Morning Brew Daily - What Deportation Means for the Economy & Mattel's 'Wicked' Mistake on Toy Packaging
Episode Date: November 12, 2024Episode 451: Neal and Toby discuss Trump’s plan to mass deport millions of immigrants, which has economists concerned such an exodus may hurt the economy. Then, the COP29 climate summit kicks off an...d nations question the US commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Next, Mattel is doing damage-control after it mistakenly printed a link to a porn site onto its dolls for the upcoming film ‘Wicked’. Meanwhile, Chegg, the once popular online education site, is hoping it’s business doesn’t become a fatal victim to ChatGPT. Lastly, notable headlines to end your day. 00:00 - 50 days left in the year! 3:00 - Immigration and the Economy 9:00 - COP29 financing 13:10 - Mattel’s big ‘Wicked’ debacle 18:00 - Toby’s Trends: Chegg 21:30 - Final headlines Visit https://www.sage.com/morningbrew for more! 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. Get your Morning Brew Daily T-Shirt HERE: https://shop.morningbrew.com/products/morning-brew-radio-t-shirt?_pos=1&_sid=6b0bc409d&_ss=r&variant=45353879044316 Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Good morning, Brew, Daily Show.
I'm Neil Fryman.
And I'm Toby Howell.
Today, the major economic implications of Trump's mass deportation plan.
Then the toy company Mattel made a wicked mistake on the packaging for some wicked dolls it's selling.
It's Tuesday, November 12th.
Let's ride.
Toby, yesterday marked 50 days left of 2024.
First of all, how are your resolutions going and any items you want to check off your to-do list before the year is up?
I got a long to-do list, actually.
Just two items.
Get my music listening habits in order.
Spotify Rapp comes out November 29th.
And right now, all I have is Hans Zimmer soundtracks.
Also, a quick plug to listen to MBD as many times as possible between now and November
29th.
So you're in our 1% of fans.
But number two, I was just thinking about the skills I could feasibly learn before the end
of the year.
We got less than 50 days left.
I was thinking juggling.
Feels a little too easy maybe.
I've never been able to juggle.
Too easy.
That's a little cocky.
Well, I don't know.
You can.
I can juggle three.
How long does it take to?
Learn how to juggle.
Not that long.
Okay, so maybe that's too easy.
You should have to set like a full set aside a Saturday.
It's rainy and cold.
Learn how to juggle.
Well, I was thinking I would just make this a nice audience engagement thing.
What should I learn before the end of the year?
I will try to follow through on if you give me a skill to learn, maybe it's, you know, basket weaving.
Maybe it is juggling.
Whatever it is, please email me and I'll try to learn this skill before the end of the year.
How about baking?
So then you can bring in stuff for us here at the office.
Oh, always with a little self-interest.
Baking is easy.
I can already bake.
What do you?
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Yesterday, President-elect Trump selected anti-illegal immigration hardliner Tom Homan
to become his administration's borders are,
showing that he's serious about carrying out his signature campaign promise
to enact the largest mass deportation campaign in American history to remove criminals from the country.
Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, said at a conference earlier this year that, quote,
if you're here illegally, you'd better be looking over your shoulder.
Homan has vowed to run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.
If such a deportation of undocumented immigrants takes place, it could have profound effects for the U.S. economy,
particularly in structures like construction, agriculture, housing, and caregiving where many of them work.
For instance, 14% of construction workers in the U.S. are undocumented, according to the advocacy group
American Immigration Council. Economists warn that mass deportation on this scale Trump has promised
could cause labor shortages, delayed projects, higher consumer prices, and slower growth.
We don't have an exact number on how many undocumented immigrants are living or working in the
United States. One analysis from the left-leaning Center for American Progress estimates that there
are 11.3 million with 7 million of them working. The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan organization,
offers a lower estimate of around 8 million people, but all agree that there are millions of
undocumented people in the labor force working at companies that rely on them and that mass
deportation could cause significant economic upheaval. Look, let's talk about how we got here.
So this was a central theme of the Trump and broader Republican campaigns, that immigration was a big problem in the U.S. for things like crime and economic issues like housing prices.
