Morning Brew Daily - Will SCOTUS change the internet? 4-day workweek & ChatGPT writes books now

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Episode 2: Neal and Toby take a look at the Supreme Court's case that could change the future of the internet. We'll also dive into a study on why 4-day workweeks actually work. Plus ChatGPT can write books now? And Neal even surprises Toby with some of his favorite numbers from his ridiculous consumption of news. Listen Here: https://www.podpage.com/dashboard/morningbrewdaily/ Watch 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 am Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. It's our second episode. Second episode feels like the first episode, though, because anyone who reads the Morning Brew Newsletter saw the top blurb today. We promoted it at the top of the newsletter. Yeah.

So for any new people joining us, welcome. Welcome. We're super glad to have you. Yesterday, we did some warm-up tosses, and now we're coming into the actual show. Yeah. Any highlights from the launch day? Well, I did hear from a lot of friends who texted me and said it was, they remember who I was, first of all.

Not I'm a big podcast star, but no, they said it was great, and I knew they were going to say that anyway, so I pushed back and said, okay, but you were going to say that anyway. Give me some actual feedback. And? Radio silence. Okay, okay. Well, maybe you need better friends, or they're just too nice to you? They're too nice,

or they just don't want to put in the work to actually give us feedback. My best feedback came from my grandma, because she's always right about everything, and she said she liked it, and she especially liked all the facts that Neil had. There are going to be a lot more today. Maybe she likes you more than me, but that's okay with me.

All right. Speaking of facts, let's ride with the show. Let's ride. I know. Where did I come up with that? I guess Russell Wilson. Broncos Nation. Let's ride.

Oh, God. Brew Nation. Let's ride. All right. Let's go from Denver to Washington, D.C., where there's a huge Supreme Court case that's going on. It's about Section 230, and it could decide the future of the internet. Not a big deal.

High stakes. I've heard a lot about Section 230. It's been in the news for a while, but, I'd love to hear you lay it out. I'm going to mansplain it to you, Toby. Okay, I need it. Thank you. So ask questions along the way, and I hope our listeners were also asked questions in the comments or whatever. But Section 230 is it's 26 words that were written in 1996, and they're crucial for protecting

internet companies from the stuff that you or I or anybody else posts on their platforms. Okay, so it led to the formation of these mega companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google. Yes, because there's no way that Facebook or Google or YouTube can possibly. moderate or police every single thing that is posted on their platforms. Like YouTube, how many hours of YouTube are posted in a single second? Right. So it kind of shields them from taking responsibility from the content. Yeah.

So it basically creates a distinction between publishers like Morning Brew and newspapers and internet companies, which are more like telephone companies. So if I call you up over the phone and we hatch a plot to, you know, kidnap. Steal the Declaration of Independence? steal the Declaration of Independence, the Verizon cannot be held liable in court. Basically, if Section 230 wasn't there, then these companies would be absolutely sued to oblivion because there would be so much crap, so much illegal content on their platforms. And if they were to be held responsible, they'd be in court every day, and we should be lawyers.

Okay. Okay, so I'm following you. Tell me about the case that the Supreme Court is airing. So this is the first time that Section 230 has been challenged in court and is being challenged by the family of a woman who was killed in Paris in 2015 in terrorist attacks. And this family is accusing Google of abating and abetting the terrorist attack by recommending ISIS content on its algorithm. Okay.

I'm up to speed now. What are the chances that Section 230 falls? What are the justices saying about this case? So people were a little freaked out because the justices are not exactly the internet experts, And they actually acknowledged that. Justice Elena Kagan yesterday said, it was a great quote. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet. Which was kind of a relief because we watched so many congressional hearings recently

that they've dragged Zuck and a bunch of other tech CEOs in. And they just embarrass themselves because they do not know anything about the internet or Facebook or Google. I remember these clips. Some legendary clips came out of those hearings. They made big tech companies look pretty. good. These CEOs look pretty good because younger people like us, we looked at tech CEOs and we're like, okay, they know what they're talking about. And lawmakers kind of look super ignorant. But back to your question, it seems like the justices are not ready to blow up the internet, which is good.

They appeared a little skeptical. Justice, Brett Kavanaugh said that the court should not crash the digital economy. So I feel like they do understand what's at stake here. And my question is, though, and this probably comes down to like the precise legal language of section 230, but YouTube does have these recommendation algorithms. So there is some line where YouTube is responsible for pushing certain content. So even though the justices are kind of hedging and saying, listen, we're probably not going to upend the interment, I can see why this case made it to the Supreme Court at all. For sure. There are a lot of smart people that say that Section 230 is outdated. Look, it was created in 1996.

