Will AI Actually Kill Us All? & It’s True–Online Returns Are Getting Harder

0:01Are you sucking wind from trying to keep up with AI and its impact? Take a breather and tune in to the Intelligence Shift, Morning Brew's new podcast with PwC. It bridges the gap between big picture AI concepts and what it actually means in practice. Host Dan Priest is joined by expert guests to discuss AI's role in sports, music, HR, and more. Listen to the Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcasts. Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, diesel prices have gotten so high, gas stations are running out of signage space. Then people are finally waking up to the fact that AI could wipe out humanity.

0:38It's Friday, September 11th. Let's ride.

0:48Today marks the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil that killed nearly 3 ,000 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, including 343 FDNY firemen. Memorials and tributes will be held across the country to remember the victims and stand together with their families. For many middle-aged and older Americans, we'll never forget 9-11. I was in the fifth grade and recall scared teachers huddling us all into a room where we watched live news coverage on a grainy television until our parents came to pick us up. But 25 years is a long time, roughly the span of an entire generation.

1:27At this point, tens of millions of Americans were born after 9-11 or don't remember it. They never looked up at the gleaming towers as he took the Staten Island ferry into Manhattan or experienced in real time the shock, chaos, and heroism when the buildings came down. But they've surely been told by their parents how life in America was never the same after that day. Yeah, I'm one of those people who was too young to remember. My entry point is a lot of secondary coverage in the years since. On YouTube, one creator put together this multi-view dashboard showing eight news channels coverage of the first 18 minutes of the attack.

2:01On X, there's this account called 2001 Live, where they pose as a reporter embedded in the year 2001 with no foreknowledge of what is coming. And yeah, speaking from experience, it can be chaotic and illuminating in equal measure, receiving 9-11 content 25 years later, filtered through the blender that is social media. So whether it is part of your memories or you're encountering it through more modern means, it's worth it to take a moment to stop, remember, and reflect. And now a word from our sponsor, Hotels.com. Hey, most hotels have beds, right? Yeah, that's like the whole point. Weird, the place I just stayed at, at a work trip, didn't have those.

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3:19That's hotels.com slash morning brew loyalty members 18 plus. It's not often that Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and Sheryl Crow all sound off on the same topic at the same time, but the looming AI apocalypse will bring people together in unexpected ways. This week has been dominated by the terrifying reality that AI progress could spell the end of humanity, a message that's been delivered by many of the people responsible for building it. In a thread that has racked up nearly 150 million views, former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon said that the systems being built by AI companies could cause human extinction.

3:58His post and the general sentiment was confirmed by other employees with one saying, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans and put the odds of that happening at greater than 10%. Ted Cruz chimed in on The View saying he read that whole tweet thread that the developer put out, adding it was highly concerning. Bernie Sanders echoed the sentiment saying American people overwhelmingly want to ban artificial superintelligence and pause the development of AI. Heck, even Sheryl Crow posted an Instagram story weighing in on Cox's post saying people should demand our leaders put aside their greed and prevent this from going forward.

4:34To sum up the general vibe, Axios wrote an article titled The AI Twilight Zone, where it noted the inherent contradictions that define the AI debate today. On the one hand, A lot of everyday people haven't really found a use case for AI beyond treating it like a more powerful Google. And yet here we are being told that it could end all of humanity. Then you have the people loudly warning of the imminent extinction of our species and yet continue to build it anyways. Meanwhile, you look at the market and how it's pricing in the end of days and stocks are hovering near all time highs powered by the AI trade.

5:09Neil, help me make sense of all of this. Is the end nigh? If the end is nigh, I'd like to know how it's going to happen. So my first question was, okay, there's a 10 % probability, according to this guy, that AI will kill us all within 10 years. How is AI going to kill us all exactly? Experts generally converge on two different ways this could happen. This is an interesting job for people to theorize about this. But number one is humans weaponizing extremely powerful AI. So think about maybe Oppenheimer 2.0. The second is that we lose control of AI and become super powerful. And ultimately, the goals that AI is trying to pursue are at odds with human civilization.

5:52So they have to wipe us out to pursue and accomplish this particular goal. A famous thought experiment is called the paperclip experiment. And it's basically when a super intelligent AI is instructed to maximize paperclip production. So their goal that they have to pursue is make the most paperclips as possible. And so what they do ultimately is turn every single piece of matter on Earth, including humans, into paperclips. Now, obviously, probably that's not going to happen. I don't want to live life as a paperclip. But that is just one way that AI misalignment with human civilization could lead to our demise.

