The Race to the Moon is Back On & Why SF is Slowing It's Roll on Robotaxis

0:00What should you invest in? And how often? Making investing decisions is easier with Fidelity. With their step-by-step experience, you can find investments based on your goals and comfort level. And if you'd like, you can decide how much and how often to invest with recurring investments that happen automatically. Ready to make your next investing decision? Head to fidelity.com slash trading. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, the space race is so back as several countries try to land on the south pole of the moon.

0:39And Lionel Messi has only been at Inter Miami for one month, but he may have already changed MLS forever. Then the robo-taxi revolution in San Francisco is off to a rocky start after Cruz and Waymo have been involved in a series of embarrassing accidents. Plus, we're going to talk about the biggest sushi seller in America, and it's not who you think. It's Monday, August 21st. Let's ride.

1:08All right, Neil, I want to start the show off today by wishing you a big happy birthday. And to celebrate, I will be singing you a full volume rendition of Happy Birthday. Just kidding. Oh, thank God. Seriously, though, at the risk of getting all emotional early on Monday, I just want to say that the 30 minutes we spend in the studio recording Morning Brew Daily is the best 30 minutes of my day. Whenever the early morning wake-up gets tough or the late night show prep drags on, I remember that you're doing it alongside me and it makes it all the easier. So Morning Brew Daily listeners, show Neil some love in the YouTube comments, in the Apple reviews, or just send us an email because he deserves it.

1:48Happy birthday, Neil. Thanks, Toby. Yeah, I can't wait for the Apple reviews. Five stars because Neil's birthday. No, no, I'm 32. This is crazy. 31, I would say the best part of it, definitely was launching this podcast. Super fun. I had really no expectations about what would happen because we had never done this before. I know. But it's been such a blast and I'm excited for what 32 brings. Yeah. A couple more birthdays in the studio together, hopefully. Yeah. When's yours? February. I'm a Pisces. You're a Leo guy. I am a Leo. Shout out to all the Leos. All right. We're going to begin our show 240 ,000 miles away from earth on the south pole of the moon, because despite being a place that hasn't experienced sunlight in billions of years, it might just be the hottest destination in the solar system.

2:35In the span of a few days, both Russia and India tried to land spacecraft on Moon's south pole, which no one has done before in history. So far, it is not going well. Russia's spacecraft crashed into the surface while attempting a landing yesterday, which is a major embarrassment given that Russia hasn't launched a Moon mission in 47 years. But India could save the day. Its spacecraft is in the lunar neighborhood and will attempt a landing on Wednesday. If successful, it'd be a huge achievement for India, considering it spends just$1.5 billion on its space program compared to NASA's$25 billion budget.

3:10Money with Katie would be so proud. The big picture here is that we're in a new space race to the moon that involves not just India and Russia, but also the U.S., of course, and China, Japan, Israel, and the Gulf states. And compared to the space race during the Cold War, the goal this time around is not just to hit a six iron on the moon, but to establish permanent human colonies there, exploit its natural resources to make money, and use it to launch missions to Mars. Yeah, and this is not your mother's space race because landing on the South Pole is way harder than where Neil Armstrong, whoa, I literally just said Neil Fryman.

3:45One day. And Buzz Aldrin landed because the South Pole is, one, it hasn't seen sunlight. It's very dark. It is absolutely pockmarked with craters, and it's just very, very difficult to find a flat place to land. So even though it is like an embarrassment that Russia's spacecraft crashed on the way there, it's not the easiest thing in the world. So people are cutting it a little bit of slack. Yeah. So that is it. No one has ever done it before. But what I want to talk about with this new space race is a lot of it has been offloaded to private companies. Before it was, you know, NASA doing everything and all these space agencies around the world doing a lot of stuff.

4:23But now they are kind of privatizing the industry a little bit, saying, like, maybe we couldn't do all of this ourselves. Let's get, you know, private companies to step up, do a lot of the R &D because there's so much CapEx, capital expenditure that's needed to build rockets. So obviously the leader in the space here is SpaceX, which won a contract for the lunar lander for NASA's Artemis missions, which are going to the moon. I think they're going to try by 2025. So that's just one example where a private company has stepped in and saying, look, we can probably do this a little bit better than you, government agency.

