EPA says EVs are the Future, NPR leaves Twitter, Walmart is over Chicago

0:01This message is brought to you by AppleCard. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases, wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Good Morning Brew Daily show. I am Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's show, we will be discussing NPR quitting Twitter and whether that could just be the tip of the iceberg for other big accounts leaving Twitter.

0:40We also crown the most uncancellable man on earth. Then we're discussing the Super Bowl of libel cases in the U.S. And we'll touch on HBO's newly renamed streaming service, which I'm not going to lie, I'm not a huge fan of. Jam-packed show as always, Neil, let's ride.

1:09Have you looked at the weather today? It's supposed to be 90 degrees. So I'm ready to call it. It is iced coffee season. See, for me, it's never iced coffee season. I am hot coffee all year round because iced coffee gives me a little bit of a tummy ache. So does regular coffee. I don't know. For some reason, it hits me differently. I don't know. You are in the minority, my friend, because for most people, iced coffee season never ends. I was just looking at this up. Starbucks says that cold beverages have accounted for more than 60 % of all of its sales in every single quarter. Cold beverages are taking over the world.

1:42I am clearly in the minority. I still have not tried the Oleato olive oil coffee from Starbucks. So maybe after this. Are you worried about your stomach getting messed up from iced coffee? Because that apparently sends you to the bathroom within five minutes. That's for dang sure, but I still want to try it. We'll find out. Just don't do it right before our podcast. Fair enough. Or else we'll have a long interruption in the middle. All right, let's go to our first story. Yesterday, the Biden administration proposed new regulations on auto emissions that experts say will lead to the biggest transformation in the industry since Henry Ford took his horseless carriage for a test run in 1896.

2:17It's true. It's a huge deal. We know that automakers have been investing tens of billions of dollars into switching over their fleets to electric vehicles over the past few years. But this plan puts that transition on 2x speed, which I wonder if anyone listens to this on 2x speed. I'm curious how we sound. So here's the goal of these new regulations. They want 67 % of new passenger cars to be electric by 2032, nine years from now, and a quarter of new heavy trucks to be all electric. to give you a sense of how much growth needs to happen in that time span, electric vehicles last year accounted for 5.8 % of new cars sold in the U.S.

2:56And electric trucks were less than 2 % of the total. So this is a monumental task. Yeah, it's a lofty, lofty goal. They're definitely swinging from the fences. And the two things that are kind of holding this back are, one, building a reliable charging infrastructure along the U.S. highway system. And then two, having the domestic production of the materials necessary for EV batteries. So those are like the two big things that are kind of throwing a dash of cold water on this lofty goal. Because without those two things, you can't have, you can't support that many electric vehicles on the road.

3:28So that's truly, even though we're seeing these headlines of this huge push for electric vehicles, I do think there is some huge constraints on it. Yeah, and the government said, look, we know we're putting this stick on you. We'll also give you some carrots. We know that there's this$7 ,500 tax credit for people who are buying EVs. They're also giving out very generous loans and grants to EV companies that are building this charging network. So they're saying, look, we know this is a huge task. We're going to help you out, but I'm not sure it's going to be enough. Right. And I also was doing a little research on – actually, I read this in the Brew this morning.

4:04I know. That's where I get my research from. But the brew kind of actually framed it as a lot of buyers of vehicles are not actually open to the idea of purchasing an electric vehicle. I believe it was 47 % of people said that they would not consider an EV purchase for their next vehicle. But I looked at that and said, wait a second, 53 % of people said that they may be open to it, which is a pretty hefty number, I would think. I think people are very concerned about the charging situation. Many EVs don't go past, you know,$250 or 250 miles on a single charge. And for people like me who like doing road trips, I'm just thinking, well, why would I get an EV?

4:44I have to stop, you know, all along the way. I have to go out of my way to, you know, charge up. Meanwhile, there are gas stations everywhere. And that definitely is a significant barrier. Another barrier is the cost of EVs. I mean, I know Tesla has cut prices five times over the past few months, but they're way more pricey than regular internal combustion engine cars. I think at the end of 2022, the average price of an electric vehicle was$61 ,488 compared to$49 ,000 for all passengers, cars, and trucks. So they have to bring the price down or else people will talk at this. But these big automobile companies are investing in it.