They won, convincingly, the electoral college, popular vote, the Senate, and it's looking like the House.
And they say, now, they have a broad mandate to enact those plans to curb immigration.
They say it's what the people want.
A lot of analysis and economists have come out since those campaign promises were first introduced.
saying, look, here's what might happen to the U.S. economy because it looks like, while you said
we don't exactly have an estimate, we think that about 5% of the total U.S. workforce are
unauthorized immigrants. And many studies have put out what would be the economic hit, because
many of them are working if they were to be deported. A lot of companies would be facing
widespread labor shortages. And there could be major implications. One study that was published in
the University of New Hampshire in August said that a deportation program on the scale that Trump has
promise, which would ultimately deport 11 to 13 million people, would reduce the nation's gross
domestic product, our GDP, by anywhere from 2.6% to 6.2%. And that would amount to an economic hit
of anywhere between 711 billion and 1.7 trillion. And again, this would not hit all sectors equally.
There are certain sectors that if you go down the line, it would be a much more disproportionate
impact. Yeah, construction and housing is a big issue. Two industries do rely pretty heavily on
undocumented immigrants, according to the American Immigration Council. Their research shows that the
construction industry would lose one in eight workers. You mentioned that 14% of construction workers
in the United States are undocumented. Another industry that would take a major hit is farm
workers as well. The USDA actually estimated back in 2018 that 41% of farm workers are undocumented.
That's the most recent figure available. So you're talking about hits the GDP in the potential of
trillions here. I mean, that New Hampshire study estimated literally it could cost a trillion
dollars. So there are certain industries that just would be more effective. It is something that has
a major impact on the economy of the United States. Yeah, economists like to talk about something
called 3D jobs, and those are dirty, dangerous, and demanding work. There's those 3Ds,
which are largely occupied by undocumented immigrants. And what they say in their research,
through decades of study is that it's not a like for like if you like native born Americans
do won't just move into these jobs should these uh these migrants get deported and therefore
that leads to massive labor shortages i mean go back to 2011 Georgia passed a strict immigration
law a lot they lost a lot of workers in their peach vegetable fruit uh fruit industries
that there's estimates by the Georgia agribusiness council that there was all of these
picked produce that was left on the vine because people just weren't there to pick them.
And those costs ballooned into $1 billion.
Go to Idaho and the dairy industry.
There's estimates that 89% of the dairy industry in Idaho are foreign-born.
Nationally, that number may be closer to 50%.
So widespread impacts from anywhere from fruits and vegetables to dairy.
And I also want to go back to housing and construction because, according to Chad Prinkie,
He was the CEO of a consulting firm, well-built construction consulting.
He said there's going to be incredible delays in the building specifically of single-family
and multi-family construction homes.
He said the average 18-month project could take five years to complete because of labor shortages.
Said it would be different all over the country, too.
Different between Boston and Austin, Texas, for example.
Prinky said in Austin it would basically shut down every project.
And just to zoom out here, we are emerging out of the COVID-19.
pandemic where it finally seemed like supply and demand in terms of the amount of workers and the
demand that companies had for those workers was finally equalizing if this deportation plan
does go to plan. We're looking at less workers now, which would force wages upwards,
and that ripples through the entire economy, the entire supply chain, everything from grocery
stores to sporting goods stores, you're going to see prices going up as well.
So when we talk about just an economy-wide implication,
of this, we are talking truly across the entire swath of the economy.
The United Nations Climate Summit kicked off in Baku, Azerbaijan yesterday, but attending a
conference about how the earth is getting hot has proved to be a not-so-hot ticket.
Nearly 200 nations are coming together at the 29th Conference of the Parties, aka COP 29,
as the UN meeting of the mines creeps up on three decades of gathering to try and figure out ways
to mitigate the worst of global warming.
But Joe Biden opted to skip and send
delegate instead, as did top leaders from China, India, France, Germany, Brazil, and the EU.
In total, 48 fewer heads of state are addressing COP29 than last year.
