FAA Wants AI to Fix Flight Chaos & TV Networks Battle Trump’s Media Ban

0:01Good morning, Bird Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, after another day of chaos in the skies, the U.S. aviation system turns to AI for help. Then the paramount deal for Warner Brothers Discovery might actually get across the finish line. It's Tuesday, September 22nd. Let's ride.

0:26it's the first day of fall the bears are bulking up ahead of their hibernation and you know what that means fat bear week is back and it's bigger and chunkier than ever starting today and running through next tuesday fans will vote on the fattest brown bear in katmai national park and preserve in alaska now in its 13th year fat bear week has gone global last year over 1.7 million votes were cast for more than 100 countries, crowning a bear named 32 Chunk as the People's Champion. Toby, who are you liking this year? Before I reveal my pick, I always get a little nervous we are hurting the bear's feelings because we're calling them fat bears, but apparently the bigger the bear, the healthier the bear, according to Kat, my park ranger, Sarah Bruce.

1:09There is no such thing as too fat of a bear. The fatter a bear, the healthier that bear is. We're getting to the point, too, where the contenders for Fat Bear Week are the offspring of other Fat Bear winners. This year, Bear 903 goalie is the son of Grazer, the winner from 2023. And then Bear number 89 backpack is the offspring of Holly, the 2019 champ. It's like seeing Bronny James or Vlad Guerrero Jr. playing professional ball. Just makes you feel old to see these Bear Cubs get chonky enough to actually contend it during Fat Bear Week. My money is still on Chunk, though. You gotta go through the champ if you wanna win, at least until Chunk Jr.

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2:29Go to advertising.roku.com slash MBD and use code BREW5K to access the offer. That's advertising.roku.com slash MBD. Yesterday brought flight chaos around the Northeast when a technical malfunction caused ground stops at New York's three major airports, Philadelphia and beyond, leading to heavy delays and cancellations. Officials blamed it, I kid you not, on a railroad construction crew in New Jersey that accidentally damaged a Verizon cable, causing an outage in the radar and radio system that manages planes during takeoff and landing. As a result, they needed to repair the cable in a process that would take 13 hours, turning Monday into a nightmare for thousands of travelers.

3:12It was somewhat poetic that the aviation turmoil happened the exact same day the government launched a new AI tool meant to mitigate flight disruptions. Just a pilot program for now, no pun intended, covering three airports in the Washington region. But if successful, they're hoping to expand it nationwide by 2028. Called SMART for Strategic Management of Airspace Routing and Trajectories, The$875 million initiative hopes to become the money ball of aviation, using predictive analytics to avoid delays and other flight interruptions by seeing problems before they happen. Under Secretary Sean Duffy, the Transportation Department has poured billions of dollars into modernizing the outdated tech underpinning the country's aviation system.

3:53Most in the industry have applauded the transformation, given just how ancient the existing infrastructure is. But others are skeptical this AI tool will have much of an impact, or worse, it'll compromise the safety of the flying public. Toby, can we chat GPT our way out of flight delays? I don't know. It was brutal yesterday, though, because I was flying back to JFK, and I opened up Twitter, and I see that an Amtrak construction project somehow was going to make my flight delayed. I go, how the heck is that possible? But it really was just a series of unfortunate events because the primary circuit failed, then the backup line was cut, and it just shows how it can ripple through an entire system like that.

4:32But from a news perspective, we're like, wow, this does segue very nicely into this AI air traffic controller system. The big question here for a lot of air traffic controllers is how is this going to fit into my existing workflows? Like I've been at this job for a while now. What is this AI going to do? And basically it's just a recommendation layer, not an autonomous air traffic controller. That's what a lot of people kind of jump to. It's not going to be taking over from a person doing the job. you're just going to see another byline saying like hey this is one potential outcome that could happen what do you want to do about it so at least initially it's a very small test but it's well it raised some fears about it replacing humans but it's not going to be replacing any humans anytime soon yeah we already are seeing some backlash from lawmakers representative don buyer who represents northern virginia said the faa should not use my constituents as guinea pigs for an unproven ai air traffic control system that has americans lives in its hands i'm calling on the FAA to immediately suspend use of this AI system at Washington area airports until its safety has been established.

