Amtrak Launches NextGen Acela & The Wizard of Oz Takes the Sphere

0:00Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozma St John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC.

0:33Good morning for Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Amtrak rolled out the fastest trains in America, but will they have decent Wi-Fi? Then follow the yellow brick road to the Las Vegas Strip. The Wizard of Oz has arrived at the Sphere. It's Friday, August 29th. Let's ride.

0:55There's been lots of recent controversy around rebrands, but one organization is hoping to freshen up its design language without setting off a firestorm. And that could be tough because it's the state of Massachusetts. My home state, well, technically it's a Commonwealth, is updating its state flag, seal, and motto. And this week unveiled the finalists after receiving more than 1 ,150 submissions from the public. Toby, you poured through them all. Are we going to do better than Cracker Barrel? Absolutely not. One of the flag submissions is just a dinosaur running while holding a cup of Dunkin'.

1:29But I really enjoyed the motto submissions. Right now, the current Massachusetts state motto is Latin for, by the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty, which is good. But listen to this one. In cod we trust. Come on. That's perfect. I also liked the gateway to New Hampshire. And God darn it, Massachusetts, number one again, question mark, question mark, question mark. Which free sense 6093 is also objectively hilarious. My submission is we put the mass in massive student debt. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Neil, I'm really going to miss August, the warm summer nights, the out-of-office auto-replies, and the B2B ad platforms.

2:08Toby, you can use B2B ad platforms like LinkedIn ads all year round. Yeah, but not while fireflies are buzzing around my head. Well, you can get over 10 million C-suite execs and over 130 million decision makers, a.k.a. the people you need for your business, on their platform a-buzzin'. You can target by job title, industry, company, and more. They can link you with the right audience for your brand. So don't let the sun set on your strategy. LinkedIn ads will even give you a$100 credit on your next campaign, so you can try it for yourself. Just go to linkedin.com slash MBD. That's linkedin.com slash MBD.

2:42Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. Here's something you don't hear every day. America is getting new high-speed trains. Beginning yesterday, travelers along the Boston to D.C. corridor will start seeing next-gen Acela trains intended to speed up service along Amtrak's busiest route. These new trains put Thomas the Tank Engine to shame with the ability to reach speeds of up to 160 miles per hour. That's 10 miles per hour faster than the current Acela fleet and could shave off 20 minutes of your journey between Washington and New York. But there's a catch because of course there is when you're talking about trains and the United States.

3:19For now, these next-gen trains will actually be slower than existing Acelas because the rail infrastructure in the Northeast is ancient, a century old. Its aging switches, signals, and power system wasn't built for high-speed trains, which are also slowed down by having to share the tracks alongside freight and the slower, standard Amtrak trains that most of us take. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new trains are scheduled to take at least seven hours and five minutes to complete the trip from D.C. to Boston, compared to six hours and 56 minutes for the current Acela trains. Still, officials are billing the$2.5 billion project as the biggest investment in Amtrak's equipment in 25 years and a key part of the company's push to catch up with the rest of the developed world and having trains that, you know, aren't embarrassing.

4:04This was supposed to come out in 2021, but it's just been held up by testing complications, by infrastructure constraints, and also just the COVID-19 pandemic as well. And right now, the bottleneck is not the trains themselves because these trains are pretty suite. We're looking at them today. They look pretty state-of-the-art, but the infrastructure is what's holding its back right now. Right now, that corridor is actually shared with commuter and freight trains as well, which is not something that happens overseas in Europe or in Asia like that. So that's just one constraint. And then also just these tracks, power systems, these switches, these signals, some of them are over 100 years old.

4:41So even though you take modern technology, if you put it on 100-year-old tracks, it slows it down more than their top speed. So they're only going to get to their top speeds in certain portions of the track, which is why initially you're actually seeing a slower timetable for these faster trains. And one aspect of these trains that I didn't mention was that they're going to be bigger. They're going to carry 27 % more passengers, which is necessary because Amtrak is doing actually really well. There was record ridership in fiscal year 2024. It surpassed pre-pandemic levels for the first time. And then Acela specifically.

