Did Google Predict Venezuela Earthquakes Before it Happened? & GTA VI’s Launch Plan Irks Gaming Purists

0:00Marvel Television's Wonder Man.

0:33Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how Google may have saved lives in the Venezuela earthquake. Then Apple is raising prices and it's blaming AI. It's Friday, June 26th. Let's ride.

0:56The U.S. men's national team closed out their group stage campaign with a last-minute loss against Turkey last night. But no matter, after two previous victories, we're on to the round of 32, facing Bosnia and Herzegovina on Wednesday night. Pretty unfair. We have to play both of them, if you ask me. But as the other countries wrap up their group play today and tomorrow, I want to draw your attention to a bizarre situation unfolding on Saturday in Kansas City. There, Austria will play Algeria in a game nobody wants to win. Basically, through a quirk in the tournament, the team that wins this game will likely have to play the juggernaut Spain in the next round, while the loser will face a less formidable opponent.

1:35So we may be about to watch a World Cup game in which you are disincentivized to score. Could be thrilling television. The World Cup has run into this problem before the infamous example came back in 1982 when West Germany and Austria entered their final group match knowing that a one-goal German win would send both teams through. Obviously, Germany scored early and then both sides literally just casually passed the ball around in front of an increasingly angry crowd. The match became known as the disgrace of Gijon, which was the Spanish city where it occurred. And FIFA literally changed the rules after this.

2:1344 years later, Algeria and Austria find themselves in a very similar situation. And I say Algeria because, ironically, Algeria was the team eliminated because of the disgrace of Gijon in 1982. History doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly does. So they can get payback by losing. Right. Right. So then we might get both teams trying to lose to each other, which would be not a disgrace, actually. All right. Now a word from our sponsor, ServiceNow. Neil, I feel like we're getting a lot of promises about AI taking over the work we hate doing. But lately, it feels like I'm doing more work rather than getting any help.

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3:27The twin cakes struck 39 seconds apart. The first magnitude 7.2 west of the capital of Caracas at 6 p.m. local time. The next a 7.5 less than a minute later, just three miles away. Rapid back-to-back earthquakes is an unusual phenomenon known as a doublet and is particularly dangerous. The earthquakes were already the strongest to hit the country in more than 100 years, and they could end up being the deadliest and costliest in Venezuela's history, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. President Trump, who ousted leader Nicolas Maduro at the start of the year, said the U.S. was, quote, ready, willing, and able to help and had instructed federal agencies to move quickly.

4:03We will be there for our new and great friends, he wrote on social media. After years of economic downturn, Venezuela will need all the resources it can get for recovery, and many other countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Qatar, have pledged help. Rescue efforts are ongoing this morning amid the rubble of collapsed buildings focused in the northern coastal state of La Guayra. This region is typically home to a population of 500 ,000, but was bursting with even more people when the quakes hit because it was a national holiday on Wednesday and everyone was at the beach. Toby, lots of attention on rescue efforts now, but I want to focus on preparation because Google played a surprising role before the earthquake struck.

4:42Yeah, I did not know this, but billions of Android phones are actually a global earthquake detection network. work. Every Android phone contains an accelerometer. It's the same sensor that kind of measures the physical orientation of your phone. When that accelerometer detects shaking consistently with an earthquake, it sends the data and location to Google, and then Google broadcasts that likely earthquake alert to phones. More than 2 billion Android devices worldwide have this feature built in, and users in Venezuela did receive warnings sometimes seconds before the quake actually hit. They were posting screenshots on social media.

5:20In total, about 4 million people got notified. And again, seconds matter in a situation like this because it can get you enough time to move away from windows, to maybe stop driving or something like that. So it's just a fascinating aspect of the technology that most of us have in our pockets. It's actually a life-saving technology when it comes to earthquakes. Right. And also about earthquakes, there's different types of waves that come with earthquakes. You have P waves first, which travel the fastest but cause smaller vibrations in the Earth. Then S waves comes next, and then L waves, finally.

