What Happens If the Government Shuts Down? & Amazon's AI Author Crackdown

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1:03On brand with Jimmy Fallon, series premiere tonight on NBC. Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, the government is barreling toward a shutdown because the auto workers strike and the writers strike apparently is not enough drama. Then have you or a loved one accidentally bought a virtual banana suit in the video game Fortnite, well, you may be eligible for a cash refund. We'll tell you more in just a bit. It's Thursday, September 21st. Let's drive.

1:37Okay, two quick updates before we get into the meat of our show. I will call it an amuse-bouche of news. As expected, the Fed did not raise interest rates yesterday, but there was a major takeaway, Jerome Powell signaled that rates could stay at an elevated level for longer than we anticipated. In fact, it might just be the new normal in today's economy that rates have to be consistently higher to keep down inflation. So anyone who locked in a mortgage during COVID, you might literally have gotten the deal of the century. Meanwhile, some good news on the Hollywood strike front. Writers and studios sat down yesterday for a productive meeting and are reportedly close to an agreement to end the strike.

2:16They could finalize a deal later today, but if that doesn't happen, then the strike would likely continue through the end of the year. I'm optimistic, though. I'm feeling good about this today. Neil, your spidey senses were tingling this morning, but I do think it's funny that we're celebrating the fact that there's just a meeting at all, or there could be some progress made, but hey, that's where we're at. Anything it takes, though, to get some new shows in the pipeline, right? So I don't know if people have heard, but the government is probably going to shut down next week. The fiscal year ends on September 30th, and House Republicans are fighting so much among themselves that they can't agree on a spending bill that would fund the government into the next fiscal year.

2:54House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is trying to find a compromise between the extreme conservative faction of his party and the moderates, but the lawmakers far to the right want funding cuts that aren't tenable to the Republican centrists, let alone Democrats. to keep the government funded, the GOP-led House, the Democrat-led Senate, and President Biden would all need to agree on a spending bill. And that doesn't look like it's going to happen in the next nine days. So what does a government shutdown mean? Well, basically, it means that the federal government can't spend any money. So hundreds of thousands of federal workers won't get a paycheck.

3:28Government facilities like national parks will be closed and certain government programs like food stamps could get halted. The ultimate economic impact will be determined by how long a shutdown last, but a bunch of workers not getting paychecks is certainly not good and will definitely hit U.S. economic growth. Yeah, the ripple effects from a government shutdown sometimes are so staggering when you just go down the list. I mean, you mentioned some of them, but you have, yeah, the national parks, clinical trials for new medications could go on pause. There could be longer lines at airports because although one of the aspects of government shutdown is that employees who work is deemed essential will oftentimes work without a paycheck for a while.

4:08They do eventually get reimbursed, but those include air traffic controllers and the TSA. But oftentimes during an extended government shutdown, workers might just leave their jobs because there's nothing that will get you scrolling LinkedIn more than just doing your job without getting a paycheck. So yeah, some of the forecasts for this, some of the ripple effects could be if you're traveling, there just might not be as many TSA workers, so there could be longer lines at airports. And air traffic controllers. And that's kind of what happened during the last shutdown, which was super long. People remember back in 2019, there was a 35-day shutdown.

4:44And one of the reasons that that came to an end was all these air traffic controllers, like you just mentioned, were a little fed up. And they're like, oh, we're not going to come into work. It's been over a month, and we haven't been getting any paychecks. And that put pressure on Congress to finally come to an agreement. I just want to quickly go over what the difference between a government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis is, because back in May, we had this major debt ceiling crisis where the government also couldn't agree to something. So we should just go over what that is. A debt ceiling crisis is considered way worse than a government shutdown because that is when the U.S.

5:18is not able to pay its interest payments to its bondholders. That affects global markets. That would ruin that would like harm our credit rating and our credit trustworthiness in the global financial system. That's that's really bad. The government shutdown is also bad, but it's not even close to, you know, the catastrophic effects of us defaulting. This just means that the government can't spend any money that because Congress needs to approve us to spend money. Yeah. And one big thing, too, is during a government shutdown, Social Security recipients will continue to receive their payments. And then also things like the U.S.