5:38Federal officials, including Sean Duffy and the head of the AAA, Brian Bedford, said, look, this is going to be a predictive system. As you mentioned, a lot of it has to do with weather and alternative routing. So they didn't explain perhaps an example of what this might look like. But I'm thinking that this AI will tell air traffic control that there's a weather pattern coming up in the Midwest in the next couple of days, like major thunderstorms coming down from St. Louis or whatever. So if you're flying from the east to the west coast, you might want to take a more southerly route or a more northerly route to avoid those potential disruptions.

6:15One point of concern was how quickly this all came together. They awarded the contract just three months ago to a Boston area tech company, and then now it's launching on September 22nd. So just that three month time span worried aviation officials, airline industry CEOs. They had a lot of meetings trying to get up to speed with what exactly this would mean for them. It seems now they are cautiously on board with this new tool. Again, it's just a small program for now, but if it works, they'll go nationwide. It's kind of essential that something does change within the air traffic control, because if you go back to, you know the 1980s ronald reagan fired more than 11 000 striking controllers and pretty much since then the agency has been existing in this state of understaffing and staffing shortages that's only been exacerbated by things like covid and things like the government shutdowns and so the faa is kind of counting on technology to come in and relieve some of that burden from an understaffed air traffic control system so they actually in back in in may of 2026 they reduced their estimate for how many controllers they would need to hire going forward by roughly 2 ,000 people hoping to make up that difference with technology.

7:24So, yes, you may hear some vocal outcries about AI being introduced into this very high-stakes system, but we do need to innovate in order to make up from the shortfalls that have gripped this agency for the last 40 to 50 years. And just look at what happened yesterday. There was an NJ Transit crew accidentally dug up a cable, and then you all the way in Florida were freaking out. about getting back to New York. And I mean, it was absolutely chaos. Newark had no commercial flights landing there from 9.38 a.m. to 5.22. So that is a huge span of time where there are no flights landing at Newark.

8:00There were flights coming from Europe that I just saw on flight radar. They just literally turned around because they were never going to make it to New York. And then you had people in Albany cheering. They said, we did it. Albany is now an international airport because you had a lot of flights diverting to Albany that couldn't land in the New York area. So all these knock-on effects. All right, let's move on. It looks like Hollywood's most controversial merger is getting its happily ever after. Paramount cleared an important hurdle yesterday in its quest to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, reaching a settlement with California and 11 other states to resolve an antitrust lawsuit, holding up the$110 billion deal from going through.

8:37The new media giant, led by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, is set to control two major movie studios in Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. two major streamers in Paramount Plus and HBO Max, and two major news organizations in CBS and CNN. It was exactly that concentration of power that led the states to bring the antitrust suit in the first place, fearing reduced competition, increased prices, and harm to entertainment workers. In order to get the states to drop the suit, Ellison had to promise to release at least 30 theatrical movies a year for the next two years. If Paramount drops the ball on that number, it can face a$30 million penalty for each missing movie.

9:15Also to address fears that the merger would mean fewer productions and jobs, Paramount committed to spending at least$1.5 billion on U.S. production over five years, and it must operate a fund dedicated to purchasing independent films, so we get to see Nathan Filder do weird stuff still. Finally, an independent board of journalists will oversee the news orgs to ensure the editorial independence of CNN and CBS. Sounds like a lot, but Paramount doesn't have to cleave off a movie studio or a news org, which keeps the general shape of the merger intact, a big win for the company. Neil, this knocks off the biggest remaining legal obstacle for the merger, though the settlement still needs court approval, and likely helps them avoid a nasty penalty come October 1st, which if the deal didn't officially close by then, would mean Paramount would have to pay Warner Bros shareholders$7 million a day.

10:03This thing might finally get across the finish line. Fascinating negotiation here. First of all, every single regulator across the world had approved this merger, And then you had this handful of states led by California. That was the last bastion, just manning helms deep there trying to fight this particular merger. I'm not sure which side had more leverage because, as you mentioned, Ellison and Paramount come October 1st, they were going to have to pay shareholders$7 million a day in these penalties. So that adds up after a couple of days or after one day, extending a couple of months. That is a huge check you have to write.

