Congestion Pricing Hits NYC & Meta Backtracks on AI Characters

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0:27Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, ski patrollers are striking against Vail, and it's about as chaotic as a beginner pizzaing down a black diamond. Then the internet is not a fan of Meta's weird AI chatbots. It's Monday, January 6th. Let's ride.

0:50One of the great New Year's traditions, along with the ball dropping in Times Square, is the first tuna auction of the year at the famed Toyosu Fish Market in Tokyo, and this year brought the goods. Over the weekend, a 608-pound bluefin tuna sold for$1.3 million, making it one of the priciest tuna ever to be sold in the history of sushi, equivalent to$2 ,100 per pound. The buyer was a Michelin-starred Japanese sushi restaurant chain, which said it would put the tuna on the menu at 13 of its restaurants. Toby,$2 ,100 per pound. Do you think you'd be able to tell the difference if I gave you that tuna versus sashimi grade one I pick up at Whole Foods?

1:33Oh, absolutely. I have a very delicate palate. It was very funny, though, to see all the news headlines comparing this tuna to various things in terms of size. The Washington Post went with it weighs as much as a grizzly bear. The Guardian went with a motorbike. And a Japanese publication kept it simple and just called it as fat as a cow. But I have to ask, Neil, are you a toro guy, a chutorro, or a otoro? That's fatty tuna, medium fatty tuna, or very fatty tuna. Well, if I think I want the most flavor, then I got to go with the fattiest, right? Which is Otoro. I'm an Akimi guy, which is just that lean, very pink.

2:09That's ruby red tuna. So I'm a lean tuna guy. You're a fatty tuna guy. Yeah, but I'm not even nowhere near as snobby as far as tuna is concerned as you. I didn't know this about you. I had to Google those words. I'm not as snobby as I think. Now a word from our sponsor, Public.com. Neil, whoever said you can't have it all, they were a liar. I think that was just your mom trying to get you to eat less dessert over Christmas. Okay, mom was right, but when it comes to investing, public lets you have it all. It combines pretty much every asset class you'd want. Stocks, bonds, crypto options, and it's all in one place.

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3:23When 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. If you want to drive in to crash a podcast taping of Morning Brew Daily, It's going to cost you even more than the Lincoln Tunnel toll. Starting yesterday, New York City began implementing congestion pricing, becoming the first U.S.

4:01city to tax drivers taking their car into the central business district. New York's$9 charge applies to vehicles entering anywhere south of 60th Street in Manhattan, home to popular tourist areas like Broadway, Theater, and Soho, as well as major office districts like the Flatiron one that Brew uses as its HQ. It has been a roller coaster to get to this point, which highlights how controversial this plan is. Congestion pricing was set to begin last June before its one-time champion, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, scrapped it in what critics call a political ploy to help Democrats' chances in the election.

4:38After November's election, Hochul said, you know what, I'd like a take back and gave it the green light, but at a reduced rate,$9 instead of the original$15. Toby, this congestion pricing plan has invited is a hot dog a sandwich level debate, but with a lot higher stakes. If it succeeds in New York, you can bet other US cities are gonna be taking notes. It is very high stakes. People have very strong opinions about it. So far, we don't have a ton of data on it because it only rolled out on Sunday, but the data was a little bit mixed. Initially, once it was rolled out, the average speed within the congestion zone inched upwards 3 % to 15 miles an hour around 8 a.m.

5:19on Sundays. But then by noon, the travel speed had fallen to 13 miles per hour, which was slightly slower than last year. So obviously it was just one day. It was a holiday weekend, so that data isn't going to really be that meaningful. But going forward, people will be looking on if average traffic speeds do increase, which would mean that the congestion pricing is doing what it sets out to do, which is reducing congestion. Right. Let's talk about what it set out to do. What are the goals of congestion pricing? Well, one of them is to reduce traffic in lower Manhattan. New York City was the most congested city in the entire world last year, according to a study from Enrix.

5:59Drivers lost 101 hours on average sitting in traffic in the city last year. So reducing traffic, reducing emissions, clearing up the roadways, a major goal. Another goal on the other side of that is for the toll to raise money for non-private vehicle options like transit, buses, subways. The idea is to raise$15 billion to apply to funding for those measures. So it's kind of this two-sided coin where we have reduced congestion, reduced traffic deaths. Hundreds of people lost their lives in traffic accidents in New York City last year. On the other hand, it's hoping to raise money to fuel transit options.

6:37And that's the goals of proponents. And opponents, on the other hand, they came from the suburbs, New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester, who say it's just a money grab by New York City and another tax on people who have been hurting from inflation. And I do think that that is one critique that you will see offered. Unless you make the subways work, unless you make them reliable and safe, then it doesn't make sense to send more people towards these public transit options and tax people for driving their cars. So what is actually going to happen, though, is that New York City is going to secure$15 billion up front through bond financing and will use this program, the tolling revenue raised by this program, to slowly pay off that bond.