5:54Postal Service would continue operations. But like if the U.S. defaulted on its deaths, then we could not make Social Security payments or Medicare or other government funded initiatives. So there is even though they both sound kind of gloomy, technically, yeah, you're right. The government shutdown is the preferable option of the two. And this is the problem because McCarthy and Biden agreed to, you know, the basic premise of a spending bill back when they did the debt ceiling agreements. And so now that they're negotiating again here, the extreme Republicans like want to go against what they agreed to.

6:29And Biden and the top GOP brass say, we agreed to something, you know, this is, we have to go through with this. Sorry, folks. Yeah. The can was kicked down the road, but now we have arrived at the can again and something needs to be done about it. All right, Neil, our next story is actually a follow-up on an FTC case from December of last year. For those of you not plugged into the Federal Trade Commission's various spats, the one I'm referring to is between the FTC and Fortnite maker Epic Games. The two settled for a total of$520 million over allegations Fortnite was engaged in some shady, and I quote, design tricks known as dark patterns to dupe millions of players into making unintentional purchases.

7:10In particular, the FTC slapped Epic Games with a$275 million fine for violating the Children's Online Privacy Act, which is a law that seeks to protect children under 13 when it comes to marketing tactics and privacy. But the other part of this fine is the FTC also instructed Fortnite to pay$245 million in refunds for tricking users into making unwanted charges. Here are some of the reasons that could make you eligible to apply for a refund. If you were charged for in-game items you didn't want, if your children made charges to your credit card without your knowledge, or if your Epic Games account was locked after you reported unwanted charges.

7:51So, Neil, right now, 37 million Fortnite players are being notified. They can apply to claim a portion of that$245 million legal settlement. Yeah, I am not one of them. I was going to ask, are you one of them? I was going to check my email. I've watched you play Fortnite. I've watched other people play Fortnite. I have not played Fortnite myself. I don't have a child who's played Fortnite. So unfortunately, I won't be eligible to this. But when you dig into what these dark patterns were, according to the FTC, it does seem extremely shady. You would get charged if you were a Fortnite user from a certain period of time.

8:25You would get charged for attempting to remove the game from sleep mode by pressing a button to preview an item. And while the game was loading, they would charge you for these things. And then when you would notify Epic Games, which makes Fortnite, of these unauthorized charges, you would get locked out of your account. And then when you would ask to get into your account, they would say, don't ever contact us to unlock your account or we'll forbid you from playing this game ever. Yeah. I mean, yeah. The actual language FTC used was that young players could buy in-game items by simply pressing buttons.

8:57So it is that classic thing where you hand your iPad to your kid and suddenly you have like$500 of Candy Crush charges later. But yeah, these dark patterns is something that you see all over the Internet. I mean, the official definition of a dark pattern, which was coined back in 2010, is a manipulative or deceptive design decision, which the end result is to get users to take some sort of action that they might not have taken on their own free will. And some other examples of this, we've all had this experience where you sign up for a free trial for something, and then suddenly the month is up, and it's impossible to cancel the trial, and you started paying.

9:34And then also, I don't know if you've seen those news stories that are actually ads, but they look like news stories at the bottom of some of the publications across the internet. So honestly, this dark pattern thing is the FTC knows it's going on, but it's very, very hard to kind of enforce this at scale. And so it does look like maybe they picked Fortnite and made an example of them because this is a very, very large fine. It is the largest refund amount in any gaming case ever. Right. So it does look like FTC looked at Fortnite and said, we're going to make an example of you. And yeah, I don't think I've gotten the email because I never bought anything in Fortnite.

10:12You were a big player. I was a big player. I was so bad. I was so bad that I didn't feel justified to even spend the$5 on a banana suit skin. So yeah, do not quote me on being a good Fortnite player. I was looking into how Fortnite is doing because it's coming up on its sixth birthday on September 26th. 26th? Yeah, in five days. It started September 26th, 2017. And at its peak during August 2020, which was peak COVID, it had around 292 million monthly active players. Still, according to third-party sources, it has 231 million monthly active players. So it's kind of sticking around on birthday number six.

