Are Cars Sharing Your Data? & ABBA's Virtual Avatar Concert Worth Millions

0:00Stocks? ETFs? Or what about mutual funds? Choosing your investments is easier with Fidelity. Our step-by-step experience can help you pick out the right investments for you. Plus, with recurring investments, you can decide how much and how often to invest. Lastly, there's 24-7 help if and when you need it. To find your next investment, head to fidelity.com slash trading. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC. Member NYSC SIPC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, the Rolling Stones are dropping their first new album in almost 20 years, and they're not the only band staving off Father Time.

0:40Plus, I'll share a stat that highlights just how lucky we are to be living here. Ben, the U.S. military is in a race against China to develop a horde of AI-powered drones. Plus, Neil and I will tell you about the unofficial drink of the summer, the Honey Deuce. It's Thursday, September 7th. Let's ride.

1:04Okay, I just want to give a shout out at the top of the show to More & Brew Daily listeners, because as some of you may know, I lost my wallet over the weekend. So I asked you all for some recs on replacements. And boy, as always, did you come through. A couple of things stood out to me from these recommendations, though. 90 % of them were for minimalist or slim wallets. So we're not a market research firm, but if MBD listeners are anything to go by, the slim wallet trend is definitely a thing neil right and that makes sense because uh you don't need to carry cash anymore okay my wallet is just literally like one one unit where you press a little trigger at the bottom and then it brings up your uh your credit card a lot of the wallets were like that the the trigger system but i've always kind of carried cash i think it's because i grew up playing like poker a little bit and like a lot of so sometimes i would win money playing poker and just have cash on me.

1:56And it's always nice. You never know in a pinch if you need cash. So I'm kind of a cash guy. So if you have any other wallet recommendations, people, please send them in to me that could hold a little bit of cash. I would not invest in the wallet industry. You think it's just, I think, yeah. Why? I think eventually all our phones will be our wallets. I mean, that's obviously not the spiciest take of all, but I don't, yeah, I just, I wouldn't like start a wallet company right now. But you see those Ridge wallet Instagram ads everywhere. That was one of them. What do people say about those? Exter wallets.

2:27I'm just going to list what people said. Exter wallets. One company is literally called Slim Wallets. One was called Roam Wallets and then Ridge Wallets a couple times as well. I have a secret. All right. There's another one. No idea where that's from or how I got it, but it is a pretty good wallet. All right. To king things off, let's talk about a new study from the Mozilla Foundation, which is best known for making the Firefox web browser, but it also writes reports about the privacy practices of different tech products. And this week, it unleashed a report that was equivalent of a Comedy Central roast.

2:58It was absolutely savage. Mozilla reviewed a product category that had the worst privacy practices of any category they have ever reviewed. And I want listeners to maybe guess what it is before I move on. It is cars. Mozilla said cars are the official worst category of products for privacy it's ever reviewed, concluding that 92 % of the 25 automakers it reviewed gave drivers little, if any, control over their data and 84 % share or sell your data. Through a web of sensors, microphones, cameras, phones, apps, and connected devices, cars can collect an astonishing amount of data. Nissan, for example, said it had all types of info on you, including your driver's license number, immigration status, race, and sexual orientation.

3:44and from its data, it can build profiles with psychological trends, consumer preferences, intelligence, and genetic characteristics. Nissan and Kia even said they collect data on their drivers' sexual activity and sex lives. Toby, cars have been flying under the radar in terms of privacy for years, but with all the tech that's been loaded onto them, Mozilla says, it's time to recognize them for the massive privacy liability they are. Right, and there are also just these connection hubs too, because even though you have all these technological advances within the cars, You connect your phone to it every time to play music, to access Google Maps, stuff like that.

4:19And so your car also gets access to all that data as well. So it's like this double data hive. And they're really just giant phones too, if you think about it. Like they have cameras on it, forward and inward facing cameras. They have things like you can play music on them, you can navigate. So they really are these giant phones on wheels that operate in such a gray area. Because that's the thing with cars. Like it's very hard to opt out of these privacy deals because if you have a car, you're going to drive it. And most of the privacy agreements are set up to say like, OK, by driving the car, you agree to our privacy.