These internet platforms are completely different than what they were, you know, 30 years ago, however long that was. And we need to update it because we're just dealing with a completely new environment. Right. So expect Congress to maybe step in and take some wax at it on certain areas, but not completely remove it, which would be a disaster. Right. Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing how that is updated and seeing some of the sound clips that come. out of the debate.

Speaking of kind of updating outdated practices from age-old times, the four-day work week is back in the news again. This time, it's because there's some actual data around how a four-day work week actually performs. So the biggest study ever on a four-day work week just ended in Britain. Why weren't we involved, first of all? The freaking Brits, man. They're doing it better than us. So here are the details of the study. 61 companies participated from June to December.

So pretty big sample size over a pretty long period of time. And the main benefits that came out of it, first of all, 90% of the companies said they'd continue testing the shorter week. That seems like the headline stat. 90% of 9 out of 10 firms that competed in this study want to continue it. And that's not the employees. That's the employers. That's the boss. That is why it's extremely interesting.

is the employers are like, all right, we're on board for this. And the main benefits was 46% of the company said productivity remained about the same, but then 34 reported improvement and 15 reported a significant improvement. So, again, you're managing a company. You want your employees to be productive. If a new innovation in work culture increases productivity, it doesn't matter if they're working five days, four days, as long as that, like, top number goes up. So I can see why people are, like, on board for this.

And of course, the employees love it, too. 78% said they were happier. 70% said they were less stress. And 62% took fewer days off. It seems like the classic win-win. It does. I'm just skeptical. First of all, it is a little scary about how productivity goes up when we're working less hour, fewer hours.

And it's just a little scary to me. Like, what are people doing all day? Well, there must be so many inefficiencies. There must be so many meetings that could have been an email or could have not been an email at all either. It's like a collective joke. Everyone knows that happens. Like, everyone knows who works in like a typical office job. You kind of go in, you maybe scroll your email for an hour, then you take a bathroom break.

Then you listen to this podcast. Yeah, then you listen to our podcast. That you should not cut out. But yeah, it does feel like a common sense. sense thing that, yes, a ton of people waste time, and maybe if you cut down the days are working, they'll come in a little more refreshed. And again, this feels like a debate we've been having forever and we'll continue to have, but having this data on it is, I think, a step forward towards making this reality. And then to bring it back to the U.S., of course,

Amazon tried to tell people to return to the office in a SlackChannel, like, all right, guys, we're going to need you to come in three days a week. Yeah. And immediate uproar. Everyone's like absolutely not. Petitions were being signed. So you can see there's still this tension between like employer and employee when it comes to in office working. Yeah, I was a cam counselor.

And we were always told to be strict initially and then let up. And so Amazon is kind of doing the opposite and a bunch of other companies that are telling their employees to come back to the office. But they were like, yeah, you can work remotely. Okay, now you actually have to come in. it's kind of the opposite of what you should do. Interesting. So, yeah, more than 14,000 Amazon employees join this Slack channel, and they're drafting a petition to Andy Jassy, the CEO.

Poor Andy. So we'll see what happens there. We are going to move on to chat GPT. We have to talk about chat GPT. I'm excited. First time on the show talking about the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room. And this is a new side hustle.

And Toby, I know you are a big side hustle guy. You're designing a pickleball shoe. Yes. You're designing a white noise. generator. I know these are all in stealth mode, but would you consider being a chat GPT author? I mean, I can see why people are doing it, but... Can I explain what's going on first? Yes. I explain what these people are doing.

Reuters looked on Amazon's Kindle store, and it found more than 200 e-books that were either written by chat GPT or co-authored by chat GPT. And so there are these guys or girls out there that are absolutely just like slinging, like cranking out books using chat GPT. This one guy said he created a 119 page novella called Galactic Pimp Volume 1 about alien factions in a far up galaxy warring over a human staff, crobble, which is really interesting to say the least, but he did it in less than a day and he said he could crank out 300 of these books in a year. I think it is the classic quantity over quantity or quantity over quality thing.

I do actually think that perhaps the romance genre or maybe even the erotica genre as the title you just suggested, there is a bit of a formula to it. And I could see potentially, it is the most lucrative book topic too is romance and erotica. So I could see it becoming a legitimate business avenue. I do feel like there is some human touch that is needed because chat, GBT, you can't just have it write a book. and it just publish it as is. So there is a human element. But I don't know. I mean, I'm not going to hate on people trying to make an extra buck.

Would you ever read a Chad GPT book? Honestly, the less I know, the better. Like, if I don't know that it was written by Chat, GBT, and it's a good book, then I probably don't care. It can't be worse than just the regular self-help books that are turned out. Right. They're probably indistinguishable. Right.