10:51I'm not one of them anymore, but hey, I might dust off the old sticks. All right, Neil, let's move on. One of the most well-worded fights against AI is heating up. More authors have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, including the likes of John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jody Picoult. They've joined others in pursuing legal action against the AI company for using their work to train its large language models. According to the suit, OpenAI copied plaintiffs' work wholesale without permission or consideration, then fed those copyrighted materials into its training models. One of the main aspects of this case comes down to the fact that OpenAI chose to train its chat CPT model on text that authors directly derive their livelihoods off of rather than pay a licensing fee or use text in the public domain.

11:41So, Neil, these types of lawsuits have been brewing ever since AI rose to prominence this year. And just this June, another group, including comedian Sarah Silverman, sued Meta and OpenAI over similar copyright complaints. And also, just yesterday, Amazon, the biggest bookseller in the world, limited publishing of multiple books a day to crack down on AI-generated text. So, Neil, this world of publishing and AI is getting ever murkier and more legally complicated by the minute, it seems. Just to zoom in on that Amazon thing, they limited the amount of books you can self-publish a day to three.

12:14Crazy. So if you're thinking of publishing more than three books a day, know that you can't. Toby, I know you've just been churning out like 10 to 15 chat GPT books, guides to the world. So you might have to slow your roll and just do three a day. I couldn't believe it. I thought I misread the stat. I was like, three a day? I thought it would be like three a month or something like that. That just shows how easy it is to spam the internet with AI-generated books that are quite terrible and can actually be harmful because there has been a rise in mushroom guides. and the mushroom, what is it? Mycology, the New York Mycology Organization warned against people reading these mushroom guides that were produced by AI because they said you should taste a mushroom to identify it.

12:58And they were like, this is a matter of life and death. You should absolutely not put your tongue on a mushroom because that just is a bad idea. If you're trying to identify it, there are other markers to do it. But they actually felt compelled to put out this warning because there was such a large amount of AI generated mushroom guide foraging books. And it's interesting too, because it's not just the text generation that AI can handle. It can also generate a fake author's photo. And then it can also generate fake reviews too. So there's this whole AI ecosystem that's developing around these Amazon publishing, because one, it's just so easy to publish a book on Amazon.

13:33So easy to crank out an AI generated text. So easy to set up a fake author profile. And then it's also easy to just flood it with positive reviews. So all of a sudden, And like Amazon is really having to come to terms with the fact that all our books on our site might be AI generated in the coming years. You're telling me that a review is fake? I don't know if that's an AI problem, to be honest. But it is pretty interesting, quickly going back to the lawsuit, is that they don't – OpenAI doesn't disclose what they train their data on. So there's no way to exactly prove that they copied these – they fed these books in.

14:06but they these authors said that they asked chat gpt about their books and they gave them such detailed responses that they like the only way that chat gpt could know this is if it was fed the entire book not just the wikipedia article because it was such on a granular level so they said even though open ai doesn't disclose the materials that it trains on there's no way it did not hoover up the entire book yeah i mean i put myself in the author's shoes you spend your whole life working to get this hit book. And then you enter the age of AI and it can write a similar book to yours in less than an hour, less than 10 minutes.

14:40So I definitely can see why you're feeling like this existential and that's why they're pressing legal action because it is an existential threat. All right, Neil, before we jump into the next story, we're going to take a quick break.

15:19We'll see you next week. at whatsapp.com.

15:51October 29th, 2025. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will make you harder, better, faster, and also stronger. The first number I take personally as a proud connoisseur of American cheese, but Kraft recalled almost 84 ,000 cases of its Kraft singles cheese slices after customers reported them as a choking hazard. Those complaints alleged that the plastic film that keeps the cheese oh so fresh kept sticking to it even after they removed the wrapper which caused at least six customers to choke or gag in response craft said the sticking plastic was the result of a manufacturing error and said it has fixed the wrapping machine that was the source of the problem toby if anything ever happens to craft singles i don't know what i'd do the funny part was i was seeing jokes all over the internet yesterday saying wait you're supposed to remove the plastic because everyone knows how similar the two textures are.

