People Love Watching the World Cup in Spanish & Dating Coworkers is OK Again?

0:01Are you sucking wind from trying to keep up with AI and its impact? Take a breather and tune in to the Intelligence Shift, Morning Brew's new podcast with PwC. It bridges the gap between big picture AI concepts and what it actually means in practice. Host Dan Priest is joined by expert guests to discuss AI's role in sports, music, HR, and more. Listen to the Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why Europe's airports are especially chaotic this summer. Then, why lots of English speakers prefer Telemundo's World Cup broadcast to foxes.

0:39It's Thursday, July 9th. Let's ride.

0:53Good morning. A Brown University economics professor is coming forward with pretty clear-cut evidence that virtually all of his students used AI to cheat in his class this spring. On the take-home midterm exam, Roberto Serrano said that the average score was 96 out of 100, while 40 students scored a perfect 100. He grew very suspicious, writing to the students, I am not declaring the midterm void for now. I'm going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. So he made the final exam in person. Here's what happened next. 18 students dropped the course, nine didn't bother to show up to the final, and the average score fell from 96 on the midterm to 48 on the final.

1:35Toby, not a great look for your alma mater. Not a great look, but I want to shout out two people in this class. First is a person who received a 95.5 on the midterm. Suspicious. Nope. 95 on the final. An ethical baller right there. And by far the lowest delta between the two scores, except for a legend a little further down the grade scale who received a 55 on the midterm and a 59 on the final. So yes, horrible at econ, but at least they didn't cheat and stepped up big time to turn that F into a C minus. on the final. Professor Serrano sounded off on the whole incident saying, we cannot afford to have a society in which a significant faction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay.

2:18That leads to a declining society to a failed society. We cannot choose to become idiots. Drop the hammer right there. And now a word from our sponsor, Ultra Running. Hey, Toby, do your shoes give you enough toe room? You know I'm sensitive about my fragile and dainty toes. I learn something new every day. Anyway, Ultra Running has shoes that can fit your lifestyle and your feet. That's because they make shoes shaped like feet. Most running shoes are narrow at the toe, but Ultra has more room for your toes so they can spread out and your feet can stay in a natural position. The Ultra Fit is designed to give you more room for your toes for comfort, balance, and strength.

2:55Use promo code MORNINGBREW10 for 10 % off your first pair of ultra running shoes at ultrarunning.com slash morningbrew that's a l t r a running.com slash morningbrew meta just rolled out a new ai image generator and it's already being described as a privacy landmine muse image is meta's newest model available in the meta ai app and on instagram it's very similar to other image generation models from open ai and google save for one key difference. It's deeply integrated into the Instagram app, so much so that if your profile is public, your face can become fodder for AI remixes. That means I could use Muse to make Neil wear a Boston Celtics jersey or give myself a little extra muscle around the biceps.

3:41While many other companies already offer similar capabilities, the big concern with Muse is consent. Most users won't realize that their public photos can be incorporated into AI content, And though Meta says users can opt out, it's buried deep in a settings menu far from the standard account privacy controls. Neil, Elon Musk's Grok already went down this rabbit hole and found outrage on the other side. The UK is currently investigating how Grok has been used to create and spread non-consensual AI-generated images of real people. Now Meta is opening up a similar can of worms. Not only are you automatically opted into this, but you won't even know if someone is making you wear a Celtics jersey or even worse, a Knicks jersey.

4:21on the company's help page, it said, you will not be notified about content created using AI features at Meta. So let's start here. Here's how you get rid of this function, which I did this yesterday. You go to the Instagram settings menu, scroll all the way down. It is buried under sharing and reuse. And then in that page, you will see something that says, allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with AI features at Meta. Toggle that off. But probably the bigger part of this story is the fact that this is a further push into AI advertising for Meta. How does Meta make all of their money?

4:55It's with advertising. And so Muse Image will now power some of those new AI creative tools inside Meta's advertising platform. Hypothetically, if you're an advertiser, you can generate multiple versions of an ad automatically. You can change styles with simple prompts. They technically have something called native reasoning, which iterates on existing creative rather than just generating random images. So that's probably the bigger business story here is that Emetta wants you, if you're an advertising lead, to use this tool to iterate on your ads, even more so than you and me or just regular people making Celtics edits of your friends.