5:25Ford is plowing$1.3 billion to build an EV manufacturing hub in Canada. And then GM actually just invested in a$50 million round for a lithium extraction startup. So they are kind of tackling this issue. They're building up the infrastructure for it and also investing in the new wave of research that might make it more efficient. All right, Neil. Let's move on to our next story. The NPR versus Twitter beef has reached a breaking point. NPR made the decision yesterday to leave Twitter, saying it no longer will post fresh content to any of its 52 official Twitter feeds, which, by the way, I did not know NPR had.

6:05NPR music. Yeah, there's a lot. Politics. I don't know. It's the first major news organization to go silent on the platform in the Elon era. So how did we get here? It goes back to Elon's decision to label NPR's Twitter account as state-affiliated media that he chose to do two weeks ago. NPR pushed back against that label saying, one, it makes it sound like it doesn't have editorial independence and it lumps them in with actual state-affiliated media from Russia and China. And then two, it also said it receives less than 1 % of its funding from government sources. So the label is kind of misleading.

6:40So Twitter did soften the label to government-funded media, but that wasn't enough for NPR. It decided to pack up its lunch and go somewhere else. NPR CEO said yesterday that he would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility. So Neil, what do you make of NPR kind of peacing out? Well, I know what we want to focus on is the fact that what was Twitter giving NPR in the first place from a business case? NPR uses Twitter to distribute its content, distribute its articles, distribute its podcasts. And NPR is coming out and saying, look, yeah, Twitter is a big headache for us on the politics front, on the Elon front, but it's also not just doing well for us in terms of allowing us to get our content out there.

7:23Twitter, NPR's analytics show that less than 2 % of its traffic comes from Twitter. And so other news organizations are probably spending this morning looking at their own traffic numbers and being like, okay, well, how much do we get from Twitter? How much do we get from Google? How much do we get from other social media platforms? And maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze to, you know, navigate Elon's whims on Twitter when they're not getting that much value from it. For sure. Yeah, I did check NPR has 8.8 million followers on its flagship account. It has more spread across its 52 Twitter accounts.

7:56I do think though, just to like push back on the idea that it's only getting 2 % of its actual traffic. Yes, it might not be driving legitimate clicks to its news sources, but there is Twitter is the pulpit of the masses. It's where discussion takes place. And if you remove yourself from that kind of the chat room of the internet, then you risk losing relevancy. It's kind of a amorphous idea of this, like you'll lose relevancy. But I do think that if NPR just no longer exists within that discourse on Twitter, they are hurting themselves on some level. That's just me speculating a little bit. I do think there is some legitimate.

8:33We'll see if this network effect that built Twitter up goes in reverse because the only reason people are on Twitter is because other people on Twitter, If you start removing big posters like NPR with 8.8 million followers from the equation, we know that other big accounts have left Twitter. Then you get into this downward spiral where Twitter becomes not that interesting because people aren't posting. And then when other big posters see other people not posting and they don't get any value from the platform, they remove themselves. So you get, I think it's pretty, I don't remember, but it's kind of what happened to MySpace, right?

9:04Yeah. Like they just – people stop going on and they get into this death spiral where the value and the content becomes less interesting and less interesting over time. People stop posting and moving elsewhere. We know that Substack just launched its Twitter rival called Notes. There are alternatives now. There are. The first time in a while. Blue Sky even, which is the decentralized version of Twitter. Blue Sky? I've never heard of that. That Jack Dorsey has been working on in the background. It's live now. What if Jack Dorsey takes over Twitter? I know. Oh, my gosh. His baby. Beautiful storybook ending.

