Meta, Google Lose Social Media Addiction Trial & NASA’s $20B Moon Base

0:00Neal Freyman:Managing media plans for multiple clients can feel like herding cats. Disney Campaign Manager is built for fast-moving agencies looking for one simple ad-buying solution to handle all of their streaming TV campaigns across Disney +, Hulu, and ESPN. Set flexible budgets, adjust on the fly, and optimize for total campaign control across every buy all in one platform. Get started today at DisneyCampaignManager.com. That's DisneyCampaignManager.com. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how the oil shock is raising prices for food packaging. Then social media just had its big tobacco moment in court and lost.

0:44Neal Freyman:It's Thursday, March 26th. Let's ride.

0:51Good morning. If you went to Philadelphia International Airport on Tuesday, you probably saw some really long lines, but not all of them were made up of humans. To celebrate National Cheesesteak Day, organizers said they set the Guinness World Record for longest line of cheesesteaks, arranging 1 ,291 of the beefy sandwiches in a row inside a departure hall to obliterate the previous record of 500. Now, Guinness World Record rules stipulate that all food used in record attempts needs to be eaten or donated, so they invited TSA workers who hadn't been getting paid for a free lunch.

1:23Neal Freyman:This is either a genius or extremely lucky SEO play because now when you Google long lines, Philadelphia airport, you get news about cheesesteaks instead of TSA. But I do hope it brightened TSA workers at days. You're not getting paid, but at least you have, you know, this two hour old soggy cheesesteak from Pat's to eat, which is better than Gino's, by the way. A little Philly lore for you there. They're all they're both worse than Jim's. Okay. Now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. Toby, what's the best return on spend you've ever gotten? And it could be anything, anything at all. All right, this might sound crazy, but easily the life-size portrait of Dorian Gray hanging in my attic.

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2:11Neal Freyman:They have a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company roles, seniority skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd. Terms and conditions may apply. Social media companies are under the same scrutiny the tobacco industry went through, and they're racking up L's in the courtroom. Yesterday, a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark social media trial for running platforms that harmed adolescents in failing to warn the public about the danger.

2:50Neal Freyman:The two were ordered to pay$4.2 million and$1.8 million, respectively, in damages to a plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who said her addiction to social media caused her mental health crisis. The case took a novel legal approach, arguing that social media can cause personal injury, and after nine days of deliberations, the jury agreed. The case brought out heavy hitters to the LA courtroom. The five-week trial included testimonials from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Aseri, head of Instagram. Both execs rejected claims that Instagram could be described as clinically addictive, with Meta mounting a defense that the plaintiff, who goes by Kaylee, suffered from mental health issues from familial abuse and turmoil, not social media.

3:29Neal Freyman:YouTube's defense was, we're not a social media company at all, and our features are not designed to be addictive. But pointing to features like infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, and autoplay videos, the plaintiff argued the platforms were designed to entice and hook young people into compulsive use. The verdict was handed down a day after a New Mexico jury in a separate case found Meta liable for failing to safeguard users from child predators. Neil, the jury is still hearing arguments around whether to impose punitive damages on the companies to go along with the compensation they are sending Kaylee's way.

4:01Neal Freyman:But the bigger question is, does this open the floodgates as the companies face down similar cases scheduled to go to trial later this year? Yes. The answer is yes, it absolutely opens the floodgates. Big tech critics have been hammering away at these companies for years with very little success. They finally pierced the armor, and now they're going to go in for the kill. And this shield was Section 230, the shield that they could not penetrate. This was this law from the 90s that said social media companies can't be liable for the content that's posted on their platform. And it provided a very important shield for social media companies throughout the past few decades, and it's called the bedrock of the modern Internet.

4:39So the plaintiff in this case and many other cases that are about to be coming down the pipeline are not going to focus on the content on the platform because that's protected by Section 230 and instead focus on the design choices, on the literal product of social media platforms like autoplay, like infinite scroll. And it seems like they've had success here in Los Angeles and they're going to have perhaps more success down the road.

5:01Neal Freyman:Yeah, I think the best way to look at this dichotomy is that it's not a speech case anymore. That's what Section 230 rested on. It's like, can people say whatever they want on our platforms and are we liable for that? That was a shield for a long time, but you are correct that now that we're looking into the specific design choices, that's what makes it addictive as a cigarette or addictive as tobacco. That's why we keep kind of comparing it to the tobacco industry. I mentioned that a punitive damages phase is what's up next in the trial. And that the plaintiff's lawyer is kind of going for the jugular.