6:29And there is a reason why researchers are putting their probability higher than 0%. It's because we've seen kind of breadcrumbs of both of these scenarios maybe coming to pass. The first scenario that you mentioned, kind of the Oppenheimer scenario, is where individuals get empowered to do mass harm by these very powerful tools. And Anthropic recently put out a risk report saying that they have come across people doing bioweapon related research on their platform. Now, they are not saying that that was literally what they were trying to do, wipe out all of humanity with a bioweapon. It could have just been researchers trying to understand pathogens more deeply.

7:08They didn't pass judgment on that, but they did say, hey, we have seen people kind of going down this rabbit hole and have had to stop them. And then on the other side, kind of the misalignment side, we've talked a lot about these hacks that have happened recently where agents are organizing, they're deceiving humans. That is the more scary path because it does show that these AIs are maybe going down a path that is misaligned with humanity. So, again, this is why the people closest to the conversation are saying, yeah, this is a real possibility that we could reach an apocalypse. Well, if you say that and I'm in Washington, D.C.

7:44and I'm someone with power, you know, am I going to do anything about this? There's really no federal regulation around AI, but that just maybe got a kick in the butt this week. You have a lot of senators, congressmen, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle saying, whoa, maybe we should start paying attention to this. We heard from Ted Cruz earlier. Bernie Sanders also made a comment saying we need to stop AI as well. It looks like there might be a bipartisan group of lawmakers introducing legislation next week to regulate AI in response to this backlash. We've seen a lot of backlash to data centers recently, and it's been very interesting to watch this evolve to a broader backlash against AI.

8:24Again, the ideas about how to regulate AI and prevent this doomsday scenario is it's unclear. Like everybody has different ideas about how you can do it. The companies themselves have different ideas. They are still pursuing super intelligent AI, but it might be up to them to say, look, guys, together, we might need a band together and and decide to slow down because these risks are becoming too real. I just want to finish, too, with what Wall Street's take on this is. It's kind of bullish, bizarrely. S &P analyst Naveen Samar was asked whether investors care about an AI apocalypse, and he literally just said, no, futures are up as of this morning.

9:00It is kind of a, again, twilight zone feeling situation. But the investor logic surrounding this is if AI isn't very powerful, that means there's a smaller economic opportunity. If it is very powerful, then that means there's a massive economic opportunity as well. So the more powerful and the scarier it seems actually that leads to better returns. Again, it feels very dystopian, very end of days kind of final late stage capitalism vibes. But that literally is some of the investor logic around this is that if it truly is, if we need AI to protect us against more powerful AI, that means the build outs getting even bigger.

9:40hence why stocks are going up moving on yesterday brought a slew of bad news for anyone who's thinking well i'll just wait to buy that when it's cheaper oil prices diesel and bond yields all soared as inflation appears primed to reignite let's start with oil which remains a lifeblood of the economy and whose price is reflected in pretty much every single physical item you buy international crude prices jumped six percent yesterday to 107 a barrel about 40 higher than before the war. Diesel also continued its rampage higher, hitting$6 a gallon for the first time ever. That's been driven by an uptick in attacks around the Middle East.

10:17And in an especially concerning development for oil supplies, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels captured a strategic port city that threatened shipping in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a crucial energy choke point. Fearing higher inflation that persists for a while, investors sold off bonds, sending the U.S. 10-year treasury yields to over 4.9%, its highest level since 2023. The 10-year yield has been called the world's most important interest rate, serving as a benchmark for borrowing costs across the global economy. When that goes up, anything you want to finance, a house, a car, a business investment, becomes more expensive.

10:51All these negative vibes have spilled over into equities, aka the stock market. While they're up this morning, stocks did fall for the fourth consecutive day yesterday as Wall Street frets that higher energy prices and higher bond yields could bring pain to the broader economy. Yeah, it looks like the oil shock is only going to get worse. In addition to Bob Elmendab coming under threat, there's also some unconfirmed reports as of now that the Houthis hit Saudi Arabia's east-west oil pipeline at several locations. That is the pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz and carries crude out to the Red Sea.

11:24if that does go down as maybe it looks like it has, that will really send a shock through the system because Saudi production, Saudi Arabia's oil production has fallen to its lowest level since 1990. And typically Saudi Arabia has acted as kind of this pressure valve for the world when it comes to oil production. They can bring spare production capacity online because they don't, they want to control supply and demand. So they're rarely running at full capacity. The fact that they are seeing their output fall to 1990s levels shows that there really isn't a pressure valve anymore. And then finally, the other thing that's happening is China is buying again.

12:02I remember we on the show a few months ago, we said, how come oil prices didn't go up as much given the supply shock that is tied to the Strait of Hormuz? And a lot of it was due to the fact that China wasn't really buying oil. They weren't constraining supply globally. They had a lot of reserves within their own country. That is now not the case anymore. They have become a resurgent buyer, which is tightening the global market even further. I am locked in on diesel prices because it is a proxy for the cost of moving everything in America, whether it's a train or a truck. Every single package, every grocery run that you take is powered by diesel.

