize that, wow, she really is five foot one. So that was my big takeaway. I saw that picture. Kim Kardashian is short. What about you? And Carl Legerfeld's cat Chupet did not make an appearance. That was the big question of the night.

But Jared Leto kind of made an appearance as the cat. I respect Jared Letto. He embodies the spirit of what the Meggala should be. I used to really hate how hard he wins, but now I respect it. He made a whole cat suit. My favorite thing, not my favorite thing, but what I noticed was Serena Williams pregnant. Pregnant. And that kind of rules out with her second child, and that kind of rules out a tennis comeback,

which I was kind of hoping for for the next U.S. Open. I know. I mean, we saw our last match, actually. Or I saw her last match, so. How isn't they? Hopefully we see another one. All right, let's go on to the news. Hollywood TV and film writers are striking for the first time in 15 years today.

And if it goes on long enough, shows might go off the air, and we all might have to do the unthinkable. Watch TikTok. The strike is one of the clearest signs yet of how the shift to streaming has upended the economics of Hollywood. Writers say as companies shifted to putting TV shows on streaming platforms, their work conditions have suffered, and they can barely make a middle-class income. Median pay for writers and producers has fallen 4% over the last decade, and that's not even including inflation. And so basically they say the current landscape has caused an existential crisis for this profession, and it turned it more into gig economy work. Yeah, that stat about the median pay falling is absolutely remarkable to me. What other professions has median pay fell 23% when adjusted for inflation?

I can't think of any off the top of my head just because it's become commoditized in a way. And honestly, I think the funniest thing is that it used to be these seasons came out with 20, So, geez, they'd go on for 20 years. Think about how long how I met your mother went and how many episodes. Too long. Yeah, arguably too long. And now you get signed for maybe a season by a streaming platform. Maybe it's eight to ten episodes.

It could get canceled next week. And so that's the issue that these riders have no job security. And I totally see why they're striking. Yeah. So you have, these are various things that have changed in the shift to streaming. You mentioned the eight to 12 episodes seasons. Every single TV show I've watched recently has been like eight or ten episodes Succession, White Lotus, Last of Us. You know, they don't really last that long.

They're so expensive and they kind of expire after eight episodes. There's also this thing about residuals, which historically, historically, if you had a writing credit on a TV show and that show was aired as a read run on broadcast, then you'd get a royalty payment from that. But that kind of got wiped out by the ship to streaming. and they have these things called mini rooms in the streaming age where you go into this room and you write a show and you don't even know if it's going to get greenlit or not. So it's a very precarious situation and you're not getting paid a lot of money to crank out these scripts.

It'd be like cranking on a newsletter every day and you never know if there's going to be a newsletter tomorrow and or if you'll even get paid for it. I also was really curious to see if they'd mention AI and they did briefly touch on it. So they said part of their demands for this negotiation cycle was they wanted regulations around the use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies, because I can also see that becoming this big wave of existential angst for

writers, because if you're already becoming more and more replaceable and you have these large language models that can write relatively well, I could see why that is potentially part of this negotiation cycle. So that's something I'll be looking forward. You see this a lot in blue collar work already, like ports and... automakers and auto workers that they were afraid of automation when they're doing these bargaining contracts. And now this is kind of the first time you're seeing it in, you know, knowledge workers or writers for the first time they're acknowledging that, you know, AI could be a threat to their work. Let's talk about what happened will happen to these shows. Yeah. I think that we maybe don't watch.

The funniest part is that they are heavily influenced by writer strikes in the past. Right. So last time this happened. So the previous strike was in 2007 and 2008. It lasted 100 days. Any show that needed very timely writing like Saturday Night Live or the late night shows kind of either went off air or did some weird stuff. So Conan O'Brien, I did not remember this. But apparently to fill air time, he tried to keep his wedding ring spinning for as long as possible. Incredibly impressive. I watched the clip. He is a good spinner of wedding rings, very inceptiony. He apparently got it to 51 seconds with the help from an MIT physicist. And then a bunch of scripted shows like Lost Friday Night Lights, Gossip Girl, Breaking Bad, 30 Rock, all the ones from yesterday year.

Got cut short by the end of the year. And this is an interesting fact that Jesse Pinkman on Aaron Paul on Breaking Bad was supposed to be killed off at the end of the first season. And because of the writer's strike, a couple episodes were cut short. And Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad was like, you know what? I think I kind of like Jesse Pinkfin, and they kept him for the show, and obviously he was an integral part of this. So, Rider Strikes, maybe not good for writers and entertainment at large, but sometimes really good for your favorite character, your favorite TV show.