5:34Neal Freyman:At one point in the courtroom, Mark Lanier, who is the lawyer who represented Kaylee, held up a jar of M &Ms saying each piece of candy represented a billion dollars of the company's value. And then he took off one bit of the shell of a single blue M &M and said, this is$200 million. They do not want to feel the pain for what they did. So basically he's arguing for much larger, you know, damages to come out of this trial. Not just the compensatory payment made to Kaylee. So what happens next? The answer is probably that Instagram and YouTube, Meta and all these social media companies get sued into oblivion.

6:08There's more than 1000 cases already waiting in the wings. We've got two big federal trials coming later this year. But because that these plaintiffs have had success going after the product themselves, this might continue until Meta, YouTube, these social media companies actually change their products or they talk or they get into this big settlement. And this is where you're talking about big tobacco. So last century in the 90s, you had Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds also getting sued into oblivion like this in terms of personal injury. So they got together with more than 40 states and they reached a 206 billion master settlement.

6:44And after that, these companies contracted in a big way. Decline in smoking followed. So there's either going to be a lot of regulation coming out of this or there's going to be a massive settlement, perhaps on the level of big tobacco in the 90s.

6:57Neal Freyman:That's a couple more blue M &Ms, which is what these lawyers are after. Moving on, the price of a brick is going up. This week, Dow Chemicals told customers it will double a planned price hike for certain plastic residents as the shutdown at the Strait of Hormuz continues to choke off critical raw materials. Dow's original 15-cent-per-pound price hike of polyethylene, a lightweight, durable thermoplastic that is the world's most produced plastic, is now 30 cents, meaning that everything from shopping bags to plastic bottles is going to get more expensive. It's a reminder that as the war with Iran drives up oil prices, it's not just the gas you put in your tank that gets pricier, but everything that uses plastic too.

7:35Neal Freyman:Plastic is a hidden inflation driver. Between 4 % and 8 % of total global oil production is used to make the stuff that encapsulates our stuff. The Oddbots team at Bloomberg highlighted the example of a bag of carrots. To bring a bag to grocery shelves, there's farming, transport, and store costs. All of those require energy of some sort, but the overlooked part of the equation is a little plastic baggy your carrots come in. If polyethylene prices go up, that bag becomes more expensive. And since your carrots only cost around$2 to begin with, any incremental height and input costs is going to cause price hikes.

8:10Neal Freyman:Neil, Tracy Alloway from Bloomberg put it well. There's something kind of remarkable or perhaps dystopian that in today's economy, even when you're buying carrots, you're really buying crude oil. Yeah, think about when you go into a grocery store. I mean, besides the produce aisle with the loose avocados and oranges and apples, pretty much everything else is wrapped up in plastic packaging. And that plastic packaging is made from oil. And that plastic packaging is also made from oil and inputs that come from the Middle East, which is now being blockaded. If you want to take one word away from this particular story, it's feedstocks.

8:46Now, feedstocks is the very strange word that the industry uses for the inputs that go into making polyethylene and this plastic packaging. Problem is that the Middle East supplies about 30 percent of one of those feedstocks, which is liquefied petroleum gas, as well as 24 percent of a global seaborne nafta, which is another one of those feedstocks. So basically, those are not getting to market, which is raising prices for everyone else.

9:11Neal Freyman:And it's been good for Dow's business. Again, they had this price hike already planned. Prices of these feedstocks' inputs were already going up before the war. Now that the war has exacerbated that, Dow's shares rose more than 6 % on Tuesday after they announced that they're up 25 % since the start of the war. An interesting thing, too, is that how much does this actually going to affect CPI readings and inflation readings, like as we look ahead to the next inflation number that shows up, it's going to show up in the food prices. Energy as a whole, when it comes to the index, is not a massive weighting.

9:46Neal Freyman:It's just 6.3 % of the index, but food prices accounts for 15 % of the index. And again, as we said, you need fertilizer to grow food. That comes through the straight. You need fuel to transport the food. That is going up in cost. And then you have to package the food in plastic, which is also going up, which is why we could see a chunky inflation reading in the next few months. And it might be worse here than the rest of the world because if you're looking at which type of populations consume plastic, it's America's number one and everyone else is way down the line. The average US resident, this is in 2019 study, used 255 kilograms of new plastics versus a world average of 60.1 kilograms.

