Morning Brew Daily - Trump’s arraignment, NASA's Lunar Mission, and Virtual Boyfriend craze!?

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Episode 31: Neal and Toby discuss Donald Trump's historic arraignment in Manhattan on Tuesday. They also break down NASA's announcement of the astronauts that will participate in the Artemis 2 mission around the moon. Plus, Paris bans e-scooters and Dodgecoin investors are coming after Elon Musk. And have you heard of dating a virtual boyfriend... IRL? Well Toby is here to tell you about it. And quite possibly, a Harry Potter series coming to a streaming service near you. 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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Terms and conditions apply. Good morning, Brew, Daily's show. I am Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell and Neil, I am super excited today because the whole daily crew is actually going to a Yankees game. Field trip. I know. A little bonding moment. They're playing the Phillies, though.

So half our crew is like Philly fans, more than half. Yeah. Me, Emily, Bryce, we're all around from Philly. I'm not actually from Philly, but I have roots in Philly. We wear Eagles, Sixers, Philly stuff all the time to the office. But the Phillies are just abonditable right now. starting 0 and 4. Terrible.

So it's your first time to Yankee Stadium, which will be interesting. It's nothing particularly special, but, you know, it's somewhat iconic. The whole crew is going, I don't know if hair and makeup are going to make it, but we'll see. We'll see. I haven't actually met hair and makeup, but they might come tonight with a surprise appearance in the sixth inning. I will look out for them. I have no idea what they look like, but I'm sure they'll introduce themselves.

Let's get to our show. We're talking about astronauts and Dogecoin going to the moon. E-Scooters are in retreat in Paris, and Toby will give his weekly lecture on Gen Z trends to us, millennials, which I'm always excited about. A lecture? A lecture? I was thinking of what word to say, and it is kind of a lecture. It's not bad. I'll take it. Professor Ted? That means it's informative, and I'm going to listen. Okay.

And maybe fall asleep. We'll find out. Let's start out, though, with this really under the radar story that we wanted to share with people. Former President Donald Trump is set to appear in lower Manhattan court today. He'll become the first president to be arraigned over criminal charges in history. So we're not going to go too in depth right now because we're going to wait till we know what the specific charges are filed against him. And we'll discuss that tomorrow. But here's a quick rundown of what his itinerary is going to look today. In the early afternoon, he'll take a motorcade with a secret service detail down from Trump Tower and Midtown to the courthouse.

He'll be booked just like any other criminal defendant in New York with fingerprints and a mugshot. He'll appear before a judge for about just 15 minutes who will read him his charges and ask him how he pleads. He's expected to plead not guilty. The whole process is expected to take just a few hours. And then he's going to get back on Trump Force One and then go back home to Florida and give a speech in prime time. I think that's so funny is that his lawyer is basically like, yes, a lot of criminal defendants don't necessarily give a speech. Like they're advised to stay quiet. But that is just not how Trump does it.

He's running for president. He's literally giving a campaign speech later. It must be so stressful being a lawyer. Like, your client just goes and makes a speech. SBFs. Right, no, exactly. He was writing subsacts, yeah. There's so many angles we can take on this.

And I'm sure that we're going to keep talking about this. But obviously, one of them is just the media attention and just kind of the symbiotic relationship between Trump and the media. I actually found this quote from The Art of the Deal, which is the book he wrote back. Did you read it? I've never read it. I've seen it in bookstores. From the art of the deal, from a bottom line business perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all.

So I feel like Trump isn't really taking that to heart during this trial. Absolutely. There was a report in Rolling Stone yesterday that he could have had this arraignment happen over Zoom. In a very chill thing, he wouldn't have been photographed. It wouldn't have been have this circus. But he said, no, I want to play the victim here and go to New York and have this. I know that cameras will follow me everywhere. that protesters and supporters will all descend on lower Manhattan.

So he knows what he's doing. And if we want to apply a monetary value to what he's doing, so far, they've raised, his campaign has raised $7 million, like pretty much solely off this event. So it pays. Right now, right now in the monitor, I just want to point out, we're playing CNN coverage of Trump Force One taking off from Florida. And so they had cameras. Yesterday was the biggest circus on cable news.

I didn't watch any, but I saw it online. And CNN had a literal speedboat in the harbor as Trump's plane was flying into LaGuardia. Ridiculous. They love it. It's their Super Bowl. But Neil, I know since Trump is going to have his mugshot taken, you prepared some of like the most famous mugshots. Yeah, I was looking them up. Some more serious ones where lots of civil rights leaders back in the 60s got arrested.

So you had very famous ones of Rosa Park, storing the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and John Lewis, looking really young. He posted it on his Twitter, actually, he's like, look at me. I'm looking pretty good. When OJ was arrested in 1994, there was a lot of controversy because Time ran the mugshot on its cover, but they made his skin darker, blurred his face, and gave him like an unshaven look. And Newsweek also publishes mugshot at the same time, and they didn't touch him up. So Time had to apologize.

gotten to this big controversy. Have you seen Bieber's mugshot from his DUI in 2014? That was when he was in his peak, like, arrogant. He's doing like a blue steel thing, like he's an Aeropostal photo shoot. And then I didn't know this one until this morning, but Bill Gates was arrested for blowing a stop sign in New Mexico in his early 20s, and he's just grinning his face off. My question for you is, okay, you get a mugshot. Maybe you've already had one, and I don't know.

There's a lot I don't know about you. Are you smile? Like, what's your face? What's your pose? I think I'd go, well, it depends on what it was, like what I did. Yeah, that's like a huge, if I'm blown a stop sign, then yeah, I'm probably giving a Rye grin, but anything else, I'm keeping blue steel. I was thinking about that.

It is a new era. You know, it sets the tone for you going forward. And if you want to change your brand, then you should go for it with your mugshot. Like right now, I'm still a nice guy kind of vibe. And I think if I get arrested, my mugshot, I'm going full scowl. Okay. And changing the public perception of me into a badass going forward. There you go. I like it.

All right, that's the Trump arraignment. We're obviously going to be talking about this in the days and weeks to come. But let's go to a story that's a little more fun, honestly, like a little bit more out of this world. Oh, I know. It's bad. Yesterday, NASA announced the four astronauts that would be heading to the moon on the Artemis II mission, and they are going to list their names off, Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. So I'm just, that crew is notable in a few ways. It's the first women, Coke, the first person of color Glover, and the first Canadian

Hansen to ever go on a lunar mission. That's great because we all know who to blame when something goes wrong. We have a Canadian. Canadian, yeah. I think that's so funny that it is, though. So far, it's been mostly Americans and at least when it comes to NASA. And Trudeau was like, this is great. We're having a Canadian up there.

So he's very proud of that. If everything goes to plan, it will take off in November. The mission itself is not actually one that's going to put boots on the moon. It's just going to do kind of like a close drive-by of the moon. And then, yeah, it's a big deal, though, because this is Artemis 2. Artemis 3 is the one that will actually put people walking on the moon. So, yeah, this is the art of the missions. Yeah, it's the crew.

You have the crew. What do you, they must be so excited or nervous. I don't know. I wish it was happening sooner. Yeah. Because these guys just have to kind of wait and hang out and train for the next, you know, 18 months, is it? November of 2020.

So, I don't know. I would just get butterflies for the next year and a half for them. I love these, the photo shoots that come out of these. They're honestly, like, so epic. It's awesome epic lighting. They're all arranged, like, in a, almost like a boy band, like, pose. And they almost look AI at this point because, like, they're so perfectly lighted and stuff like that.

My brain is just broken by AI. Let's talk a little bit about how this mission is going to work. like the various components to the mission because getting to the moon is a little complicated and a lot of companies and different you know components go into it so we have Orion which is the capsule where the astronauts will be traveling on that's where they're just going to hang out space launch system is the powerful rocket that will get them to the moon and you were given to me some some space launch system facts it costs 800 million per launch so it's not that that's everything from like building the rocket to the fuel to doing the launch itself so it's something not something you want to mess up, really. It's also taller than the Statue of Liberty, and it's the most powerful launcher ever. It's 15% more powerful than the Saturn rockets that launched the original lunar mission. So this thing is a behemoth. And then finally, to get from Orion to the moon, we're leaning on SpaceX. I know. We're leaning on SpaceX here. We've got Starship, which is that massive rocket that you see doing tests in the middle of nowhere, Texas. That's

what they're going to use to get them on the moon and back onto the capsule. And that is not ready yet. Muska said they're trying to do an orbital mission this month. So we'll say. That thing is, I love looking at that, honestly. It looks very cool. All right, moving on to Paris is burning. Well, Paris is rejecting e-scooters, actually. On Sunday, Paris became the first major European city to ban e-scooters, those divisive little micromobility devices. This is a really significant move, actually, because Paris was one of the first cities to adopt shared e-scooters during their heyday back in 2018. So it's seen as quite a U-turn.

And the vote was more lopsided than the Yukon game last night. There was 89% of people who voted for a ban. The only thing is no one voted on this. fewer than 7.5% of eligible voters came out, and the young people who were more in support of keeping the scooters on the streets, they stayed home. So are you pro or anti-scooter? I'm pro-scooter because it's just such a convenient way to get around.

Like, I have been there where you're, especially in like a city that you're not, it's not your own city. It's so nice because you don't know the transit system that well. Like, you don't really want to take an Uber. It's great to just have a scooter. So I'm pro it. But the problem is there's idiots. Like there's dumb people.

I also think there's a tragedy of commons issue where parking these things, they're not yours. So they're like for the common good. And people just leave them everywhere. They leave them in the middle of streets. They don't take care of them. It became trendy to like throw them into water. So it just became this thing where it's kind of the worst of humanity showed through. So I can see why there's this groundswell of support against them.

This probably isn't good for content, but I agree with you. We're supposed to disagree with each other, but I'm also a big fan of scooters. I think the reason that they're in retreat right now and they've gotten so bad is that it's a governmental failure because there isn't infrastructure for scooters. So if I'm on a scooter in Los Angeles, like I have been, I have to go on the sidewalk and, you know, blast through pedestrians because there's not a scooter lane for me. So they don't have the infrastructure for scooters. And so people are inevitably going to do stupid stuff because they don't have lanes. don't have traffic lights that are devoted to them. It's like putting cars on the road without having stop lines or lanes or anything. That's basically what's happening. Yeah. So I see that there's,

you know, a lot of consternation around like vandalism and then also, you know, three deaths were caused by scooters and over 400 injuries. But my thought is I looked at the stats for cars. 66 pedestrian deaths were related to cars in 2016. So I, you know, we're not really focusing on the problem. difference of scales, though, too. A lot more people are driving cars than pedestrians. But yeah, you're right. I mean, it stinks, honestly. But I was there in Paris while people are ripping around.

It is drunk, like, kids, basically. And I could, I was even doing my old man shaking fish with the cloud mill. I'm like, slow down, get away from me. So I could see it. One second. I just don't want to talk about bird. Bird is the corpse of bird. The corpse of bird.

So these companies are retreating. The e-scooter companies. were booming. Why I want to bring up Bird real quick is because it was the fastest unicorn ever. Within one year, it became a billion dollar company of its founding and now it's worth less than a cent. That's great. Per share. Yeah, less than one share. Eventually. So the scooter market has utterly collapsed. It has collapsed. Okay, that was scooters. That's the first half of our show. But before we jump into the next half, we're going to take a quick break. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Okay, Neil, so yesterday we were scrolling Twitter and kind of simultaneously, everyone in the Morning Bruce Slack channel just said, are you seeing what I'm seeing right now? Like, do you see this? And what we were referencing was this little Doge icon in the top left corner of the web browser of Twitter.

Basically, Elon yesterday replaced the Twitter logo with the Doge meme only on desktop. And everyone was like, am I hallucinating? It was like, is there a little dog there? Honestly, I'm just going to give a quick, for the less internet obsess. Doge is a Shiba Inu, it's a meme that has kind of been popular in culture. If you don't know what Doge is at this point, good for you. I'm happy for you. You're smarter from it.

But part of the reason why he did this is, one, he did send a tweet back in 2020 saying, like, hey, I'm going to buy Twitter and change the logo to a Doge. So he's kind of like referencing his own joke from back in 2020. But also there's this other aspect to it is that he, currently being sued for 238 billion in damages for allegedly driving the price up of Dogecoin via tweets, via memes, and then letting it crash. And so there's this huge, like, class action lawsuit against him that is just ridiculous on every level. Yeah. So Dogecoin obviously spiked on this news in, you know, developments that were still seeing like memes and stuff can drive the

market. We were kind of wondering whether that would stay. So it was up, you know, 35% yesterday before I don't know what it's up today. It went right back down, but it's still 43% up year to date. The craziest thing is that it's still among the top 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies. Right. Even after having collapsed more than 90% from its peak. So I have no idea about the merits of this lawsuit. I can't expect that it's going anywhere. It accuses him of, you know, pumping the price of running a pyramid scheme of going on SNL, knowing that he was going to tank it after selling doge coin. And it just brought me back to 2021. And that feels like a lifetime ago. I know.

And I mean, I guess credit to Musk for like falling through and like actually going for it. But just again, this story, it makes you feel like almost dumber on every level. When you go through the reactions in the reactions, the reactions, yeah, just a lot of, a lot of dumb jokes. There is not the first time Musk has gotten legal trouble with his tweets, though. Remember there was a recent lawsuit. about taking Tesla private that he was sued for. That was seemed as very legitimate because the investors lost a lot of money, and he misled them because, or he allegedly misled them because he didn't actually have

the funding to take Tesla private when he said it, but he won that lawsuit. He was found not liable last, I think it was in February, actually. So that was seen as kind of a surprise victory for Musk, and he's done pretty well in the courts over all of this legal drama. And it does look like this lawsuit doesn't have a ton of legs to it. And yeah, the lawyer's basically saying, like, he can tweet pictures about a cryptocurrency. So we'll keep an eye on that. I hope we don't speak of it again, though, honestly.

Okay, Neil, you mentioned it at the top of the show, but let's go to everyone's favorite Tuesday segment. That's also an alliteration. That is Toby's Trends. Okay. So today we are talking about love and dating in the post-AI post-lockdown world. So up first, I want to bring you to China where the newest craze is women paying cosplayers to dress up as their favorite male video game characters than going on dates with them. Now, obviously, this is an extreme form of infatuation of fandom, but it honestly makes sense if you start thinking about some of the social factors that go into this. One, there's a huge gender imbalance in China still just like socially, culturally, the leftovers from the one child policy.

So there's a lot more men than there are women. And then two, the pandemic happened where a lot of the youth in China were isolated, didn't have these normal relationships that you typically do during this age. So they turn to the digital world. And now that the world's opened up, they're trying to bring that digital infatuation into the physical realm. So it's a crazy story. It feels very black mirrory. But when you hear the social factors, it makes a little bit of sense, right? Yeah.

What is the end game? Are they just going on one day? or if they hit it off, are we... It's honestly, they feel very fulfilled by the dates. If the cosplayers, which ironically are often women dress up as these male characters, but people leave the dates saying, like, we had a great time. Like, they played the character that I remember from the video game. So it's kind of harmless.

Obviously, it's not great for... I think it's awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's not great for procreate, like, you know, like continuing the human race. Yeah. But I think it's creative. Yeah, you can see how all the trends led to it. Okay, and then the second part of this, I mentioned AI.

So literally people are dating AI versions of their exes. So there was this Reddit posts that went pretty viral of a girl who used OpenAI's sandbox feature, which you can actually create and train your own chatbot. She fed the AI chatbot text from her ex and now can communicate with an AI chatbot version of her ex-boyfriend. This one's a little... I'm no therapist. I'm going to hold off on saying

whether that's healthy. Because the Reddit post, she specifically calls out like, I'm stable, like, I have, I work with a therapist. I'm literally just using this to, instead of texting my ex, I'm emotionally maturing and moving on from this relationship.

So she was kind of self-aware about it, but holy moly, it's a dangerous, slippery slip where people are going to start dating these, like, alter egos of their former lovers. Whenever I hear about particular trends, they're happening in AI, I always have to think to myself, we first, you know, kind of started using this in November. Yeah. And so, uh, it's moving fast. Yeah, I have not yet recreated my ex on, uh, on a chatbot. But hey, if I'm bored on Sunday. All right, final story. Toby, would you watch a Harry Potter TV series

about the original books? I am firmly in the yes category in this, but talk me through it. Either way, you're probably going to get one. HBO is close to a deal with Warner Brothers to turn the seven Harry Potter books, original ones, into a TV series, one season per book. The idea is there's a lot of appetite for the original story, but the movies had to skip over many parts and couldn't really marinate in the Potter world

because of the two-hour runtime. Again, this is obviously going to be very divisive because J.K. Rowling has alienated much of her fan base with her stance on trans rights. And so we see this conversation every time a creative property of Harry Potter comes up. We just saw it with Harry Potter or Hogwarts Legacy, which was the video game adaptation. That just sold like gangbusters. Yeah, 850 million in global sales.

Crazy. Like bigger than any of the movies. So it's hard to kind of, we hear about the fan base turning against her, but then Harry Potter clearly still resonates with this generation, with previous generations, in that new Harry Potter media just rips. Plus, I think that the original movies, while impactful, people aren't so tied to them and would be fine seeing other Harry Potter's or other Hermione's played by other people, would be perfectly fine with that and would be totally engrossed with that and wouldn't be like, we wish we had Daniel Radcliffe back in there.

Yeah. I don't know. Honestly, that's my thought. Yeah, maybe. Like, it would be weird to see a different Harry Potter, though. I think after the first episode, you'd be totally, you know, engrossed. And there probably are some interesting stories to be mine

that the movies had to gloss over. I mean, that was the main thing about the movies. They're like, why didn't you, you know, talk about what happened on page 37? Yeah, you have to leave stuff out. So I would be excited for it. Also, you got to just trust HBO is going to make this awesome. They've had Euphoria, White Lotus, Succession, Last of Us, All Bangers. And they're also dipping back into the well.

There's going to be another Game of Thrones prequel. Oh, my gosh. And they're making Warner Brothers, the picture. Heron is making more Lord of the Rings movies. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? We're dipping back in full a while. That is our show. Make sure to email us at Morningbrewdaily at Morningbrew.com about everything, anything we talked

about. As always, we couldn't do this without our incredible team. Shows' producer and editor is Emily Milliron. Show's technical director is Justin Orlando. Our queen of graphics is Michaela. Welcome, Michaela. Our supervising producer is Bryce Belloff. Dan Baza is our Master of Sound.

hair and makeup put on an invisibility cloak and hasn't been seen for days. 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. Aw. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history.

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