5:52Those are the most destructive. But often we can't detect P waves. You just wouldn't be able to tell before the bigger ones come. And that's what Google's technology, this accelerometer in your phone, can do. It's the same technology that when you flip your phone sideways or horizontally, it changes the screen. And that's exactly what they use for this earthquake detection technology. Obviously, they don't rely on one phone. They rely on the fact that there are billions of people and often millions of people in a certain location like Venezuela with Android phones. So they work together. They go to the server and the algorithm says, OK, it looks like a bunch of these phones are jostling in this same exact area.

6:28And then they send out this alert as fast as they can. And it's sort of information arbitrage or at least like speed arbitrage because data travels at the speed of light. So they can get the alerts to phones faster than the waves can travel through the Earth. So literally, P-waves travel at six kilometers per second, which is fast, but data is literally the speed of light. So that's why you can get this second advantage on the earthquake. And this is a system that has been employed before. Back in 2024, there was an earthquake. A million Android users received alerts as well. In the U.S., they actually have underground sensors buried as well to go along with the accelerometers that are in Google's phone.

7:12So it's a relatively new field, earthquake detection and earthquake notification, but it's growing more complex. And this was one of the biggest examples of it potentially saving lives. Yeah, there is no way to predict an earthquake. that Google, every seismologist says, we have no idea when an earthquake is coming, but if the earth starts to tremor a little bit, that is when we can get the word out. A bunch of countries do have government-run early earthquake warnings, and Google takes pains to say, look, this is not a replacement for those, it's a supplement. So in the United States, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, these places that have a lot of seismic activity have these existing government-run programs.

7:51So people in California might have an existing app called My Shake, and so they might be very familiar with this. That goes off before an alert in addition to the Android system, because a lot of people also have iPhones. Venezuela, other countries with less, fewer resources that maybe aren't as seismically active, don't have these government programs, just don't have as many resources. So that's where maybe an Android system could fill in the gap. But all eyes now turn to the rebuilding costs as, you know, you try to clean up after this. Estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey put economic losses between$10 and$100 billion for Venezuela.

8:26That high in estimate is roughly the size of Venezuela's entire economy, so there is going to be a long road back. Moving on, it is Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week time, this segment where we pick one stock that is overreacting to last night's USA game and one stock that trusts Pochettino. I won the pre-show Timothee Chalamet look-alike contest, so I'm up first, and since I'm feeling a bit pessimistic after last night's result, I'm starting with our Dog of the Week, which is Apple. A week ago, we were warned that Apple was going to raise its prices as the company could no longer absorb soaring memory costs.

8:59Well, that day has come and the increases are significant. Its cheapest computer, the MacBook Neo, jumped$100, the MacBook Air,$200, MacBook Pro,$300. Increases also hit the iPad, HomePod, and Apple TV. Tim Cook has called the memory shortages caused by AI a 100-year flood. I've never seen anything like it in any area over 40 years. Cook followed up. Parts of Apple's ecosystem did remain untouched. The iPhone did not get more expensive. Neither did the AirPods or Apple Watch. Seems like Apple made the deliberate decision, at least for now, to protect its most popular products despite shortages affecting every part of its lineup.

9:38Still, the bottom line is prices are going up and it's not hard to point the finger at the AI build out. The infrastructure boom is so big with over$740 billion in spending committed by big tech this year, that it's pushing up prices across the economy. All these input pieces, memory, storage, servers, everything is so in demand that things are just going to get pricier. Neil, investors did not like seeing Apple capitulate here. Shares fell more than 6%, setting the stock to its worst day in over a year. I like the way The Verge put it. When it comes to prices, Apple is kind of a reverse canary in the coal mine.

10:13It's not necessarily the harbinger of a crisis, it's an indication that a crisis is already full blown. I mean, think about how standardized Apple prices are. You go into an Apple store, you go online, it's AirPods are$299, iMac is this. It's just the standard until they release a new model. And then you figure out what that price is. And then that's the price seemingly forever. So for Apple to raise prices like this, I mean, it's up to 25 % too, is certainly an indication of where we are in what they're calling Ramageddon. It's not just Apple. Electronics prices are going up across the board because of what Elon Musk also chimed in and said, this is a, I've never seen anything like this price increase.