10:27So we are a plastic loving nation, which is gonna bite us in the butt right now. Get in losers, we are building a moon base. In a major presentation on Tuesday, NASA laid out concrete plans to build a long-term base on the moon, and it's not kidding around this time. Administrator Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, promised, quote, there will be an evolutionary path to building humanity's first permanent surface outpost beyond Earth. Since Isaacman took the top job at NASA in December, he's been going full Coach Carter to rejuvenate a struggling agency that's done a whole lot of talking and a whole lot of nothing over the past few decades.

10:59He's also someone who's intimately familiar with space, having been in low Earth orbit twice on missions he's financed himself. Okay, about that moon base, it's going to be built in three phases over the next decade, with each phase costing about$10 billion. If all goes according to plan, and that's a big if when it comes to space, the habitat will contain the basic elements of civilization like power sources, complex communications, scientific labs, on-site manufacturing, and of course permanent habitats for astronauts to live in. There is a long way to go and 150 ,000 kilograms of payload to be delivered to the lunar surface in the interim.

11:33But this is a big deal. Instead of treading water, NASA finally has a detailed 10-year plan with deadlines, reasonable budgets, and buy-in from indispensable private sector partners. Sounds like they received a visit from McKinsey.

11:44Neal Freyman:Let's go through these three phases that were maybe laid out in the McKinsey PowerPoint presentation. Phase one goes through 2028. They want to basically just send up a relentless barrage of private robotic landers. No humans are going to be involved in any of that. 21 landings total. They want to bring four metric tons of payload to the moon. These will include things like rovers that can explore the surface and look for key resources. Phase two goes from 2028 through 2032 or so. That is when you're going to start to build semi-habitable infrastructure. That comes with 27 landings with a total mass of 60 metric tons.

12:21Neal Freyman:So you're bringing a lot more stuff to the moon in that phase. And then phase three, 2029 through 2036 or so, that is establishing infrastructure to support a continued human presence. That is when people are on the moon itself. So, again, we are stretching way out into the future. But there is a plan, which is more than we could have said, you know, a few months ago. I'll go in phase four when they put in TVs with Red Zone and I can watch then. No, so I think the big reaction to this was, this is kind of cheap, right? $10 billion to establish a moon base. Well, each of the three phases that, you know, there's a lot of projects on Earth that cost a lot more.

13:00And this has been a big mission of Jared Isaacman to bring down costs at NASA. He thinks there's not a revenue problem, but an expense problem. During the presentation, he said billions of dollars wasted. He's talking about his predecessors, years lost, hardware that never launched, fewer flagship science missions. and he framed this as an existential crisis for NASA and the space industry in general, that people weren't getting excited about space because he went on to say, fewer astronauts in space means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween. I don't like it.

13:29Neal Freyman:We have to say that the moon base is replacing a prior plan that was essentially build a orbiting space station above the lunar surface and use that as kind of a jumping off point to make these missions. That is no longer a thing anymore and that has caused a lot of rifts between the U.S. and their international partners. Europe is extremely mad right now because they're feeling whiplash around. They had actually delivered a massive metallic cylinder that was gonna be this big critical habitation module for NASA back in April. So they were all in on this plan to build basically a mini international space station.

14:07Neal Freyman:That plan is dead now. It's all about moon base, which some people within NASA are saying, hey, this is a good idea. For so long, we've just been pulled in so many different directions. At least we know we can wrap our heads around a moon base. It's all about moon base over the next decade or so. But it came with some some European. They'll get over it. The biggest date to look for now is actually April 1st, which is in less than a week. And this is not April Fool's. NASA is planning to launch four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth on the Artemis 2 mission, which will be the first time we visit the moon since 1972.

14:42Neal Freyman:I'm pumped. Let's go. I'm dressing up as an astronaut for Halloween. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers right after this. This episode is brought to you by Apple. Neil, there's nothing like your first Mac. I remember my first Mac like it was yesterday. I got mine right as my sister started to get recruited to play soccer in college. I was given the very important task of making her a highlight tape, and iMovie was my best friend. She ended up playing at Georgetown, so I'd say it was all worth it. When I got my first Mac, I was heading into freshman year at the University of Maryland.