4:53And that's just a complete there is no opt out feature. You have to drive your car. Yeah. But I think that's one of the things that Mozilla is digging these automakers for. They're like they're not giving consumers an option to say, don't share my data or wipe my data at the end of, you know, at the end of. And Tesla has like an app that you download. All these cars, automakers have apps that you download that kind of tie your phone to your vehicle. So we're just becoming ever more wired to our cars over different ways. And the craziest one to me was Subaru's privacy policy says that even passengers of the car that use the services have consented to allow them to use and maybe even sell their personal information.

5:30That's absurd to me. So even if you're riding in the passenger seat of the car, Subaru is like, actually, we get access to your data too if you connect your phone to the car. So again, it's just like this crazy area of non-consent. Like no one is really consenting to this because no one is reading the privacy manual of their cars. And you're especially not doing it. In Subaru's kind of fine print, they say you should tell your passengers. And in the Mozilla article, they're like, that's great small talk advice. Like, let's bring up the privacy pamphlet when you get into my Subaru. You may want to think twice about taking over the ox, I got to say.

6:07Right, exactly. Why are cars so bad? I just want to run down a few of the criteria that Mozilla judged them on. They all collect more personal data than necessary and use that info for a reason other than to operate your vehicle and manage their relationship with you. More than half say they would share it with the government or law enforcement without a court order. And then most drivers have little or no control over their personal data. Only two of the 25 car brands say that all drivers have the right to have their personal data deleted. So that is sort of the rubric that they were judged on.

6:39And they were like, across all product categories, even mental health apps, sex toys, these things that are known for being extremely invasive. They said that cars are the worst. I just am wondering whether consumers care about privacy anymore because. Consumers do. There was a study, it was like 50 % or so of people said that they do care about their privacy. Again, it's probably one of those things that you're not consciously thinking about on a day-to-day basis. But then when you take a step back, you're like, yeah, I'd probably like a little say over what people are doing with my data. But yeah, I think the funniest quote out of this study was Albert Fox, who is a human rights fellow at Harvard, said increasingly most cars are wiretaps on wheels.

7:21It is just crazy how much like these things are listening to you on a daily basis. All right, Neil, let's move on. We've talked a lot about the AI arms race when it comes to big tech companies, but there's also a literal AI arms race going on between the U.S. and Chinese militaries. Kathleen Hicks, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, gave a speech yesterday where she laid out the U.S. military's vision for developing a massive fleet of AI-powered drones and other technology in the next two years. The goal, of course, is to match the rising threat from China and other adversaries. Hicks told listeners to imagine distributed pods of self-propelled autonomous systems afloat, powered by the sun and other virtually limitless resources, packed with sensors aplenty and able to relay information in near real time.

8:11Other things on our wish list were autonomous ground-based systems, space-based systems so numerous they'd be difficult to destroy, and autonomous anti-missile technology as well. It kind of felt like a Google or Microsoft earnings call with how many times it's mentioned the word autonomous systems and artificial intelligence. But Neil, this has always been the lingering second order effect of AI. How was it going to impact our military in the future of warfare? And yesterday we finally got a glimpse of the so-called replicator drone program that the US is cooking up. Wow, it's heavy stuff, but you can see why they are investing in it because these things are much cheaper to build than manned aircraft.

8:53I mean, what is the F-35 costs$80 million per aircraft. They always low ball it. And at some of the low end of these drones that only cost$3 million to make, they can process way more information a lot more quickly than other types of systems that we have in existence. So you can see why this is a huge thing that we're investing in. And the big threat is obviously China and when you're like, you know, when critics say to the U.S. military, like, why are you doing all this AI stuff? It's super dangerous. And they respond, look, like we don't really have a choice. The PRC, the People's Republic of China is doing all of this.

