Record Heat Hits Europe, SAG-AFTRA Takes on Influencers & Apple Maps is Good Now?

0:00Hey Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month? With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs. Oh, that sounds easier than I thought. You got this. Yeah, I do. Now, where did I put my keys? You will find them where you left them. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I am Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, we will talk about the brutal heatwave in Europe and what it means for tourism in the long term over there. And is the fast fashion giant Sheehan actually just the mafia?

0:43Then Meta dropped the second generation of its AI large language model and decided to give it away for free. Plus, we'll tell you all about the rise of the new Workday Dead Zone that employees love but bosses hate. It's Wednesday, July 19th. Let's ride.

1:04All right, Neil. So obviously we talked about the Powerball lottery yesterday, and it's well over a billion dollars now because no one won yesterday. But I was seeing some tweets on what people might do if they did win the jackpot, a classic genre of Twitter. And what the funniest one by far was this one guy who said he'd buy up the licensing rights to friends, edit out the laugh tracks, and then re-release it to the world. Honestly, See, I'm not even a friends hater, and that would be freaking hilarious. No, nothing can save friends. I'm sorry. Spend your money elsewhere on things that can be revived.

1:39I forgot. Leave friends to its grave. You're a Seinfeld guy. All right, Neil, what would you do if you won the lottery? I haven't thought about it a lot, but something I would do if I was super rich would be to just wear a new pair of socks every day. I know that's terrible for the environment, but I wouldn't let them go to waste. and I would just wake up in the morning feeling so incredible for putting a new pair of socks on. There's no better feeling. That is a truly wild thing to do with a billion dollars, but I think I'm coming around to the logic behind it. That is a good feeling. It would cost maybe like 50K over my life probably.

2:17Yeah, you could probably do it right now. I will help everyone else do it and destroy the environment at the same time. Yeah, oh Lord. What about you? I don't know. I'd probably build a golf course or something or maybe enter a really high stakes poker tournament. This is what you're supposed to do when you win a billion dollars. You're supposed to make irresponsible decisions, not wear new socks. That's irresponsible on many levels. OK, let's start off today's show in Europe where a funny thing is going on. There have never been more tourists visiting in the summer. But at the same time, it is so hot that temps present a danger to human health.

2:50So all of your friends who are there now and it feels like half of Morning Brew is in Europe right now. They're probably cutting down on their tours of ancient sites and just sipping Aperol spritzes in the shade all day because it is roasting. Rome hit 104 yesterday. Madrid hit 102. And Athens is expected to reach 107 on Sunday. Wildfires are blazing in Greece, Spain and Switzerland. And officials told people yesterday to keep it indoors during the hottest hours of the day. the brutal heat could really have long-term economic consequences for tourism in southern europe which is home to many of what we'd consider the continent's greatest spots to visit and whose economies are overly reliant on tourism so any changing visitor patterns is a huge deal to people whose livelihoods depend on foreigners coming in to spend money but it seems like climate change could maybe make that happen and shift patterns yeah it's been a wild time to be on social media and reading the news recently because not only do you see everyone in europe but then you see every single headline is dedicated to europe is so hot right now so we can't escape europe no matter where we look i also think it's super interesting that these heat domes are kind of diverted by the jet stream so they settle over these very high pressure areas and they settle in these really specific areas of the continent and if you think about it humans are also being diverted by these heat domes too, because there's been a 10 % annual decline in interest in Mediterranean travel, according to the European Travel Commission, which ends up benefiting more countries more to the north, like Denmark and Ireland, which are a little cooler this time of the year.

4:29So you really do think about these weather patterns. The jet stream is diverting human activity as well in the region. Oh yeah. You're going to see huge, I think you are going to see changing travel patterns away from the Mediterranean, which has typically been the hotspot where all of our friends are now and towards maybe under the radar destinations. Like you said, Denmark, I'm bullish on a few countries here. Slovenia, which is so cool. Mountains has everything you need. And are you using that the double meaning of cool, right? Because it's a little. I don't really know the climate, but I know it's not, you know, in that Mediterranean.

