The Bitcoin ETF Is Here & OpenAI Opens a GPT Store

0:26Race the rudders! good morning brew daily show i'm neil freiman and i'm toby howell today open ai is opening up a store so get in losers we're going shopping then where the heck has all the snow gone this winter and is it ever coming back it's thursday january 11th let's ride

0:52if any high school age kids or parents of high schoolers are listening to the show this morning I have some facts about college admissions that will blow your mind. A new peer-reviewed study found that legalized weed is a huge factor in where kids are deciding to go to college these days. In the year that a state legalized recreational weed, the number of applications for that state's colleges grew 5.5 % more than colleges in states that did not legalize. And if we want to zoom in on the largest schools, applications jumped nearly 54 % compared with similarly sized schools in non-legal states.

1:30So if your kid says, I'm really digging what Coach Prime is doing at the University of Colorado these days, just know there might be an ulterior motive. This is hilarious. This adds to the body of research that shows that maybe external factors kind of contribute to a rise in applications. There are studies that show that schools that do well in sporting competitions, maybe St. Peter's goes deep into March Madness one year. That generates publicity and interest around schools, and you'll see applications go up, which is great because then your admissions rate goes down. You rank higher, and everything's great for you.

2:05Before we jump into the show today, we have a quick word from our sponsor, Veeam. Believe it or not, Veeam and Simone Biles have a few things in common. Has Veeam won multiple Olympic gold medals that I'm not aware of? No, I'm talking about flexibility and confidence. With Veeam, you have the flexibility you need to protect your data living in this hybrid cloud world and the confidence to know it will be safe in the long run. Well, I'm still going to need to see a Veeam floor routine before I can accept this metaphor. Hey, I'm doing my best out here. Head to Veeam.com today to discover more. That's V-E-E-A-M.com today.

2:41This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Nobody panic, but the spot Bitcoin ETFs that we've been hearing about and hearing about finally got approved by the SEC yesterday. All 11 that applied for approval got the green stamp from the regulatory agency, including BlackRock, the biggest ETF issuer on earth.

3:22This is a monumental day or a little anticlimactic, depending on your perspective. Monumental because it opens up Bitcoin to a whole new audience of everyday investors who can now get exposure to the asset without actually owning it. A little anticlimactic because we got that pump fake two days ago when the SEC's Twitter account was hacked. The path towards this day was a long and winding one. Multiple asset managers applied for Bitcoin ETFs in the past, dating all the way back to 2013. But the SEC continually rejected them, thinking they would be too vulnerable to market manipulation. But in August last year, a court found the SEC was wrong to reject a company called Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF application, which made the agency rethink its position.

4:05And now here we are. Neil, we've been talking about this for so long, and the price of Bitcoin has been running for so long, up 160 % in the last year. And now you or I, or anyone listening to this, can head to their normal stock brokerage account and maybe buy this thing as early as today. Right. Let's talk about why this is a big deal, how it opens up access. So ETFs are types of index funds that track a basket of security. So if you go into your 401k retirement fund right now, you're probably going to see under the hood that it's just a bunch of ETFs tracking everything from the S &P 500. That is, of course, the most popular one.

4:40The Nasdaq 100. There are other ones that track specific stocks in specific industries. So you could get a space ETF or a marijuana ETF or one that tracks Nancy Pelosi's trades if you think she is a great trader, which apparently she is. So this is just another one that would track Bitcoin. And until now, you had to kind of download Bitcoin crypto native applications like Coinbase of the world. Robinhood started doing it a little bit, too. But you kind of had to have a separate wallet, quote unquote, to be able to get exposure to Bitcoin. Now you can go into Schwab, E-Trade, any of these traditional brokerages and now invest in Bitcoin if that is something you want to do.

5:19Yeah, in a single sentence, just to sum it all up, the ETF makes it easier to add to your portfolio and a lot easier for the everyday investor who doesn't want to go down that kind of crypto rabbit hole. I want to talk a little bit about the fee war that is broken out, because the way that these ETF issuers make money off ETFs is they charge a small fee. The industry standard for other U.S. ETF products is around 0.54%. The fees coming in for these Bitcoin ETFs, some of them are as low as 0.2%. We're seeing kind of this fee battle going on, I think, in anticipation of trying to gather inflows when they first became approved.

