Musk's Glitchy Trump Interview & People Falling in Love with ChatGPT's Voice?

0:28Change is always happening. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, another gym chain filed for bankruptcy. What did I tell you all about skipping leg day? Then MDMA therapy just had its role slowed by the FDA. It's Tuesday, August 13th. Let's ride.

0:52Happy International Left Handers Day to all the Southpaws listening to this, which should be about 10 % of you if you're a representative of the general population. Look, modern society was not designed with you in mind. Spiral notebooks, scissors, those desks in lecture halls. It's a righties world and you're just living in it. But you've managed to overcome these hurdles and produce some of the greatest minds around, including Oprah, Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Bart Simpson, and Dontrell Willis. So enjoy your day because the other 364 belongs to righties. I do just want to give a shout out to the animal kingdom, though, because it's full of lefties.

1:32So gorillas are about 75 % right-handed, but orangutans are 66 % left-handed. Kangaroos tend to be southpaws, so think of that next time you're boxing one. And then the common octopus, even though it has eight technicals, actually does have a favored technical. You could claim that as a left-hander if you wanted. But then I also looked at what's the most frequency of left-handedness in the animal kingdom. It comes from parrots. Studies have shown that about 90 % of parrots use their left foot to pick things up. So you're in good company if you're a lefty. Now a word from MBD's sponsor, Beehive.

2:10Neil, did you always know you wanted to be a writer? Well, considering that I was a history major and then got a master's in urban planning, I wouldn't say it was necessarily top of mind. That said, I did write for my school newspaper. Yeah, I guess you took a circuitous route towards the brew, but I feel like you would have thrived in college if a platform like Beehive had been around. For sure. If you would have given me the ability to set up my own newsletter, the sky would have been the limit. Maybe my route would have been a little smoother. See, that is why I love telling you all about Beehive.

2:40It gives everyone and anyone the opportunity to just get their thoughts down on the page or start a multi-million dollar company like Morning Brew. I think the coolest use case for Beehive that I have seen is starting a family newsletter to keep you and your extended family connected. That's exactly what I mean. Give people like College Neal the tools and you never know what they'll do. Oh, College Neal, you would have loved Beehive. If you want to check it out, too, head to Beehive.com slash brew. That's B-E-E-H-I-I-V dot com slash brew to get a 30 day free trial plus 20 percent off three months with code brew.

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3:42last night elon musk and donald trump solidified their bromance with a conversation on musk's platform x a sign that musk is pulling out all of his business levers to help get trump elected in november it was not smooth sailing the space x's audio feature suffered technical difficulties and the talk was delayed for 40 minutes which was reminiscent of ron de santis's botched presidential campaign rollout on X last year. But once it got going, you could see why the two former adversaries have developed a close relationship. They both railed against illegal immigration and believe the U.S. is on a path to collapse.

4:19Musk repeatedly brought up the idea of creating a government efficiency panel to audit how taxpayer money was spent and asked Trump if he could be on it. Trump said, I'd love it. And Elon and Trump didn't appear to let their biggest disagreement get between them, electric vehicles. Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is obviously a huge proponent of electric vehicles and clean energy, while Trump has dismissed climate change and said EV owners should rot in hell. Last week, Trump changed his tune, saying, I'm for electric cars. I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly. Toby, how did X do last night?

4:54Well, it did not do very well. The delay was a tough look for everyone involved. Musk claimed a distributed denial of service attack happened that overwhelmed the company's servers. That said, people did start pushing back immediately and said, huh, it's very unlikely that the rest of the site, the rest of X, would be functioning properly except for this particular space. He did say in a series of follow-up posts that they had tested the system up to 8 million concurrent listeners on Monday, but then when their interview began, there was only about 915 ,000 people listening to the space, and yet somehow it wasn't working.

5:28So if this was a test case for not only Elon and Trump on the campaign trail, a test case for X itself, X did not pass the test. For sure. And X's CEO, Linda Iaccarino, was hyping up this conversation ahead of time as well. This was a big moment for the platform. But in good news for the platform, one of their biggest accounts appears to be back. Remember, Trump was kicked off X for two years after January 6th, and he started his own social media company called Truth Social, where he has been posting nonstop for many years now. And now it looks like he's back on X, where he has a much bigger audience.

6:08He has 89 million followers as of Monday night. And on Truth Social, he has just 7.5 million. Truth Social stock, of course, dipped yesterday as Trump returned to the platform. It remains to be seen how much he's going to post. Yesterday, I think he posted like eight times, including a long video, which was an ad for his campaign. So we'll see whether this marks Trump's return to Twitter slash X, where he really has such a large audience and wielded a lot of power and influence during his presidency and during the campaign in 2015. We'll see if he repeats that ahead of the election in November.