10:50Analysts from Gartner say, estimate that this year we're going to see hardware price increases ranging from about 10 % to 20 % laptops, PCs, and smartphones. I think this was very strategic though. Obviously the input prices forced Apple's hand here, but the fact that they made Tim Cook do it, he's an outgoing CEO. He did not want to lay the responsibility of that unpopular decision at incoming CEO, John Ternus. So he kind of got it out of the way, taking the fall, if you will. But then the other purpose that it served is that Apple is equipping their devices to be more AI native going forward.

11:27They're putting more RAM into their iPhone to support their upgraded Siri. So rather than making those AI-enabled products seem pricier, they're kind of blaming it on Cook and then blaming it on the memory shortage. So consumers are sort of warmed up to the idea that the iPhone might get more expensive. You probably have a$2 ,000 foldable iPhone coming as well. So I think it was a very strategic move by Apple to do this right now outside of their normal product cycle so they can prep consumers for what's coming. I'm glad you brought up AI. I mean, we haven't brought it up on the show yet. this and it's been about 10 minutes which it must be a record because there's a raging debate about whether ai will be inflationary or disinflationary among economists or is is ai is this revolution going to raise prices or is it going to lower prices in the long term at least in the short term we're seeing evidence of ai inflation all this data center build out you've mentioned 741 billion dollars spent this year they're all going after the same components the same stuff that goes in your phone and your laptops also goes into a data center.

12:31And the fact that they're spending so much money on these components is raising prices, not just for data center stuff, but for the stuff that goes on our desk and in our pocket. And at least in the short term, it seems like the AI inflationary predictions are going to be true because we're expecting these companies through 2032 to spend$8 trillion on AI infrastructure, which is five times the market value of New York City property market. So this is just an insane amount of money going after a certain amount of components. So it looks like there might be AI inflation going forward for these particular devices.

13:08Now, in the long term, it's a bigger question because history shows us that when you have a technical revolution, yet it's really expensive to build the infrastructure and that causes inflation in the short term. But over the long term, increased productivity means prices go down. Okay, my stock of the week is oil, which like Bilbo Baggins went there and back again. Yesterday, the international benchmark Brent crude erased all of its wartime gains, falling to below$73 a barrel for the first time since the war in Iran began in late February. Yes, usually stock of the week means price go up, but oil prices going down is unequivocally good news for the global economy, which was dealt the largest energy shock in decades when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, choking off 20 % of the world's oil and natural gas supply.

13:52At their peak, oil prices shot up to$125 a barrel, causing all kinds of problems in East Asia and raising gas prices for American drivers. Because of higher fuel prices resulting from the war, U.S. inflation has reached a three-year high. But the worst appears to be over, with the U.S. and Iran reaching a truce to stop the hostilities. The Strait of Hormuz is tentatively, shakily back open for business, drenching the world in much needed oil. On Wednesday, 78 tankers sailed through the strait, representing 57 % of traffic levels before the war. Toby, while it wasn't pleasant at all, it looks like the global economy was able to absorb this once in a generation energy shock without too much permanent scarring.

14:32Yeah. How did they escape? Basically, a lot of different factors came into play. Countries started releasing their strategic petroleum reserves. They had the rainy day fun and they tapped into that for sure. Saudi Arabia kind of came in clutch too. They started doing pipeline shipments that, again, isn't enough to replace the oil going through the Strait of Hormuz, but it was 5 million barrels per day. That's a third of the Hormuz's normal traffic. The U.S. military did start to escort some ships through. They managed to get 500 ships carrying 250 million barrels of oil through the Gulf, which is, again, not nothing.

15:06And then also, there just wasn't quite a strong demand right now. That's a big component as well. Specifically over in China, there wasn't a massive increase. If China had put too much pressure on the global oil markets, we might be talking about this in a very different way right now. So it wasn't just one thing. It was just a bunch of little things that helped paper over the crack that was the Strait of Hormuz being closed. All right. So you got this vacation come up. You have a road trip. It's almost July 4th. Next weekend, you're thinking, okay, great. Oil prices are going down. Gas prices are also going to come down because they've been so high recently.