Okay, Neil, let's move on. Let's talk about SpaceX. The hits keep coming for SpaceX. Environmental groups have sued the FAA over SpaceX's recent launch, saying the agency didn't properly assess the impact that the launch would have on the surrounding environmental area, and it certainly had an impact. Remember, Starship was the most powerful rocket of all time. All that power absolutely demolished the launch pad.

It sent chunks of concrete metal literally thousands of feet away. It spread dust miles away and even sparked a fire on state lands near the launch site. So the groups are super mad about this mayhem and destruction, and they're calling on the FAA to potentially revoke Starship's launch license, which would essentially ground the the program until a proper environmental impact survey can be completed. So, Neil, do you think that these environmental groups have a point? I mean, okay, so before this show, I went on Google Maps to where Star Base is located, which is on the very southern tip of Texas. And all you see around Star Base is like Wildlife Management Area or Conservation Area or endangered species region.

And I was just a little confused why Elon decided to put a huge launch pad in this area where there are, we were looking up what kind of species are there that they're saying are threatened by spaceship or starship. And there's oscillates. There's something called the Jaguar Roondi. There's sea turtles. And these are all like very critical habitats for these endangered species. And Elon was like, you know what? Cape Canaveral, I guess I just don't want to be, I don't want to be mainstream. I want to be a hipster and put it down in Texas for tax breaks purposes.

He didn't need to do any of this. He could have just used the normal Florida launch light that hundreds of rockets have launched out of. But yeah, he loved, he wanted to go to Boca Chica, Texas, which is where it launched. Some of these stats are hilarious. There was dust found 10 kilometers away to the northwest. So that's 6.2 mild dust. It just kicked up so much more than they expected. And then speaking of unintended consequences,

or things that they didn't foresee. So we have a little bit more details around what went wrong with the launch. So we know that three boosters just didn't fire at all in the beginning. That caused a dangerous lean when the spacecraft ascended. So things were kind of going wrong

immediately from the start. And then this is the juicy detail that Elon revealed in a Twitter spaces recently is that when they pressed the self-destruct button when they wanted the rocket to blow up because the launch wasn't going to play, the launch wasn't going to plan. It took 40 seconds for it to actually blow up.

That must have been a very stressful 40 seconds. Yes, but what do you do when something doesn't blow up and you want it to is you add more explosives? So Elon said, we're adding more explosives to make sure it's going to explode next time. But he said he was not expecting this environmental damage and said they were going to install a plate near the, you know, below the launch pads, so it won't happen again. There are definitely a lot, this lawsuit. There's a variety of other challenges that SpaceX needs to make good on to have another launch of Starship that Elon wants in the next few months.

But it's not going to be like, hey, let's do this again. Yeah, he's got some boxes to check for sure. Yeah, a lot of challenges. Okay. Let's move on. The godfather of AI is abandoning his godchild. There was this New York Times article that came out yesterday that a lot of people were talking about because Jeffrey Hinton, an AI academic, whose research provided the foundation, literal foundation for AI tools like chat GPT, Google's

Bard, all these other generative AI breakthroughs, quit his job at Google so he could have the freedom to warn about the tech that he helped create. So he seemed pretty regretful in this interview. He said, I can sole myself with a normal excuse. If I hadn't done it, someone else would have, maybe. But as AI tools advance over the next couple months, a bunch of experts have said we need to hit the brakes because we don't know what the heck is going on. The fact that the godfather of AI, he's called the godfather of AI, one of the most respected people in the field is sounding the alarm adds a lot of legitimacy to the people who are warning about slowing down here. First of all, great name, great title. I'd love to be the godfather of something.

Godfather daily podcast. Godfather of blonde hair on daily podcasts. It's a very niche godfather. But yeah, obviously when this guy speaks, people listen because he's just been there. since the beginning. And his main concern that he voiced was that the average person will not be able to know what is true anymore. And we've already seen this. We already saw Dripi Pope, the AI Balenciaga dripped out version of Pope Francis. That image fooled you fooled a lot of people. Don't remind me. I know. No, but it's true. That is his main concern is that people will not be able to know what is true online anymore, which is a very valid excuse. And then also, he's worried that AI will upend the job market, which we've heard there's that report from Goldman Sachs that

said 300 million jobs will be replaced. And we're really, really actually seeing that play out. IBM is pausing their hiring. They're replacing 7,800 jobs with AI, which is just a pretty ridiculous number to hear on paper. You're shaking your head a little bit. Yeah, you said over the next five years in back office roles. So not consumer, customer face. No, not customer faces. So the back office HR and that kind of stuff. He said, I expected to be automated by, you know, 78, 30% of the 2,600 back office rolls over the next five years. So, I mean, yes, it's really happening. And that was kind of the first news article that we saw and were like, whoa. Yeah. And then we also, this is happening. We saw another thing that made us say, whoa, about AI,

was Chegg, which is this education company that helps kids out with their homework. They said their business is massively affected by AI and their stock actually stumbled 43% ahead of Tuesdays open. Crazy. It's like truly the first company that said AI is killing our business and the market reacted to it because people are just going to chat chip.com and getting help with homework. Usually if you put AI in your earnings report or you talk about it, you get like a huge boost. And this is kind of the inverse of that where you say, you know, chat CBT is actually a threat to our business. Chegg says it's using AI now. I think it's developed. its own chatbot called Chegmate.