15:16A lot was uncertain that fall, but I knew I had a dependable sidekick for homework, connecting with other students, and devouring blogs about our basketball recruiting class.

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16:02Save your budget and reach the people who actually want to hear from you. Go to Twilio.com slash daily show. That's T-W-I-L-I-O dot com slash daily show.

16:13Neal Freyman:Neil, think fast. About what? Order fulfillment. ShipStation's intelligence-driven platform brings order management, rate shopping, inventory and returns, warehouse systems, and comprehensive analytics all in one place, saving customers 15 hours per week on fulfillment. With ShipStation, you can connect to over 200 sales channels. Instead of five to seven disconnected tools, you've got one. Try ShipStation free for 60 days with full access to all features, no credit card needed. Go to ShipStation.com and use code MBDS. That's ShipStation.com, code MBDS. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will give you lots of conversation material to bring up with the strangers you're waiting in a TSA line with.

17:01For my first number, Americans are feeling really bad about their jobs, like historically bad. In a new Gallup poll, more U.S. workers said they're struggling in life than thriving the first time this has happened on record. It is a sharp departure from historical trends. Between 2009 and 2019, the thriving rate among workers was as high as 60 percent. And even during the pandemic year of 2020, it was 55 percent. Now it's collapsed alongside a bunch of other indicators of confidence in the job market. In the fourth quarter of 2025, just 28 % of U.S. employees said now is a good time to find a quality job, with 72 % calling it a bad time.

17:39Just four years ago, this was flipped. 70 % of workers were optimistic, and 30 % weren't, a collapse of 42 percentage points. Even among the broader doom and gloom, a few groups stand out for being the biggest Debbie Downers. American workers with higher levels of formal education were far less optimistic about the job market than those who spent less time in school last year. Meanwhile, younger workers were less hopeful about the labor market than older workers, with just one in five workers aged 18 to 34 saying now is a good time to find a quality job. Toby, these aren't just vibes. The reality on the ground is miserable, too.

18:12As The New York Times reported, this is the worst hiring spring for young degree holders since the depths of the pandemic.

18:17Neal Freyman:Debbie Downer, but I'm just going to continue piling on. A recent ZipRecruiter survey also found that over a quarter of new hires are taking pay cuts when starting new roles. So even if you can find a job, it's usually for less than what you were being paid at your previous job. And then one more data point to throw into the mix, too, is that this survey was conducted during the final few months of 2025. That is before the Iran war broke out, before oil and gas prices started soaring. So maybe it's even worse out there than this survey actually painted the picture. For my next number, let's do something more fun.

18:53An AI version of Love Island starring Fruit has taken the internet by storm, and it's become more popular than the show itself. This is real. A TikTok series called Fruit Love Island has surpassed the Real Love Island, which is the U.S.'s top reality show, in terms of followers on the platform. And it's racking up more viewers per episode than the non-AI version, according to tech investor Olivia Moore. Yes, 15 million people are tuning into bite-sized, made-for-mobile AI Fruit Love Island episodes to see whether Bananito, an AI-generated banana, will find his match. AI Kitchen Slop has been percolating on social media for months when people began posting benign educational videos of objects sharing life hacks like how to remove a wine stain.

19:35If that was weird, things got only weirder from there, with an entire ecosystem emerging of talking AI fruits, finding themselves in emotionally fraught, sexually charged situations, In one video, which received 1.8 million views on Instagram, a homophobic Clementine kicks his gay son, also a Clementine, out of the house when he caught him messing around with a strawberry into this AI fruit milieu the Love Island knockoff was born and has absolutely exploded. Toby, it might be time to log off.

20:04Neal Freyman:No, I'm logging on. I need to know what Passiona and Razzalina are getting up to and the Fruit Love Island. This is not the only genre that's been fruitified either. There's basically spinoffs of most popular culture at this point in the fruit realm. The summer I turned pretty became the summer I turned fruity. So I think the larger takeaway, other than just how weird and sexually charged a lot of these videos are, is that every piece of popular entertainment is now just gonna be have a kind of a weird mirror image in the fruit world and that we can't create anything new anymore. I do have to just stress how bad these videos are too.