5:07basin that's getting baked right now. And Albania, which is on the Balkan Peninsula, and it's an absolute hotspot right now. Short-term rentals have jumped 195 % in Albania since 2019. And the demand for nightly stays there is up 500%. So it's this cheaper destination for a bunch of other Europeans coming from London. They typically go to Budapest on their stag parties, and now they're going to Albania because it's this cheap destination. But it is kind of wild to think about, you know, these sites like Rome, Madrid, places that are becoming almost inhospitable to visit because of climate change and increased heat waves.

5:49Yeah. And it, well, it's also this phenomenon of revenge tourism because a lot of people didn't get the chance to travel in 2019, 2020 to 2022. And so now there's all this pent up demand, especially coming out of China. And so that's one of the reasons why you're seeing just this massive overcrowding. And White Lotus. Oh yeah. And White Lotus, you kind of almost don't want it to come to your neck of the woods. I think the next one's going to be in Thailand. Yeah, it definitely puts a microscope on certain areas of the world um yeah and the funniest part of all this though is that if we cross the other side of the atlantic we're seeing heat act as a tourism draw yeah and so people have been flocking to death valley california kind of in the recent month to take a picture with this big thermometer they have down in death valley that shows just absurd temperatures on there it recently hit 128 degrees Fahrenheit, which honestly boggles the mind.

6:50You could cook cookies down there. That's six degrees short of the world's hottest temperature ever recorded, which was 134 degrees in Death Valley in 1913. So if you can go there, get a picture with that. It's such an Instagram friendly thermometer. I wonder what they were thinking when they initially put it there. But people are going also ironically in wearing fur coats, which I'm not sure how long you can wear a fur coat in 128 degree temperatures and you know stay alive leave it to humans to take a selfie with the basically indicator of of like climate impending climate change so yeah gotta love us all right neil uh let's move on for our next story i need you to imagine you're an influencer shouldn't be too hard now since we're world famous podcasters now imagine warner bros comes to you with a nice pink outfit and asks you to film a promo for the upcoming Barbie movie, would you take the deal?

7:48Well, if you want to make it in Hollywood, the answer should be no. That's because SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents Hollywood actors amongst other Hollywood personnel, has laid out strict guidelines for social media influencers during the strike. The guidelines state that even if you are not a member of the Actors Guild, if you take promotional work for studios and cross the so-called digital picket line, you will be barred from joining the Guild in the future. The union even goes as far as to advise creators to not hype up any work coming out of the studios, even if it's just as a fan. I think this is pretty crazy to see SAG kind of reach over and instruct non-union members on how to conduct their business.

8:32Yeah, but there might be this influencer to Hollywood actor pipeline that I didn't really think about, but that might exist. And so if you are an influencer, maybe your ultimate aspirations are to be in a Hollywood movie. You know, we might see Mr. Beast in a, you know, in an Adam Sandler movie coming up. I don't know. Fast and Furious. But also in 2021, they opened up membership to influencers. So the big ones are actually in SAG-AFTRA already. Right. So this is kind of like a dual mandate to be like, you know, you, all right, some of you are already in our union. And the smaller ones are probably aspiring to get there because it means you've made it in Hollywood.

9:10So it's kind of this interesting relationship between old entertainment in the Hollywood Actors Guild, which has been around for decades, and this new emerging form of entertainment of TikTok influencers, YouTube creators. There's this really interesting dance where the influencers are super important and have become so in the last five to ten years. but you still have to kind of play by Hollywood's old rules, which they still want to hold on to power there. I just think this puts influencers in a rock and a hard place for sure because influencers have very unpredictable and not a long shelf life in some cases.

9:47And yeah, sometimes you don't want to just be making cringy TikTok lives for the rest of your life so you have your eyes set on Hollywood, but you also have to get the bag, secure the bag, and pay the bills in the meantime. And so if a studio is coming to you with money, you have to make this decision between like a short term trade off or your long term future, as you kind of spoke to. And then also influencers are very important to the Hollywood machine, because if you see these these giant movies that come out, you're going to get an influencer push before they come out. And Paramount invited 450 influencers to an advanced screening of Mission Impossible.

10:25and like the goal is to reach the youths, to reach these people that young people look up to. And so it's definitely one of those things for now. The studios are like, dang, I kind of, I wish we had the influence of the disposables still. I had no idea that the influencers were a big part of movie promotion. I'm just not a part of that world, but reading into this, it seemed like it's a huge part of their overall marketing strategy. Yeah, and then if we just want to do a quick zoom out on how the union negotiations are going, In a word, they're not going great. When it comes to general minimum wage increases, the union is seeking to implement an 11 % raise in year one, 4 % raise in year two, and 4 % raise in year three.