4:57So that's the Starship thing that blew up, that we all saw blew up in the spring. A rapid, unscheduled assembly, which is funny, too, because the Russian space agency said that their spacecraft spun into an uncontrolled orbit and ceased to exist. That was their language. But also one of the reasons why we're trying to land on the South Pole is because a lot of tests and a lot of sensors have indicated that there is water there. But when I hear about water on a foreign or on the moon, I always thought it was for drinking and supporting human activities. But one of the main resources that you need to make rocket fuel is water.

5:34And if we want to use the moon as kind of this jumping off base into deeper space exploration, we need to make rocket fuel on the moon. So that's one of the big reasons why we're interested in the South Pole is because there's water there to make rocket fuel. One of the biggest areas of the space industry that's going to see a lot of growth is this thing called in situ resource utilization, which I love that word. That's basically we use resources on the moon to make stuff rather than continuously ship stuff from Earth to the moon. Because every extra pound on a rocket adds fuel costs, adds all of these things that you need to take into account.

6:12So we need to go to the moon and figure out what is there, all the resources that are there, moon dust, water, anything that we can find there and turn that into usable stuff. And companies are going to come in and make a lot of money on this. One example is Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin won a$35 million contract from NASA to do something, you know, to make something usable from moon dust, which is called regolith, that blankets the entire moon. So they, you know, they're getting millions of dollars to see whether they can make anything useful from regolith. And I think one of them would be making solar cells because another thing you need, we just have to recreate civilization on the moon.

6:47So we're going to need everything that we have here, there, cars, communications infrastructure, power plants, podcast studios, all the important things. Yeah, the moon economy is something to keep an eye on. I'm really excited to see how that kind of takes off in the next century. All right, Neil, let's move on to our next story where Meta's feud with the Canadian government is growing more serious. So Canada recently passed a law that requires internet platforms like Facebook or Google to pay news publishers for linking to their articles. In response, Meta said, okay, we don't actually need your news articles, so we'll actually just block all links from Canadian outlets for Facebook and Instagram users living in Canada.

7:29Now, that decision has become even more controversial as Canadian authorities try to share valuable information about the wildfires currently raging in Western and Northern Canada. You have evacuation orders getting posted on social media. But since news links are blocked, the velocity of that information has been severely restricted, with some people resulting to just posting screenshots of articles in order to get around the ban. So, Neil, what do we think about this ongoing tussle between Canada and big tech companies? Yeah, it seems like a pretty big deal for the people in Canada that are dealing with the wildfires right now.

8:03They live in a lot of remote communities in rural areas where a lot of times their only source of news is Facebook. So this has been really bad for them to not have news information for things like evacuation notices and emergency responses. So it seems like a pretty debilitating thing to not have that information source. But this is a much bigger issue that is kind of playing out all over the world where governments are cracking down on Google and Meta saying that they need to start paying publishers for all of the news that they share on their platforms. Yeah, I've definitely been seeing kind of two different takes on this.

8:42One is that the Canadian government is just behind the times and they're trying to institute this law that will just never work because companies like Google and Meta just say it would make their business models unsustainable. And then also they're saying that the subscription revenue that they bring in for news platforms by giving them the distribution that they do makes up for the fact that they aren't paying them for the links. And then also it's just fundamentally the internet has never worked this way where you have to pay to access links on aggregators or platforms itself. So people are just calling it a misunderstanding of the internet.

9:18But then also on the other side, you have people saying big tech can clearly afford it. Like they bring in billions of dollars, support journalism, don't be like predatory and off the backs of journalists. And then also the impact of a news ban in a situation like this is extremely dangerous and restricting the flow of information when it's a matter of life and death could is like a very big deal. I've seen both sides of the argument. Australia did this in 2021. They were kind of the first government to say, you have to ban, you have to start paying publishers. Meta and Google kind of acceded to that request.