10:39So his back was against the wall. But then on the other side, you had Rob Bonta, who's the attorney general of California. Paramount was threatening to leave the state of California, and they already had talks with Tennessee. I'm probably Nashville, but they were threatening to leave. That is a huge job creator and investor in California. So both sides had their weaknesses and they were trying to exploit each other. I guess they worked on this compromise that to a lot of critics of this deal didn't extract enough concessions from Paramount to get the deal across. They were not so particularly happy with Bonta for making this deal.

11:14But again, I'm not sure I had more leverage because both of them had particular weaknesses when they came to the negotiating table. And there's still a lot of critics out there about this merger, but there is a lot of both sides-ism happening at this point because the main concern from a lot of people was that when you consolidate in this industry, you're going to create a lot of redundant entertainment jobs that are just going to go away when you have two studios and two production companies coming together. But the counter argument from that is that a lot of people in this industry have felt very ill at ease over the last couple of years.

11:49There's been strikes, there's been writer strikes, director strikes, acting strikes, and they see this as bringing a degree of stability to the industry. The Directors Guild of America actually backed the settlement binding production commitments by saying that they provide greater stability during a period of declining production. So the fact that they have to make 30 movies a year or else face penalties, that actually is music to the ears of a lot of these people saying that now it seems like there's a more steady force in the industry rather than all the upheaval we've seen over the past couple of years.

12:22And a counterweight to all the tech companies coming in. Who won the most Emmys last week. It was Apple. And now you have at least companies, people know that have been around Hollywood for decades, which is Paramount and Warner Brothers saying, okay, we're going to combine to take on the encroaching tech companies, Apple, Amazon, et cetera, who have encroached on our turf from the Bay Area now coming down to Los Angeles. So maybe that is heartening to some of those people. What it does do is crown David Ellison, the prince of Hollywood. He's one of the most powerful people in that industry. Now, just a few years ago, he was the owner of this small production company called Skydance, and then he just Pac-Manned his way up the food chain, ate Paramount, and then just ate Warner Brothers.

13:03A lot of that had to be some help from his dad, Larry Ellison, one of the richest people in the world. Moving on, we haven't seen a TV news showdown like this since Brick threw a trident in 70s-era San Diego. Yesterday, three news outlets, CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, sued the Trump administration to regain access to the White House after they were banned from the grounds by President Trump on Friday. Escalating the battle even further, major TV networks known as The Pool, which take turns providing television coverage of the president's public events, said they would stop doing that in a historic move of solidarity with the banned outlets.

13:36Tensions between Trump and the press flared up last week when the president surprised even his own aides by confiscating the badges of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico at the White House complex, citing their unfavorable coverage of him. Trump elaborated in a post Monday morning, the White House is not instituting an assault on the free press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the fake news, something that has grown like cancer in our beloved United States of America. Many others do see this as an assault on the free press, with the three networks filing their lawsuit under First Amendment grounds.

14:07They wrote in a statement without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalist credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public's right to independent journalism free from government interference. Soby, with the pool banding together to not cover the most powerful person alive, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation in modern media history. What is the pool? It sounds like this very... Something I spent a lot of time in this summer. Exactly. That's what most people would think the pool is. But the pool exists actually mostly as a space-saving mechanism because when you are the president, you're giving addresses in the Oval Office, for instance, and that is newsworthy.

14:47So a lot of news organizations want access to that footage, to that coverage. And yet the Oval Office can't fit every single news organization in the world who wants access. And so what they do is this rotating group of news organizations are the designated pool person for that day. They go in, they film Trump's addresses, and then they distribute that to everyone else in the news ecosystem. The fact that it's kind of an unofficial alliance, but the fact that they are now banding together again to do a blackout on everything that Trump does shows that it does have leverage and it is a powerful organization because it's basically the eyes, ears and mouth of the president out to the rest of the world.