5:59And so we're seeing this almost race to zero to try to attract and have the lowest fees out there. It reminds me of the New York City rental market in May 2020, when all these landlords were slashing prices and they were saying, hey, we'll give you a full year free, six months free, you don't have to waive the broker fee. But it does seem like Cathie Woods, ARK Invest, who is one of these Bitcoin ETF issuers, said, you get six months free and a bunch of others have followed. So there does seem to be a race to the bottom because there is an expected inflow of billions of dollars when they start trading today.

6:31And each of these ETFs, it's a very competitive market. They want to be the ones that capture all that money coming in. Right. Absolutely. Crypto advocates are very happy right now because they think that this shows that the gap between the traditional finance world and the world of crypto is narrowing. Crypto non-advocates, crypto haters are saying that this is just putting a stamp of approval on an industry that's still rife with all this fraud and these scams and the downfall of FTX. Now we're suddenly approving Bitcoin ETFs. So there's definitely going to be people on either side of this that say this is a monumental day for different reasons.

7:07but it is a monumental day. And there are those of us who say, wait a second, this is the merging of the traditional financial system with Bitcoin, which is created to subvert and go around the traditional financial system. So there are those of us who may say, hey, Bitcoin, crypto people, I thought this is exactly what you wanted to avoid. The whole point was to kind of skirt the traditional financial system. And now you're becoming enmeshed even more. So that is an interesting thing. And I think Bitcoin is kind of having an existential crisis. I mean, what is it for? It still hasn't proven itself to be anything more, I would say, than digital gold.

7:41That seems to be the use case at this point because I haven't bought anything with Bitcoin. It needs some therapies, having that existential midlife crisis. All right. What if you fired up ChatGPT and instead of asking questions to a jack of all trades, you got a personal audience with the absolute expert in their field? If you wanted cooking tips, you could chat with Julia Child. If you wanted to learn how to coach college football, you could chat with Nick Saban, who has a lot more time on his hands now. That is what OpenAI is trying to do with its latest product launch. Yesterday, the ChatGPT maker opened up a store where developers and regular people alike can share what's known as custom GPTs, or chatbots that are trained to become masters of a specific domain, like recommending books or teaching math or searching through scientific papers, and therefore are more useful to people than just vanilla chat GPT.

8:32Think of this like the App Store meets YouTube in that OpenAI is trying to become a platform that attracts people and creators to build cool new things on top of the technology it's already released, generating more users in the process. Not everyone can enter the GPT store, though. For now, it's only available to customers who pay$20 a month for a subscription to chat GPT+. But it's a sign that OpenAI is putting last year's leadership boondoggle behind it and rapidly releasing new offerings to put distance between it and the other big tech rivals that are trying to compete in the AI space. Yeah, remember, this was actually one of those things that kind of caused the rift at OpenAI to begin with.

9:10The store was initially set to launch back in November, but was delayed amidst all the Sam Altman board drama. The board thought Sam was potentially racing to commercialize ChatGPT a little too quickly. But now we're seeing kind of that vision fully fledged out here. There is still some murkiness on exactly how OpenAI is going to profit off the store because they do say that they promise to do a revenue share with the creators on the store, but they're not taking that 30 % fee that the App Store, Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store have been known for. So there's still some murkiness around exactly how they plan to monetize and how they plan to reward creators.

9:50Just know that they are going to reward creators. That's why I said this is very much like YouTube, because they're trying to attract people to the platform to build on top of it. And they're going to give out a rev share. I think the way they think they're going to make money is through this subscription of$20 a month, ChatGPT+. The only way you can access the store and all of these different custom apps is through the subscription. So maybe people like you and me, we only use the free ChatGPT store, or free ChatGPT version. Say we want to access some of these apps or some of these different things that ChatGPT is doing.

10:21will pony up the$20 a month. And I think that is sort of the long game to get a lot of people who use ChatGPD, 100 million users, to convert some of them to paying subscribers. Yeah, make it pay to play. I do think this is what could potentially differentiate OpenAI even more so. I know they were first to it, but now like Llama from Meta, Gemini from Google, their chatbots have kind of risen to a point that it's on par with OpenAI. So this is one way that OpenAI can create kind of like a network effect and create a moat in a way that some people have been skeptical that they could pull off. I just want to mention a few of the custom GPTs.