9:36So I guess we'll definitely be watching to see if other news organizations follow NPR. PBS actually already did jump ship as well. They're saying they're not posting either. All right. Jury selection began today in easily the most closely watched and significant business trial of the year, if not the last two years. I'm talking about Dominion Voting Systems, which makes voting machines, is suing Fox for 1.6 billion in damages for defaming it following the 2020 presidential election. Dominion says Fox knowingly said false things about it, like that it was involved in a conspiracy to rig the 2020 election for Biden and changed its devices to help out Biden.

10:15So like many corpus trials, this one's happening in Delaware, where Elon Musk's Twitter trial was supposed to take place before they reached an agreement. Most corporations are incorporated in Delaware, and its court system is very experienced in dealing with business cases like this, which means that people in Newcastle County, Delaware, 1 ,600 of them just got jury duty notices, and so they're going to start to question them and whittle them down to just 12 jurors and six alternates before the six-week trial. This is a big one, Neil. I mentioned that it's the Super Bowl of libel law. We need a new metaphor.

10:49I know. We were trying to come up with a better one. The WrestleMania of libel. I like WrestleMania. It's big. But honestly, this case does hinge on, let's talk about what is going to cause this case to be significant. It's very difficult to prove libel in the American legal system. There was a precedent set all the way back in 1964 that sets an incredibly high bar for public figures to prove that they have been defamed. that's because the plaintiff has to prove that not only did an organization publish false information they did so with actual malice yeah and we've touched on that term before but it's basically saying that they either published the information knowing it was false or they displayed a reckless disregard for the truth so again there is that legal gray area gray area that's why we are having this case at all but that's the key point here if dominion can prove actual malice then we might actually see one of the first times that a news organization is hit with a libel lawsuit.

11:47And Dominion already cleared one hurdle. The judge already ruled that these remarks by Fox about them were false. Right. So now the jury just has to decide whether the motivation behind it, essentially. Yeah. That is a crazy part that the judge is like, yeah, they were saying false stuff. It's a big win for Dominion already. Right. And we saw that, you know, all these text messages that were released as part of the court filing, from Fox News anchors saying that they knew that the election claims were false, but they wanted to share it with their viewers anyway because their ratings were taking a hit.

12:21Right. It is. There's a lot of evidence. Right. And the text messages themselves are just a treasure trove of, you have Chuck O 'Carlson saying like he hates Trump. And he just interviewed him two days ago. Right. We're going to see, as this case progresses, we're going to see more tea come out. So I'm excited for that from the drama portion. And this is and you mentioned this is the Super Bowl, the WrestleMania of libel cases, because it means a lot for other this entire industry. This is just not self-contained for Fox News. So even for people who hate Fox News's content, they say that Fox losing could lead to other libel suits against other news organizations and chip away at press freedoms.

12:56And then even on the other side, a Fox win could lead to calls to change libel law because people argue, well, if Fox can't even if Fox isn't convicted of being a faming Dominion voting systems for this, then what? Why do you even have a libel law on the place? Yeah, for sure. You summed it up well. All right, Neil, before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break.

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14:23Neil, there's this famous scene in The Social Network where Justin Timberlake's character tells Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg to drop the the from Facebook because it's cleaner. Well, it looks like Warner Bros. Discovery was taking notes because it's also dropping three superfluous letters from its new streaming platform. Going forward, HBO Max will now be known as Just Mac. That was one of your better intros. Thank you. I was really proud of that one. Now I can see your eyes rolling a little bit, Neil, not just because of the intro, but because it sounds like kind of a dumb decision to drop HBO, given all the incredible content associated with that platform.

15:01Game of Thrones, Succession. I don't even need to go into it. Everyone knows HBO's great shows. But that was actually the problem, according to Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav. Zaslav. The brand was too elite, too rarefied to attract the customers that the company wanted to sell these less high quality shows to like Naked and Afraid and Dr. Pimple Popper. Don't you slander them. I'm suing you for libel. I know. It's just a different sort of audience. So Neil, what do you make about HBO Max ditching the HBO? Well, I just want to take a step back and talk about how we got here in the first place, which was that Warner Media merged with Discovery.