Yeah. It's hopping on the chatbot trend and the chess trend in one. So it thinks it can ultimately win by, you know, leveraging AI and not getting killed by AI, but clearly investors think that this is just another industry or a company that chat GPT is going to blow. We'll see. Okay, before we jump into our next story, we'll take a quick break. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot.

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specifically due to this TikTok trend that shows how easily they can be broken into and stolen for some data at the end of last year, New York saw in 890 percent. increase in Kia thefts and a 766% increase in Hyundai thefts. So the answer here is to put an Apple air tag tracking device in your car so police can recover them. It is so weird that the police is relying on this consumer technology that you can just go buy at an Apple store. And it makes sense though, because Apple air tags are very easy to track. Like if your car gets stolen, you can just give the police to the location and say like, hey, help me get my car back. But the thing that stood out to me most of this story is why don't cars already have this feature in them? Clearly, they're all

already equipped with GPS systems because you can use your on-screen to navigate places. And yet there's no feature that you can ping when you can't find your car. You were talking about how helpful it would be when you go to a large event and you lose your car in a parking lot. Why can't you just ping it? You just take a picture of the section two. That's where I am in the parking lot. Right, right. I've spent so much time. My friend used to lose his car in the University of Maryland parking garage all the time. And I think I wasted an hour per day looking for this car.

Yeah. People are worried about surveillance and being tracked. I mean, when Apple air tags came out, there was all this discourse. People were being stalked by people. People were tagging, putting air tags in people's cars so they could stock them. So this is a very deep concern about air tags. And now that it's in the hand of law enforcement or working with law enforcement, people might even get a little more spooked.

That's actually what a 180 degree turnaround for air ties because you're right. When they first came out, they got a ton of bad publicity because people were using them to stock people. And now suddenly they're being hailed as this great law enforcement tool. So I think it is a little bit of cognitive dissidents with people where they're like, wait a second. I thought we didn't like the fact that AirPods can, or air tides can do this. And now we rely on them. So very, very interesting story, honestly. And probably good for Apple. Meanwhile, cities are suing the crap out of Kia and Hyundai because they're like, how can you make your car so easy to steal? So you have Seattle, St. Louis, Cleveland, at least five other cities are suing these South Korean car makers being like, yo, get your stuff together because it's costing us a lot of money. Yeah. Because people on TikTok are going on and showing others how to steal these cars. Yeah, they're using it. They don't have a push to start. Right.

They literally use like a USB cable and they can manually turn the ignition over. it's a crazy thing that, first of all, why are you posting it on TikTok? Come on. Like, you're, for views. I know, for views. So, and this trend has been going on since 2020. Like, this is not a new thing by, by any stretch. So TikTok, man, it's, it's big. TikTok, good for air tags. So that's how we got there. All right. Let's talk about TikTok a little bit. And it's Toby's Trends time. It's Tuesday. Look at all the all the alliterations we got going. So today, we're going to talk about a trend that, again, has been, percolating the background of TikTok for a while, but it just recently came to Twitter. So on Sunday before you came to the show, I actually decided to watch the Super Mario Bros movie.

Not exactly a surprising thing to do. We know it just crossed one billion at the box office, but I actually didn't go to a theater to watch this. I didn't buy a ticket either. That's because the entire movie was uploaded on Twitter over the weekend. The whole movie. I can't stress that enough. The whole movie.

And the reason why that was possible is because, because under Twitter Blues new rules, someone who pays for the $8 a month can upload longer videos. And so people started immediately abusing that and putting entire titles of movies like Super Mario Bros. We also saw Avatar Way of Water,

which is a famously long movie. They did upload that in three parts because it's too long, even for Twitter Blues' new longer video rules. But it's just a ridiculous thing. This is not just a Twitter thing because people who have been on TikTok at all, can't go more than three scrolls without seeing a clip from Moneyball or

Sully or. I was on Sully TikTok for a while. I was on Better Call Saul TikTok. For some reason, shameless. I was just watching episodes of shameless on TikTok and it's pretty good. And I was like, I don't really know anything about this show, but you know, these three minute clips, they're very compelling. Yeah. So to sum up this trend, just if I had to put a label on it, it is I think we're seeing the atomization of long form content. We're basically, seeing these things that are meant to be viewed in one sitting being broken up and put on social media sites there's a obviously i i have to stress that this is illegal right like there are copyright laws against this the digital millennium copyright act DCMA uh should strike these

videos down and eventually the account that posted super mario bros that the name was vids that go hard by the way which i think is funny and the the account got banned but under elons like Twitter regime. It was up for multiple, multiple days. It got 9 million views while it was up. And then TikTok is a disaster in regulating this stuff. Because you can just tweak certain things about the audio.