So I'm not hating on anyone making an extra buck. But the publishing industry more broadly is really dealing with chat GPT authorship. So there's this prestigious science fiction magazine called Clark's World, and they closed submissions yesterday because they were getting flooded with bot written stuff. I do think there will be a turn it in.com. I hope everyone listening has had to experience turn it in.com for chat chabit. And I know they're already being developed, but they're not quite at that level yet. So for places like this that want human submissions, hopefully a technology arises that can

kind of combat chat GBT. But in the meantime, honestly, I might try to write a book and see how it goes. I think you should. It really suits you. All right. Let's move on to the post-Super Bowl performance of some of the ads that aired at the Super Bowl. Most people see the ads and then probably forget about them a few weeks later, but I always love to check in on some the companies who spent $7 million, $14 million on ads and see how they're doing. The top performer, I think, from this batch was TEMU. Okay. I don't know what Timo you're going to have to explain.

I'll drop a little bit about Timo. But so in the sense the Super Bowl ad, the app's been downloaded 24 million times total and has over 11 million active users. So it's really, really big. It's the top app in the app store right now above any, like, it is the top free app. And basically I like to call Timu Alibaba means TikTok. So it's essentially, I know. It's essentially an online store with very, very cheap items.

I'm talking like 39 cents for like 400 Q-tips. But didn't we do this with Wish? It is very similar to Wish. In this case, it's a Chinese company. What it does is cut out the middleman. So you're getting the goods from the Chinese factory. It is slow. Yeah, I was going to say, what is delivery?

It sounds like you're going to get. Seven to 15 business days. So what you're saving in total cost, you're losing in convenience. So it's not exactly Amazon. It's a little bit of a different business model. Sounds like something my brother would use to get a knockoff soccer jersey. Right. That's exactly.

That's a great use case. Or, yeah, for some reason, you just want, I don't know, toilet paper to last you 10 years. You can get it very cheap. Okay. But so, yeah, it ran its TikTok. It ran a Super Bowl ad. The ad wasn't even good.

A lot of people don't remember it. But it did say, like, shop like a billionaire. That's its tagline. Shop like a billionaire. And it's also become big on TikTok. People are doing T-Moo halls where they try on 30 clothes. They spent, like, $5 for. So T-Moo's done super, super well.

The other performer in the class is Tooby. Okay, so you just need a four-letter name that starts with a T. Very similar. I know you remember the T-B ad. Oh, of course. Well, there was two, and the one that I do remember was when, you know, they made it seem like someone was sitting on a remote and you, everyone just sort of yelled at everyone. Yeah, it was, this is the rare ad that performed well, but also people will remember forever because, yeah, a lot of people thought that someone had changed the channel and got really mad at them. But so, two Bs now reached 64 million active users.

And the other thing I want to talk about is this is getting into a little bit of the streaming wars, but A, A Vod is ad-supported video on-demand, which is what T-B is. That means you're watching, it's almost like cable. TV, yeah. Yeah, you're watching your program. It gets interrupted by an ad. Advertisers pay T-B. That's its business model.

Versus FOD, which is streaming video on-demand, which is your Netflix's, your peacocks. Okay. And people are saying that those services are getting way more expensive. So now A-Vod is coming back into style, which, so T-Vy kind of time. it right with their Super Bowl ad. A lot of people are like, I want to pay like $60 for all my streaming services. I'm just going to go back to watching ads. Yeah, watching ads again. So Tooby's kind of having a moment right now. Interesting. Yeah. Toby, that was almost as illuminating as your

core, core discussion yesterday. Yesterday? I think it's because I also have a four-letter name that starts with T. T-Mood, Tooby, and Toby. You're going to about to shoot up to the top of the ad store. You should buy a Super Bowl ad next year. It would help. us both out. If enough people like, subscribe, and share. Who knows? We might be in front of you next year. All right. So yesterday you did, you did illuminate me a millennial on some TikTok trend that was called CoreCore. And I kind of want to flip the script a little bit. I need to bring something to the table here. Okay. And what I can bring to the table is that I read a lot of stuff all the time. You read the most news. I read a lot of news and I come upon some crazy

numbers and stats that people service. And so I want to bring that to you and our viewers. worship and listenership. Okay. So we're going to call this segment, Neal's numbers. Let's go. I love a nice alliteration. A lot of alliteration. And we're going to kick it off with this stat, which there are more hedge funds than Burger

Kings. Wait, say that again. There are more hedge fund globally. There are more hedge funds in the world. There are 30,000 hedge funds in the world. There are more hedge funds than Burger Kings. And there are way more than Taco Bells. There are more hedge fund managers than Taco Bells.

There are more hedge fund managers than Taco Bell managers. Oh, my. So that is, like, one of the funest stats in investing. And it shows that hedge funds aren't this, like, little club. They are a really big industry and a growing industry. And it kind of speaks to something significant and serious is that there was this growing trend of passive investing and hedge funds generate mediocre returns. And it's not worth putting your money in there, just dump it in an ETF.