15:40and it's kind of a weird pairing. Discovery, like you mentioned, has all of these unscripted reality shows. Discovery owns HGTV, Food Network, TLC, and that's combined with Warner Media that owns CNN and HBO. So that happened last year and this guy was left with, Zaslav was left with, okay, I got Discovery Plus, which has all of these reality shows and then I have HBO Max, which has Euphoria. Like, what do I do with this? And I guess he decided to put them together and create the slogan here is max is the one to watch and emphasis on one and so they think they can successfully pair a point what they call appointment viewing which is the successions the last of us the sunday night hbo things you you know with the comfort viewing of reality shows which you kind of just put on the background watch for hours on end so they it just wants to become this one mega streaming service i'm fine with it i i know you don't like the fact that they're reducing the or they're kind of like eliminating the the hbo from it right but this is i think it just comes down to like what content is on there and this seems like it has really really good content because people love these reality shows and people love these hbo shows they're different audiences and they're going to bring them all into one place seems seems smart it is at the core they are trying to compete with disney plus and netflix and just to give the context on how big their audiences.

17:05So right now, all the HBO platforms, Discovery Plus together reaches 96 million people back in 2022. Netflix gets five times as many monthly viewers as that, and their subscriber numbers are pushing 220 million, same as Disney Plus. So you can see why Max is making this push, because it's around half the size and gets 20 % of the viewing hours. So this is their play. They want to really enter the streaming wars with this. And I don't know, I do think you're right. It's appealing to two different customer bases. That could be a messy middle or they could just crack the code and they're going to actually make inroads into the streaming wars.

17:44I'm laughing because Toby just says messy middle a lot. It's a new term I learned. Should we talk about what people can expect? So if you have HBO Max, most people will get rolled over into Max. There is two tiers, same pricing structure as HBO Max,$10 a month for an ad-supported tier, and$16 a month for a commercial-free experience. And the biggest announcement, the biggest content announcement, was Harry Potter. So they're doing a decade-long series. They're already committing to 10 years, which seems like an eternity in the content universe. It's decades long in terms of the Harry Potter universe.

18:19The actual series is not 10 years long. Really? Well, it's going to be one series or one season per book. They're going back to the original books. They're doing a Harry Potter series. So that's at least seven. And then maybe you build in chunks to, you know. I wonder if we're still going to be doing the podcast talking about Harry Potter. I hope so. Season 11. I'm super excited. I mean, it's going to lead to so many book sales again. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. I'm interested. I'm bullish on Max. Okay. Neil's numbers. It's Thursday. So this segment, I share three stats from the week's news that will make your jaw drop so low it'll reach the Earth's core and get melted in the fiery abyss.

19:01Wow. Okay. That is an intro right there. That's an intro. And I just hope I can live up to that. First stat. These days, Latin music is pop music. So Latin music revenues in the U.S. topped$1 billion for the first time last year, jumping 24 % from last year, crushing the broader music market. How is it making so much money? Streaming. Streaming accounts for 97 % of all Latin music revenues. Bad Bunny, the most streamed artist globally on Spotify for the third year in a row last year. Latin music is eating everybody's lunch. It's just so fun to listen to and dance to. It just scratches all the right itches for me.

19:41And I love it. That is a crazy number, though, how big it's become. It's double-digit growth for the past two years, far outpacing any other type of genre in the industry. I remember when Bad Bunny came to Yankee Stadium last summer. Yeah. I don't know if anyone in our control room went, but it seems like everybody went. I was at a function a couple hours before, and pretty much everyone was on their phones looking for tickets to go. And then finally, this is like the icing on the cake. Like, Daddy Yankee's hit, Gasolina, Absolute Fire, is the first reggaeton song to be inducted into the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.