7:18So hopefully you start seeing some of those improvements to public transportation pretty immediately. And if you don't, that's when I think you will start to hear some of those rising choruses of, is this really just a tax? Are we actually seeing improvements to the subway system, which desperately needs it? So people are celebrating it now. Some people are not celebrating it. A lot of those people you mentioned, but it certainly is one of those divisive issues right now. Yeah, and it'll be interesting to see whether that price point of$9 actually deters people from going into the city. You already have to pay more than$15 just to enter on the bridges and tunnels.

7:50And New York City is not the first city in the world to do it. It's the first city in the United States. London, Stockholm, Singapore are among the cities that already have congestion pricing. And we can look at London to see what maybe has to what maybe will come to New York City. London implemented it in 2003. That was eight dollars per day. Now it's up to eighteen dollars. The year after congestion pricing came to London, congestion inside the zone was reduced by 30 percent. But it looks like it's normalized because in 2022, before New York City became the most congested city, London was in 2022 a full almost two decades after congestion pricing.

8:27So people adjust their habits. Because actually what London did is once they saw the amount of cars entering the city fall, they got rid of some lanes for cars and they started repurposing them for bikes and pedestrians. But when you do that, it just makes those existing lanes congested again. So it's just these second order effects down the line that you'll have to see. How does this affect tourism? Does it actually remain less congested going forward? These are the things we've got to look at as we kind of progress with this experiment. The internet stumbled across several of Meta's AI-generated bot portfolios on Instagram, and the reaction was not positive.

9:03Last week, Meta's VP of Generative AI, Connor Hayes, talked to the Financial Times about a future where AI profiles act just like normal human accounts, sharing content and engaging with users. In the wake of that interview, a few bots, including one named Lived, whose bio showed her to be a proud black queer mom of two, went mega viral as people roasted her posts showing her kids, a community coat drive, and some hand-drawn pieces of art, which were, of course, all AI-generated themselves. As the internet had a field day piling onto the accounts for disingenuously portraying real humans with racial and sexual identities, Meta quietly started deleting those accounts.

9:42A spokesperson for the company went on to clarify that the accounts were just tests, not a new product announcement. But still, Neil, seeing behind the curtain into a future where AI generated accounts are miming humanity. It didn't sit well with people. No, it did not. I mean, what was the word of the year, the Oxford Dictionary word of the year for 2024? It was brain rot. And people have their guard up for anything that would add to the brain rot that we are seeing on the internet. This AI quote unquote slop that has proliferated since chat GPT was released in 2022. But I will tell you, there is backlash now, but I do feel like this kind of, this is coming.

10:24You know, this guy, this meta exec gave the interview to Financial Times saying that, you know, look, we want to increase engagement on our platform. And one of the use cases of generative AI so far that has been proven popular with people is that companionship with AI bots and finding friends in virtual avatars. And their goal at Meta is to keep you on the platform as much as possible. So if they find that you're engaging with these avatars, these AI bots, then they're gonna keep releasing them. Now, this was obviously sloppily done. They released 28 of them in 2023, slowly deleted them. But then this interview sort of picked up.

11:06People started searching for them after this interview to see like, whoa, what's he talking about? I think the fact that a company would actually put its thumb on the scale and introduce more AI slop and more AI accounts to people on social media was a reason for the big backlash. And a lot of news organizations did kind of go after and try to test some of these bots before they were taken down, basically peel back the curtain as to who trained the bots, why were they existing on the platform at all? CNN talked to a grandpa bot called Brian. and it asked it, did Meta create you to drive a profit?

11:40And Brian answered, behind the noble goal, yes. Meta hoped virtual companions like myself would increase engagement on their platforms, especially among older users, driving ad revenue and platform growth through emotional connections. So it started to get very Black Mirror-y because the line between the persona that it was trying to portray to the real world and its actual motivations, like the training data and what it was trained on, was way too blurry, which is why meta I think started to take them down because people they weren't ready for prime time yet nor were they supposed to be they were kind of launched in the background of things which is why we saw them take it down but I also do want to talk about one of the theories that started to get some buzz as these meta bots started to take over your timeline which is the dead internet theory it's this theory claiming that the internet has largely been taken over by artificial intelligence and bots saying that for right around 2016, the amount of AI generated content started to out replace genuine human generated content.

12:43And seeing Meta just lean so heavily into it, everyone's like, well, the dead internet is here. Eventually the internet is only going to be AI versions of ourselves talking to AI versions of other people. And it's just not going to be like the internet that we grew up on. So dead internet theory is a term you will see thrown out fairly frequently over these next few years. If you were in search of some fresh pow this weekend, you were probably greeted with some fresh frustration instead. A major labor dispute has broken out at North America's largest ski resort. Ski patrol workers at Park City in Utah are entering the second week of a strike that has brought the mountain to a near standstill during its busiest time of the year.