9:54So Canada's law is very much modeled on Australia's law. But this time around Meta and Google seem like they're not bluffing when they when they're saying we're just not gonna You know allow news on our platform their argument is that you know the news organizations need us to distribute their content and get traffic and Why would we pay for that essentially and I think about morning brew honestly because we are a news aggregator And obviously not even close to the size of Meta and Google and I get requests a lot of times from other publishers saying can you put our link in your newsletter? That makes our product better and it also drives traffic to their websites that they want to get.

10:38So it's kind of this mutually beneficial scenario. But either way, Meta is moving away from news. Facebook is moving away from news. When they launched Threads, which is the Twitter competitor, they made a point to saying news is not going to be an integral part of this. We don't want to do news. It's not a great business. Right. They just don't make that much money from it either because advertising revenue doesn't do that well next to news content in the grand scheme of things. So, yeah, it is definitely one of these things where we're talking about it because of these wildfires currently happening.

11:09But it's definitely going to be a broader conversation because even the U.S. has looked into potentially carving out something that allows publishers to band together in order to kind of withstand the might of big tech. So it will be interesting to see if other countries fall in line or if they see what happened in Canada. There will be global implications. The big picture here is that, you know, newspaper ad revenue has plummeted while Facebook and Google have become this duopoly of the digital ad market. And so this power dynamic could not be even more stark. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to our next story, Neil, where San Francisco is putting self-driving robo taxis in timeout following a series of accidents.

11:51So Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of GM, has been ordered to reduce its robo-taxi fleet by 50 % in the city at the behest of the California DMV. It's a big setback for Cruise after the city had allowed Cruise to boost its capacity and offer 24-7 commercial rides earlier this month. But when you hear about some of these accidents, it makes sense that they are throttling. Should we play the Curb Your Enthusiasm music? Yes, a little bit. So 10 driverless cars came to a stop unexpectedly at an intersection by a concert after the cell network got overwhelmed, disrupting communications with the cars.

12:25Another cruise car drove through a construction site and got caught in wet concrete. And the most serious one was when a person was injured after a cruise car failed to yield to an oncoming fire truck. So, Neil, the driverless car revolution in SF is off to a rocky start, to say the least. I would say, imagine that you were just in a city where half of the drivers or a good chunk of the drivers were student drivers. And you're right. This is exactly what's happening. You're you're driving along and you see that, you know, that little car with the thing on top that says student driver and they're everywhere.

13:00And I can imagine that can be very frustrating because they're not as good drivers as you and they slow down. They make mistakes. But, you know, it's in the service of eventually them getting better. And I think that's what we have to look at here because these cars need time and miles to learn the streets to their technology needs to just accrue time and distance to get better. And, you know, I it's easy for me to say here in New York City, like to the people of San Francisco, like be patient, be patient. Right. But I think that's what a lot of the companies are saying. It's like we to get we want to get better.

13:34We think we can get better and we just need a little a little more time and a little patience. Meanwhile, the people of San Francisco are like, look, we've been guinea pigs to all sorts of VC backed tech companies over the past few decades. This is just another one. We're tired of being guinea pigs in these experiments. It's time to find another place to do your self-driving test. Yeah, I mean, I do. Cruise always comes whenever some bad press happens to self-driving cars. They come with facts about normal drivers because in their press release in reaction to this reduction to 50%, they said over 100 people lose their lives every day on American roadways and countless others are badly injured.

14:15Because, again, obviously there's going to be a microscope on self-driving cars. But in the grand scheme of things, there's so many more. Humans suck. Humans are really bad at driving, so they can always fall back on that data. And so even though every single time a driverless car messes up, there is a wealth of data support that potentially, if we hit a critical mass of autonomous vehicles, it would be safer. But they're rightly under scrutiny. I thought the fire truck crash was pretty interesting about the actual details of what happened because the cruise car had a green light. And what happened was the fire truck put on its siren and came through the red light.