5:14Now, if you haven't heard of the Acela, it's Washington to Boston on these premium higher speed trains. It costs more. There's only business class and first class. So you're going to pay a pretty penny. But it's quite a comfortable experience. There were three million passenger trips on Acela last fiscal year, which generated five hundred and thirty million dollars in ticket sales. So Acela is doing well. It's why they're expanding the capacity of these trains to fit all these people that are shuttling up the East Coast. Even though the ridership is increasing, Amtrak's profitability is still in question.

5:47It's been losing money. It spent$4.3 billion on operations last year, but only brought in$3.6 billion. So the White House is putting a ton of pressure on Amtrak to become more profitable. So it's been reducing a little bit of its headcount and trying to get to an operational profit by 2028. We'll see if these new trains bring more people out, get more people excited about the train system, which is not something that usually happens. Famously, California has been trying to build one stretch of high-speed rail for literally decades now, and they haven't been able to manage it. Maybe this is just an incremental improvement that will show that, hey, we can make these foundational upgrades the system needs.

6:24Yeah, I mean, let's compare it with the rest of the world. I know I said high-speed trains, but technically going, topping out at 160 miles per hour is not even a high-speed train. That's characterized as systems that run above 186 miles per hour. That doesn't yet exist in the United States. We're still at 160. If you go around the world, a number of train systems do exceed 186 miles per hour in Europe and in Asia. The fastest train in the world right now is in China. It has a 217 mile per hour max. So the United States is still behind in terms of how fast these trains can go. Moving on, today marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans.

7:04In that time, the city has been rebuilt but remains on precarious ground, both geographically and economically. New Orleans has always been a city at war with its environment, built with rising water on one side and sinking land on the other. But on August 29, 2005, Katrina overwhelmed the city's levies. It flooded, killing 1 ,800 people, displacing roughly a million, and causing$200 billion in damage. It remains the costliest storm in American history. Some politicians argued whether New Orleans should exist at all given its tenuous environmental position. The country eventually decided yes, but it's been a long road to recovery in the decades since.

7:42Washington pumped$125 billion into rebuilding the shattered community. Later, another$14 billion went into a flood protection system of levees and pumps. But its three core industries, tourism, shipping, and oil and gas, are still shedding jobs to this day. The city is bleeding residents faster than any other city of its size and is now 23 % smaller than in 2000. And in the next 50 years, Louisiana is expected to lose as much coastal land as it did in the past 100, according to The Economist. Neil, Katrina was 20 years ago, but in many ways the city still sits on the edge of existential risk. Yeah, I think people are forgetting just how big this government recovery was.

8:23They poured$140 billion into New Orleans in order to rebuild this city post. Katrina. That is bigger, adjusted for inflation than the amount spent on the post-World War II Marshall Plan or the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan after the September 11th attacks. These two guys, a journalist and a urban planner, both from New Orleans, have this op-ed in the New York Times where they wrote the$140 billion failure we don't talk about. They said that this particular recovery was painful, expensive, and ultimately a failure. They say that New Orleans is more unequal and poorer than it was before Katrina.

9:03They said that the$140 billion was not spent wisely. It went to a variety of contractors and companies and local governments that were all at war with each other, and there was lack of organization and accountability, and that all this money kind of ended up as a slush fund for contractors and didn't actually go to the places where it was needed. Still, there are some success stories from the rebuilding project. The West Closure Complex is the biggest pumping station in New Orleans. It can empty an Olympic pool in five seconds, which is just difficult for my mind to comprehend. Residents pay about$150 a year to maintain it.