15:40Not quite. So oil is down about 36 percent, but gas prices are down just about 12.5 percent from their peak. So what is going on? Why aren't gas stations lowering their prices in conjunction with oil? It's because of this phenomenon known as rockets and feathers. Well, gas prices go up very quickly like a rocket, but they come down like a feather. So it's going to take some time for the price at the pump to come down. President Trump is not happy. Actually, he's taking out a page out of President Biden's book by blaming major oil companies, saying you have to lower prices. Look, the oil prices are down to$73 a barrel from before the war.

16:19but your gas prices are still much higher. So he's ordered the DOJ to investigate these oil companies. Chevron CFO gave a interview to CNBC saying, look, president, we're doing all we can to bring down prices. Just doesn't come down as quickly as you want. It kind of feels like a moment in the race where like the leader is celebrating right before the finish line. And then someone might come from behind and nab them at the end because U.S. crude inventories are still at their lowest level since 1984. We really drained, you know, the tanks, the strategic petroleum reserve. So if something flares up again in the Strait of Hormuz, we don't have that cushion anymore.

16:56So literally no gas left in the tank. Right. That was a much better metaphor right there. Son of a gun. OK, no gas left in the tank. So don't celebrate too early. There still might not be the end of this crisis playing out. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with a story about Grand Theft Auto right after this. Neil, it feels like every week there's a new AI model making headlines. And somehow I'm expected to keep up with all of them. Fair, but Minimax's new M3 is one worth paying attention to. Their open-weight model combines frontier-level coding and AI agent capabilities, a massive 1 million token contacts window, and native multimodal understanding.

17:38M3 is built for coding, agent, and visual understanding, helping developers and businesses build more capable AI products and automate complex tests. It's available today through APIs and leading AI platforms. To learn more and start building with M3, visit minimax.io. That's minimax.io. Neil, check out my card. This just says thank you. Yes, that's for the dinner you paid for last week. But you should also check out the Verizon Visa card. It helps eligible Verizon customers get more from everyday spending. You can earn 4 % rewards on gas, groceries, and dining. Redeem rewards toward Verizon bills or devices with no annual fee and unlimited rewards with no expiration.

18:22For a limited time, new cardholders can get up to$150 cash back. Just head to verizon.com slash morningbrew to learn more. That's verizon.com slash morningbrew. Did you happen to catch what Emily told us to absolutely not do on next week's episode? No, I missed that. I usually meditate during our team meetings. That's where Plod No Pro could come in handy. It's an AI-powered note-taking device that magnetically attaches to your phone and helps capture and organize real-world conversations from meetings to deep work. Instead of scrambling to take notes or relying on memory, Plod automatically transcribes and summarizes the discussions, turning long conversations into clear, structured notes and actionable takeaways.

19:03It meets enterprise-grade standards including SOC2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance. Start at plod.ai slash brew. Use code brew for 10 % off. Gamers have been waiting over a decade for Rockstar to finally release Grand Theft Auto 6. Over 13 years to finally taste that sweet sensation of sliding the disc into their gaming console. But they might not get that moment ever. Now don't panic, there is a release date for the off-delayed game, November 19th. But there's no physical disc. When you order the most anticipated video game of all time for$79.99, you get a box with a download code inside. This won't be all that new to gamers.

19:45Digital game sales have long since overtaken physical copies. A lot of new consoles don't even have slots for discs anymore. But for a game whose previous edition sold over 225 million copies, this so-called code-in-a-box model is being tested at the very highest levels of hype. Why go digital? There's clear upsides from instant downloads to easier updates, but consumers aren't the biggest fans because you don't actually own the game. You can't loan it to a friend and if your hardware hits the fritz you might lose your game too you know after all this anticipation and all this build-up would you be let down if your actual game box came with nothing in it personally i would not care because if i was waiting 12 years for something you could serve it to me on a steaming pile of doo-doo and i'd play just to put this in perspective how monumental of a development cycle this was it took less time and was cheaper to build the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world in Dubai, than GTA 6.