14:52And the reason the autonomous car did not pick it up, it was because the fire truck had to move into the other lane. And so that happens. And as a human driver, you probably wouldn't notice or care whether, you know, if it swerved to go to the lane because you'd hear it and you just stop anyway. But the self-driving car didn't pick it up. So that's just another wrinkle that it has to learn. I know. Once you start thinking about every nuance of every situation, you do kind of think, how would an autonomous vehicle ever pick up on these things? but they kind of have to because that's just realities of the roadways.

15:24I would put autonomous cars in Boston. That is a chaotic driving city. I think they learn a lot there. Apparently the worst city for driving or the hardest city to master is Pittsburgh, actually. And a lot of the roads are sometimes like the lines are drawn clearly. So Pittsburgh is like the battleground for proving that you can actually withstand. I think there are a lot of self-driving. There's like a self-driving car ecosystem. Somewhat Uber did their self-driving car experiment, which I think they folded. That was in Pittsburgh. It's the big leagues, yeah. All right, Neil, before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break.

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16:46Bundling, just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. It's Monday, so let's head to our winners of the weekend, the segment where Toby and I picked two people who had weekends they could brag about on LinkedIn. It's my birthday, so I get to go first, obviously. And my winner is Lionel Messi. I mean, the guy had astronomical expectations when he announced he was joining Inter Miami and MLS, and somehow he's exceeded them.

17:24On Saturday, Messi scored his 10th goal in seven games and helped his team, which used to suck, by the way, win the League's Cup in penalties. With his 44th trophy, Messi became the most decorated soccer player ever. But while Messi is the winner, everyone who is in his orbit is benefiting. Apple, subscriptions to MLS season pass on Apple TV Plus have more than doubled since Messi joined the team. Adidas, Messi's now iconic pink Inter-Miami jersey was the top seller across all sports for Fanatics last month. Ticket prices are going berserk. It's like the Eras Tour out there. Tickets on resale sites for Messi's games have jumped more than 1 ,700%.

18:02There was this game in Philly against the Union and Inter-Miami. I mean, if Messi wasn't there, I feel like this would have been a very sparse crowd. But tickets were going for$241 minimum, and some field-level seats were going for over$16 ,000. And then, you love this stat, InterMiami on social media is going berserk with 14 million followers. They have more Instagram followers than any team in the NFL, NHL, or MLB. It's just sped up the timeline of so many different facets of MLS. The Apple subscription to Apple TV Plus doubling is truly absurd. That would have, I mean, without Messi, that takes two, three more years.

18:42And it happened in two months with Messi here. So that's crazy. And then, yeah, the Instagram thing, I think it just goes to show the power of the international audience and the international soccer audience. Because, I mean, the fact that InterMiami is now the most followed professional sports team in America. They were nothing. They were nothing. They had less than a million Instagram followers, and now they have 14 million. I will say, Toby did not believe this stat. So he checks before this morning we went on the we went on the show. He checks Baltimore Ravens on Instagram and it has 1.7 million followers.

19:15The Baltimore Ravens have 1.7 million. And Messi's inter-Miami team, which used to be a no-name, has 14 million. Maybe my whole feed on social media everywhere is just Messi all the time, especially when he scores a goal, which seems to be every day. So maybe maybe that I was like incepted and that's why I picked Messi. But he's really taken over social media. I think the pink jersey has a lot to do with it I love it it's a great jersey my thing is it looks like he's having so much fun which makes me proud to be like an MLS fan and like I'm glad that Messi's enjoying himself in our league it's like I wanted to be a good host so I'm glad he's enjoying himself okay Neil my winner of the weekend is Ugandan distance runners so I'm probably a little more plugged into the distance running scene than the average Joe so I've been watching the World Track and Field Championships in Budapest that started over the weekend.