5:34Yeah, but they could also just make it available to advertisers, not for users. So they clearly see this as a potential windfall for increasing engagement on Instagram and their other apps like Facebook Marketplace on WhatsApp. And they use a specific example of Facebook Marketplace to see why AI image generation could fit, could bolt on into their particular apps. Maybe you see a piece of furniture on Facebook Marketplace. Oh, how would that look in my room while you use this AI image generation feature? This is also the first AI image generator that come out of this new initiative that Mark Zuckerberg spearheaded called Meta Super Intelligence Labs.

6:10Over the past year, they've spent tens of billions of dollars building out this new lab, this new team. After falling behind in the AI race, they released a chatbot, a new large language model a couple of months ago called MuseSpark. That was okay, and now they're releasing an image generation model. and upcoming, they tease that a video one is coming. So they spent all this money on Superintelligence Labs and now the receipts are coming due. They wanna see what these guys can produce. And it does seem like it will make money from it because AI subscriptions is becoming a larger part of Meta's business.

6:43Again, it's mostly an advertising business, but if they can create demand with normal people to pay for MetaOne, which is a new consumer subscription that they recently rolled out, if you are a heavy user of this latest model, then you will need to pay extra for a Meta 1 subscription. So kind of a little sneakily, Meta has been layering on subscription revenue in a way that they haven't done historically at their company. Like Facebook has always been free to use because it's always been ad supported. Now they think that people will pay a little bit more to have more capabilities when it comes to AI prompts or AI image generation.

7:17It's also worth noting that this is going against the grain of where the broader industry is going because OpenAI and XAI, Elon Musk, have been looking at how much money Anthropic is making on its coding tools and saying, actually, we should stop doing this image generation stuff and making AI slop on the internet. Instead, give people coding tools because they'll pay$200 a month or much more for a subscription to do stuff that can actually help them at work rather than make funny photos of their friends. So OpenAI, Sunset, its video generator, Sora, a few months ago, And SpaceX AI, that's its new name, XAI and SpaceX together, just yesterday released a new AI model that's more adept at finance, legal, and coding tests.

8:00And you know Elon Musk has been very big into this AI image generation, but when you look at what is actually going to make money in this particular industry, they think it's coding tools and things that can help you at work rather than whatever Mark Zuckerberg is doing. Let's move on. What is more exciting to hear when someone scores a goal in the World Cup and Messi scores a goal or goal, goal, goal, goal, goal, goal, goal. If you chose the latter, you are part of a large contingent of U.S. viewers opting for Telemundo's broadcasts over Fox's. Fox is averaging 5 million viewers per match through the group stages.

8:33The Spanish language broadcasts on Telemundo and Peacock are bringing in 4.6 million. That means nearly half of all U.S. World Cup viewers are choosing to watch the games in Spanish rather than English. And given that only 20 % of the U.S. population is Hispanic, English speakers are a big chunk of that viewership. Many viewers say they simply prefer the energy and emotion of these Spanish-language broadcasts. There's the excitement of Andres Cantor and his iconic goal calls. Seriously, listen to him call Messi's latest finish. He loses his voice.

9:18Goal! Goal! Goal! Just kept going. Even if you don't speak Spanish, you speak the language of passion. The coverage itself is different too. Fox typically cuts to commercials during hydration breaks. Telemundo stays with live feeds showing coaches, player conversations, and the tension on the sidelines. it's boiled over into some real tension between the two networks too because Telemundo is pulling away viewers that Fox expected to have Neil have you watched the Spanish language broadcast what do you think I actually have not but pretty much everyone I know has at some point personally I just like to know what's going on so I like to hear the English but you know this has become astoundingly popular and just to set the stage FIFA has divided up the World Cup rights in the United States into two different languages Fox got English Telemundo under NBCUniversal got Spanish.