11:09And the studios came back and offered them 5 % in year one, 4%, and 3.5 % in the ensuing years. So they're pretty far apart there. And then another thing that the union proposed was that casket a cut of subscriber revenue generated from performances that land on these streaming platforms. And the studios outright rejected that. So we're in for a long haul because they're really – they're still acres apart in where they want to end up. Okay, Neil, let's move on to our next story. We've talked a lot about AI on the show, specifically OpenAI, who's made the ultra-popular chatbot, ChatGBT. But we haven't talked all that much about Llama, Meta's large language model.

11:53That's because it wasn't really commercial-facing in any way. It was mostly for AI developers, researchers, and tinkerers to play around with. Well, yesterday, Meta made the announcement that not only is Llama 2 here, but it would also be commercially available and open source. It dropped the news yesterday at Microsoft's Inspire event as part of a larger partnership with Microsoft and explained that the decision to give away its model for free came down to the desire to allow more experimentation in the AI community as well as to improve the safety and transparency of AI in general. Neil, what do we think about meta-zucking while everyone else is zagging?

12:34I think it is obviously self-serving. This is like when you play defense and Catan because you're stopping others at the same time while you're probably helping yourself. So, I mean, you know that metaphor better than I do because you're quite good at Catan. But no, the point is like OpenAI and Microsoft and Google's Bard are all charging for commercial access to access to their chatbots. And they have this very proprietary system, which is typical of certain tech companies where it's like, OK, we worked on this for years. We slaved away in the dungeons in our office. Like, why would we just open it up to everyone?

13:12No, you have to come and pay for it. So, Microsoft or Meta, Zuck has done this for many years and has kind of done something different where like you've talked about where they're saying, okay, we want to open it up, let developers tinker with it, find the bugs. And ultimately that will lead to a better product for us. And it's also this like soft power play in tech where, you know, this geopolitics game where you spread your influence far and wide. People are using your products, startups and mid-sized businesses that couldn't afford open AI stuff. Start using Llama instead, which, by the way, is the best name of any large language model we have.

13:50It is classic. Crushes everything else. I know. And then you're like, okay, well, I'm already on Llama. Like, I'm just going to keep using this. and it's a better product. So ultimately, it's like a long run tortoise versus hare kind of thing. Yeah. I do want to talk a little bit about Microsoft though and how they're situating themselves in these AI battles. So not only do they have open AI under their umbrella, remember they infused$30 billion into the company, but now they're making Llama 2 available on its cloud infrastructure. And honestly though, you can get Llama on AWS and other cloud providers, but Meta said that Microsoft is its preferred partner.

14:27So it's really kind of weaseling in to every nook and cranny of the AI space. But then outside of Meta, Microsoft did drop a ton of AI news on its own. It announced it's bringing its AI subscription add-on to Microsoft 365. So that's tools like Teams, Excel, and Word. So right now, Microsoft charges businesses $36 per user per month for the typical suite. The AI package will cost an additional$30. So it's almost doubling the cost of its Microsoft package. And we've seen this rollout from Google, by the way. Like it rolled out an AI. It helps with Google Docs a little bit. Helps with Gmail. But Microsoft is going to make absolute bank from this because there's around 345 million paid seats of Microsoft 365.

15:17So even if a small percentage of them convert. And investors think they are because Microsoft gained tens of billions of dollars in market cap yesterday. Its stock was up almost 4 % to a record high. So investors are betting that companies will look at these AI tools and say, OK, maybe I'll pay$30 more per user per month, which is a lot. Like you said, it's almost double what they're currently paying. But they're going to assume that they can recoup that investment by making things more productive, by having Microsoft's AI tools, which is like the underlying tech behind ChatGPT, write all the emails for them and save a lot of time on the back end.