20:16So it's being immortalized as part of, you know, this American history. As it should be. As it should be. All right. Let's go. All right. Second stat is that Walmart is closing half of its stores in Chicago because they haven't made any money since the company entered the city almost 17 years ago. In fact, Walmart says they've been losing tens of millions of dollars every year in Chicago and annual losses have doubled in the past five. This is one of those stats where I saw and said, why hasn't Walmart told us this earlier? Why didn't they move? It's been 17 years. Trying different formats, speaking, you know, why can't, you know, the everything store work in the third largest city in the U.S.?

21:01I know. I was truly, you said jaw dropped through the core. My jaw dropped at this because, again, it's just like, how can you have, I mean, I understand. I'll tell you why. Because it didn't say crime or safety, which is what commonly people associate Chicago with, unfortunately. but just competition from Target, Aldi, Albertsons, which have a much bigger presence. And in general, Walmart hasn't been super successful adopting the big superstore suburban model in urban areas. I searched for a Walmart in New York City yesterday, and there's not a single one within the New York City city limits.

21:38There's one right on the outskirts in Queens, right on the border, but there's not one in the city limits. So it hasn't even tried to come into New York because of all the competition. It's so, yeah, it's so interesting. I see targets pretty frequently. I live right near one, but you're right. Now that I think about it, I've never seen a Walmart here. No. All right. Third stat, Dick Wolf. Dick Wolf is the most uncanceable man on the planet. His shows just keep getting renewed. It's absolutely insane. This guy, known for producing Law & Order, had six of his dramas renewed by NBC for next season in the Law & Order and Chicago franchises, and also has three other shows running on CBS concurrently.

22:14So now he's put his name on more than 84 seasons of TV, which is more years than he's been alive. SVU going on 25 seasons. Regular Law and Order, 23. Chicago Fire, 12 seasons. Chicago PD, 11. He's like the DJ Khaled of television producers where he just pops up everywhere. Who knows how much he's actually doing, but his name is attached to a lot of stuff. Very impressive. And you know what's even more crazy? I've never seen a single one of these TV shows. What the heck, Neil? I haven't seen a single one. We're so bad. I guess we're two, we're Maxies. We love HBO Max too much. Yeah, maybe if Lawn Order will come there, obviously it won't.

22:50But yeah, I've never seen it, apparently. Apparently it's, I think it's a comfort viewing thing that, you know, the HBO guy was talking about. For sure. Okay, Neil, have a fun little story to wrap up our show. As we all know, Major League Baseball has introduced some new roles this year meant to speed up the pace of play in games. That includes things like limiting pickoff attempts and also instituting the use of a pitch clock that gives a batter and a hitter 15 seconds in between pitches. So far, there's been near universal praise for these new rule changes. The average time of games has dropped by 31 minutes.

23:26But I said near universal praise because the concessions department of stadiums are not as happy as the rest of the baseball world. That's because shorter games means less time to buy food and more specifically, less time to buy beer. So historically, MLB teams have cut off beer sales in the seventh inning so people don't get over-served and have a chance to sober up before leaving the game. But now some of the teams are extending beer sales into the eighth inning because games go by so much quicker. So what do you think about this push to increase the time that you can sell beer sales? Well, it is interesting that it could lead to more drunk driving because they push it later into the game.

24:07So obviously we'll monitor that. But it just, I don't know, when something like this happens, like a rule change about a pitch clock, and then you think about all of the secondary effects that it impacts is kind of interesting. Like it has a bearing on the economy, the fact that they put a pitch clock on. Like bars might sell less booze because games last less time and people are, you know, leaving the bar earlier train. I was thinking about train schedules. You know, they usually bunch them at 10 o 'clock, 1030 to get the people from games. And now they're going to have to move them up to 930 or 10 and kind of switch around their schedules there.

24:44And then TV ads, maybe there's less inventory during a game and they might arm their revenue that way. You're so right. The product on the field improving might have this butterfly effect and lead to less money. And I also thought it was interesting that MLB doesn't set rules around beer sales, which on the surface you would think that they would be the governing body. It's actually up to the stadiums themselves. And they've been – I'm sure they know the data. Like if you over-serve past a certain point, it leads to negative consequences. But now they're kind of like sacrificing that because these rule changes.