Reddit Goes Dark & Netflix Password Sharing Lockdown Skyrockets Subscribers

0:01This message is brought to you by AppleCard. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases, wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I am Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's Monday Morning Pod, Philadelphia has got some major highway problems not even gritty can fix.

0:39And the Unabomber died. We'll explore why he's kept his grip on the American consciousness decades after he sent his last bomb. Then we'll dig into the high stakes game of chicken going down between Reddit and its users before checking in on how Netflix's crackdown on password sharing is going. Neil, it's Monday, June 12th. Let's ride.

1:05All right, Neil, we're back. It's Monday. Give me one quick highlight from the weekend before we get into the news. So I went to a concert at Summer Stage in Central Park, which is a really cool venue. It reminded me of the Globe Theater a little bit. Just kind of very tight. There are some stands around and you can bring your blanket, have a little picnic. Concert was great. Beautiful night. It's free. Yes. So it was all in all a good time. What struck me the most was how much liquid death people bought. It's such a staple of the concert culture right now. I had no idea. I know. Did you have some?

1:43No. For people who don't know what liquid death is, it is water in a can with very menacing branding. That's all you need these days. You just need some fun branding and they can sell water. My highlight was I slept in until 10 a.m. Wow, impressive. That's a big deal. I will say it comes with an asterisk, though, because I did wake up at 4 a.m. accidentally. But other than that, the six more hours of sleep, primo. All right, Neil, great weekend. Excited to be back in the studio with you, though. Let's jump into our top story, which takes us to the world of social media. Reddit, which is home to some of the most dedicated internet goers out there, is facing a huge user-mobilized backlash against some recent changes the company made ahead of its planned IPO.

2:30When I say huge, I mean huge. Starting today, between 3 ,500 and 5 ,500 subreddits will go dark for the next two days. That includes five of the top 10 biggest subreddits on the site. So what has everyone up in arms? Well, the IPO Reddit is gearing up for has the company leadership trying to make its financials look a little beefier. Part of that means they want to charge third-party apps for accessing the company's API or its application program interface. If I had to sum up an API in a couple of words, they are essentially a way for two apps to talk to each other. And Reddit has always allowed other apps to talk to it for free.

3:12But now they plan to charge some of those bigger apps built on the back of Reddit for using Reddit. And those costs could rise as high as$20 million per year in some case. So it's not exactly chump change. This has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. So they mobilized this big blackout campaign with the goal of hurting Reddit's traffic. Neil, this is putting Reddit in a real rock and a hard place kind of before their IPO. Yeah. I think what really hit home for people was when this developer named Christian Selig, who created this app, Apollo. And I didn't know this about Reddit or the Reddit ecosystem, but there are third party apps that people use to look at Reddit that aren't the Reddit app because it was kind of late to the game.

3:55So people built these apps around that you can see Reddit and Reddit has a famously janky user interface where it's kind of hard to read stuff. So they created like there's Apollo is I think the most popular one there are other ones and he wrote this blog post and said Look, they are charging me now 20 million dollars a year to run this thing I do not have that money at all like it's you know, this is not a huge operation, right? So I need to shut down and then a bunch of the other reddit apps like Apollo also said they were shutting down Yeah And then he and the Reddit CEO got into this crazy war on words and they're all like calling each other names.

4:34And so it is a complete lack of trust between Reddit leadership and its users and its moderators that kind of make its ecosystem flourish. Yeah. The CEO did an AMA, which isn't asking anything. It's an absolute staple of Reddit culture. And every single answer he responded with got instantly downvoted into oblivion. Reddit uses upvotes and downvotes. And it was crazy. Before it could even be posted, it already had 2 ,000 downvotes. So yeah, it just illustrates how little trust there is between leadership and Redditors right now. I also was digging into some of the comments across the internet and seeing what the reaction is.

5:13And people are going even further than just blacking out and not engaging in these popular subreddits. They're also advocating for people to delete their entire account and delete every contribution you've made to Reddit. So there's these apps that allow you to kind of wipe your internet history completely. And they're like, without us, Reddit is nothing. So I could see this snowballing into a really, really bad slippery slope for Reddit. So we'll see if that happens. Yeah, it is. I think it was a communication problem because the Reddit CEO came out and said, we are going to start charging for our API access for AI companies.