15:29But yes, essentially, it's a space saving mechanism to make sure that there's not too many cameras from too many different cooks in the kitchen covering everything the president does. The five networks are ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News. What basically happened yesterday, the show of Solidarity was CNN was banned. So all of the other four said we are not going to take our replacement cameras, putting them in the room or just have them trailing the president wherever he goes, because that's what they do. And they said this is what we do in Solidarity. More so, all the photojournalists from a bunch of media outlets like The Washington Post and New York Times said, we are not going to publish our photos of the president's daily activities until midnight, also in solidarity.

16:13You had this Veep-level type of humorous situation earlier in the day that arose from the lack of a TV pool, which shows why it's so important. Trump was doing this big unveiling of a new helipad that he wants to release to the public before President Xi Jinping comes from China to the White House later this week. You watch the video. It's literally nothing but static for this like eight minutes and nine minutes. He's talking in front of a bunch of people trying to introduce this entire new helipad. And you just can't hear anything because there's no there's no microphone. There's no equipment that CNN would typically provide.

16:52So that was just a pretty humorous moment. Yeah, they were trying to go direct. The White House was saying, we don't need the pool. We can go to our own feed. And yet it mostly picked up the helicopter's blades, which is funny. But it also comes during a big week because this is the UN is in town. Again, this is actually relates to our previous story about the air traffic controller situation. A lot of people were trying to come to New York this week. And the fact that, one, it's blacked, the president's normal coverage is blacked out is unprecedented. And then, two, the fact that no one could land their flights in JFK was also unprecedented.

17:25So it's been a rocky week here in New York City for a lot of different reasons. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends right after this. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now you can easily make your voice heard too. Vanguard Investor Choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds. In just a few clicks, you can have a say on important shareholder topics like executive pay and director elections. Visit Vanguard.com slash Investor Choice to learn more.

17:58It's your shares. It's your voice. It's easy. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds, and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. Oh, whoo! What is happening? I'm just excited for what a howling good time families can have at any of Great Wolf Lodge's 22 locations across the country. Splash away in the indoor water park, where it is always 84 degrees, there's a massive wave pool, a lazy river, and tons of water slides. There's also a bunch of great dining options, spacious suites, and complimentary daily events like nightly dance parties all under one roof.

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19:16For more info, head to the link in the show description. Has your local bagel shop started to sell suspiciously trendy merch? Is your favorite neighborhood coffee spot starting to post Instagram videos with a little too curated of a vibe? It could be a sign that private equity has moved in on your favorite eateries, a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. The PE-ification of food places is causing an open rebellion amongst consumers who are tired of funds coming in to try and squeeze out every last dime out of their favorite spots. The most recent example comes here in New York City, where Los Tacos No.

19:521 looks to a fallen victim to an undisclosed investment from the PE firm TSG Consumer. Despite its founders promising that they are definitely not messing with the tacos, most people immediately joked how it was the beginning of the end where juicy al pastor would give way to juicy profits oftentimes private equity is wielded as an insult regardless of if a fund is involved or not meant to evoke a lack of charm or soullessness it has now become a kind of meme where everything gets worse as soon as it's bought by private equity magan greenwell author of bad company private equity and the death of the american dream told the guardian greenwell says she teaches high schoolers who can't even really articulate what private equity is and yet tell her they'd never eat at a place owned by it you know everyone's had food from one of these places crumble cookies blank street coffee they all just have this vibe to them trust right here i don't mind some of them but i can see why they rub people the wrong way they all kind of look the same and you feel like they just don't have any soul but if you're a restaurant owner and you're seeing a line down the block for your cookies or your ice cream or your bagels or your tacos what do you and you want to expand what are you supposed to do this is a brutal business cost of labor is super high.

21:02You have to pay insurance. You have to pay rent in New York City. The margins are very low when it comes to the food industry. So if you want to expand, sometimes it's impossible not to take outside capital, which we know the young people have branded private equity, no matter what kind of outside capital it is. Those are the people with the money. And if you're pop of bagels and you're seeing so much success in Southern Connecticut, and you want to expand in New York and all of these other places that now have pop of bagels, that's just one example, you kind of have to go to get somebody to write a check to you, and then you will be branded as selling out to PE by Gen Z, but they're definitely in a pickle when it comes to expanding.