9:38It's looked at as the gold standard for flood prevention in the U.S. New York City actually looks at Louisiana and New Orleans in particular to figure out how they can protect their city from flooding. And then also, one thing that you don't think about is that you had to rebuild the entire school system as well after Katrina because basically public schools shut down. They decided to shift to an all charter school system, which was the first time in the country that a city had done that. And it's led to gains in education outcomes. It is now looked at as a massive success story where test scores have risen.

10:12So when you have the chance to rebuild like that, some parts of the city did in fact come back better. Yeah, the charter school system is very interesting. 56 % of high school students graduated on time before the storm. Now around 80 % of students graduate on time. There's still a lot of controversy around whether this system is working as well as intended. But, I mean, you can't argue with the metrics. Test scores, high school graduation rates, college going, pretty much every metric across the board when it comes to educational attainment has improved due to this charter school overhaul. New Orleans looks like there's a long way to go.

10:49its population is 23 % lower than it was before Katrina. There's going to be commemorations and memories all over the country today. Might be worth checking out a documentary or two or reading up on it this weekend. Welcome back to Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week, where Neil and I pick one stock from the week's news that is Grimsby Town and one stock that is Sad, Sad Manchester United. I won the pre-show game of Tongue Twisters saying a stunning rendition of Unique New York. So I'm up first, and my stock of the week is the Sphere Entertainment Company, because the hotly anticipated recreation of The Wizard of Oz began showing at its Las Vegas location last night.

11:26Emerald City is moving to Sin City for this whole month, with the Las Vegas Sphere transforming the classic film into a 1 ,700-seat sensory roller coaster. For over$100 a ticket, you can see the yellow brick road stretched out over its 160 ,000 square foot LED screen and can hear the rust of the tornado on its 167 ,000 speakers. The goal, as producer Carolyn Blackwood put it, was to create an immersive medium, not a passive one. Visitors will be thrust into Oz with a barrage of real-life effects, tornado winds from wind machines, actual fire when the wizard shows up, flying monkeys that take flight via inflatable drones.

12:03the goal is to make the movie feel both enormous and alive. Before the launch, the show sold over 200 ,000 tickets. Of course, using technology to recreate and expand upon the classic film has not come without criticism. Film historians and online critics have slammed the spectacle as a desecration of the source material, pushing back specifically on the use of AI to, quote, enhance the original work. But producers of the film have dismissed that backlash as premature since no one had seen the whole film yet. but that all changed yesterday. Neil, this movie arrives right as the broader film industry grapples with anxiety over AI replacing jobs.

12:39The sphere's publicly traded stock is up about 8 % this week, but it'll be interesting to see how Dorothy and Toto on the biggest screen ever is received by the masses. Yeah, it'll be a huge test for how AI and Hollywood can collaborate. One specific AI use that has gotten critics all riled up is the fact that they are artificially generating images that are not there in the original 1939 movie because this screen is so much bigger than what The Wizard of Oz has typically been shot in. So Dorothy has legs in a particular scene where it was cut off before. The poppy field goes on and on and on.

13:18The cowardly lion and Uncle Henry in certain scenes were not in the scene. They were technically off the screen, but they were generated to be on the screen in this particular format for this massive screen. So we'll see how audiences respond. I think it's particularly cool. But if you look at the comments of the CBS Sunday Morning video on YouTube where they talked about The Wizard of Oz, you saw things like artistic butchery, the death of cinema. You should all be ashamed. And that is coming from a place of deep concern for Hollywood and creatives across the board where AI is threatening to take their jobs.

13:52The Sphere, working with over 2 ,000 people from Google DeepMind to Warner Bros. people, are saying that we can do this collaboratively where it enhances and refreshes a classic. Well, the issue is your view of cinema. A lot of people view cinema as, I'm calling it cinema because I'm a cinephile, they view it as a static medium. You release a movie and then the movie is what it is. This reimagines it as almost a software program that you can update and remix and just endlessly change with the technology we have at our disposal today to improve it, or maybe not. That's the question that people will have to sift through themselves.