6:46And then now let's dig into that relationship that you spoke about between Trump, Elon Musk, EVs, climate change, because that is probably the biggest source of tension right now. It led to a little bit of an awkward moment last night because Trump is kind of outwardly downplayed climate change, saying how there's plenty of fossil fuels left. And Elon half-heartedly pushes back, but also says that, OK, I guess you're right. So it is this not perfect marriage by any sense. And it is kind of there's definitely going to be tension around Elon's agenda, especially if you are a Tesla shareholder listening to this and saying, all right, Elon, how are you going to make these two sides of you marry and create value for Tesla?

7:29Because it would if Trump goes ahead and gets rid of that EV tax credit, for instance, how is that going to impact Tesla's business? Elon says it would hurt his competitors more than hurt Tesla. So definitely an uneasy relationship, especially when it comes to electric vehicles and climate change. Yeah, especially, you know, Trump has gotten Trump has pledged to get rid of a lot of incentives and subsidies that have to do with EVs and clean energy. But that is a huge part of Tesla's business. Tesla sells regulatory credits to GM, Stellantis, all these other automakers because they hit their emissions targets.

8:02They have some left over. And through this scheme that has been that has been created, they can sell those to automakers that don't hit their targets. And they brought in nine billion dollars since 2018 through these regulatory credits. It was a huge part of their business. They brought in nearly one billion dollars in revenue last quarter alone. So it does appear I mean, generally, it appears like Elon Musk has ambitions beyond Tesla. So if I'm a Tesla shareholder, I'm like, well, maybe he's not even in the EV game anymore. He's talked a big game about AI and all these other projects that are going on.

8:36And I think his growing embrace of Trump may be another sign that just EVs are not a major priority for him anymore. There were some tough pills to swallow for those in the field of psychedelic medicine the past few days. First, the FDA decided not to improve MDMA-assisted therapy as a treatment for PTSD, asking the drugmaker who organized the trial, Lycos Therapeutics, for more studies around the safety and efficacy of the treatment. Then three papers about MDMA-assisted therapy were pulled from a notable scientific journal for unethical conduct at one of the sites where the research took place.

9:09Several of the authors are affiliated with Lycos Therapeutics too, so it's been a not-so-fun couple of days over there. The one-two punch of a rejected clinical study and retracted papers have left the nascent industry in shock after years of building momentum. This would have been the first FDA-authorized psychedelic therapy, as well as the first new PTSD treatment in more than two decades to hit the market. But now the industry is almost set back to square one here. Yeah, I think the question right now is, is this a minor setback, or is this more of a tone-setting decision by the FDA to not approve MDMA for therapy as a treatment for PTSD.

9:51And that is the question the industry faces right now. Is this a Lycos problem specifically that has to do with this company and how they designed their particular trial? Or is the FDA appear to be generally opposed to this experimental medication that a lot of people say shows a ton of promise for treating PTSD where we haven't gotten a treatment, a new treatment in a few decades? Or is it a little more nefarious and can lead to severe side effects because you are hallucinating during this. You have a great dependency on the therapist when you go into these sessions. So I think that's what the industry is grappling with right now, whether this is a short-term setback and meanwhile, there's a bunch of other studies going on, or this is a much longer-term problem that it's going to have to wade through for many years.

10:36Let's dig into the actual study and why people were so bullish on this because it did seem promising. So patients would receive the therapy, you get a capsule containing MDMA, But then you're also guided by a therapist through three eight-hour-long sessions spread three to five weeks apart. Then there would also be 12 drug-free therapy sessions as a follow-up. And the results that they published were very promising, very surprising, almost too promising if you ask some people. In a phase three clinical trial, 71 % of patients no longer had symptoms meeting the PTSD criteria. So it looked to be an overwhelming success, which is why there was so much momentum and so much almost euphoria around these studies.

11:19But the FDA has pushed back. They said that maybe that there were some data practices that weren't exactly kosher. And then also that they wanted to see more impact on how it impacted the cardiovascular system and other health effects. So even though that the FDA did grant MDMA breakthrough therapy status, saying that it can now be recognized for its potential benefits, it looks like it still has a hill to climb in terms of actually getting that FDA stamp of approval. Yeah, they told this company to go back to the drawing board because they could not accept the data as it was. one of the main problems with this study was what is known as functional unblinding.