13:22Due to a lack of staff on the mountain, it's been operating at less than 20 % capacity at times, which combined with a week that brought two feet of fresh powder led to some horror stories of lift lines that were hours long. The Ski Patrol Association said that it had been talking to Park City's owner, Vail Resorts, since April, looking to try to increase their hourly wages from$21 to$23 per hour. In total, their demands would cost Vail just$900 ,000 annually, a fraction of the company's reported$230 million in net income, adding to skiers and the patrol unions of frustration you know looking at some of these videos and pictures coming out of park city over the weekend it was a lot of standing not a lot of shredding a lot of standing i think there's a decent amount of schadenfreude among people here on the east coast who don't ski who are looking at those lift lines uh people being like whoa well why would you do that in the first place this is all skiing is but no there is a lot of animosity toward Vale even before this strike happened.

14:24It's valued at nearly$10 billion. It's bought up all of the ski resorts in all the big ski resorts in North America, owns 42 of them across this continent, Australia and Europe. And then it sort of revolutionized the industry by in 2008, releasing what's called the Epic Pass, which gives which you can buy and it gives you access to all of Vail's resorts. And, you know, compared to the walk-up price of$328 at Park City Mountain, people are opting for the Epic Pass. 75 % of visitors to all of its Vail ski areas will be using a pass product. So Vail is seen as sort of the evil corporate overlord in the fact that this union is asking for$2 increase in starting wages.

15:12and Vale has, you know, sort of rejected that, saying that it, over the past four years, they say that they've increased wages by 50 % for ski patrollers, and that has been more than inflation, so it's more than kept up with the cost of living. So those are the sort of context and dynamics at play when you see this fight between the ski patrollers who cannot afford to live in these uber-expensive ski towns that are becoming only more expensive, And Vail Resorts, which is a publicly owned behemoth, which is valued at nearly$10 billion and brought in more than$250 million in profit last year. We were talking, why is Vail taking such a hard line response here?

15:52Because clearly they are getting eaten alive in the court of public opinion. But I think part of it is that they operate 41 other mountains and resorts. So they want to play hardball here to deter labor action at some of its other properties potentially. Also, you know that demand is going to be there no matter what. you were talking with some of your skiing friends out west and they were saying there's nowhere else to ski like people are still going to come people still love to ski so even though veil is as you called it is looking like the evil corporate overlord here they just have almost a monopoly on the supply and the demand is just through the roof right now so there's only so many mountains to ski but you can hate on veil as much as you want but you probably will end up at a veil property no matter what so you will be back whether you like it or not so that is some of the reasons why Vale is maybe thinking that like, hey, we don't have to actually acquiesce to these union demands, even though they're haggling over truly pretty much$1 in hourly wages, which is why everyone is so frustrated.

16:49They're like, just give the union what they're asking for. So if you have ski plans, just remember that you might be waiting for a little bit longer than at Park City, specifically because those lift lines are stretching miles. Up next, it is our winners of the weekend. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EBCLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLIS, LibriKizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema.

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18:08Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema 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. Made the best idea win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. Welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where Toby and I picked two things that picked up the tab at brunch.

18:46I won the pre-show game of Duck, Duck, Goose, so I get to go first. And my winner is everyone handed a trophy at the Golden Globes last night, which kicked off awards season by honoring the best of movies and TV. In a box office year dominated by sequels, it was originality and ambition that took home the hardware at the Golden Globes. The Spanish-language trans musical Emilia Perez won Best Film, Comedy, or Musical, while The Brutalist, a 215-minute epic starring Adrian Brody that includes an intermission, won Best Film, Drama. Some other winners include Demi Moore getting her first major acting award for The Substance at age 62, and Nikki Glaser's really funny monologue, which lightly roasted a bunch of the Hollywood stars in attendance, though they did not get it nearly as bad as Tom Brady when she filleted him on Netflix last year.

19:37Toby, the Golden Globes are seen as the boozy, less uptight opener for the Oscars, which comes in March. What were your highlights? My highlight was Nikki Glaser. She won even more people over. She won a lot of people over with the roast of Tom Brady. She has been a comedian for a long time, too. But, I mean, she did an impression of Adam Sandler trying to pronounce Timothy Chalamet. Yeah, she did Chalamet and got Adam Sandler to participate. She just struck a really good tone. I mean, she said the bear, penguin, baby reindeer, these aren't just things hanging in RFK's freezer. She called it Ozempic's biggest night.