Part of this year's tepid turnout might tie back to last year's frustration when talks stopped
short of calling for an international plan to reduce fossil fuels by replacing phrases like
phase out with more lenient suggestions and language.
Plus, this year's decision to host the summit in Azerbaijan, a Petro State who derives
60% of its income from fossil fuels might also have some feeling pessimistic.
But this year, the theme of the meeting is finance cop as the UN tries to estimate the funding
needed to fight climate change, but figuring out who pays and how much is proving to be quite
contentious. It is because the amount of money that the UN wants richer countries that have
already been transitioning to renewables but have been the source of the large amount of
the emissions that have ever been produced.
in the world could amount to more than a trillion dollars. We've thrown around that trillion
stat a lot this show already. One, they did it. They did manage to get an agreement actually
yesterday at the start on a global carbon market, which basically establishes a financial
market for carbon credits. So if you are a country that's doing well and you're getting a lot
of your energy from wind and solar and nuclear, then you can sell credits to, you can make money
by selling credits to less developed countries that are still in the process of transitioning
over to renewable.
So that was kind of a big win.
No one was really, as you mentioned, no one's really expecting much to come out of this conference,
but it looks like they already got, you know, some things in motion on the first day.
So I did mention that one of the big things at this year's conference is trying to get
the developed countries to pay to help subsidize undeveloped countries in their fight
against climate change as well.
there was this $100 billion pledge that was rolled out actually decades ago at this point
where they were supposed to contribute $100 billion to a climate-related fund.
One, that number looks kind of woefully small at this point.
But two, new targets have been tossed around because when that initial number was decided upon,
nations like China as well as most of the Middle East countries were not considered developed
under the UN's guidelines.
And so now people are saying, wait a second, we need to drop new regulations that include China,
include Saudi Arabia, who are not obliged to.
contribute to this fund would not oblige to lead on finance in years past. So now they're saying
we need, one, a lot more money, and two, we need these countries that have come to the forefront of
economic kind of power in the last decades to start contributing as well. And of course, there is
a major overhang, a major shadow, which was the election in the United States. Donald Trump has
pledged to roll back a lot of environmental regulations that have been passed over the past four years.
he has vowed to remove the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, which was reached
at the COP in 2015.
Yesterday, he made his EPA pick, who is the former New York Representative Lee Zeldin.
And Lee Zeldin has said he wants to roll back things like tailpipe regulations for vehicles,
rules that slash power plants emissions.
So there appears to be a broader rollback and a backing away from climate initiatives
are going on in the United States.
And the United States, being the world's largest economy,
kind of sets the stage for the rest of the world when it comes to this.
So the people there from the Biden administration are saying,
we're not backing down from, you know,
maybe climate's going to be on the back burner for the next four years,
but this is a longer haul that the U.S. is absolutely committed to.
Ahead of its premiere later this month,
Wicked has staged an all-out marketing blitz that puts Glinda's materialism to shame.
But one of its brand collaborations is not going over,
so well with the parents. Sunday night, the toy company Mattel apologized after one of its dolls
tied to Wicked was found to contain a misprint on the packaging. Instead of writing the URL,
wickedmovie.com, which directs to the movie website, it had left out the word movie,
and that is a big problem because that's a link to a porn company's website. Mattel said it
deeply regrets the unfortunate error and is taking immediate action to remedy this. It didn't say
how many dolls were slapped with the X-rated packaging or whether it was recalling the product,
but a search on Target and Amazon listed the item as unavailable.
But God bless capitalism, people who bought a doll with the now infamous packaging are listing them
on eBay with one seller offloading two for $99 a piece, more than double the original price tag.
Toby, this is even more embarrassing than when I sang for good at my high school graduation.
Oh, you nailed that, Neil.
This is especially embarrassing because Wicked is kind of going the,
Barbie root when it comes to merch for this movie. They are going all out. You are seeing
stores just plastered with pink and green. You can find Elfaba Squish malls. You can find Stanley
Cups with the green gradient. I even saw pimple patches that had the, you know, Elfaba hat on them.