11:55And the fact is that if you're supposed to not be able to know whether you got the treatment or not, that is the gold standard of these types of clinical trials. But people knew whether they got the MDMA or not, and that could affect their results or their self-reported results. And that's what the FDA did not approve of. They're like, you guys got to fix this. But then you had people pushing back in the other direction being like this is for these types of studies this is a problem that's not just confined to MDMA or Lycos or this particular type this specific study because functional and blinding is something that happens all the time in these types of studies people know whether they're getting a psychedelic or not yeah yeah so that is a major question that Lycos will have to figure out as it goes back to the drawing board and tries to do this study again remember a few Once ago, when OpenAI introduced its human-like voice feature for ChatGPT, and we all thought, well, people are totally going to fall in love with that robot.

12:53Well, OpenAI just issued a report saying, yeah, people are totally going to fall in love with that robot. The AI startup has begun releasing its voice interface for ChatGPT into the wild. And to accompany that rollout, it also issued a report on the safety risks of the feature. One of the risks it flagged is that some users could become emotionally attached to this voice and anthropomorphize it or perceive it in human terms. This is the movie Her come to life. Like, actually, during the testing of the model, OpenAI researchers noticed users talk to the voice chat GPT as if they had a relationship with it.

13:31People said stuff like, this is our last day together. In its report, OpenAI said users' relationships with the AI may reduce their need for human interaction, which could benefit people who are lonely, but could also damage healthy human connections. Toby, it feels like Pandora's box has officially been opened. Right. Everyone saw this coming, let's be honest, because these voices not only sound human, they also have mastered the pauses and the filler words that humans use as well. they can respond with an average time of 320 milliseconds, which is exactly mirrors the conversation that we're having.

14:06Although sometimes I think you're a little quicker than 320 milliseconds there. But you're right. We heard these voices. We heard them coming out. There was the whole Scarlett Johansson debacle where one of them sounded much like the actress. We knew that there was going to be these fears of people developing these deeper connections, especially in a post pandemic society where a lot of people are struggling with loneliness and are willing to form these parasocial relationships. So I guess it's good that OpenAI identified this and caught this in testing, but this was not something that blindsided really anyone.

14:38Yeah, I think there are two ways to look at this. You can say, oh, great, OpenAI is publishing these risk reports. They're having more transparency about this very potentially dangerous or scary or novel technology that is going into the wild. And they are making this move toward transparency because a lot of safety execs have left this company. There are questions about whether it's pursuing profits over safety. And then the other side is like, well, look at what you've created. You've created this voice that can very much mimic a human. You've already shown that people are getting attached to it in literally V1 of this product.

15:14So we are really entering a new phase that we're not prepared for of humans developing relationships with robots. And then the final red flag that popped out from this report was that on the it's very alarming is that a instance of a tester encountered a moment where the model yelled out no and then switched into a voice that mimicked hers you can hear this audio online it is actually extremely creepy where this this tester is talking to the model something switches in it and then it starts parroting her voice back to her And this, they said, was an instance of a, it's a edge case, but sometimes an unauthorized voice will come out of these models because of, they said it was something to do with background noise that overrided like the presets of the model.

16:00So, of course, you have these images of like this Aladdin as a genie AI voice, just switching into different voices all the time, switching into accents and songs, sounds, whatever. It's very scary to think about. So these are two instances that come out. And again, you're right. That is a V1 model of this. So who knows what else is lying on us on the other side of Pandora's box. Up next, is Burning Man even cool anymore?

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17:08EbGliss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EbGliss. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EpGliss. Before starting EpGliss, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about EpGliss and visit epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host a highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life.

17:42They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. In less than two weeks, tens of thousands of people will descend upon a barren spot in the Nevada desert for the annual Burning Man Festival. But while there will surely be art exhibits and house music galore, the festival may be facing a shortage of one key resource, people.

18:22And that's what I wanna talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends, the lack of demand for Burning Man this year. Typically, this event draws out a who's who of Silicon Valley, giving tech dignitaries a chance to be not so dignified in a free-spirited desert free-for-all. And every year since 2011, the festival has sold out almost immediately. But this year, things are very different. The demand for tickets just isn't there. Organizers have reopened sales and a bid to boost attendance. Offers to sell tickets on secondhand sites aren't getting any bites. And veteran burners are hesitant to return after last year's rainy and muddy debacle that left many stranded.

19:01Neil, Burning Man may have lost its fire. It might have. And there are many factors that could go into this. I mean, one is what you mentioned. And people saw these images of 80 ,000 people stranded in the desert. There were no toilets available. They were backed up for hours on end. There was mud and rain everywhere. It did not seem that fun. And those images were displayed all across social media. So if you were an edge case being like, hey, should I go to Burning Man? And you remember that, you're probably like, okay, I probably don't want to go. Another thing is just something we've talked about a lot on the show, which is inflation.