5:48So Microsoft, Google, like the huge tech companies of the world use Reddit conversations to train barred chat GPT and he's like we probably shouldn't be giving all this data away to Microsoft which is worth you know upwards of almost two trillion dollars now and so all the Redditor the regular editors were like okay that makes sense like make your money on the big boys the big boys and leave us alone and then it turned out that the regular guys were getting hammered too it's very similar to what Musk is doing at Twitter he revoked free API access for for developers to build on. And, you know, you have these like public transportation agencies that use Twitter data for a lot of things.

6:33And honestly, Morning Brew used Twitter API to let us know when someone was mentioning us on Twitter. It was a very valuable piece of information because we could see what articles were trending and what people were saying about our articles. That channel has gone completely silent, which has been very frustrating for me. but we're not going to pay Musk tens of thousands of dollars each year. Now we've got to do it the old-fashioned way and just scroll through forever. But my big takeaway is if there's one internet community you do not want to piss off, it is Redditor. So hell is coming for them, and we'll see how it plays out.

7:08We'll see if they blink. We'll see if Huffman, who's the CEO, blinks. Okay, to intro our next story, I want to give a little personal anecdote. So before I started at the brew, which seems like decades ago, I lived in Philadelphia and I commuted up to Princeton, New Jersey for work. And my route took me along an elevated stretch of Interstate 95 in Northeast Philadelphia every morning near Cotman Avenue. I remember it very well. Well, if I did that commute this morning, I'd have to find another route. Because a whole chunk of I-95 in Northeast Philly collapsed to the ground yesterday morning after a tanker truck carrying flammable cargo caught fire at around 6.30 a.m.

7:50So now if you look at pictures, which you definitely should, there's this big gap of concrete where a highway used to be. And I-95 is closed on this stretch until further notice. Somehow, this is the craziest part, that there were no immediate reports of injuries from this huge slab of concrete just collapsing to the ground from an elevated highway. So I just want to emphasize this is a very busy highway that's close to the city center. And it's likely the most trafficked highway in all of Pennsylvania. About 160 ,000 vehicles travel on this road each day to go in and out of Philly. They're going to need to find another route.

8:25It's a main artery. The videos coming out on Twitter over the weekend were absolutely absurd. Some of the jokes being made were like, classic Philly making their own air quality problems after New York just went through its own air quality issues. But yeah, the videos were apocalyptic. The huge stretch of highway is gone. But Neil, this is kind of your road, so give me some of the details. It's my road, baby. How much did this cost? How much is it going to cost? And how big a deal is it? It's tough to say how big of a deal is it yet. They said it would take months to repair. So they are beefing up SEPTA, which is the regional train system in the greater Philadelphia metro area.

9:04And people are just going to have to find other routes. Luckily, for the big rig trucks, they go to travel from Delaware through New Jersey up to New York City along 95. You don't really go through Philadelphia. There's this stretch of the Jersey Turnpike through South Jersey that kind of skirts all of this. And South Jersey people know what I'm talking about. I'm smiling and nodding. I've just been on this road so often. So it really affects people in the Philadelphia area. But I-95 in general, for people, I know we have a lot of international listeners and people who may not live on the East Coast.

9:36This is like the goat of all U.S. highways. Sees more vehicles traveled than any other road. It runs north-south from south of Miami all the way up to the Canadian border in Maine, connects major cities like D.C., Baltimore, Philly, New York, up near Boston. This is crazy. This shows just how dense the route is. Only five of the 96 counties it runs along are rural. So it passes by about 110 million people. And by carrying all of these people and goods, it facilitates 40 % of U.S. GDP. Wow. Okay. According to the I-95 Corridor Association, which I guess is like— That sounds like I-95 propaganda.