14:28So a lot of the producers are saying, you've got to unlearn how you used to watch movies. This is the future. We have this insane medium. Why not use it and project more effects in there than you're typically used to? So maybe it's just an ultimate commodification of just classic IP, or maybe it is an awesome reimagining. I also thought it was very interesting why they chose The Wizard of Oz specifically. Well, first of all, it's the most viewed movie in history according to the Library of Congress. So there's that name recognition. Everybody knows The Wizard of Oz. And if you're trying to sell tickets, well, that's obviously a good choice.

15:01And then second was the symbolism. They chose The Wizard of Oz because it was the technical marvel of its time. It was pushing boundaries. It used technicolor. And it was one of the first movies to do this and make those colors actually pop. So, you know, back in 1939, it was a technological marvel. They're hoping that the same goes for 2025. I can't wait to see it. Now let's take a quick break before we go to our dog of the week. Just like you have regular visits at the doctor, your company's supply chain needs checkups too. Thankfully, it takes less than a minute to do it with Supply Chain Health Vitals Checkup from SPS Commerce.

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16:12That's sbscommerce.com slash morningbrew.

16:42my iPhone. If that sounds like the kind of simplicity you want in a credit card, apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Brands. Terms and more at applecard.com. Okay, my dog of the week is India, which the U.S. slapped with one of the highest tariff rates of any country in the world, 50%. With the American market becoming too expensive, analysts are warning of a jobs bloodbath for labor-intensive Indian industries, including textiles, jewelry, and farming, which employ hundreds of thousands of people.

17:16The U.S.'s 50 % tariff rate on India, which went into effect on Wednesday, is made up of a 25 % reciprocal tariff, plus a 25 % tariff to penalize India for buying Russian oil, which the U.S. says is funding Putin's war machine in Ukraine. The steep rate came as a huge shock since the U.S. and India are close allies and Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi share a close relationship. India's number one trade destination is the United States. But with tariffs in place, India's major export industries could get wiped out. I'm talking southern India's shrimp farms, which is where most of the frozen shrimp you buy at the grocery store comes from, or the diamond workers of Gujarat, home to the world's largest diamond cutting and polishing center.

17:57Not all of India's$90 billion in exports to the U.S. will be subject to the new tariffs. Electronics are exempt, a big win for Apple, which increasingly makes its iPhones there, and so are pharmaceutical products. Still, about two-thirds of India's goods exports to the U.S. will be tariffed, which could lead to an estimated 70 % drop in shipments, or in other words, a near-trade embargo. A jewelry industry leader called it an earthquake. It is an earthquake because once those U.S. buyers go to a different competitor, it's very hard to win that market share back. So even if this is just a brief moment in time and the tariff tension eventually settles down a little bit, you have lost some of your business, which will have long-term effects.

18:38Let's talk about Russian oil, because if that's at the heart of this issue, can India wean itself off Russian oil? And it looks tough because, one, India is the number three biggest oil consumer in the world. And since the Ukraine war broke out, they have gone from sourcing less than 1 % of their oil from Russia to 40 % of their oil from Russia today. So it's become a much bigger part. And one of the reasons is because Russia allows them to buy the oil in rupees, which is their native currency, instead of the U.S. dollar. So that is one reason why it's definitely a favorable situation for India.

19:13And then the Indian refiners have saved around $17 billion on buying Russian crude oil since 2022. So again, these are big numbers that we're talking about here. It's not going to be easy for them to just immediately find a fungible source to sub in for the Russian oil that they've been consuming. Yeah. And the problem isn't just 50 % tariffs. It's their tariffs related to their competitors. So that 50 % tariff is 16 percentage points above China, 31 percentage points higher than Southeast Asia and 35 percentage points higher than South Korea. So if you are making the same type of goods, think textiles, right?