19:35and people have a choice about where they're going to spend their last week of August. And some things may be more attractive than others. And Burning Man costs$575 plus hundreds more in taxes just to get in. So you have a bunch of different factors going on here. And people have to make a decision about what they're doing. And they're like, well, I may take a vacation to Italy because the dollar is very strong right now. Instead of going to Burning Man. And that may be what's going on. Another thing could be losing its cultural relevance just a bit. You mentioned Silicon Valley has kind of taken over a little bit of the anarchist, avant-garde, countercultural spirit of the original Burning Man.

20:19And people may not want to go there and be in that environment. They want that more anarchist spirit of the way it was founded in the 90s. And it's become too mainstream. And then it becomes less cool when it becomes too mainstream. Yeah, when you're talking about it on podcasts like Morning Brew Daily, then it's not as avant-garde and free-spirited anymore. We're normies. But you're right. It has been just a tough few years. I mean, the event was canceled in 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID pandemic. Some people went through their own Burning Man at the time, but it's just not had a lot of momentum recently.

20:52And then finally last year was supposed to be like this return to normalcy for it, as normal as Burning Man can be. and it just really went south because of these very heavy rains. I mean, we got those iconic videos of Diplo and Chris Rock hitchhiking for miles through the desert in a bunch of mud. People have come out and said it didn't look as bad as it actually was. We had a good time. But, yeah, I think Burning Man might have hit its cultural peak. We'll only see in the coming years if it starts declining in importance in Silicon Valley, and we'll see what the numbers look like this year. But for now, tickets are not selling very well.

21:25Yeah, if you want to go, I mean, you can definitely grab them. Okay, blink twice if you went bankrupt. Okay, confirmed. The budget fitness chain Blink filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday, unable to regain its financial form after COVID restrictions walloped gyms four years ago. The company said it would keep its 100-plus locations up and running through bankruptcy proceedings as it tries to reposition its business and look for a buyer. If you're not from the seven U.S. states with a Blink location, It was founded 13 years ago with the goal of democratizing deadlifts. Compared to other chains like Lifetime, it's much kinder on the wallet, with memberships ranging from$15 to$45 a month.

22:05Sure, you may not be able to drape yourself in a eucalyptus scented towel before hitting the infrared sauna, but you can still get a good pump in. And that formula seemed to be working pretty well. Over the last two years, Blink's revenue climbed 40%, mirroring the broader industry's solid bounce back from the pandemic. but costs rose even more than sales, leading Blink to Blink first in this financial staring contest. Toby, you think Blink has a few more reps left in it or is it time to hit the showers? It's just, and it's tough. We call it the messy middle a little bit of gyms because you have on the very low end the planet fitnesses of the world where it's just very cheap and is known as being a very cheap option.

22:43And then you go the complete opposite end of the spectrum. You have the equinoxes, you have the lifetimes of the world that have those eucalyptus scented towels. and Blink was just a little bit caught too far towards the other end. The issue, too, is that the business model of gyms rely on people signing up and then not necessarily coming to those gyms because they sign up more people that would lead to overcrowding. And Blink is kind of in that camp where they're trying to just get as many signups as possible. But Gen Z actually really, really loves the gym and attendance is way up to gyms. And that actually throws the business model a little bit out of whack.

23:19So they may have suffered from their own pandemic bounce back. They suffered from their own success. But yeah, there's always going to be demand for a lower price gyms, especially in a world of the when you have so many higher price options. Right. But we never thought that. I mean, four years ago, if you told me, you always you if you said there will always be demand for gyms and lower price gyms, we would have been like, well, I don't know, because everyone's working out at home and no one saw the bounce back in gyms coming. According to surveys during the peak pandemic, people said that they miss gyms just as much as they miss their family and friends.

23:54Gyms have become a place of social gathering for people, much like run clubs, especially the younger generation. So, you know, a bunch of these gyms that are being successful now, the equinoxes of the world, the lifetimes, are creating more social spaces for people to come and meet others and hang out. And that has been a recipe for success. So I wonder if Blink, as it's going through its bankruptcy proceedings, is going to look at some of the more successful chains and be like, we're creating more of a hangout, WeWork, you know, co-working space vibe where people can hang out. And, you know, that might be something we want to lean into more.

24:29By the way, this could just be an Equinox group issue as well because it owns Blink. And they have been struggling with a very large debt load. They raised$1.8 billion of funding back in March to refinance$1.2 billion of debt. So maybe Blink was doing okay, but since it's part of this broader group, it was just the one that hit the chopping block when it came to trying to get their finances in order. The Olympics are over, which means we are on to 2028 in LA. It also means that despite the feats of athleticism you just witnessed, some of you are daydreaming about your ability to feature in LA in four years.