10:58Say somebody's listening to this, they want to go to the store. It may seem a little nebulous. What kind of things can I do? Well, there are a couple notable companies that have already introduced custom GPTs. AllTrails is a very popular app for finding hiking trails and different hikes in various areas. Well, they have a custom GPT that's specifically geared towards finding hiking trails. There's another company called Consensus, which searches through 200 million academic papers. So that is another specific use case that I think a lot of people have used GPT for. It's sifting through documents that I don't want to read.

11:32Finally, Khan Academy, the online tutoring company, released one called CodeTutor to help people learn coding. And these custom GPTs aren't just trained on the entire internet like chat GPT is. They're trained on a specific data set, so they can become really good and really useful at finding what you need to know in this specific domain. Let's move on. Bottled water is not just bad for the environment. It's likely bad for your health, too. It's always been known that really, really tiny fragments of plastic can be found in plastic water bottles. but a new study found that there's about 10 to 100 times more of them than previously estimated.

12:11Researchers from Columbia and Rutgers found roughly 240 ,000 detectable pieces in a typical liter of bottled water, 90 % of which are nanoplastics, which at a width of one thousandth of a human hair are so small that they can easily get into the tissue of your lungs, digestive tracts, or even your bloodstream. The last study on this phenomena back in 2018 only found an average of 325 pieces of microplastics in a liter of bottled water, but the new methods in this study found way, way more. Quote, people don't think of plastics as shedding, but they do, Sherry Mason, a director of sustainability said.

12:50In almost the same way we're constantly shedding skin cells, plastics are constantly shedding little bits that break off. How's that for an unnerving visual to start your day with? It's a little unnerving, and this tells you what you need to know. all four of the co-authors interviewed said they were going to be cutting back on their bottled water use because of the study that they conducted i immediately thought that as well because i am a big refill my plastic water bottles do whenever you do buy one i always try to reuse them because to me that offsets some of the plastic usage but now i immediately looked at plastic water bottles differently because 240 000 bits of nanoplastics that's a lot of nanoplastics here's was even more unnerving the plastics only accounted for 10 of the total particles they identified the rest could be minerals or other other types of plastic or something else entirely in a report um but if the plastic isn't coming from the water bottles themselves where is it coming from and the researchers kind of hypothesize that some of the plastics could be shedding from ironically enough the filters that are used to filter this supposedly purer water so we're We're getting plastic from every different which way up and down the supply chain.

14:01So there was a industry response, obviously, the great old Bottled Water Association. They responded that there is no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of these nano and microplastic particles. And if you actually look at the literature, they do have a point because scientists say, look, we really don't know whether this is harmful, how harmful it is, how it impacts the body. This is a very new area of research. They do hypothesize that nanoparticles, which are much smaller than microparticles, it's crazy to say that there's something even smaller than microparticles, but they could affect human health because they're so small they can get into your bloodstream and filter through those semi-permeable membranes we learned about in eighth grade biology.

14:43A lot easier than the bigger plastics, but it is true that there is no sort of conclusion or consensus on whether these are bad and how bad they are. It's just kind of a little alarming to think about. Absolutely. Before we stress you out too much about nanoplastics, let's take a quick break. Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host a highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not Play Play.

15:22We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best I do win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back, and Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL. I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the internet last year, and I think this season's lineup is even cooler. And so does my wife, who keeps stealing all my hoodies. Stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals. Shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online, and in store.

16:03Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will make you harder, better, faster, and stronger. The first stat is about the surprising resurgence of cursive writing in schools. Last October, California passed a law that makes cursive handwriting instruction mandatory in the 1st through 6th grades, becoming the 21st state to require some sort of cursive handwriting instruction. As recently as 2016, just 14 states required cursive. This is bound to make you feel a little bit loopy. Bring back cursive when everyone uses computers? That's like telling people to start using outhouses again even after we invented indoor plumbing.