10:13And you can understand why Fox has beef, because according to Nielsen, 20 percent of Telemundo's World Cup viewers speak English as their primary language. And they've been very intentional about courting English viewers because they've rolled out this ad campaign with Owen Wilson that pretty much has nothing to do with Spanish speaking. He is not Latino. know they also have a much better price point than uh fox so if you are just a streaming viewer then peacock peacock will give you telemundo you have that for 10.99 a month if you want to get fox one their streaming service that's 19.99 per month so telemundo is really flexing its muscles here yeah so nbc is the parent company of telemundo and they are intentionally targeting these english-speaking fans not only with that random owen wilson ad it always cracks me up when comes on because he's literally in the ad for five seconds doesn't say anything he's just there but their announcers on tv have been thanking english-speaking viewers on air for tuning in so clearly they are aware that this is happening and this all comes against a backdrop of a new tv rights deal that is being negotiated for future world cups that is going to be massive right now uh the 2030 and 2034 world cups are being shopped around and guess who's interested netflix disney YouTube, Amazon, Apple, and Fox.

11:36Fox paid$485 million for the English language rights to the 2026 tournament. The next rights package is expected to affect $1.5 to$2 billion for each World Cup in the future. So they have an incredible deal. That's why Fox can't be too mad about Telemundo siphoning off a few viewers. They have the deal of the century. There are stats that have come out that just the ads that they are airing during hydration breaks have already paid back that rights deal that they struck. So they've already made more than$485 million just on hydration break ads alone. So the price of a brick is going up, obviously, because clearly this has been a very popular tournament.

12:19So now FIFA is saying we can get a lot more bang for our buck as we shop it around for future tournaments. And what they're doing as a result of Telemundo's success is probably going to package the English language rights and the Spanish language rights together because they think that'll fetch a higher price in this upcoming bidding war. You mentioned that the World Cup is popular, and we just have to run down the numbers because they are staggering. So many people in the United States are watching these World Cup games, especially the marquee ones. When the U.S. lost to Belgium for the one, I know, I'm sorry.

12:50A lot of people watched that happen, unfortunately. 42 million people watched this game. 30 million on Fox, 12 million on Telemundo. That beats out pretty much every other sport except NFL playoff games. So college football, NBA, MLB, NHL, any game in history that's the most watched, that U.S.-Belgium game topped it. And then, actually, that wasn't even the most popular game of the entire World Cup. Mexico-England was the most watched soccer game in U.S. history. 21 million Fox, 23 million Telemundo. That means more than 44 million people watched that epic Mexico-England game. that pretty much tops every single thing on television except the championship weekend in NFL.

13:34Yeah, you're getting NFL-sized audiences, but on a global scale. The one caveat for these future World Cups that I've mentioned is that they are not in the prime time time zones that this North American tournament is in because Morocco, Portugal, and Spain are hosting 2030. Matches will kick off five to six hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast. And then you go to Saudi Arabia where the time difference will make it even less convenient for U.S. audiences. So even though the price is going up, you might not capture the same sort of viewership that you did this time around. Meanwhile, this final on July 19th probably is going to blow Super Bowl numbers probably because not only is there going to be two very good teams, but we also learned that Justin Bieber is co-headlining the halftime show.

14:18This did not typically have a halftime show, but FIFA is pulling out all the stops to make even more money and keep viewers attracted to the final. So we have Bieber, BTS, Madonna, and Shakira in an 11-minute halftime show. And give me Belgium versus Switzerland in that final for the chocolatey matchup of the century. Moving on, as you head to Europe on your Jet 2 holiday, just be aware that you might be spending more time than expected at the airport. Earlier this spring, the EU rolled out a new security system that's led to hours-long airport lines, queues, my bad, and outraged the aviation industry.

14:53The new rules, known as Entry-Exit System, or EES, requires the 29 members of the Schengen Open Border Area to collect biometrics such as fingerprints and face photos from non-EU travelers when they enter a country and verify them when they leave. While ultimately intended to save time, EES is causing havoc at some airports right before the peak summer travel season. One writer for the Points Guy said he arrived at the Copenhagen airport three and a half hours before his scheduled departure time, but barely made it to the gate before boarding after waiting for ages in a border control line. Besides upsetting travelers, the new system is infuriating airlines who've called it needless chaos that's costing them business.