10:16It might be I-95 propaganda, but if you drive along this and you see all the economic activity along, passes by huge ports like the Port of Newark where they're just taking goods from overseas and shipping them out to warehouses. So we'll see how this affects economic productivity. Yeah, we might be getting some carmageddon. We'll see if traffic goes crazy, but hopefully it does not. All right, Neil, thanks for my I-95 education piece right there. But let's move on to Netflix. Neil, not all decisions companies make for the sake of maximizing profits backfire as spectacularly as Reddit's. In fact, a recent one made by Netflix seems to be paying off big time.

10:58So Netflix has been cracking down on password sharing. They rolled out more stringent rules internationally before bringing it to the U.S. in the past few weeks. Well, we have some data on how users are reacting to those crackdowns, and it turns out a lot of them are paying for Netflix now. Data analytics firm Antenna released a report that showed a huge jump in U.S. subscribers for Netflix right as password sharing started getting curbed. On May 26th and 27th, it saw close to 100 ,000 daily signups. And average signups from that period, May 23rd to May 27th, were 102 % higher than its 60-day average.

11:37That's an even bigger spike than in the signups from the initial phase of COVID lockdowns in March of 2020. So, Neil, it looks like this crackdown is working for Netflix. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about whether this is really going to move the needle in any way. Like, is this kind of just like a lump sum payment that you get? And then it's because there's it's not going to change the long term growth trajectory of Netflix. Right. Well, I mean, you're just like recouping costs that you should have had at the beginning. And everyone's going to sign up who hasn't signed up already. And we're kind of like using another person's account.

12:13I think it shows that people really have FOMO about Netflix. Netflix still drives like a huge amount of the cultural conversation. you want to be watching the show that everyone else is talking about. And so I do think this is going to be kind of a slower burn where you want to stay in the loop on Netflix. And if you can't watch anymore, piggybacking off your parents' account. Or actually, last time I said that people were piggybacking off their parents' account, a lot of people said, uh-uh, my parents are piggybacking off my account. So whichever way you have it, I do think more people are going to start paying for Netflix.

12:44It does show the cachet of Netflix, I agree. And this was just one part of a dual-pronged effort to recoup some costs, boost subscriber growth in this age of the streaming wars of a little austerity there. So the other prong was this ad plan, which I think was$6.99 a month that they rolled out recently. That also is going really well. The plan attracted nearly 5 million monthly active users across the globe in the first quarter. And also these users are actually more generative to the company as well because they pay a subscription fee and then there's ads on top of that. So it's kind of strange that Netflix did not do this for its entire existence.

13:30They resisted it. And then these two things and the U-turn on password sharing too because only a few years ago they were saying stuff like love is sharing your password. Netflix is having a fantastic year. Up 25 % in the last month and 129 % for the year. So the changes they've been making have been working. The key will be whether they can turn the money that they're getting now to funnel it back into content and create the next stranger things that will create more organic growth than these kind of, I don't want to say the password, like gimmicks. I'll just say it. Making money is making money.

14:06All right, Neil, before we jump into the next story, we're going to take a quick break. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to move your business forward, but first you need to find the right team. Start your search with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It can help you reach qualified candidates fast, ensuring your listing is the first one they see. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs are 90 % more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. See the results for yourself. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

15:09Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. All right, Neil, it's Monday, which means it's time for us to hit our Monday segment, Who Won the Weekend?, where we look back at someone who had an extra solid weekend. Although, remember, I slept until 10 a.m. yesterday, so it's tough to think about anyone who had a better weekend than me. But I'm up first, Neil, and my winner of the weekend is Dr. Deep Sea, who just completed a stay of 100 days living in an underwater hotel, which set the world record for most consecutive days living underwater.

15:44First of all, epic nickname, Dr. Deep Sea, but his real name is Dr. Joseph Deturi, and he's a biomedical engineer who teaches at the University of South Florida. He said that the goal of his stay was to study the effects of underwater living on the human body. There's still a lot of research to parse through, but he and his team are specifically looking at how pressure might affect the body and especially how it might reduce the effects of aging. Jury is still out on all that data, but so far the one conclusive piece of evidence from the study is that Dr. Deepsea shrank. He came out a full half inch shorter than he went in.