20:45So the Burj Khalifa took cost about$1.5 billion, took six years to build. Well, GTA 6 took 12 years since its earliest development. And some estimates, we don't know for sure, some estimates put this cost of development in the$2 to$3 billion range. Insider called it the stakes for this are among the highest of any product release this decade. And I don't think that's hyperbole. The Burj Khalifa being easier to build than a video game is crazy. But again, let's go back to why the heck that they're not doing a physical disc here at all. Some of the reasons too, is just that leaks have been a massive issue for this.

21:26And if you only have access to the game when the servers unlock, it hypothetically cracks down on leaks. Also, when it takes that much money and that much time to develop a game, it's going to be very large. And some people are like, I don't even know if GTA 6 could fit on existing PlayStation and Xbox discs. That's how big it is. That being said, your device now is going to have to eat that memory as well. It is ironic too, because it relates back to our previous story. The Xbox has seen their price hiked multiple times over the past few months because of the memory shortage. So I'm sure Xbox's X are going, come on, Rockstar.

22:03Like you're giving one of the biggest games in history to us now, right when we're having a memory crunch. But gamers are a little bit split on this. I was asking one of our coworkers who games, and she's like, for games that I really care about, like Legend of Zelda, I want to get a physical copy, one, for archival purposes. I want to have this. I want to be able to pass this down. And then two, I just don't, I won't lose it. Like she says, I'll just leave it on myself versus digital. You never know what can happen. Maybe your device, you know, goes dead and like you don't have the game anymore.

22:35So definitely not the most popular decision amongst gamers. So this thing is actually coming out, which is crazy. It seems like it's been forever. This was originally scheduled for the fall of 2025. Then it was delayed till May, 2026. But now we have a date, November 19th. It's going to be available for pre-download or pre-purchase on November 12th. So you can have it ready to go on November 19th. This has been a long time coming. Let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Remember when Apple spent years trying and ultimately failing to build a car? Well, it turns out some of the people behind that project never got transportation out of their system.

23:14One of Apple's top former designers, Julian Heinig, just launched a company called Amble, and its first product looks like what would happen if Apple designed a golf cart. It's an open air electric buggy with no doors, barely any buttons, a cork steering wheel that tops out at 40 miles an hour. People who have seen one in person have likened it to a Moon Rover. The target market is not golfers, despite looking sort of like a golf cart. Each model costs$25 ,000, but their first production line is completely sold out with the initial customers being almost entirely luxury hotels. Neil, Hainning's thesis is that there's a transportation gap between a Tesla and an e-bike, one that Amble can amble into.

23:57I know most people can't see what it looks like right now, but it looks like something you would use to get around Jurassic Park, though I'm not sure with a top speed of 40 miles per hour, you would be able to outrun the T-Rex. Not the Verge, but it's crossed between a Rivian and a Land Rover, shrunk to adorable dimensions. And it feels like there is a need here based on the demand from these hotels. We're golfers. Golf carts are ugly. And when you think about, when you think we don't really think about it, because we're just use it to get around. But if you're a higher end resort, you're shuttling people, you want to give off this air of luxury and you're using a standard golf cart, it looks like this industry, this particular vehicle, this short range mobility is ripe for disruption.

24:38It's definitely one of those things that sounds really dumb on the service, but then you start digging into the use cases, getting around communities. Again, most people use golf carts, but the thesis is that golf carts are suited for grass. They're not necessarily built for moving to pavement. and well, I guess they're kind of built for moving to payment. They're mainly just ugly and they're mainly just slow. So why don't you beef it up, make it a little bit more roadworthy, make it a little easier on the eyes, and maybe it can start to fill in those micro-mobility situations that you don't think about but definitely do exist.

25:07Imagine rolling up to the buffet in the villages with one of these. That's what I'm talking about. You'd be the coolest person there. All right, finally, Taylor Swift is marrying Travis Kelsey over July 4th weekend, and the celebrations will take place at Madison Square Garden. Thanks to some sleuthing by the New York Times, it sure looks like the home of the world champion Knicks will be the venue for America's version of a royal marriage, the biggest pop star of her generation with a three-time Super Bowl champion football player. While there's been no official announcement, the tea leaves all point to an MSG wedding.