16:43Here are some of the reasons cursive is coming back, though. The most frequent argument you hear is that learning cursive will ensure students can read primary source historical documents that are written in cursive. Another is to identify students' work in handwriting in the age of chat GPT-influenced cheating. And finally, a significant body of research has found that writing in cursive comes with lots of benefits for students, like building fine motor skills and developing synergies between different brain hemispheres. Toby, are you buying stock in cursive? I'm so out on cursive. You're digging up a lot of bad memories for me, too, because I was never a very, I had bad handwriting growing up, so I never understood the point.

17:22It's like, I already learned how to write. Why are you teaching me this additional way to write? And the historical documents argument is absurd, in my opinion. How many kids are saying, oh, man, if only I could read this historical document where they even write their Fs and Ss weird. So I don't know. I'm out on cursive. Well, what if you think it's wet in the horse of human events instead of wet in the course of human events? That's kind of a big deal, but I agree with you because there are these new technologies that will kind of transcribe a historical document into something that's a little more legible than what Thomas Jefferson wrote with his little quill.

17:54I'm on team keyboard for life. Let's teach kids how to write or how to type faster, not write cursive faster. This does seem like the last sort of dying, gasping breath of cursive because I don't think— We're out. We're out. Okay, for my second number, let's say you were on a flight during which a door plug burst open at 16 ,000 feet. You feared you'd be sucked out of the plane and are now left with significant emotional trauma from the event. How much money are you entitled to? For passengers on the Alaska Airlines flight that happened to this week, that dollar amount is$1 ,500. In addition to giving passengers on that flight an apology, a full refund, and access to mental health resources, Alaska Airlines is giving passengers$1 ,500 to, quote, assist with any inconveniences.

18:38The Washington Post interviewed several passengers on this flight to ask them what they thought, and they said they were still processing what happened and didn't really know whether this was the right number because they just didn't know how the ordeal would impact them in the coming months and years. Is$1 ,500 enough to cover such a traumatic event? It is a very interesting problem. What makes it more interesting, too, is that if this case ends up in court, some legal experts say that the amount of money each passenger could potentially earn hinges on how close they were to the opening which i think makes a lot more sense if you were a dude like way in the back of the plane by the bathrooms you probably didn't get affected by this hole as much as someone sitting in the immediate row so i think there should be a sliding scale based off of how close you were to the actual hole well the people in the back they already had to be in the back board last get the plane last and now they're not entitled to as much i think you give middle seat people extra money as well just for being middle seat people.

19:33But in all seriousness, who knows whether this is$1 ,500 is enough. It's obviously the threshold at which Alaska Airlines thinks people will be appeased and they won't pursue legal action. But in cases in the past where things have broken in airplanes, there has been plenty of legal action. So it does appear like this could happen. We just don't know who to sue yet. It could be Boeing. It could be Alaska Airlines. It could be Spirit Aero Systems who made the part and put and assembled the fuselage. So things will shake out now. Things will continue to shake out. I'm sure there will be lawsuits in the future, and they're going to demand a lot more than just$1 ,500.

20:10For my final number, the workplace review site Glassdoor released its rankings of the 100 best major companies to work for and make fun of consultants all you want, but some of them love their job. The Boston-based management consulting firm Bain & Company was ranked number one based on anonymous employee reviews. It's sixth time topping the list. Second was AI powerhouse NVIDIA, whose employees are probably pretty stoked that their stock options are worth a zillion dollars after last year's share surge. Some other takeaways. Apple returned to the top 100 list, checking in at number 39, one year after falling off completely.

20:45That could be because Apple didn't conduct mass layoffs like the rest of its big tech peers. Another interesting finding retail made its presence felt, with the number of retail companies doubling from 5 to 10 among the top 100. In-N-Out, Lululemon, Heave Grocery, Wegmans were all ranked highly by their employees. Who the heck is paying someone from Bain Capital to Bain & Co. to always get on the top of the list? Six years running? That is a pretty, not six years in a row, but six years since they've been doing the survey. That is a lot. What other companies come to mind as someone who should be the top of this list?