16:21And Neil, I feel like the whole underwater living part, isn't that crazy? It's the fact that he stayed in a confined, isolated environment like an underwater hotel for 100 days, that was truly surprising to me. It's really impressive. I've become a lot more claustrophobic recently for some reason. I felt like five years ago, I probably could have pulled off maybe a week down there. But now, I don't know. My brain goes in weird places, in very confined spaces. So I do not think I would last more than three hours down there. What about you? I wouldn't last very long either. And I actually, this hotel, Underwater Hotels in Key Largo, of florida i've definitely seen it before because if you've seen those youtube videos of i i stayed in an underwater hotel from like a mr beast or like a ryan trahan or something this is the hotel that all of them use for those underwater stays so this kind of has like a cult following in certain youtube circles and also the previous record of 73 days was also set at this hotel this is the premier undersea hotel in the world dr deep sea love them uh let's go to my winner of the week, which is Alex Soros.

17:28This guy is 37 years old and he just got handed the keys to a $25 billion empire. That empire belongs, of course, to his father, George Soros, the left-wing billionaire, investor, and philanthropist. Unlike Logan Roy, Soros actually made a decision on a successor and this weekend announced that his youngest son, Alex, will succeed him in leading his nonprofit, Open Society Foundations, which is this massive force in the philanthropy world, It gives$1.5 billion a year to causes advancing human rights and democratic governments around the world. The succession story is kind of spicy because another of George's sons, Jonathan, who's 15 years older than Alex, was seen as the likely successor to take over from his dad.

18:14They played tennis together. They were super chummy. But apparently they had a falling out and then Alex won the trust of George. What is he going to do with the money? Everyone is asking. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Alex said he was even more political than his famously liberal dad. And he's going to be focused on spending money on more domestic political issues, such as improving abortion rights and gender equality. But he differs from other young lefties in other ways. Like he thinks that, you know, college campuses are a bit too woke and they stifle free speech. But he's my winner.

18:48He just won a high stakes succession sweepstakes. sweepstakes. Now he has a big piggy blank to play around with. I know. And it was interesting because a lot of people doubted that George Soros would ever give up kind of the keys to his empire while he was alive. And it is funny that these things keep happening while succession is in vogue. So of course we're going to compare it to it. And yeah, I mean, the Soros name is obviously one that everyone usually jumps on. So good luck, Alex. Good luck dealing with the pressure that comes with that. I know when I'm in my mid thirties, I hope I'm not having to speak for a $25 billion organization.

19:24So good on you, Alex. All right. Um, let's move on to this other piece of news, uh, from the weekend, Ted Kaczynski, who's also known as the Unabomber. He died by suicide in prison on Saturday, according to the Associated Press. He was one of the 20th century's most notorious criminals, domestic terrorists who killed three people and injured 23 by mailing homemade pipe bombs from 1978 to 1995. What a backstory here. I think this is what grips people a lot about this guy. He was a math prodigy who entered Harvard at age 16 and was published in academic journals. When getting his PhD at Michigan, a member of his dissertation committee estimated that only 10 or 12 people in the entire country understood his topic.

20:11But something snapped he moved to this shack in montana where he started a bombing spree he appeared to be motivated by this philosophy that everything went wrong for humans since the industrial revolution and that modern tech and scientific advancements have led us to become slaves to machines so all that progress had to be unwound and his targets were somewhat consistent with that philosophy even though they seemed random he bombed airplanes was a big target he targeted the president of United Airlines, the owner of a computer rental store, an ad executive, and a timber lobbyist. How he got caught is very fascinating.

20:46He wrote this 35 ,000-word manifesto explaining this anti-modern society philosophy. And it was published in the Washington Post and the New York Times because the FBI said you should do this because they think he would stop doing it and it would lead to clues to help his discovery. So his brother was reading this and he recognized his writing style and tipped off authorities who nabbed him in Montana in 1996. And that is considered to be one of the most expensive and biggest manhunts in the history of the U.S. That's my favorite detail from just the Unabomber story is that, yeah, the publishing that manifesto led to his capture.