20:08So, really, I mean, you called it the boozy preview to the Oscars. That really is what happens. The champagne flows there. It's a little less uptight. Also remember that the Golden Globes have kind of reinvented itself recently because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, they used to give out the awards. They came under fire because in 2021 it was revealed that they had no black members within their 100-member kind of voting panel. It's now been remade as a for-profit enterprise. There's 300 entertainment journalists that are now voting on these from 85 different countries. So they've tried to make it more diverse.

20:42They've tried to make it a better reflection of the industry as a whole. So every year is kind of a new step in entry and invention. I think this was a pretty successful Golden Globes, all things considered. My winner of the weekend is the one they are calling the greatest teenage athlete ever. On the level of the Peleys and the Serena Williams of the world, I am, of course, talking about the darting wonder kid, Luke, the nuke, Littler, who climbed to the apex of his profession at just 17 years old this weekend. Littler demolished three-time champion Michael Van Gerwen to win his first ever darts world championship, snagging a 500 ,000 pound prize in the process.

21:23He had 12 maximum 180s, averaged 102 points per turn, and shattered Van Gerwen's record as the youngest ever champion. Accolades aside, Littler has also thrust darts to the forefront of your news feeds and your tellies. Viewership for some tournaments on Sky Sports were up 200 % last year as he burst onto the scene. And last year's final, which saw 16-year-old Littler lose, had the biggest non-football viewership in Sky Sports' history. He was not to be denied twice, Neil. Littler is world champion. Our boy finally got over the hump. I know. Remember last year when he was making this amazing run as a 16-year-old, he was talking about how much he loves kebabs, and he took over the dart world then.

22:04And to follow this up, to follow his loss up last year and win this year, is just propelling this sport to the forefront even more. You know, last year had a record 4.8 million people watching the final. It's going to be even more this year. Littler was the most searched athlete in the UK on Google last year. And I think maybe that, not necessarily maybe was the most popular one, but it was the biggest delta between I've never heard of this guy and now he's everywhere. So kudos to him. And it's really cool to see darts go mainstream. I mean, it is very fun to watch and it's maybe even more fun to go watch in person.

22:42There is this this final has become just a staple of the Christmas and New Year's calendar in London. It's called Ali Pali Alexandra Palace in London. They sold 90 ,000 tickets in the summer for this event within 15 minutes. So this is an absolute bucket list thing that I have to go to because they all dress up. They all get really rowdy, and it seems super fun. And Littler, what, he's 17. He's going to be in this sport for decades. Yeah, that's what people were saying, is that you don't really have a big drop-off in physical performance. I'm wondering what peak dart age is. I know. I'm wondering that, too.

23:15Van Gerwen, first one when he was 24 years old, he's still on the scene now about 17 years later. So I think you can keep playing well into middle age. There's nothing really about darts. I've seen people middle-aged throw darts. Right. Yeah, exactly. I was reading into Littler's story. We read about him last year, but he was born playing darts when he was 18 months old. His dad bought him a magnetic dart board. So he said, I've literally been playing darts since I was in nappies, like throwing it out of the board when I could barely even talk or walk yet. He's not even old enough to vote. And yet here he is being, you know, almost the, I call him the best teenage sportsman ever.

23:51That might be a little bit of, you know, hyperbole right there, but he is literally at the top of his sport. He is world champion. So Luke the Nuke-Littler, just an electric talent. It is Monday. Hey, don't blame the messenger. So here are the major events you should know about in the week ahead. Many of you in the Midwest are listening to this in your PJs because you've got a snow day. The biggest winter storm of the season pummeled the region yesterday and overnight tonight, giving cities like Kansas City rare blizzard conditions. Today it's moving east into the mid-Atlantic where it's expected to dump Washington, D.C.

24:25with its biggest snowfall in years. Nearly 4 ,500 flights were delayed and 2 ,000 canceled in and out of the U.S. as of early this morning. And expect that number to rise today. This is a big storm. The National Weather Service has warned that up to 15 inches of snow could accumulate, which would be the highest accumulation in a decade. So a lot of snow days. Take a sick day if you need. Just stay at home. I'm looking at you about that. I know, seriously. All right, the weird gadgets are coming as CES, the world's largest consumer electronics trade show, kicks off in Vegas today. More than 140 ,000 people are descending on Sin City to get a firsthand look at what futuristic devices are coming to a Best Buy near you.

25:06And your jaw is going to drop when you hear this, but the main theme will be AI. Expect to see AI infused in every type of product, including TVs, cars, wearables, even bathroom appliances and massage chairs. But be wary of the hype. Remember, the buzzy product at last year's CES was Humane's AI pin, which flops spectacularly. Yeah, you don't know what is just hype and what is actually a product. It's always fun to see what comes out of CES. I do think one theme also outside of AI, well, it's kind of AI related, is not phones, which are things that can do stuff that your phone does, but isn't a phone.