16:47So I've definitely eaten some plastic in my day. I mean, it's not so different than the actual Kraft single themselves because they are not technically cheese. They are less than 51 % real cheese. So they have to call it. If you look at the package, it's cheese product. Gosh, I can't believe we put that on our body. It's great on a burger though. Oh my God. The melting point is low and it melts so perfectly. So yes, I'm glad they're getting this cleaned up and you know obviously this is a serious situation that they had to resolve okay for the second number earlier this week soccer superstar cristiano ronaldo made his first visit to iran with his saudi arabian team al nasir and it was like if taylor swift showed up to the morning brew office hundreds of fans swarmed the hotel and chased after the team bus to get a glimpse of their hero who they've been only able to watch on tv and here's where the number comes in the The driver of the team's bus reportedly gained 150 ,000 followers on Instagram in just a few hours.

17:48That's how crazy these fans are about Ronaldo. Beyond that, though, there are really interesting and important geopolitical implications to this game between an Iranian team and a Saudi team. Iran and Saudi Arabia have a lot of problems with each other, but they restored diplomatic relations this March after a seven-year dispute, paving the way for this historic soccer game. Ronaldo, give him the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, we know Ronaldo just has a massive Instagram presence. $606 million, most followed person on Instagram. So it is crazy to see just, one, his geopolitical influence now, but then two, it's just social media clout too.

18:26We're in the wrong line of business, Neil. I might just go get my commercial driver's license and start driving buses for famous soccer players. Follow us on Instagram. Don't follow him. 150 ,000 in hours. That's crazy. Okay, let's go to the final number. Several weeks ago, we discussed how many ways you can arrange a 52-card deck. The number came out to 8 times 10 to the 67th power. Here's a similar question. How many ways can you customize a Starbucks latte? Now we know the answer to that, thanks to the math nerds at Bloomberg. when you factor in all of the possible combos, including the syrups, the sweeteners, the types of milk, the foams, the whipped cream, the drizzle, the toppings, and more, there are 383 billion possible ways you can make a Starbucks latte.

19:10And that is becoming a problem. Starbucks baristas are overwhelmed by people ordering customized drinks, and it's slowing down the line. For more than a third of Starbucks customers, the time it takes from placing an order to it being served exceeds five minutes. And if the company just serves five more orders a day in each of its stores, it'd add$900 million in revenue. To combat the customized drink problem, Starbucks is embarking on what it calls the biggest overhaul in its history, spending billions of dollars on technological improvements to speed up the line. Toby, the people want to know.

19:44Caramel crunch topping, cookie crumble topping, pumpkin spice topping, or cinnamon dolce sprinkles? I'm a pumpkin spice guy. Tis the season. I got one yesterday, as people who follow our Instagram know. So I'm a PSL guy. Like, come on. It signals fall. So everyone was wondering if that's my answer. And you were at Starbucks yesterday, right? And how was the line? It was crazy. It was so crowded. I mean, I can't believe that they're faster, though, because they are moving in there. I mean, during peak hours. But I guess five more customers a day translates to so much revenue. Of course, you're going to try to improve at the margins.

20:17All right, we have to move on. A new celebrity health ad just dropped. And no, it's not a sensory deprivation tank or bee sting therapy. The hot medical procedure among elites in Silicon Valley in Los Angeles is a full body MRI that scans your body for early signs of cancer, liver disease, aneurysms, and even multiple sclerosis. The idea is that these machines can spot irregularities in your body so you can take early action. The leading company providing preventative MRI scans is Prenuvo, which offers an hour long body scan for twenty five hundred dollars. Kim Kardashian, who definitely did not pay for her scan, shared that she got a Prenuvo MRI to her 364 million Instagram followers, speaking of influencers, last month, claiming that it saved some of her friends' lives.