9:28And just like, we're not at war with them. We don't want to be at war, but we have to keep pace. And that's why we have to invest in these new technologies. Yeah. This actually kind of reminded me of Operation Warp Speed, but for AI powered drone warfare, Operation Warp Speed was when we developed the COVID-19 vaccine in a really short timeline. That was kind of the energy I was getting from this speech is that we have to galvanize the military. If we sleep on this, then we'll just be lapped by our competitors and adversaries. And yeah, the Pentagon has earmarked some cash. They've requested$1.8 billion for artificial intelligence in the next fiscal year.

10:06So the money is about to pour into this space. And I do actually want to talk a little bit about private companies that could benefit from this. One company is called Ocean Arrow, which has developed an environmentally powered autonomous underwater vehicle. And so I feel like we're about to see, again, I've used the term AI arms race. We've seen it kind of in the chat GPT kicked off the generative AI one. I wonder if we're going to see this boom in private autonomous AI powered vehicles that can stay up in the air powered by the sun forever. So I feel like we're going to see some private companies kind of emerge from like these bigger government contracts.

10:42Yeah, it could shake up the defense contracting world because forever it's been dominated by four companies. And I'm not going to get them all right. But, you know, it's Lockheed Martin, it's Boeing, it's Northrop Grumman, it's Raytheon. You got them. I guess those are all the four. But they've dominated this sector for decades, just hoovering up all this money from Pentagon's budgets. And now that the Pentagon is spending way more money on software and autonomous systems, there's going to be a whole new generation of contractors that people can be mad at. Like Andrew Real is one. Palantir, we've talked about a bunch where they're developing AI systems for the military.

11:20And if I were like Boeing or North of Grumman, I'd be like, well, some of the stuff that we've made for decades may not be so relevant anymore to what the US military is trying to do. All right, switching gears completely. For our next story, you can't always get what you want, but you sometimes do. The Rolling Stones, I butcher that. The Rolling Stones revealed their first album of new songs in almost 20 years yesterday called Hackney Diamonds. And while the jury's still out on the music, it seems the Stones haven't lost their marketing mojo at all. To tease the album, they projected their iconic mouth and tongue logo on landmarks in cities all around the world.

11:59And yesterday they dropped a single called Angry with a music video starring the actor Sidney Sweeney. This is how you bridge the generational divide. And speaking of generational divide, I just want to point out that Mick Jagger is 80 years old. And not to go full labor economist on this, he reflects the trend of more octogenarians still working, at least in the U.S. About 650 ,000 Americans over 80, including music legends Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, were working last year, which is an 18 % increase from the decade before. And almost half of them are working full time. So the Stones were formed in 1962, and they're putting out a new album in 2023.

12:38Yeah, I mean, you touched on it, but like the way to get people interested in a new album, first album since 2006, or since 2005, excuse me, is to launch using a music video starring Sidney Sweeney. So I still think they have their marketing fastball a little bit, because this is, whenever I saw people covering it, they're like, this Sydney Sweeney music videos. It gets the people talking for sure. But it's also just this industry of aging songwriters cashing in on kind of their last little bit of, I don't want to say relevance. Oh, Mick Scott. They got 20 years to go. Right. They still have some cultural cachet, but like, I mean, Bruce Springsteen sold his music catalog for$500 million back in 2021.

13:19We've seen this trend of people using, making money off their catalogs we haven't seen as much people actually releasing new stuff so it's been interesting to see rolling stones are back to the drawing board again um but then if we also want to talk a little bit about i i read this other article about this thing called the abba arena which is this place it shows abba concerts but it's 3d virtual avatar renderings of abba and this place just mints money. The arena itself costs$175 million to build, seats 3 ,000 people, but it's sold more than 1.5 million tickets already. It's making more than$2 million a week.

14:00And so this is another way of kind of an aging artist group making money off their song catalog, but just in a very different technologically powered way. So you have Rolling Stones on one side releasing albums, then you've ABBA on the other side saying, we're just going to write our catalog, but we're just going to do it in this very modern and compelling way. Yeah. And apparently they're, they want to expand this show to Vegas, New York, Singapore, Sydney, a bunch of other, other places. So this could definitely be a model. I would say it's, everyone's probably thinking about like the Tupac hologram from Coachella, but this is a completely different technology.