Often you see like subway surfer being played underneath it. That's in order to get past TikTok's kind of copyright filters. And if the person who's being ripped off, like if the like studio doesn't know what's happening, like they can't, if they're unaware of it, then they probably won't sue you. So lots of people are getting away with posting these videos. And it's good for the consumer.

Like, I love watching the clips. It's good marketing. Remember, there's this new movie that's coming up that we've both seen a lot on TikTok about like they're planning an affair? I know. What's her name? It's Elizabeth Olson. Yes.

And I don't know the name of it, but I swear it's a marketing stunt where they're feeding the masses clips from this show. And now we're all talking about it, even though we have no intention of watching it. It looks great. That's Toby's trends. You're seeing lots of those videos. I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about, but that's our trend for the day. Okay, Neil, our final story is about Uber.

We're going to briefly touch on their earnings because it happened this morning, but they also just released a report about the most forgotten items in Uber's, and I really want to talk about that. But first, earnings first, Uber crushed it. Unbelievable, unbelievable quarter. mobility gross bookings, which is catching a ride in Uber, up 40% year over year. Delivery was up 8% year over year. It's still a bigger category than mobility is, but just by a little bit.

Just a fantastic quarter all around. Revenue was up 29% year over year, so absolutely crushed it. So, anything to add on that front. Meanwhile, they're distancing themselves from Lyft like crazy. I mean, Lyft is cutting 26% of their workforce. Uber of ride share sales. In early 2020, Uber was 66% of the U.S. market. Now it's 76% of the U.S. market.

So this has been a long time coming. These two are going at it for almost a decade now. And it's pretty clear. I think we're ready to declare a winner that Uber has absolutely defeated Lyft in the ride share market. Yeah, just a fantastic quarter. But again, that is not the news I want to talk about. You sound very CNBC right now.

I know. I'm very... Fantastic quarter. I'm very excited about this next thing, though. So Uber releases their annual loss and found report every year around this time. They say they do it because Mercury is in retrograde right now, and that's a time when people are more forgetful than usual. But it's just an awesome, fantastic read. So the top 10 most forgotten items, they come as no surprise, really. It's stuff like phone, wallet, keys, jewelry, headphones, laptops, which is actually kind of sad.

So those are the most forgotten items in Uber's. but the 50 most unique items lost list, absolutely unreal. So I'm going to just list some of these. Okay. So it includes people have left a Danny DeVito Christmas ornament, a fire sword, remote-controlled vibrator, six cheesecakes, a half gallon of fireball. That's a fun time. A catheter insertion tray kit.

A positive pregnancy test. Dentures, a lightsaber, and one Gucci loafer. What a list. That is wild. I mean, that's interesting. But my takeaway here is that every company is coming out with their own Spotify wrapped. Yeah, Uber lost. It's such good marketing.

I mean, Spotify is like, here's all the data from the past year. And then Uber does this thing that everyone talked, we're talking about it. And TSA does it with their, you know, most weirdest lost items found at security. So Uber's jumping on this Uber wrap friend. I just want to hang out. I'm imagining that some of these were in the same Uber. so I really want to hang out with the person who had a half gallon of fireball and 16 ounces of fake blood. Can you even buy a half gallon of a fireball or do you like pour it into a half gallon milk carton?

I don't know, but I love this. And also just quickly, the last note about the report is the most forgetful cities, Jacksonville, Florida, number one, San Antonio, Texas, number two, and then Palm Springs, California, number three. I might go with a base rates hypothesis here because Jacksonville is notoriously not a walking city. And did you say the next one was San Antonio? San Antonio. Also not a walking city. So I'm going to go with, they just take way more Ubers than the average, so they lose more stuff. And they're party places.

Good weather. Is Jacksonville party place? That means good weather. Everywhere on Florida is a party place. All right, that is our show. Let us know if you have what the weirdest thing you lost in Uber with, if you didn't report it to them. Just know you can always reach us at Morningbrooddaily at morning brew.com or at 1-800 daily pod. Big ups to everyone who made this show possible.

The show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. Our technical director is Eugenwa Ogu. Samantha Vela's and Raymond Lue are our associate producers. Billy Menino is on audio. We left hair and makeup in an Uber. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil.

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