One of the weirdest ones that was a Walmart was selling this mac and cheese container that was
either pink or green depending on which kind of thing you got, which I don't want my mac and
cheese to be pink or green at any... That's just not an appellate. That's just not an appellate.
appealing color to me, but I do think that it shows that they are trying to turn this into a big
box office temple of the Barbie ilk where you can just have these recognizable characters,
these recognizable colors, and just going top to bottom across all retail shelves,
plastered and pink and green.
And they think they can because Wicked, ever since it premiered in 2003 and a little flex here,
I saw the original cast that year.
Thank you, Mom, for taking us.
That is one of the biggest Broadway shows, most popular, best.
selling of all time. It's generated more than $1.67 billion in ticket sales only at the Gershwin
Theater. And that's not counting all of the other national tours as well. More than 14.5 million
people have bought tickets to see the show in the last 21 years. So this is an interesting bet on
a musical where that hasn't been kind in the box office in recent years. There have been
some major flops. And they're just hoping Wicked can defy, if you will, the gravity of the
of the broader movie musical market,
which has seen some downturn.
Oh, I will.
All right.
Yeah, Dear Evan Hansen,
Mean Girls Musical,
those have been two notable flops recently.
This movie needs to do well because it has a $160 million budget.
That is Marvel superhero territory we're talking about right now.
One thing that I do want to point out is Mattel is liking this current kind of crop of toys
because not only does have wicked merch coming out,
which hopefully can solve the packaging issue that we started this.
story with, but it also has Moana 2 dropping. So those are two absolute powerhouses in the toy
industry. So Mattel is kind of sitting back and saying, we're looking at a good Q4 here. Up next,
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All right, you guys remember Chegg, the software that would come in clutz when you were
stuck on certain problems from a textbook in high school.
If you're much older than me, you probably don't remember.
But if you're much younger, you'll never even know what I'm talking about because
Chegg has been eaten alive by ChatG-G-T.
And it's the downfall of the once-helpful software company that I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's trends that I am calling Chegg yourself before you reg yourself.
Chegg's stock is down in insane 99% since reaching an all-time high just a few years ago in 2021.
14.5 billion dollars in value, poof, gone in a smoke of artificial intelligence.
A look under the hood shows that has lost half a million in paid subscribers with no end in sight.
as students realize that chat CBT and other large language models could help them with their work like Chegg did, but for free.
So, Neil, I want to talk about how there's not really a better example of a company getting swept away by the rise of AI than poor old Chegg.
Right. So look at the survey of college students by the investment bank Needham.
30% intended to use Chegg this semester, which is down from 38% in the spring.
Meanwhile, 62% plan to use ChatGPT, which is up from 43% in the summer.
spring, it's not hard to, you know, fill in the blanks here about what's going on. People are
turning to AI, students especially in really big numbers, maybe more so than I would have expected
a few years out after its release. And Chegg has just collapsed as a company. It had 11% revenue
drop in the second quarter. And this quarter, it's expected to have a lower sales of 15%.
So this is an absolute destruction of a business model by AI earlier this year.
Chegg laid off 441 people.
And I think you have to say, this is a pretty precise instance of AI taking somebody's job.
And what's ironic, too, is that Chegg had AI on the mind for years.
I mean, back in 2018, they were using open source models developed by OpenAI to help offer, you know, grammar assistance, help in a writing aid feature.
But they kind of backed away because they were afraid that kind of a still a fear now is that these AI kind of generated answers,
would give misinformation to people
and they didn't want to stake the reputation
on an AI model.
So they kind of backed away
from really going down that path.
So they were directionally correct.
Like they knew that AI was maybe going to become a thing,
but they just didn't want to take the leap full in.
So that's why you need maybe like a Sam Altman
to just put this out into the world.
Hallucinations be damned.
So it is wild though to see just how close they were
to actually maybe being on the frontier
of this large language model boom.
But instead they're on the complete other side.
Chegg was not a small company. It was almost $15 billion.
And I do think we talk a lot about the hypotheticals of AI potentially wiping out certain industries.
But this is just such a clear example of them saying, everyone started using AI.