15:58So people are really bullish on making these AI tools available for enterprise customers. And we're starting to learn where the price points are kind of filtering out. OpenAI just charges$20 for their premium version. Microsoft said, wow. And Meta is just like, llama's free, baby. Oh, they're going to make money somehow because Meta wants really good AI to increase better ad targeting for Instagram and Facebook. so like they've been spending tens of billions of dollars on ai infrastructure yeah in terms of the year of efficiency that zuck has embarked on it is not applied to ai okay it's just on these other things uh they're spending so much it's long-term efficiency neil it's the year of the decade of efficiency if you can get your ai up and long-term extracting as much value from us as possible when we go on instagram never bet again zuck all right before we jump into the next story we're going to take a quick break.

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17:59All right, Toby, everyone's favorite Chinese fast fashion giant is in the news again. Shein got sued last week by three graphic designers for what they call egregious copyright infringement by copying and selling their designs. But it doesn't stop there. These artists claim that what Shein has done is so despicable and widespread that it should be considered racketeering. They say the company is violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, that has long been used to prosecute organized crime. So basically they're accusing Sheehan of being the mafia. And this is because Sheehan isn't just using their designs as inspiration for new products.

18:40The suit claims that the company is making, and I quote, truly exact copies of copyrightable graphic design in its attempt to throw up 6 ,000 new items a day to get people buying new styles. And it's doing this deliberately and systematically. Copying designs is just part of its DNA. This lawsuit just adds to this heap of scrutiny Xi 'an is under in the U.S. for a wave of accusations, including using forced labor from the Xinjiang province in China. Yeah, I was dying laughing reading through these lawsuit in the pictures because you have these news organizations putting a picture saying like the caption will be like christa perry who's also involved a lawsuit made a make it fun poster on the left and then it was allegedly exactly copied by shein on the right and it's literally the same picture it's like the office meme of like can you tell the difference between the two pictures so when they say egregious copyright like it clearly is egregious copyright but the thing is is that we mentioned Sheehan operates a lot like the mafia in the sense that it's very hard to figure out who even to sue in this case because it uses these third corporations like these shell designers that if someone sues them then they go it wasn't us like sorry we outsourced that particular one so take it up with whoever designed it so they do have like this built-in mafia-esque structure that kind of insulates you can't get the Tony Soprano right well yeah even the lawsuit says basically argues this point.

20:09They say in a lawsuit, there is no Coco Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent to actually find out who the person behind it is that's doing the puppeteering. It's run by this guy named Chris Zhu about whom no one knows anything. Yeah, truly. They don't even know the background. Some stories describe him as a Chinese-American who actually went to George Washington in the U.S., But then there's other reports that he was actually born in a Chinese province and went to a science and technical university in China. So not only do we not really know who's behind it, we don't even know the backstory of the person who founded it.

20:49So the mafia ties, once you slapped the RICO Act on it and you started thinking through it, it makes a ton of sense. Right. And also the mafia is hard to bring down. And so is Sheen for this reason. legal experts don't think this is going to go to trial in that Sheen will eventually settle. And apparently this happens a lot in the fast fashion space where designs are copied fast and freely. And then the designer typically sues and then they settle. But this designer that you mentioned earlier in one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit said that she wrote to Sheen and then they offered her$500 as a settlement.

21:26And she was like, no, I don't think so. Yeah. Okay, Neil, let's move on. I want to address MBD listeners directly here. We always want you to share this show with as many of your friends and coworkers as possible, but maybe refrain from sharing this particular story with your bosses. You'll see why. So the Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article describing this new workday dead zone where nothing gets done. It stretches from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., which many of you recognize as the end of the traditional workday. In a recent one-month sample of Microsoft Teams usage, both in-person and virtual meetings scheduled between this dead zone, 4 p.m.

22:07to 6 p.m., were down 7 % from a year earlier. People are increasingly using this period as sort of a flex time where you might hit the gym or pick up the kids from school or even hit the links. This is a carryover from COVID where work moved remotely and thus could be spread across the workday. there's this well-documented phenomenon called the triple peak which shows that workers keyboards activities spike in the morning the afternoon and then one more time around 10 p.m which leaves 4 p.m to 6 p.m as this dead zone neil what is up with the wall street journal exposing the corporate world like this though i think they were just uh it was a microsoft study and they were uh just kind of publicizing it yeah um i think you got to embrace it right like this is what people want.