21:00The growing interest in these scans has divided the medical community. Many experts say that a standard cancer screening schedule would catch anything that a full-body MRI would find and that false positives could lead to anxiety and extra tests that just aren't necessary. Others say it's an important medical innovation that could help lots of people, not just the wealthy, detect cancers once costs go down. Either way, Pernubo is just one of many startups that is cashing in on the buzz around what's known as the quantified self, which promotes gathering tons of personalized data about your body to help extend your life.

21:31Yeah, I was looking into where did this trend come from? And there is a little bit of a this could be the result of a pandemic thing, because a survey data suggested that many Americans feel more health conscious now than before the COVID-19 pandemic. But also, I feel like there's a psychological aspect to this where most of these people who are getting these scans are wealthier, and they have this illusion of control over their lives, and so they want to control their health as well. And the randomness of a chronic disease is something that they want to get out ahead of. So it does feel like there are some psychological and also maybe COVID era trends that are pushing us towards these really, really in-depth physicals, basically, or self-body scans.

22:12I wouldn't want one necessarily. We were talking about this before the show. Would you want to know? But if you were offered one. I mean, maybe. Like it's no, you know, it doesn't hit your wallet at all. They're just like, hey, we want you to, like we are offering you to do this. Potentially. But I mean, a lot of the reasons that physicians push back against it is that there's a non-zero chance you'll get a false positive. And that could lead to even more expensive testing and to some psychological distress. Totally. Because if you identify something outside the range of normal, then when you're going to sleep at night, you're like, okay, is that bump really something or not?

22:46So I don't know. Until the tests truly do become more accurate at identifying correctly rather than identifying false positives, I'm going to pass on it. I think that's sensible. Thank you. I think that's the way I think about it too. Though if someone said, I'm going to scan your body for any irregularities, it's hard to pass that up. I wouldn't do it because an MRI would get claustrophobic as hell. That sounds scary to me. I could not do an hour. I would need to be sedated or something. That would stop me. But yes, I don't like being anxious about worrying about your health. That is like not a way to live.

23:20Gotcha. We'll sedate you, Neil. If that ever comes up, then I'll make sure we give you a nice little herbal bomb or something to put you at ease. All right, Neil, for our next story, I just want you to take a minute, pick up a paintbrush, and remember, there are no mistakes, just happy accidents. That was my best Bob Ross impression for anyone confused. But I'm trying it on for size because the legendary painter and educator is back in the news after one of his paintings has been listed at auction for a whopping$9.85 million. If it sells, it will be by far the most expensive painting from Ross's illustrious career.

23:58The painting depicts a very Ross-esque scene of a stone path meandering through trees near a quaint and quiet pond. And of course, it was painted in under 30 minutes during the 1983 premiere of his then-to-be-hit PBS show. I love this story because it is putting a price on the Ross resurgence we've seen in recent years. The youths love Bob Ross. He's all over TikTok. One Twitch stream of old Ross episodes back in 2015 attracted over 5.6 million viewers. And the official Bob Ross YouTube account has grown to 5.6 million subscribers. Neil, Bob Ross is timeless. And I kind of want to raise some money to try to snag this painting.

24:40I love the guy. I think if you have guests over and you have this picture and you're like, that's a Bob Ross. That was, I mean, the significance of this particular painting is that it was the first he ever drew on the show. If you say, hey, look, this is the first Bob Ross painting that he ever painted on the show, your social clout would be through the roof. They would tell all of their friends, like, you would be the coolest person on your block. So 9.8 million to me is a steal for this. I totally agree with that take because I don't think you'd get more clout from any other art. Even if you had a Picasso, like everyone's got a Picasso.

25:13How many people have a Ross in there? But I do want to get into some Bob Ross statistics because the man painted a lot of paintings. Ross himself said he painted over 30 ,000 paintings in his lifetime and he likely painted 1 ,143 alone for the filming of the show. And 538 did this analysis where they looked at exactly how many paintings he painted on air, and they found 381 for 403 episodes. So then you're probably wondering, where does that 1 ,000 number come from? Well, his standard process was to make three of the same paintings for each show, one as a template to copy, one on camera, and then a third after the show for use in instructional materials.