15:31In a letter to the European Commission president, an airport lobbying group warned that planes are half empty when the gate closes because the rest of the passengers are still getting their face scanned. The EU is holding its ground for now. Now, on Tuesday, leaders rejected calls from the industry to suspend the program until next year, saying, just bear with us. Everything's going to work out in the end. Ryanair's COO called passengers guinea pigs for a half-baked passport control system. All you have to do is look at what's happening in Rome right now. It's one of the busiest airports in the world.

16:0011 million passengers during June and July. Every single time they reach peak travel, they suspend the biometric collection because they're like, We just cannot process all these passengers in time to make them go on their flight. So even though a lot of EU regulators are pushing back and saying, hey, this is better for long-term border security. This is better to invest in digital immigration controls. It is absolutely crushing airports in the short term when it comes to convenience. And I did actually recently experience this. I went to a wedding in Greece and I was traveling back through Athens and I got there two hours before being very responsible.

16:36I thought the line is almost out the door for passport control. And the way that they alleviated this was not the smartest way. Basically, whenever your flight got to, you know, code red zone, they would just scream like everyone on Delta flight four, four, six to New York, come with me. And then they would just foster this herd of people through very, very angry passengers. And they just kept doing that over and over. So clearly, you know, something is going amiss right now because the, the border security is just not worth what is happening to passengers right now. And the EU is like, yeah, we hear, understand your concerns.

17:10Actually, this is not happening at that many airports. Basically 20 out of the 1500 airports are our trouble spots. And they say, we've been working on this for eight years. I mean, it kind of reminds me of the Real ID rollout that happened in the United States. So that didn't necessarily lead to long lines, but you know, eight years in the making after some, after terror attacks in Brussels and Paris in 2015 and 2016, they're asking travelers to bear with them, but it does come at just the worst time possible. The peak travel season to Europe is starting next week. Some you're maybe traveling there.

17:44Maybe someone you know is probably traveling there. So just be aware that you got to get your face scanned and fingerprinted before you even get inside the airport. It's also just miserable to travel to Europe right now in general, because we've talked about this a lot. Europe's four hottest summers on record have all occurred within the past five years. So it is hot. There's been health concerns with travel this year. We've had norovirus spreading around. We've had hantavirus. There's lingering COVID fears as well. Now you have these super long immigration lines. There's just so many things that are going on right now, and you're actually seeing it reflected in traveler data.

18:17Before the pandemic, only 10 % of travelers booked 10 to 12 weeks before departure. That's close to departure time. Now, 40 % wait until roughly 10 to 12 weeks. There's too much going on in the world right now that everyone's kind of delaying their travel plans and saying, we'll book at the last minute because who knows if the straighter four moves is going to close. Who knows if it's going to be the hottest summer on record. It's just not a great time to fly across the Atlantic to Europe right now. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers right after this.

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19:24Toby, you got an idea and a browser? Browser? Check. Idea? I can't wait for my first one. Why? Because that's all you need to build real software. Whether you need a CRM, an internal tracker, or an app, Bolt.new builds it with you. Describe what you need and Bolt.new can build it, and you can have it shipped by the weekend. Not a prototype, the actual thing. Get started at Bolt.new slash MB. And the first 100 listeners to use code MB26 will get a free month of Bolt.new Pro. That's Bolt.new slash MB. Neil, if you were a shape, what would you be? I think a big red octagon because then maybe you'd stop.

20:04Geometric burn. Anyway, we're talking about Square, the fair and easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes or cutting hair, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. And right now, listeners can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash morningbrewdaily. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash morningbrewdaily. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats in the week's news that will feel like Telemundo's play-by-play guy is narrating your life.