21:26And I was thinking, Neil, if you go rogue and pen a manifesto, I assume millions of people would recognize your writing style since you have written The Brew, or at least your brother. So yeah, just interesting to see kind of the cultural grip that Unabomber has maintained on society, especially the youth, especially technologically savvy youths. Like TikTok has this whole Unabomber subculture going on in it. And then the 2017 docuseries from Netflix called Manhunt Unabomber also just kind of reintroduced him to another generation of people. Again, there's Netflix kind of dominating the cultural conversation.

22:02But it is so ironic too that these conversations are playing out on technology, facilitated by technology, which is the very thing that Unabomber was kind of against. So very interesting to see how he's just still culturally relevant to this day. Yeah. And people say that we shouldn't ascribe so much to his philosophy and what he was saying and his motivations because he was kind of diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, so he may not be fully there and competent in, you know, putting together a coherent political ideology. But yeah, people have just been like on Discord and Reddit and TikTok, just like kind of holding him up as this heroic figure on both the far right and the far left.

22:47So I assume we are going to see documentaries about him in years to come. Let's move to our final Monday segment where we preview what you can expect the week ahead. Tomorrow's going to be a biggie. Trump will surrender to authorities after being charged last week. He's going to be arraigned for the second time this year, this time in a Miami courthouse. And we know how this goes by now because we saw what happened in New York. He's going to turn himself in at the courthouse and the judge will read 37 counts Trump has been charged with relating to his handling of highly sensitive documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left the White House.

23:25So zoo in Miami on Tuesday. The biggest economic news of the week is definitely this Federal Reserve meeting, which happens tomorrow and Wednesday. And the Fed is expected to do something it hasn't done in the last 15 months, which is not raise interest rates. Let's go. The Fed thinks it might be time to hit the brakes to wait and see how all the previous interest rate hikes have slowed down the economy and are filtering through things like mortgage rates and bank loans and things like that. There have been some economic slowdown hiccups like the regional banking crisis and, you know, other other negative effects.

24:05But overall, the labor market has held really strong. So people don't think this is going to be the total end of rate hikes. But it might be a pause just to kind of take a breath, see what's see what's been happening over the last 15 months. We need a breather. Thank you. Thank you, please. All right. And then to the sports calendar. It's a big week for sports. The Denver Nuggets and the Las Vegas Golden Knights are closing in on championships. And then the U.S. Open for Golf tees off on Thursday. This is the first major since Live and the PGA Tour announced they were linking back up in a move that really shocked the world and had all these geopolitical currents since the new venture is going to be backed by$3 billion of the Saudi Investment Fund.

24:46Who knew golf was going to create so many storylines for us? But, yeah, going to be watching the U.S. Open. I also love the rough videos just showing how deep the rough is going to be. Is the rough going to be deep? Oh, it's always deep. So I'm expecting carnage as well. And then on Friday we got Wes Anderson movies. So is that going to – sorry, I'll just explain. Wes Anderson's Asteroid City is coming out in select theaters on Friday. Wes Anderson has been a huge trend on TikTok. People are making videos in his brand and his particular style. Is this going to increase or decrease the amount of Wes Anderson content?

25:21Well, I think it's going to increase sales to Asteroid City because, again, he kind of experienced not a revival. Like Wes Anderson's always been popular, but especially with the youths and the TikTok audience. So I'm kind of expecting this to be one of his biggest movies ever, just from a commercial perspective, because of the TikTok machine and what it's done to his brand. All right. You heard Toby. And then Saturday or Sunday is Father's Day. So start thinking of ideas. Thank you. That is our show. Thank you for everyone who wrote in with personal finance questions for Money with Katie. Great questions.

25:53Great questions. We're actually going to record that later today. So we will get back to you, your emails. Just be a little patient. And thanks again for writing in. If you want to write in in general, you can send us a note at morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Huge shout out to our crew for making the show happen. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Veles and Raymond Liu are the associate producers. Yuchenawa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and makeup has gone underwater to break Dr. Deep Sea's record. Good luck. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew.