SpaceX Explosion Lawsuit, Hollywood Writers' Strike & 'Godfather of AI' Quits

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 pod, Hollywood writers put down their typewriters and pick up their picket signs.

0:38The godfather of AI goes against the family, and we break down James Harden's 45-point masterpiece against the Celtics last night. We're not actually going to do that, but that was sweet. R.I.P. Celtics. Then SpaceX is in trouble with some environmental groups for blowing chunks of concrete thousands of feet into the air and potentially endangering some of the local wildlife. Then we'll finish up with some highlights from Uber's annual lost and found report. Mercury is in retrograde, so people are forgetting stuff. Neil, it's Tuesday, May 2nd. Let's ride.

1:13All right, Toby, what were your takeaways from the Met Gala last night? I was honestly shocked by how short Kim Kardashian is. It happens every year where she emerges on a certain red carpet. She stands next to one of her sisters and you realize that, wow, she really is five foot one. So that was my big takeaway. I saw that picture. Kim Kardashian is short. What about you? And Karl Lagerfeld's cat, Choupette, did not make an appearance. That was the big question of the night. But Jared Leto kind of made an appearance as the cat. I respect Jared Leto. He embodies the spirit of what the Met Gala should be.

1:49I used to really hate how hard he wins, but now I respect it. He made a whole catsuit. And my favorite thing, not my favorite thing, but what I noticed was Serena Williams pregnant. Pregnant. And that kind of rules out with her second child. And that kind of rules out tennis comeback, which I was kind of hoping for for the next the next U.S. Open. I know. I mean, we saw our last match, actually, or I saw our last match. So hopefully we see another one. All right. Let's go on to the news. Hollywood TV and film writers are striking for the first time in 15 years today. And if it goes on long enough, shows might go off the air and we all might have to do the unthinkable.

2:29Watch TikTok. The strike is one of the clearest signs yet of how the shift to streaming has upended the economics of Hollywood. Writers say as companies shifted to putting TV shows on streaming platforms, their work conditions have suffered and they can barely make a middle class income. Median pay for writers and producers has fallen 4 % over the last decade. And that's not even including inflation. And so basically they say the current landscape has caused an existential crisis for this profession and it turned it more into gig economy work. Yeah, that stat about the median pay falling is absolutely remarkable to me.

3:05What other professions has median pay fell 23 % when adjusted for inflation? I can't think of any off the top of my head just because it's become commoditized in a way. And honestly, I think the funniest thing is that it used to be these seasons came out with 20 episodes each. They'd go on for 20 years. Think about how long How I Met Your Mother went and how many episodes. Too long. Yeah, arguably too long. And now you get signed for maybe a season by a streaming platform. Maybe it's eight to ten episodes. It could get canceled next week. And so that's the issue that these writers have no job security.

3:40And I totally see why they're striking. Yeah, so you have these are various things that have changed in the shift to streaming. You mentioned the eight to 12 episode seasons. Every single TV show I've watched recently has been like eight or 10 episodes. Succession, White Lotus, Last of Us. You know, they don't really last that long. They're so expensive and they kind of expire after eight episodes. There's also this thing about residuals, which historically, if you had a writing credit on a TV show and that show was aired as a read run on broadcast, then you'd get a royalty payment from that. But that kind of got wiped out by the shift to streaming.

4:17And they have these things called mini rooms in the streaming age where you go into this room and you write a show and you don't even know if it's going to get greenlit or not. So it's a very precarious situation and you're not getting paid a lot of money to crank out these scripts. It'd be like cranking on a newsletter every day, and you never know if there's going to be a newsletter tomorrow and or if you'll even get paid for it. I also was really curious to see if they'd mentioned AI, and they did briefly touch on it. So they said part of their demands for this negotiation cycle was they wanted regulations around the use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.

4:52because I can also see that becoming this big wave of existential angst for writers because if you're already becoming more and more replaceable and you have these large language models that can write relatively well, I could see why that is potentially part of this negotiation cycle. So that's something I'll be looking forward. You see this a lot in blue-collar work already, like ports and automakers and autoworkers that they were afraid of automation when they're doing these bargaining contracts. And now this is kind of the first time you're seeing it in knowledge workers or writers. For the first time, they're acknowledging that AI could be a threat to their work.

5:33Let's talk about what will happen to these shows. Yeah. That we maybe don't watch. The funniest part is that they are heavily influenced by writer strikes in the past. Right. So last time this happened, so the previous strike was in 2007 and 2008. It lasted 100 days. Any show that needed very timely writing, like Saturday Night Live or the late night shows, kind of either went off air or did some weird stuff. So Conan O 'Brien, I did not remember this, but apparently to fill air time, he tried to keep his wedding ring spinning for as long as possible. Incredibly impressive. I watched the clip.

6:11He is a good spinner of wedding rings, very inception-y. uh yeah apparently got it to 51 seconds with the help from an mit uh physicist and then a bunch of scripted shows like lost friday night lights gossip girl breaking bad 30 rock all the ones from yesteryear got cut short by the end of the year um and this is an interesting fact that jesse pinkman on uh aaron paul on breaking bad was supposed to be killed off at the end of the first season and because of the writer's strike a couple episodes were cut short and vince gilligan the creator of Breaking Bad, was like, you know what? I think I kind of like Jesse Pinkman.

6:46And they kept him for the show. And obviously he was an integral part of this. Yeah. So Rider Strikes, maybe not good for writers and entertainment at large, but sometimes really good for your favorite character, your favorite TV show. Okay, Neil, let's move on. Let's talk about SpaceX. The hits keep coming for SpaceX. Environmental groups have sued the FAA over SpaceX's recent launch, saying the agency didn't properly assess the impact that the launch would have on the surrounding environmental area. And it certainly had an impact. Remember, Starship was the most powerful rocket of all time. All that power absolutely demolished the launch pad.

7:24It sent chunks of concrete and metal literally thousands of feet away. It spread dust miles away and even sparked a fire on state lands near the launch site. So the groups are super mad about this mayhem and destruction and they're calling on the FAA to potentially revoke Starship's launch license, which would essentially ground the program until a proper environmental impact survey can be completed. So Neil, do you think that these environmental groups have a point? I mean, okay. So before the show, I went on Google Maps to where Starbase is located, which is on the very southern tip of Texas.

7:58And all you see around Starbase is like wildlife management area or conservation area or endangered species region. And I was just a little confused why Elon decided to put a huge launch pad in this area where there are, we were looking up what, you know, kind of species are there that they're saying are threatened by spaceship or starship. And there's ocelots. There's something called the Jaguarundi. There's sea turtles. And these are all like very critical habitats for these endangered species. And Elon was like, you know what, Cape Canaveral, I guess I just don't want to be mainstream. I want to be a hipster and put it down in Texas for tax breaks purposes.

8:40He didn't need to do any of this. He could have just used the normal Florida launch light that hundreds of rockets have launched out of. But, yeah, he wanted to go to Boca Chica, Texas, which is where it launched. Some of these stats are hilarious. There was dust found 10 kilometers away to the northwest. That's 6.2 miles of dust. It just kicked up so much more than they expected. And then speaking of unintended consequences or things that they didn't foresee. So we have a little bit more details around what went wrong with the launch. So we know that three boosters just didn't fire at all in the beginning.

9:18That caused a dangerous lean when the spacecraft ascended. So things were kind of going wrong immediately from the start. And then this is the juicy detail that Elon revealed in Twitter spaces recently, is that when they pressed the self-destruct button, when they wanted the rocket to blow up because the rocket wasn't going to, the launch wasn't going to plan, it took 40 seconds for it to actually blow up. That must've been a very stressful 40 seconds. Yes, but what do you do when something doesn't blow up and you want it to is you add more explosives. So Elon said, we're adding more explosives to make sure it's gonna explode next time.

9:52But he said he was not expecting this environmental damage and said they were going to install a plate below the launch pads so it won't happen again. There are definitely a lot. This lawsuit, there's a variety of other challenges that SpaceX needs to make good on to have another launch of Starship that Elon wants in the next few months. But it's not going to be like, hey, let's do this again. Yeah, he's got some boxes to check for sure. Yeah, a lot of challenges. Okay, let's move on. The godfather of AI is abandoning his godchild. There was this New York Times article that came out yesterday that a lot of people were talking about because Jeffrey Hinton, an AI academic, whose research provided the foundation, literal foundation for AI tools like ChatGPT, Google's Bard, all these other generative AI breakthroughs, quit his job at Google so he could have the freedom to warn about the tech that he helped create.

10:49So he seemed pretty regretful in this interview. you, he said, I console myself with a normal excuse. If I hadn't done it, someone else would have maybe. Uh, but as AI tools advance over the next couple of months, a bunch of experts have said, we need to hit the brakes because we don't know what the heck is going on. The fact that the godfather of AI, he's called the godfather of AI. One of the most respected people in the field is sounding the alarm adds a lot of legitimacy to the people who are warning about slowing down. First of all, great name, great title. I'd love to be the godfather of something.

11:21Godfather daily podcast. Godfather of blonde hair on daily podcasts. It's a very niche Godfather. But yeah, obviously when this guy speaks, people listen because he's just been there since the beginning. And his main concern that he voiced was that the average person will not be able to know what is true anymore. And we've already seen this. We already saw Drippy Pope, the AI Balenciaga dripped out version of Pope Francis. That image fooled you, fooled a lot of people. Don't remind me. I know. No, but it's true. That is his main concern is that people will not be able to know what is true online anymore, which is a very valid excuse.

11:58And then also he's worried that AI will upend the job market, which we've heard. There's that report from Goldman Sachs that said 300 million jobs will be replaced. And we're really, really actually seeing that play out. IBM is pausing their hiring. they're replacing 7 ,800 jobs with AI, which is just a pretty ridiculous number to hear on paper. You're shaking your head a little bit. He said over the next five years in back office roles. So not consumer customer face. No, not customer faces. So the back office, HR and that kind of stuff. He said, I expect it to be automated by, you know, 78, 30 % of the 2 ,600 back office roles over the next five years.

12:41So, I mean, yes, it's really happening. And that was kind of the first news article that we saw and we're like, whoa. Yeah. And then we also - This is happening. We saw another thing that made us say whoa about AI was Chegg, which is this education company that helps kids out with their homework. They said their business is massively affected by AI and their stock actually doubled 43 % ahead of Tuesday's open. Crazy. It's like truly the first company that said AI is killing our business and the market get reacted to it because people are just going to chat gbt and getting help with homework usually if you put ai in your earnings report or you talk about it you get like a huge boost and this is kind of the inverse of that where you say you know a chat gbt is actually a threat to our business chegg says it's using ai now i think it's developing its own chatbot called cheggmate yeah it's it's it's hopping on the chatbot trend and the chess trend in one so it thinks it can ultimately win by, you know, leveraging AI and not getting killed by AI.

13:39But clearly investors think that this is just another industry or a company that ChatGPT is going to blow. We'll see. Okay, before we jump into our next story, we'll take a quick break. My name is Percy Jackson. Getting in trouble is like breathing for me. The hit series returns to Disney Plus and Hulu. The danger the camp is under is greater than you can possibly imagine. For the key to our survival, three of you must quest to the sea of monsters. Let's go do the impossible. I'm not going to let some stupid monster stand in my way. Percy Jackson and the Olympians. New season now on Disney Plus and Hulu.

14:21Learn more at DisneyPlus.com slash what's on. 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. All right, Toby, on Sunday, I don't know if you saw this, but the NYPD's chief of department tweeted, 21st century calls for 21st century policing.

15:03Now, what does that mean? It means put an Apple AirTag tracking device in your car so that police can recover it if it gets stolen. So this is the NYPD's high-tech response to a rise in thefts of Kia, Hyundai, and Honda cars, specifically due to this TikTok trend that shows how easily they can be broken into and stolen. For some data, at the end of last year, New York saw an 890 % increase in Kia thefts and a 766 % increase in Hyundai thefts. So the answer here is to put an Apple AirTag tracking device in your car so police can recover them. It is so weird that the police is relying on this consumer technology that you can just go buy at an Apple store.

15:45And it makes sense though, because Apple AirTags are very easy to track. Like if your car gets stolen, you can just give the police the location and say like, hey, help me get my car back. But the thing that stood out to me most of this story is why don't cars already have this feature in them? Clearly, they're all already equipped with GPS systems because you can use your on-screen to navigate places. And yet there's no feature that you can ping when you can't find your car. You were talking about how helpful it would be when you go to a large event and you lose your car in a parking lot. Why can't you just ping it?

16:21You just take a picture of the, you know, section two. That's where I am in the parking lot. Right, right. I've spent so much time. My friend used to lose his car in the University of Maryland parking garage all the time. And I think I wasted an hour per day looking for this car. Yeah, see, people are worried about surveillance and being tracked. I mean, when Apple AirTags came out, there was all this discourse. People were being, you know, stalked by people. People were tagging, putting AirTags in people's cars so they could stalk them. So this is a very deep concern about AirTags. And now that it's in the hand of law enforcement or working with law enforcement, people might even get a little more spooked.

16:56That's actually what a 180 degree turnaround for AirTags because you're right. When they first came out, they got a ton of bad publicity because people were using them to stalk people. And now suddenly they're being hailed as this great law enforcement tool. So I think it is a little bit of cognitive dissonance with people where they're like, wait a second, I thought we didn't like the fact that AirPods can or air tags can do this. And now we rely on them. So very, very interesting story, honestly. Yeah. And probably good for Apple. Meanwhile, cities are suing the crap out of Kia and Hyundai because they're like, how can you make your car so easy to steal?

17:33So you have Seattle, St. Louis, Cleveland, at least five other cities are suing these South Korean car makers being like, yo, get your stuff together because it's costing us a lot of money. Because people on TikTok are going on and showing others how to steal these cars. They don't have a push to start. Right. They literally use like a USB cable and they can manually turn the ignition over. It's a crazy thing that, first of all, why are you posting on TikTok? Come on. For views. I know, for views. So, and this trend has been going on since 2022. This is not a new thing by any stretch. So TikTok, man, it's big.

18:08TikTok, good for air tags. So that's how we got there. All right, let's talk about TikTok a little bit. And it's Toby's Trends time. It's Tuesday. Look at all the alliterations we got going. So today we're gonna talk about a trend that again has been percolating in the background of TikTok for a while, but it just recently came to Twitter. So on Sunday before we came to the show, I actually decided to watch the Super Mario Bros movie. Not exactly a surprising thing to do. We know it just crossed one billion at the box office, but I actually didn't go to a theater to watch this. I didn't buy a ticket either.

18:43That's because the entire movie was uploaded on Twitter over the weekend. The whole movie. I can't stress that enough. The whole movie. And the reason why that was possible is because under Twitter Blue's new rules, someone who pays for the$8 a month can upload longer videos. And so people started immediately abusing that and putting entire titles of movies like Super Mario Bros. We also saw Avatar Way of Water, which is a famously long movie. They did upload that in three parts because it's too long, even for Twitter Blues new longer video rules. But it's just a ridiculous thing. This is not just a Twitter thing because people who have been on TikTok at all Can't go more than three scrolls without seeing a clip from Moneyball or Sully.

19:30I was on Sully TikTok for a while. I was on Better Call Saul TikTok. For some reason, Shameless. I was just watching episodes of Shameless on TikTok, and it's pretty good. And I was like, I don't really know anything about this show. But, you know, these three-minute clips, they're very compelling. Yeah. So to sum up this trend, just if I had to put a label on it, it is I think we're seeing the atomization of long-form content. We're basically seeing these things that are meant to be viewed in one sitting being broken up and put on social media sites. There's a obviously I have to stress that this is illegal.

20:04Right. Like there are copyright laws against this. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DCMA, should strike these videos down. And eventually the account that posted Super Mario Bros. The name was Vids That Go Hard, by the way, which I think is funny. and the account got banned but under elon's like new twitter regime it was up for multiple multiple days it got nine million views while it was up and then tiktok is a disaster in regulating this stuff because you can just tweak certain things about the audio um often you see like subway surfer being played underneath it that's in order to get past tiktok's kind of copyright filters and if the the person who's being ripped off like if uh the like studio studio doesn't know what's happening like they can't if they're unaware of it then they probably won't sue you so lots of people are getting away with posting these videos and it's it's good for the consumer like i love watching great it's good marketing there's this remember there's this new movie that's coming up that we've both seen a lot on tiktok about like they're planning an affair i I know.

21:08What's her name? It's Elizabeth Olson. Yes. And I don't know the name of it, but I swear it's a marketing stunt where they're feeding the masses clips from this show. And now we're all talking about it, even though we have no intention of watching it. It looks great. That's Toby's Trends. You're seeing lots of those videos. I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about, but that's our trend for the day. Okay, Neil, our final story is about Uber. we're going to briefly touch on their earnings because it happened this morning, but they also just released a report about the most forgotten items in Ubers.

21:42And I really want to talk about that. But first earnings first Uber crushed it. Unbelievable, unbelievable quarter, uh, mobility, gross bookings, which is catching a ride in Uber up 40 % year over year delivery was up 8 % year over year. It's still a bigger category than mobility is, but just by a little bit, Just a fantastic quarter all around. Revenue was up 29 % year over year. So absolutely crushed it. So anything to add on that front? Meanwhile, they're distancing themselves from Lyft like crazy. I mean, Lyft is cutting 26 % of their workforce. Uber of rideshare sales in early 2020, Uber was 66 % of the U.S.

22:25market. Now it's 76 % of the U.S. market. So this has been a long time coming. these two are going at it for almost a decade now. And it's pretty clear. I think we're ready to declare a winner that Uber has absolutely defeated Lyft in the ride share market. Yeah. Just a fantastic quarter. But again, that is not the news I want to talk about. You sound very CNBC right now. I know. I'm very excited about this next thing though. So Uber releases their annual loss and found report every year around this time. They say they do it because Mercury is in retrograde right now and that's a time when people are more forgetful than usual but it's just an awesome fantastic read so the top 10 most forgotten items they come as no surprise really it's stuff like phone wallet keys jewelry headphones laptops which is actually kind of sad so those are the most forgotten items in ubers but the 50 most unique items lost list absolutely unreal so i'm going to just list some of these okay so it includes people have left a danny devito christmas ornament, a fire sword, remote controlled vibrator, six cheesecakes, a half gallon of fireball.

23:33That's a fun time. A catheter insertion tray kit, a positive pregnancy test, dentures, a lightsaber, and one Gucci loafer. What a list. That is wild. I mean, that's interesting, but my takeaway here is that every company is coming out with their own Spotify wrapped. yeah uber lost such good marketing i mean spotify is like here's you know all the data from the past year and then uber does this thing that everyone talked we're talking about it and tsa does it with uh their you know most weirdest lost items found at security so uber is jumping on this uber rap friend um i just want to hang out i i'm i'm imagining that some of these were in the same uber so i really want to hang out with the with the person who had a half gallon of fireball and 16 ounces of fake blood even buy a half gallon of fireball or do you like pour it into a half gallon milk carton i don't know but i love this and also just quickly the last note about the report is the most forgetful cities jacksonville florida number one san antonio texas number two and then palm springs california number three i might go with a base rates hypothesis here because jacksonville is notoriously not a walking city and did you say the next one was san antonio San Antonio.

24:48Also not a walking city, so I'm going to go with they just take way more Ubers than the average, so they lose more stuff. And they're party places. Good weather. Is Jacksonville a party place? I mean, it's good weather. Everywhere in Florida is a party place. All right. That is our show. Let us know what the weirdest thing you lost an Uber was if you didn't report it to them. Just know you can always reach us at Morning Brew Daily at morningbrew.com or at 1-800-DAILY-POD. Big ups to everyone who made this show possible. the show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. Our technical director is Uchenoa Ogu.

25:19Samantha Veles and Raymond Liu are our associate producers. Billy Menino is on audio. We left hair and makeup in an Uber. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.

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