Yeah. And, but they're still growing. That is great. Should we launch a hedge fund? We could launch a hedge fund. Or maybe we should launch a hedge fund. Or maybe we should launch a Burger King. I think we should.

No, yeah. The big takeaway of Jamie, one of our writers, was like, okay, we just need to build more Taco Bells. That's the main takeaway from this stat. All right. Okay. That's mind-blank. That's number one.

That's Neil's number, number one. The second Neal's number is that TSA intercepted 6,50042 guns at U.S. airports last year, which was a record. And it also is equivalent to 18 guns per day. Oh, my. How are people still doing this? Like, this is crazy. They claim they forgot.

Right, I know. I assume it's not malicious to tent because, like, obviously it's going to get... You don't have to be that dumb. Get caught. But, like, I mean, I get mad at someone if, like, they still have their water bottle left. Right. Which is, like, a very common thing to happen. But how are you forgetting your gun?

It really holds up the line because they have to call the fleece and they could arrest you. And it's this whole commotion. And I'm just trying to get to Fort Lauderdale. So, yeah, I've never seen it actually and happen. But, you know, 18 and... Today, it's actually been growing every year since 2010 besides the pandemic year. So that is Neal's number, number two. The third one, I just saw this last night, and it's just wild.

Do you know Victor when Bunyama is? I do. He's the next LeBron. He's the best prospect since LeBron. He's an insane NBA prospect. And apparently they measured him again. So he's really tall. Do you know where this is going?

No, I have no idea. Okay. So they measured him again. He is now, he's 19 years old. He is now 7-5 with shoes. That is 4 inches more than chat. It's just a shocking number. 7-5.

Yao Ming was 7-6. Oh, my good gosh. And he's still growing. Yeah. So they're going to keep measuring him. Like, he's going to be well past 7. You know, Yao Ming, and he shoots the 3. Right.

This is going to be a recurring segment on the show. How tall is Victor Wenban Yama? Oh, my Lord. Wow. So I love all those stats. Feel free to drop those at, yeah. whatever part, bar, or social gathering you go to this weekend, because incite Neal's numbers, because I just learned a lot.

Okay, we're going to wrap up the show with a very fun story, honestly, out of Starbucks. Okay. So Starbucks is now pursuing these olive oil drinks, and olive oil, they think it's... Wait, olive oil with coffee? Olive oil with coffee. So it's called oleato. And essentially, they're adding extra virgin olive oil to. some of their famous drinks.

So you might get a cold brew drink trot with like a golden olive oil foam. Or you have an oatmeal latte imbued with olive oil. I am totally for this. It sounds disgusting. But like Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, did his thing again. He went over to Italy. He saw them drinking it there and he wants to bring it back to U.S. consumers. So there's a thing Schultz does because I think there's a famous story of in the 80s he went on this trip to Italy.

and saw how espresso cafe culture, you know, was so big. And he wanted to bring that to the States. And that led to Starbucks being this more luxury brand. And he kind of turned the company around. Right. And then he did it again with Sicily. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? So he's got to go on these inspirational journeys and creates all these new drinks.

Who knows whether this will be successful, though? I'm a little worried. I know we kind of disagree about this, but it looks like it's going to add 120 calories to every drink. A little small droplet of olive oil. Do you think that's going to make? matter to people. And the example I want to cite is back in like the mid 2000, 2010's, fat-free yogurt was like the new rage. Like everyone wanted to sell yogurt that was fat-free. But then Chabani and these Greek yogurt companies said, no, no, no, we're going to do like

fat-filled yogurt, this really rich, creamy yogurt. And it totally reversed the trend towards fat-free. So I do think that we've had like kind of the surrogens of oat milk, and these alternative milks that are a little healthier for you. Now we're going back to a more decadent, decadent drink that has all of them in it. So I'm actually bullish on this. It looks good. I can't wait to try it.

And then there's a little bit more Starbucks news that I just want to cap the show off with. But essentially, Starbucks has filed a patent for a machine that would help baristas create those highly customized drink. So if you're the type of people who orders like a double shot, venty, mocha chino, with three pumps of vanilla, Starbucks is developing a machine that will help kind of streamline that process.

It's that kind of thing that's going to get us to the four-day work week. Good on you, Starbucks. Exactly. Thank you, Starbucks. I think that's the show. Before we go, I just want to thank our amazing team behind the scenes and shout them out. Our show is obviously a production of Morning Brew. The show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron.

VP of Production Operations is Dan Bousa. show's technical director is Justin Orlando. Hey Justin. Our supervising producer is the man himself, Bryce Belloff, and Devin Emery is our chief content officer. See you tomorrow. See tomorrow. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari.

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