21:41You could grind it out with low margins for a lot of time, and you know what? A lot of restaurant chains have done that, but if you do want to plot your nationwide expansion, then you do have to kind of go to private equity and say, please, I want some of your money. There also is just this vibe to a lot of them, And a lot of people, you just kind of know upon walking in that it is owned by private equity. A lot of that has to do with the food itself. They all seem to be the similar vein of cuisine. It's cookies, it's bagels, it's ice cream. And there's a reason for that. Those are very simple and repeatable products.

22:15You don't need highly trained staff. You don't need a big chef to come in. Production can be standardized across a lot of different locations. And so it is not a it is not an accident that, you know, you're seeing crumble cookies. You're seeing Blank Street Coffee. You're seeing all the same ilk of restaurant taking money from private equity because they love this place. They put a lot of money into it. Actually, P firms invested almost 100 billion dollars in bars and restaurants between 2014 and 2024, according to CNBC. However, almost half of the bars and restaurants that filed for bankruptcy just two years ago in 2024 were backed by private equity.

22:51I'm thinking things like California Pizza Kitchen. All right. I love CPK. And then Red Lobster in 2024. They were seen as PE being the death knell of them because you often saddle these companies with a lot of debt and maybe make them do an endless shrimp promotion to pad your bottom line or pad your supplier. So it does come with a lot of strings attached when these companies go to private equity and say, I want you to help me expand half of all the bankruptcies two years ago. We're backed by private equity. I just think it's so funny, too, that it's just become this insult that you throw around, regardless of if it's true or not.

23:27Some people are saying, if I see a place with more than two locations, I get suspicious. I'm like, well, come on. Can we not have ambition anymore? Can you not say, oh, people love my delicious tacos here. I'm going to open another shop. So it's certainly in the lexicon of Gen Z in particular right now. They love tossing it out as an insult. All right, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. The stock market closed out summer with a bang. Soaring tech stocks lifted the NASDAQ a ginormous 2.3%, and the$1 trillion Market Clap Club welcomed a new member. The chip maker AMD, an NVIDIA rival who's been on a tear, rising more than 180 % year-to-date.

24:05Yesterday's rally appears to be linked to Meta's ultra-popular Muse AI agent, which has topped the App Store and fueled optimism over demand for the CPUs needed to run agentic AI. Meta, for instance, is AMD's second biggest customer, making up 5.5 % of its revenue, Bloomberg notes. MetaShares had their best day since April 2025, up 11.4%. Whenever we get a big day in the market like this, people start to point out that it's a very bifurcated market because literally just Muses' adoption percentages and numbers brought the market to all-time highs, but that's not actually indicative of the entire health of the market.

24:43Under the surface, more stocks fell to new 52-week lows on Monday, then rose to 52-week highs. Also right now, the technology sector is making up 51 % of the S &P 500 market cap. This is supposed to be the diversified cross-section of every industry in America, and yet over half of that is coming from one sector alone. So anytime you are seeing these all-time highs, look under the surface, you might not see quite as robust of an economy, not economy, but as robust of a market as in years past when the market reaches all-time highs. Moving on, Seattle is adding a new protected class, people whose relationship status requires a shared Google calendar.

25:26The city council unanimously approved a measure to ban polyamorous and non-monogamous relationship from discrimination, meaning businesses will have to make sure decisions about hiring or serving customers aren't based on someone having multiple partners. Sounds like a niche law, but the dating pool here is bigger than you'd think. Research cited by the city shows roughly 5 % of Americans are currently in consensually non-monogamous relationships, while estimates put the share of people who have tried one at about 20%. Seattle also isn't going about this solo. Portland, Oakland, and Berkeley have adopted similar protections.

26:00Neil, big week for thruffles. And I got to give you credit for a great joke. When I shared this link last night, I said, I think people will be into this. And you replied, multiple people will be into this. And I literally laughed out loud when I read that. So good job, Toby. To me, it always strikes me that whenever you see a more progressive law like this coming at the city level, it is always the same cities. There's always Oakland. It's always Berkeley. It's always Cambridge. It's always Somerville in Massachusetts. And it's always Seattle. They've always been on the vanguard of these things that you might raise your eyebrows about, but maybe become more normalized in the subsequent decades.