No one used our product anymore. And now our company is essentially gone.
Yeah, they had a one-day wipeout of 48% when they said originally earlier this summer that they were losing market share to chat GPT.
It's a pretty interesting example of what economists call creative destruction of one innovative.
out basically killing the other and hopefully in the long, you know, it leads to a destruction
of business and lost jobs. But the idea is that in the long run that AI and replacing the old
with the new will lead to further job gains, further productivity, further economic growth.
So we're seeing it in action right now and it's pretty startling. Let's sprint to the finish
with some final headlines. Bitcoin is on an absolute bender right now. Yesterday morning, we
discuss in astonishment how it topped $80,000 for the first time. Well, in the span of 24 hours,
it rose to nearly $90,000. And the post-election euphoria shows no signs of stopping. Bitcoin and the
rest of the crypto market has jumped about 25% in the week since Election Day on November 5th.
And the value of the global crypto market rose above $3 trillion topping its previous peak set in
November 2021. Maybe the current attitude around crypto can best be captured by a note the asset manager
Bernstein wrote to its clients yesterday. They said, and I quote, buy everything you can.
Yeah, it is insane out there right now. One thing that is interesting about this particular bull cycle
is that usually when Bitcoin peaks, you can go back and track Google search trend data
and see a corresponding peak with people just Googling Bitcoin, like what is Bitcoin, Bitcoin,
etc. This time, the peak is not as high. So I'm not really sure what that means. I think it
just means that more people are already aware of it. So you don't need to search it anymore.
but we are not seeing the same amount of maybe retail interests this time around.
So maybe it is smart money moving into Bitcoin.
Maybe it's less retail people getting in this time around.
But for whatever reason, we are not seeing a similar spike in search traffic,
even though Bitcoin is just absolutely flying right now.
And, I mean, if we see 90K, that means we're on the road to 100K, which was just unfathomable
to think about even just a few years ago.
Two U.S.-based commercial passenger jets, one operated by Spirit Airlines, and the other by JetBlue,
were hit by bullets yesterday while flying near Haiti's capital port of Prince.
The Spirit Airlines flight was riddled with bullets and diverted to the Dominican Republic
where one flight attendant was treated for minor injuries, but all passengers made it through unscathed.
The jet blue flight, on the other hand, didn't even know it had been hit until it landed
in New York, where an inspection revealed the hole had been struck by a bullet.
These incidents come against a backdrop of political unrest and gang violence in Haiti,
but still, it is rare for passenger planes to be shot at and hit by gunfire.
Yeah, I mean, I've never heard of this before, but it is definitely symbolic of the violence that has engulfed Haiti.
They, the UN estimates that gangs, politically connected gangs, have banded together, and they basically took over control of the capital.
They control 85% of it right now.
They've cut it off from the rest of the world or the rest of the country.
So what's happening with the rest of Haiti is they just removed a prime minister.
and they just installed a new one who's an entrepreneur yesterday.
So you have this insane political backdrop that's going on.
Meanwhile, they're going to see basically no visitors, at least from the United States,
because all of the commercial carriers have stopped flying there,
or paused at least for the next few days.
JetBlue, after this happened, said they're going to not fly there through December 2nd.
So basically, you know, for a nation that had been isolated,
it's going to be even more isolated after these incidents.
Toby, how far would you travel for a really good soup dumpling?
I mean, probably not even out of the house.
I just Uber eats it.
Well, young people in China are biking 40 miles overnight to an ancient city famed for its soup dumplings.
It's a viral craze that reached a climax over the weekend when an estimated 100,000 college students rented bikes and peddled through the night in a breakfast quest for the ages.
The trend started when four female university students in Zhengzhou traveled to the nearby city of Kai Feng, famous for its,
oversized soup dumplings and posted their adventure on social media.
It caught on as the weeks went by, culminating in this weekend's armato, where young people
overtook the streets under the banner, Night Riding Army, prompting a crackdown by authorities.
Toby, in a sense, this isn't about soup dumplings at all.
It's all about youth liberation.
I mean, if anyone's ever ridden a city bike through the streets at night, it is truly just
a top five feeling.