20:06And one race I was especially interested in was the men's 10 ,000 meters because Joshua Cheptegei from Uganda was going for a three-peat. And boy, did he deliver, outkicking Salomon Borrega from Ethiopia, the man who beat him in the Tokyo Olympics down the final stretch to snag gold. It cemented Uganda as a major player in the distance running world, which has historically been dominated by its larger neighbor, Kenya. Uganda and Kenya are neighbors and have the same conditions that make Kenya successful, like high altitudes and a predisposition for having thin lower legs and high length to torse ratio that also make Uganda a major international force.

20:46But Neil, all this to say that Joshua Cheptegei is a boss and a name that is quickly rising through the ranks of the goat discussion. Well, I'm never forgetting the words Josh Cheptegei, because that is the coolest name I've ever heard. But it is cool how one person from one country can kind of have these ripple effects for creating an ecosystem. So he, I think, has established a running school and has created a foundation. And so like one person, you look up to them as a role model and then all of, they're just like the coaching tree as we've seen, or the, you know, the long distance running tree where everyone looks up to this person and like, I could be like him.

21:22And then all of a sudden you create like an ecosystem for success. Right, you're totally right. And the fact that if one person sees success, then it filters down to the younger generations and you need to establish kind of these home training bases. By the way, these training bases that popular runners set up are kind of something I aspire to. It's almost a monastic life where it's very simple living. You wake up, you live with the same people, you run two, sometimes three times a day, and you just subsist off of very little and you get so much from it. So I do just love, I watch training videos of these Ugandan and these Kenyan training camps.

21:59And it's just, it's a different way of life. And you think maybe, maybe that is the way of life. I mean, they're up in the mountains at like 9 ,000 feet. I know. And they're just crushing it. So I love Chip the guy. Okay, Neil, let's move on to our next story where I want you to think about sushi. I'm sure your first thought might be of Japan and beautiful nigiri that is fresh as it is delectable. I'm not sure your first thought would be of Kroger, but sushi and Kroger go together like white on rice. The nation's largest grocery store operator is also quietly the biggest seller of sushi in the U.S.

22:33It began selling sushi in the 90s, but it wasn't until it was reviewing data from an outside research group in 2020 that Kroger realized it was the nation's biggest seller. There are a lot of factors that went into Kroger nabbing this title. Namely, it has over 2 ,700 stores. but it's also been really focused on getting its quality up and serving regional specific sushi, which has helped people take it seriously as a purveyor of fresh fish. So Neil, I know you're a bodega sushi guy, but are you a grocery sushi guy? I love grocery store sushi. I've been getting it for years. I think it's solid.

23:07It's very good. I'm on. I don't know about very good, but it just seems like you don't need to go to a restaurant to get fine sushi. And sometimes when you get takeout from a sushi place, it's not, you know, it's not that good. So this stat didn't surprise me. It kind of surprised me when I first read it in an article in the Wall Street Journal. But then when I thought about it, you go to the deli counter. I mean, a lot of times that whole bin there is filled with sushi. And it seems like grocery stores are really leaning in across the board. I mean, sushi sales at U.S. retail outlets are up 70 percent this year alone.

23:40So this is a huge growing category. I think people are getting over the stigma of buying sushi that comes in those little, you know, the classic plastic containers. So I've been on this train for a while. So, you know, everyone is just catching up with me. Right. I thought the regional specificness of these, of the sushi things that they offer was really interesting because Ralph's, for instance, which is a chain that's popular in Southern California, which is owned by Kroger, they sell rolls topped with sweet mango sauce and tajin seasoning. So it's definitely adds some regional flair to it. And then another thing I thought was super interesting was Kroger execs have been looking at TikTok trends.

24:17And one of the main trends that's been going around is this thing called a sushi bake, which is essentially a casserole made using the ingredients from a California roll. And so they see that trending on TikTok and start thinking, how can we loop that into the fairs that we sell in Kroger? So I think just staying on top of trends and being kind of agile in the TikTok world, being a part of Kroger's sushi strategy. It was just, that's a wild sentence to be uttering. They say, when you think of sushi, we want you to think of Kroger. So they probably have hundreds of people working on their sushi strategy.