12:41Diesel prices hit$6 per gallon this morning, the highest ever. They're 63 % higher than before the war. In California, which is the biggest agriculture state in the U.S., diesel prices are at$8 a gallon. And Gas Buddy found five stations in California that have hit their limit, hit their signage limit. They're selling diesel at their dispensers with the highest possible price,$9.999 a gallon. I don't know if they're going to actually sell it more, change to electronic signage, but it's fascinating. five. And it's probably going to be more because diesel prices are only going up. Crude goes into diesel.

13:20Diesel powers everything that you buy because it's just the cost of moving things in America. So when we're talking about inflation, diesel prices go into everything and make everything much more expensive. If you wake up, pull into a gas station and see quad nines, you just got to call it for the day. Go home, stay home, walk to work that day. Okay. Welcome to stock of the week, dog of the week, where Toby and I pick one stock that's growing like crabgrass and another that's withering like your houseplants. I won the pre-show coin toss, Tales Never Fails, so I get to go first. And my stock of the week is piecing out of work in the fall.

13:54Going on a trip in September, October, and even November is surging in popularity, creating a trend known as fallcations. A new study from the travel network Virtuoso found that fall bookings for luxury travel and experiences are up nearly 60 % compared to last year. In a separate summer travel survey by Deloitte, the share of major trips taking place after Labor Day increased to 20 % this year from 12 % four years ago. As Misty Bell's VP of Virtuoso put it, that shoulder season is no longer really a shoulder season. It's becoming a peak season unto itself. Shoulder season is a travel industry's term for essentially the spring and fall, those in-between times that bridge a particular destination's busiest period with its most quiet.

14:36But what we're seeing now is that the shoulder concept is going extinct as more people go on vacation in the fall months. What explains this? One reason is that many vacation hotspots have become exactly that, too hot, particularly in southern Europe where summer heatwaves make visiting the Acropolis or the Duomo not particularly pleasant. Another factor is the metaphorical hot. These popular European countries are simply too busy in June, July, August, so people are staying local those months, then venturing abroad post-Labor Day, anticipating thinner crowds. Toby, you can roll your eyes at yet another cringy travel industry portmanteau, fall-cations, but it does point to a very significant shift.

15:14There's so much irony, though, in the fact that the rush into September and October is sort of easing the very advantages that made fall attractive in the first place, because if everyone has the same idea of, huh, maybe I'll skip the summer and go in the fall, then the fall becomes more crowded, and Virtuoso's recommendation for avoiding the new fall crowds is go in November. So eventually we're just going to loop all the way back around to summer again. Their problem is that they've seen November bookings up about 70%. So we're kind of on a hamster wheel right now to keep moving later, to avoid those crowds and to have a little bit of crispness in the air.

15:52Separately, I found this Airbnb study that showed where people are going and how they are traveling in the fall. And it looks like they're shorter trips, quirkier trips, and actually something called lore tripping. Again, travel industry is full of those kind of lame labels, but they help. Lore traveling is very popular with Gen Z and it's going not to the most popular places, but going to places with great lore. What counts as a lore trip? One is Point Pleasant, West Virginia. That's where the Mothman legend started. There's Gibstontown, Florida. That is a circus town. There's Williams, Arizona, where if you want to go see Route 66, basically you're finding these sort of off the beaten path that you can just go for maybe a weekend trip with your friends and just like take in the lore.

16:39That is what's popular in fall right now. Yeah. It reminds me of this, this other trend called phenomenon chasing, where you just go for cool things and it's shorter trips. I mean, we should say this is a big thing for the travel industry because typically it was a very smooth curve. It would be like the holidays are up and then in the shoulder season in the spring would go down and then the summer would go up and then the fall would go down again. And And it would be this very smooth curve. But now people are going on much quicker chips for for either lore or phenomenon. I mean, now there's something called tailgate tourism where you basically go to a college town in the SEC for to tailgate and experience, you know, a Saturday college football game.

17:14Sounds exactly like something I would want to do. There's white truffle season now in Italy where you go for like specifically the white truffles and to visit wineries there, which is a more quiet time. And then on Vancouver Island and British Columbia, this might be the most specific. There's a coastal town of Tofino. They want you to come just watch storms because they're just epic storms there in the late fall and the early winter. So you're just supposed to go there, rent a lodge and watch storms. If that's not lore travel, I don't know what it is. We got fall occasion, lore tripping, tailgate travel.

17:44What else is there going on? I don't know. I've actually heard of ground hopping as well, where you just go around to see different stadiums. So we got a busy travel season ahead of us with lots of good ideas. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my dog of the week right after this. Meet Amazon Ads rising star Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow. I walked away from big tech to build a luxury brand in a category that no one was paying attention to. With the help of Amazon Ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names in men's grooming.