14:33There is an actual band there. There's a crazy light show. It's super expensive. They built this arena purposely just for this avatar. And apparently it's doing super well. I think it started in 2022. It was supposed to start in 2020, 2021, but COVID delayed it. So that could be another model is like, all right, well, you know, I'm old. Oh, you know, what's his name? Uh, Billy Joel is going to hang up the cleats at MSG next year. Elton John stopped touring earlier this summer. So if they wanted to, you know, kind of replicate themselves digitally and still make a lot of money, then that is certainly one way.

15:05I think ABBA is providing the blueprint for that. Totally go watch electric ABBA concert. They used, they use motion capture technology to film younger people behaving as ABBA. So it like is reflecting when they were actually touring. So it is a really cool technology to see how they kind of merge new with old. All right, Neil, before we jump into the next story, we're going to take a quick break.

15:29Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host a 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 tonight on NBC.

16:01When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. Let's head to our Thursday segment, Neil's Numbers, where I share three numbers from the week's news that will make your head spin faster than a Patrick Mahomes spiral. Up first, an update on the gender gap between men and women in the workplace.

16:42It has never been smaller. The difference in the labor force participation rate between men and women was just 10.5 percentage points in August 2023, an all-time low. So maybe this whole lazy girl trend was a myth because this summer, companies have more women on their payrolls than at any point in U.S. history. After the pandemic, women have reentered the workforce at a faster pace than men, thanks to the emergence of flexible work and COVID era stimulus programs that boosted childcare options. And that is where this story takes a sharp U-turn, because later this month,$24 billion in government aid for childcare is going to expire, threatening these historic gains for women in the workforce.

17:23More than 70 ,000 child care programs are estimated to be at risk of closing in October when this funding runs out, meaning 3.2 million children could lose their spots. And as a result, women might be forced to give up their jobs and spend more time with kids in the absence of child care options. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in July that a lack of affordable and accessible child care is a stunning oversight by policymakers and called the problem a huge drag on our economy. Yeah, I saw 6 ,000 daycares in New York City alone might be at risk of closing. It is one of those things where you forget how big of an economic unlock child care is for women and men.

18:03And so it's just ridiculous that we've gotten to this point where suddenly millions and millions of kids might not have access to child care. It's truly an economic issue as well. So that's definitely something to keep an eye on when this funding runs out. so disruptive. I mean, I'm at the age where a bunch of my friends have really small kids, and our group chats have transitioned from five years ago talking about maybe the World Series or the contenders of the World Series to being like, you know, my child care place closed down, and I don't know what to do. I need to find this option because I need to work and all that kind of stuff.

18:35So it's such a pressing concern for a lot of people, and the government's probably going to try to find ways to re-up this funding, but it does seem like a pretty dire situation. and could threaten like these historic gains that women have had. And on the other side of the coin, you know, we talked about this gap being the narrowest it's ever been. The male labor force participation rate has dramatically declined. It was near 90 percent in 1950 and now it's in 2023. Now it's like 68 percent. So that is something that is like of a huge concern as well. All right. Our number number two is an alarming statistic about cancer.

19:15Cases of cancer among people under 50 have surged almost 80 % globally in the three decades, from 1990 to 2019, according to a new survey that examined 29 cancers across 204 countries and regions. Breast cancer accounted for the greatest number of early onset cases in 2019, but windpipe and prostate cancers had the fastest rate of any during the period studied. This is to some degree a first world problem, as they say. The highest rates of early onset cancers were found in North America, Oceania, and Western Europe. So what is going on here? The rise seems to be linked to generally unhealthy lifestyles.

19:52The study said that things like diets high in red meat and salt and low in fruit and milk, as well as alcohol and tobacco use were the main risk factors. Secondary factors were not getting off the couch and exercising, obesity, and high blood sugar, plus genetic factors also play a role. In conclusion, the researchers said we need to invest in early detection and diagnosis, and more research into the causes of early onset cancer to find better treatments. I mean, we talked about blue zones on the podcast last week. It seems like the entire modern world is set up to be very anti-blue zone-y in the sense that everything you eat seems to have high sodium content, a lot of red meat.