21:21Well, I don't know. I don't work for them. I know. potentially the one that i thought was in in and out actually which it's just a good vibe like wear the hats i don't know but good for bain i guess bain and google have been on this list since it came out in 2009 they're the only two that have been in the top 100 the entire time i mean if you're working at bain and google you're making a lot of money bain the employees cite a lot of upward mobility so you get promoted pretty quickly if you do your job well so i mean those two combined getting paid well you get promoted to make even more money it's all you need to be equation for success.

21:52Any listeners in the northern climes of the U.S. have probably had a similar water cooler conversation this year. Where the heck is all the snow? Northern California snowpack this week sat at just 38 % of its average. Most of the country has been well below snowfall averages, according to the National Weather Service. And only about a fifth of the country was covered in snow before this past weekend storm, the lowest in more than a decade. This is bad news because despite the occasional benefit of wearing a t-shirt outside in january we need snow for one it generates a ton of economic activity through various ski resorts it serves as a valuable source of drinking water and irrigation come springtime and it also protects certain winter crops so they can thrive once the weather warms the main fear is that if the snowpack volume changes enough all those benefits can go away very very quickly neil we're living in a bit of a snowmageddon right now.

22:46We are. And you can easily say, you can easily point to one data point this winter and be like, where is the snow? And you could maybe chalk it up a little to El Nino, which is making things a lot warmer this year specifically. But there was a new study released yesterday that examined 169 Northern Hemisphere river basins, which examined the snowpack there. And what you were mentioning, it's really critical for there to be a lot of snow in the winter, because when that melts, It runs off and it basically serves as a frozen reservoir for crops and agriculture in the spring and summer months. This study found that nearly half of them have seen their snowpack decline since 1981.

23:25So this is a long-term trend that has researchers thinking that we are just living in a long-term period where there is declining snow. And that poses a lot of problems economically, socially, culturally across the board. And I want to talk a little bit about New York City because, you know, it's where we live. New York City has now gone 694 days without at least one inch of snowfall, a record snow drought. Also, New York City missed out on a white Christmas for the 14th consecutive year, which is a record since at least the 1950s. So New York City is not living in a winter wonderland. Well, let's not leave out our Acela Corridor friends because Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

24:05have also now gone more than 700 days without a single inch of snow. So it's just a little disconcerting when you're in January and you haven't seen a single lick of snow. Okay, here to interrupt our New Year's resolution of eating healthy are the Girl Scouts, which officially kicked off their 2024 cookie selling season on Tuesday. The organization calls this cookie drive the largest financial investment in girls annually in the U.S. And I'm not going to question that because these cookies do numbers. Girl Scout cookies do about$800 million in total sales each year. that's more than oreos and it tops chips ahoy and milano combined so what should you know about this year's girl scout cookies well there won't be a new one to try last year raspberry rally came in on the scene and was so popular it sold out everywhere and was being hawked on the secondary market for up to 80 a box the girl scouts apparently didn't want to deal with that again speaking of prices inflation is still a thing so boxes are getting just their second price hike in 12 years.

25:06Depending on where you live, they'll range from$5 to$7. But honestly, it's the best $7 you ever spent. It really is. The sheer size of the Girl Scout Industrial Complex is astounding, but what was very interesting to me is that there's only two registered bakers of Girl Scout cookies in the US. There's ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers. And this is actually why sometimes near-identical cookies have different names. So some people know those chocolate-striped coconut caramel cookies as Samoas, while other people know them as Caramel Delights. So that's why sometimes you see different boxes with different names.

25:41Also, they make the cookies differently. So if you've ever had one box of Thin Mints that just really hit the spot and one that you thought you didn't like as much, they do have slight differences in the recipes. So that's some of the nuances going on behind the scene of the Girl Scout Industrial Complex. Okay, we have to wrap it up there. Toby, what is our swing thought for the day? Our swing thought is a quote from the author Mel Robbins. Quote, you call it eating five boxes of Girl Scout cookies alone. I call it supporting young female entrepreneurs. Now, I know you may be laughing, but there's some deeper truth there.

26:13The perspective you take when evaluating an action can be just as powerful as the action itself. That's a lovely thought, Toby. Let us know what you thought about any of the topics we discussed at our email, morningbrewdailyatmorningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Veles and Raymond Liu are associate producers. Yuchenua Ogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and makeup has left us for Bane. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. And our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.