18:19We've scaled to over$500 ,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars.

18:53It's your shares. It's your voice. It's easy. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds, and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. A very guten Morgen to do, Neil. Very good, Toby. But why are we speaking German? Because I just snagged breakfast at Berlin Currywurst, and thanks to Square, they were uber fast. Square is the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Plus, built-in tools like loyalty and marketing to help reward customers and keep them coming back.

19:26Get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash morningbrewdaily. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash morningbrewdaily. My dog of the week is trying to return stuff because, frankly, it stinks these days. Shopping online used to come with the expectation that if things don't fit or chartreuse isn't your color, you could return the item within a generous period of time and often for free. But that era is coming to a close. Nearly 7 in 10 retailers now charge a fee to return items up from just 43 % five years ago. Even the purveyors of fast fashion are tightening up their purse strings.

20:07Zara, H &M, Uniqlo, and TJ Maxx all charge between$4 and$12 for mail-in returns, hoping to direct shoppers to in-store instead. If the fees weren't enough, your window for changing your mind is shrinking like a Shein top in the wash. Just look at Macy's. Back in the day, Macy's used to allow returns for one whole year. In 2017, that dropped to 180 days. In 2019, it was cut in half to 90, and now it's fallen to just 30 days. The reason for the crackdown, according to retailers, is fraud and abuse. According to a Wall Street Journal article, a small group of customers effectively treat online shopping like a rental service.

20:44Typical behavior from this cohort includes wearing an outfit for multiple days, then returning it, or buying holiday decorations for Halloween, then returning them as soon as spooky season is over. Neil, feels like this has been a battle that has been brewing for a while now. Customers treat free returns as a normal part of the online shopping experience, while retailers say they have to charge to avoid drowning in processing fees. That's why I only return things if they are three sizes too small. The sheer amount of crap that Americans send back to retailers is kind of mind-blowing. So 2020, which I thought was peak returns when everyone was ordering stuff online, return volume was$428 billion.

21:26Fast forward five years, 2025, return values was up to$850 billion, almost double that of 2020. That is 16 % of total retail annual sales. When you take into account that processing a return costs on average 27 % of the purchase price and about 9 % of returns,$76 billion worth are fraudulent. That is a lot of financial burden to place on retailers so that maybe it's understandable why they're cracking down right now. It is a very catch 22 position retailers find themselves in because yes, they feel like they're drowning in the amount of returns that they have to do. Yes, they feel like they need to pass on some of those fees to the customer.

22:09And yet Trustpilot has done kind of a look at this and said, if you have bad return policies, it correlates with a 1.6 star decline in its five star rating scale. So it is almost existential for a retailer to have a good return policy in place because so many shoppers, it's one of the first things that they look for. Almost 92 % say return fees affect how they shop online in some way. So it is absolutely one of those things that you can't just try to skirt under the rug a little bit. You have to be very forthcoming and often offer it for free in order to maintain the trust and the business of your customers.

22:45We've seen the emergence of this trend called bracketing, which sounds like you participate in with your shirt that's three sizes too small, but Gen Z is leading the forefront of this. Basically you order because of perhaps permissible return policies, you order, you find a shirt that you like and you order it in extra small small medium large extra large and then see which one you like and then you return the rest maybe that era is coming to an end because it's going to cost you 12 each time to return all of the clothes that you that don't fit you but that you know that the trend the emergence of bracketing was really fostered by these lenient return policies now that they're cracking down maybe people are just gonna maybe order just fewer clothes at a time.

23:26I hate returning stuff. I would rather wear something I hate than just go through the process of finding a box, putting a label on it, going to UPS or wherever. I think I'm an ideal customer for this region because I buy once. I'm like, yeah, you know what? I don't even like it, but I'll wear it. Let's run to the finish with some final headlines. August, 2026 will be remembered for being very hot with a worldwide average temperature of 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit, it was the hottest month ever recorded globally, barely edging out July of 2023 by a 100th of a degree Celsius. In the U.S., things were even toastier with the lower 48 states averaging 74.37 degrees Fahrenheit from June through August, which means it was the hottest summer since record keeping began, edging out the previous record set during the Dust Bowl in 1936.

24:17The culprit is a climate change and El Nino tag team. El Nino is adding roughly 0.1 to 0.2 two degrees Celsius to the record temps, but scientists say the much bigger driver is decades of greenhouse gas emissions. Neil, it's looking like 2026 is likely to become the hottest year ever, while scientists say 2027 is almost certain to beat it as El Nino strengthens. So we buy some portable fans. Shout out Willis Carrier, 1902. He invented modern air conditioning, this particular plant that there was a paper plant that was getting too hot. And he was like, we need to cool this down. And we have all benefited from it as these temperatures continue to warm.