20:29So I don't know, anytime you see these studies, you do do a mental checklist as well. And I could probably reduce the red meat in the sodium consumption. Don't want to be a statistic. All right, for my final number, I want to talk about a manufacturing problem, a human manufacturing problem, that is, because a new study argues that about 900 ,000 years ago, our ancestors had a very close call with extinction. The researchers used genetic analysis and computer modeling to estimate that their population plummeted 99 percent to less than 1 ,300 reproducing individuals. They aren't sure why there was such a population crash back then, but it could be attributed to dramatic changes in climate like cooling sea surface temperatures, droughts or longer periods of glaciation.

21:13Whatever caused our ancestors to almost completely die out, it could explain why humans have remarkably low genetic diversity compared to other living primates, because there had to have been a lot of inbreeding to build our population back up from the brink of extinction. Other scientists have been skeptical of this study, saying that further research is needed to corroborate these claims of a nearly fatal population bottleneck almost one million years ago. But I don't know about you. After reading this, I'm like, damn, I'm lucky to be here right now. Oh, so lucky. Thank you to those 1 ,300 reproducing individuals.

21:44Without the 1 ,300, we literally wouldn't have Morning Brew Daily Show. We did when we were talking about the statistic in the office yesterday. Everyone kind of thought about it. That's not a lot of people. None of this would have happened without those 1 ,300. And they didn't have the Starfield developers, you know, kind of encouraging them to reproduce. Exactly. All right, Neil, let's move on. We've talked a lot about how rising temperatures this year have thrown a global warming size wrench into the food supply, but no commodity has been as affected severely as olive oil. A massive drought in Spain cut the nation's olive oil output in half for the 2022-2023 season, while production challenges in Italy have also reduced supplies globally.

22:24As a result, prices of olive oil have doubled over the last 12 months to$8 ,000 a metric ton, an all-time record. And here's an unexpected secondary effect. Rising prices have turned olive oil into a target for thieves. The most recent heist evolved over 50 ,000 liters of extra virgin olive oil getting stolen from a mill in Spain in the middle of the night. Total value of the haul,$536 ,000. This isn't the first time rising commodity prices have driven crime waves. Copper, for instance, has been a popular target over the years. But, Neil, it's interesting to see olive oil turn into this liquid gold worth stealing.

23:04Yeah, as you said, any time a price rises becomes a threat or a target for theft, what I found interesting was that they're not just stealing olive oil. They're stealing olives off the freaking tree and bringing them into these, like, you know, Breaking Bad type labs where they're making and basements where they're actually producing olive oil and selling it on the black market. So I think this thing has become so valuable. And like you said, there's going to be a ton of food price volatility from coffee to cocoa to all these other commodities that are going to be fluctuating in price thanks to climate change and disruption.

23:39So, you know, once they're done with olive oil, we'll probably move on to the next thing that has a huge price spike because production is stymied somehow. Olive oil is also a popular product to fake. So in March, authorities in one region of Spain withdrew 11 brands from the market because they'd been mixed with other oils and they weren't fit for consumption. This reminded me, did you ever see the Sour Grapes documentary on Netflix a few years back? It was about a guy who was this really big wine collector, and he kind of duped the entire wine world by selling these supposedly really, really rare bottles of wine.

24:11But in his house, he was literally just mixing and matching different wines and passing them off as this. So I don't know. That just reminded me of that. And then also, if we just want to bring this back to you, and if you're not a big olive oil consumer, but maybe you're a big Starbucks consumer, remember, Starbucks launched their Oleato line, which is olive oil infused coffees. And so a lot of people are saying, keep an eye out for a price increase on the Oleato line going forward. I haven't heard of anybody ordering that. I just got to say. We're going to go try it after this. Okay. We've been saying that for months.