19:48India definitely competes with Bangladesh in terms of textiles. Well, now they're at a 30 % price disadvantage to Bangladesh, which is why you have textiles industry in India saying, well, we're going to lose millions of jobs here. And the industries I mentioned, it's not all the industries that are going to be subject to the tariffs, just two thirds of them. But those industries are the ones that are mass employment. Those are the ones that employ so many people. It's not the tech industry, which has less employment. employment, its textiles and farming and things like that, which, you know, are very labor intensive.

20:22And that's why India is in crisis mode right now and trying to figure out how it will respond to this. Prime Minister Modi actually traveled to Japan today where, you know, he's trying to get Japan to buy more stuff from India. Basically, the goal now for Modi is saying, well, if the U.S. market is closed off, well, I got to find some other markets for my exporters or else we're going to lose a ton of jobs here. Tomorrow is week one of the new college football season. So don't be surprised if you see a drunk 19-year-old yelling something like, Roll Tide, hook them, or we are unprompted. The marquee matchup tomorrow, and it's extremely juicy, is the number one Texas Longhorns visiting the third-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes in Columbus.

20:59But outside of the horseshoe, before the noon kickoff, is another duel we're keeping our eye on, Fox vs. ESPN. Both networks will be outside Ohio Stadium for their pregame shows, a media rivalry that escalated this offseason with an emphasis on online creators. Fox's Big Noon Kickoff will bring on Barstool Sports' Dave Portnoy to join its panel as part of a broader partnership with the company. That was seen as a counterpunch to ESPN, which hired sports personality Pat McAfee for its own college pregame show, College Game Day. ESPN currently has the upper hand, with Game Day entering its 39th season compared to Fox's Big Noon Kickoff, which was launched in 2019.

21:36But Fox is hoping Portnoy's big personality and his University of Michigan homerism will tilt the playing field. Toby, they're calling it the frat boy takeover of sports media. There are so many layers to this because also Fox has the rights to air Big Ten games while ESPN has the rights to air SEC games. So everywhere you look, it's Fox versus ESPN on the personality front, on the game front itself. And we haven't even really mentioned the fact that Texas versus Ohio State is just a banger of a game to start the year off with. But yeah, this competitive conference realignment has made its way all the way up to the broadcasters themselves.

22:10Right now, it looks like game day does have the upper hand. Last season, game day averaged 2.2 million viewers, while big noon averaged just under 1 million viewers. Obviously, some new faces in play this year, so we'll see if Fox can close the gap there. But it is funny that maybe the biggest rivalry isn't even taking place on the field. It's taking place before the game and during the broadcast itself. The other aspect of the college football season we should call out is sideshow Bill, as in Bill Belichick. as in Bill Belichick and his girlfriend, 24-year-old Jordan Hudson, who just can't stop making headlines.

22:43Somehow, Belichick's college coaching debut has been overshadowed by the pair's business ventures and morning show appearances. First, there was the awkward moment on CBS Sunday morning where Hudson interjected when Belichick was asked how the pair met. Then Hudson allegedly interfered with UNC getting a season of HBO's Hard Knocks, which cost the university millions in exposure. And just yesterday, it was revealed that Hudson had used Belichick's company to file for the trademark for the term gold digger alongside 17 other filings earlier this year. Needless to say, Neil, somehow the greatest football coach of all time making his college football debut for the University of North Carolina has gone under the radar thanks to the other noise from the two's relationship.

23:25Well, I don't know if you would know that if you were on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill because the Belichick merch is going crazy. They're playing Monday night. UNC already sold out football tickets faster than it ever has, hoping to get this return that it spent a ton of money on Bill Belichick, $10 million a year, putting him in the top 10 college coaches across the board. They're expecting a$750 ,000 bump in merch and concessions. So, you know, this has been a financial windfall for UNC, and Belichick and Hudson are hoping that it's a financial windfall for them as well. But yeah, everyone's going to be watching Monday night to see Bill Belichick, an eight-time Super Bowl winner in the pros who has passed up for a bunch of professional jobs, making his college debut in Chapel Hill.