20:42For my first number, no one can stop Big Berry. And by that, I mean Driscoll's. The king of berries, Driscoll's, is leading a berry boom that's made these fruits the fastest growing category in American produce. In U.S. supermarkets, the top-earning brands are, number one, Coca-Cola, number two, Driscoll's. As the New York Times reports, back in 1989, Driscoll's hatched an ambitious plan. It wanted to make four berries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries, available to every part of the world in every season. It's gotten pretty close. In the last decade, Driscoll's has pioneered a berry revolution, shipping four billion containers across 60 countries every single year.

21:21It's a remarkable feat, considering not too long ago, you could only snag these highly perishable, fragile fruits in season, and they probably didn't taste very good. But Driscoll's went into the lab to create breeds that had longer shelf life, maintain structural integrity when shipped across the globe, and pack more flavor per bite. It's resulted in a$7 billion giant, to quote the Times, that is less a farming business than a research and marketing enterprise harvesting berry-related data instead of berries. The company has had its fair share of controversies, catching heat for its use of pesticides, labor practices, carbon footprint, and water consumption, but nothing has seemed to slow its role dominating a berry industry that's tripled production since 2000.

22:01Driscoll's business model is fascinating to me. They don't grow berries. What they do is develop berry genetics. They figure out what growing inputs need to go into it. They provide technical support. They provide distribution and marketing. but the actual risk of growing the berries falls on growers and growers receive 75 to 80 percent of the berries selling price after harvest because they are willing to offload that branding that distribution the negotiating with retailers and so driscoll's just gets enough time to get into the lab and say hey we test a lot of berries scientists tested 210 raspberry varieties but only two are expected to ever reach consumers so it really much it very much is a silicon valley style R &D environment for a fruit.

22:47For my next number, the World Cup quarterfinals begin today, and none of the 20 most populous nations on earth are competing. Not India or China or Indonesia, Brazil, the US, Russia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and so on. In fact, eight of the top 10 most populous countries didn't even make the tournament to begin with. So how do you square this sphere? In the most global game on earth, why does the size of your population, your potential talent pool, not seem to matter. There are a lot of variables and each country is different, but most economists say it comes down to some combination of a lack of infrastructure, underinvestment, historical know-how, and experience in competition with other sports.

23:24In Ethiopia, for instance, the 10th most populous country, there is a shortage of usable stadiums. This season, their domestic league staged over 380 matches in only three stadiums. In India, the country with the most people in the world, soccer competes for talent with cricket as it does in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the U.S., there's been a lot of reflection in the past few days about why we can't field a better men's World Cup team. Many have blamed a broken pay-to-play youth model that excludes potential stars due to high costs. Other cases are more mysterious, like China, which became an Olympic powerhouse but has never figured out soccer despite heavy investments.

24:00Meanwhile, Norway, population 5.6 million, less than the Philadelphia metro area is in the quarterfinals, as is small Switzerland and Belgium. It's clear that when it comes to fielding an elite soccer team, size doesn't matter. So economist Stefan Szymanski, who is the co-author of Sockonomics, say that big populations are clearly not enough alone. You need people, obviously, which I just said is not enough, but you also need the money and infrastructure, which you mentioned with like when it comes to Ethiopia, you just need stadiums, But you also need know-how, which just comes from long, long decades of connecting knowledge with competitive experience.

24:35And the country that comes to mind is Uruguay. Uruguay has a population of 3.5 million people, but they've won two World Cups because they've just been in the game for over 100 years at this point. So that's why someone with three and a half million people can go toe-to-toe with someone like China that has 1.4 billion people. I found actually the metric that does correlate better than population with performance at the World Cup. This is some deep cut stuff from UEFA Obscura X account. Every round of 16 matchup in the 2026 World Cup has been won by the nation with more sheep per square kilometer.

25:12So if you are looking for an angle on who's going to win, just look at who has more sheep, not more people. The FIFA Sheep Index. For my final number, should you date your coworker? coworker? Writing in the New York Times, Juno Kelly says absolutely and lays out a bunch of evidence why you should go looking for the gym to your Pam. First of all, finding love at the office used to be a big thing that's fizzled out. One fifth of adults over 50 met their partners at work compared to just 13 percent of people age 18 to 29. As recently as 2009, about 40 percent of U.S. workers went on a date with a colleague.