What's ironic is that a lot of authorities were initially welcoming me.
they're saying, what a great way to show this camaraderie and just the joy of use.
But then we're talking about literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Some estimates put it over 200,000 people making these rides.
And whenever that happens, inevitably, you're going to have some bikes left to side.
So authorities have started cracking down, saying remotely locking any ride share bikes taken out of designated zones.
So it did start out as a good thing.
It probably still is a good thing, net positive.
Like, what an experience riding with 100,000 of your friends.
but authorities are kind of saying, all right, it's too much.
We're overwhelming this poor city.
And I can't imagine what the line looks like at the dumpling shop.
Yeah, well, hopefully there are more than one dumpling shop.
But yeah, I think this does speak to something interesting going on in Chinese society
where there's a little depressed consumer spending and the economy is stagnant.
And the youth are, this is not, I wouldn't say a revolt, but it was a chance to show that
they're calling it, youth is priceless.
And that's sort of the banner they're flying.
under and they're talking about traveling and spending on the cheap. And the fact that you're getting
a hundred thousand people hyping each other up in a ride through the night, 40 miles to go to get
breakfast in this ancient city that has amazing soup dumplings. It seems like a very, you know,
it seems like a societal moment. And I think that's why it's caught on. And we'll see if it spreads
to other cities. I'm sure the authorities don't really want that. Let's do that to Queens tomorrow
morning. Let's finish up with a monkey update. Remember those 43 macaques that escaped from a medical
testing facility operated by Alpha Genesis in South Carolina. Well, as of yesterday, 30 of the 43
monkeys that got a taste of freedom are back in the company's custody. Now, this incident will
lead to some questions about Alpha Genesis security protocols, but go a level deeper. And there are
some moral and legal questions to unpack here regarding an escape monkey's claim to freedom
as well. I didn't know you were getting that deep. I was just going to say this is out of a
sci-fi movie, I think especially because Alpha Genesis is a name straight.
of a movie. I mean, this thing has 7,000 primates in this facility. They're only 2,200 residents.
So I think you're starting, for some reason, not for some reason, but this story has kind of
taken on a life of its own in the United States. People are watching this every move. They have
counters about how many monkeys have been freed and, or how many have been captured so far.
But I want to tell me about the moral implications of a monkey out in the wild.
Yeah, because if you think about it, you would never steal someone's dog or cat, someone
a companion pet that is beloved by someone else, that would be stealing.
But when it comes to wild animals, the law is a lot different because when a wild animal
escapes, the captor remains liable for any damage they're doing, but these macaques aren't
doing any damage to society.
They are not dangerous.
They are not, they're not disease carrying or anything like that.
So if you lose ownership of the animals, if they integrate into the surrounding wild
environment, then they have a claim on freedom under the law.
So it is this very gray area where they're trying to recapture what they think is their property.
But if these macaques kind of integrate into the native South Carolina landscape, then they have a claim on freedom.
So I think it is interesting.
Are they wild animals, though?
Well, that's what, yeah, they are not pets.
Like they're not necessarily domesticated animals.
They are considered wild animals.
So a lot of gray areas here.
And that's why I went down the morality side of the things.
Are you rooting for the monkeys?
Of course I'm rooting for the monkeys.
Are you kidding me?
Like, that sounds like you finally break free.
I mean, you're in South Carolina.
and now at this point, I don't know where they're native to, but I am rooting for the macaques
in this situation.
That is all the time we have.
Thanks for starting your day with us and have a wonderful Tuesday.
For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at Morning
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Toby, which of these 8 billion people should people share it with today?
I want you to share the podcast with someone who you want to better yourself alongside
for these last 49 days of the year.
49 days is a long time, so make a pack that you will get after it
and send this pod to someone who will hold you accountable.
Let's roll the credits.
Emily Milliron is our executive producer.
Raymond Liu is our producer.
Olivia Graham is our associate producer.
Eugenua Ogu is our technical director.
Billy Minino is on audio.
Hair and makeup is on the hunt for soup dumplings.
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.