22:53Four to six is typically a terrible time to work. And with flexible work styles, you can get a hop on your commute early. You can do childcare things. You can go grocery shopping. Overall, having these things spread out over the course of the day is just better for the economy because you reduce these peak situations where you get overcrowding at gyms in the morning. You know, we go to the gym after this and it is crazy packed. Imagine if you go to the gym at, you know, 4 p.m. or 3 p.m. or noon. That is just better for the gym overall because it makes it a better experience. They can get more members in and you're reducing just like the huge fluctuations.

23:32We talked about golf. I mean, it's been unbelievable for golf. Golf tee times on Wednesday at 4 p.m. were 278 percent higher last year than in 2019. And that is great for a golf course because you don't have people backed up at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning. If we can go and get on our, you know, round of 18 in the early afternoon. So overall, the researchers who have been doing work on this, which is this guy, Nicholas Bloom from Stanford, who's this work from home guru, is like getting things spaced out may suck for managers who are like, I need this response right now. But it overall is a really good sign for the economy because it spreads out leisure activities.

24:09But if we're taking the workers perspective, flexibility sometimes is a bit of a trap because you never truly log off when you when you say like, oh, I can always get to it later in the day than when you're never fully present during your leisure activities. I mean, we've been doing leisure activities while you're still on your phone and like you're still getting work stuff done. So even though flexibility can be seen as this great thing for a lot of workers, if you never truly log off, then you're always kind of cortisol levels, the stress levels are always there. So flexibility is a bit of a trap.

24:41It does seem like the nine to five is pretty much over. And I think Gen Z wants that. There's these new studies that show that Gen Z workers are kind of prefer the later shift. Yeah. Like 26 % of them said they're most productive from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. So they're happy just like having their day, you know, and then going and grinding at night. Maybe that's because they're young and they don't have kids or family or anything. But they've shown a proclivity for just being some night owls and grinding it out later. Yeah. And then you're right. The 9 to 5 is dead. The 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. is where it's at.

25:17That's the schedule we're rocking, baby. Oh, no. That's where it's at. All right. Our final story. I want to talk about a late career comeback that rivals Matthew McConaughey's. Apple Maps is apparently good now. According to a Wall Street Journal article, more users are coming back to the app, and experts say it's now basically reached feature parity with its more popular rival, Google Maps. So when it debuted in 2012, Apple Maps was a total joke. I don't know if you remember. Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized to customers about it, which is not something Apple CEOs normally do about their products.

25:52And Australian officials even warned that its navigation mistakes were potentially life-threatening. But hey, to their credit, instead of giving up, Apple got to work and fixed a lot of the things people hated about Apple Maps, which is basically that it was pretty awful at giving directions. Now it's an impressive app and Google has to be a little nervous. This is the least surprising thing to me as an Apple user. First of all, it is great. Like I do prefer using it over Google, but Apple is the king of design. Like, of course, they were going to eventually figure this out. And the bar for Apple Maps becoming widely used is so low because it's pre-installed on all your Apple devices.

26:31Whenever you look up directions to go straight to Apple, if you click on a Yelp place, it will take you to Apple Maps. So all they needed to do was just have it not be life-threatening, and they were going to take market share from Google. Because you have to actively download Google. You have to actively and consciously make the choice. And people are so lazy. So if their phone just routes them to some place. Which shows just how bad Apple Maps was. It was so bad. Because the vast majority of iPhone users were using Google Maps. Right. So the fact that they went out of their way not to use Apple Maps was pretty remarkable.

27:02I would argue it's not just a design thing, the Maps product. it's really data dependent. You want the best directions. You want the most timely subway times. You want traffic updates. So you want the best data coming in. And you want other customizable features like Street View that Apple has worked on. They were really far behind Google Maps there. So I don't disagree that the Apple Maps interface is probably way more pleasing than Google. I use Google, obviously. But whenever I see someone using Apple Maps, I do think like, damn, that looks really good. I wish I could use that because, but it's just too bad and it won't get me anywhere.

27:42It's also, Maps is increasingly becoming an important part of Apple's future because if you think about it, Apple's ambitions lie in this augmented reality space. And there's also these rumblings of a automated car, a self-driving car. And so not even just trying to make apps look pretty, like it is a fundamental part of Apple's future. So it's been a long time coming, but I think it's going to be even more important going forward. These apps are sick. I love Google Maps. I spend at least two hours a day on Google Maps. That's true. Google, make it better. I've seen you just scroll through different modes and stuff.