Chapter 1: How is the longest US government shutdown affecting air travel?
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why every college student is double majoring.
Then Google has a plan for AI data centers that is out of this world. It's Thursday, November 6th. Let's ride.
It's all happening. Mariah Carey has been fully thought out. Gift guides are taking over the internet. And today, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree will begin its journey from a farm near Albany to New York City. The holidays are on their way. And there's no better way to celebrate than by coming to our live holiday show in Brooklyn on December 4th.
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Chapter 2: What innovative store concepts is Whole Foods testing?
we're entering an unprecedented era, too, because Bedford said he's not aware in his 35 year history in aviation where we've had a situation where we're taking these kinds of measures. We're in new territory in terms of government shutdowns.
If you're an air traffic controller, you can understand why you might be calling out because right now, according to Duffy, most are working mandatory overtime six days a week. He said some controllers are even struggling to pay for transportation to work. We've seen a lot of government employees who've been furloughed get side gigs working for Uber, DoorDash, things like that.
But when you're working six days a week with overtime, you don't have time to get those part-time jobs. So they've missed not just one, but multiple paychecks at this point. They don't have enough money to get to work, Duffy said. So that's why they're taking these measures, because there's just not enough air traffic controllers.
They're trying to preempt this, and it looks like air travel is going to get snarled beginning this weekend should this government stay closed.
Yeah. And if you are flying, you're probably thinking, how does this affect me? It does look like this is going to affect the 40 highest volume domestic market. So if you're flying within the US, this is definitely something you should keep an eye on. International routes will not be affected, Duffy has said so far.
If 10% cut is fully implemented across these 40 major markets, it could cancel or delay around 1,800 flights. So again, it's not a gigantic number right now, but the fact that this is preemptively happening shows that it is a serious, you know, lack of air traffic controllers that we are facing right now.
So I don't know, maybe think about a road trip or something because it's going to get a little dicey over the weekend. The other big story from yesterday was Trump's tariff agenda getting its day in court. The vibe as the Supreme Court justices heard the administration's argument is best described as somewhere between skepticism skepticism, and outright doubt.
As a reminder, the justices are looking at whether an emergency-powered law gives the president unilateral authority to impose billions of dollars in tariffs without Congress's approval. And across ideological lines, it seemed like the justices were balking at the administration's arguments.
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Chapter 3: How is Google proposing to solve the AI data center problem?
Chief Justice Roberts invoked the major questions doctrine, the same principle used to strike down Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. This seems to be a misfit, Roberts said. suggesting the law's vague wording doesn't justify such sweeping economic authority. Justice Gorsuch floated a hypothetical, could a future president impose a 50% tariff on gas cars under the same logic?
Trump's lawyer admitted, yes, they could. The tone of the justices was reflected by prediction markets with positions tied to the court ruling in favor of Trump slipping to around 30% from nearly 50% before the hearing kicked off. Neil, still a long way to go in this case, but the justices' initial lines of questioning did not bode well for Trump.
It was a rough day for your boy, Solicitor General John Sauer. He was in charge of defending Trump's tariffs, and it was kind of like defending your high school party rager to your parents the day after when the kitchen is a complete mess.
He had a rough go of it, and that's because across ideological lines, these judges seem to make the conclusion that tariffs were taxes, and who has the power to levy taxes in this country? Dating back to the Constitution, it's Congress, the famous power of the purse.
And they're saying that Trump cannot do this under, well, they are suggesting that Trump may not be able to do this under the 1977 Emergency Powers Act.
And speaking of emergencies, there was a healthy discussion about what constitute an emergency because Trump, in invoking this law to levy all these tariffs, is saying, yeah, we have a huge emergency here in the United States because of persistent trade deficits. And then Justice Sotomayor said, well,
The president threatened to oppose a 10% tax on Canada for an ad it ran on tariffs during the World Series. And he also imposed a 40% tax on Brazil because its Supreme Court permitted the prosecution of one of its former presidents for criminal activities. So this question of whether we're actually in an emergency that the Trump administration declared also came under attack.
By the end of this day, by the end of oral arguments, the question seemed to be not whether he had the power to do this. A lot of justices seem very skeptical of that. It's like, what do we do now? Because as the Trump administration weren't going into this, you're going to cause a huge mess if we have to refund all these companies $90 billion that we took from them for tariffs.
And that was the main question is how do we cause, you know, not economic chaos if we were to rule against the Trump administration's tariffs?
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Chapter 4: What statistics highlight the trend of double majoring in college?
That's what's being tested in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, where a Whole Foods has been combined with a small warehouse tended to by employees and robots who will fulfill online orders. Here's the way it works. You head into the Whole Foods, say go birds to everyone you see, and buy your organic produce and wild-caught seafood in the store. That's not totally doing it for you.
You also want to pick up goldfish or Kraft mac and cheese, products Whole Foods doesn't carry because it doesn't align with the brand's healthy ethos. That's where the warehouse comes in. You scan a code with your phone that takes you to a portal where you can order stuff you'd see on Amazon, but not at Whole Foods.
The robots will go fetch it for you from the warehouse and you can pick it up within minutes. Okay, so that's test A in Pennsylvania. What are they trying in test B in Chicago?
Well, first of all, Test A sounds like, you know, my dream as a teenager, a warehouse full of junk food that robots go and fetch for me. Like, come on, that is my dream growing up. But in Chicago, they're actually going a little bit more direct.
They're removing some seating area and replacing it with a 3,800 square foot Amazon grocery kiosk, which is filled with your normal supermarket fare, you know, the bright and shiny Kraft mac and cheese, the Chips Ahoy's of the world. So The idea is they want you to buy your cabbage upstairs.
They want you to buy your kale upstairs, but then descend downstairs into Doritos land so you can pick up that stuff as well. So that is a more direct test on if these two brands can coexist. Can we have our health conscious shoppers be upstairs while maybe the less health conscious food items are downstairs rather than staffing it in the back of a warehouse?
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Chapter 5: How are bright headlights impacting night driving safety?
This is trying to smush them together.
Clearly, Amazon thinks they need to shake up their grocery division because eight years ago, 2017, they were thought of disrupting the entire grocery industry when they paid $13.7 billion for Whole Foods, every single stock, Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons. They all cratered that day. I remember it very well because, oh, here's Amazon getting into grocery. It's all over for us.
But since then, Amazon's grocery division has not gained market share above 4%. Whole Foods has grown. Whole Foods has grown its sales 40 percent since Amazon's takeover. That works out to about five percent a year on average. That's far cry from what they were growing before this acquisition. Amazon's really not had a good time integrating Whole Foods into its broader ecosystem.
And sales at Whole Foods has declined as there's been or has grown more slowly as there's been increased competition from Walmart, Costco, Kroger, et cetera. So this is one way that Amazon thinks it's going to use its convenience, its fulfillment capabilities to bring more sales to Whole Foods because it's struggling right now.
It just feels like it's a culture mismatch. This is something that has been said ever since Amazon bought Whole Foods a long time ago, where it was this local place where you had in-store healthy foods, like artisans coming by. And it just felt like a very, you know, forward looking human touch company. And now Amazon is probably not known for a lot of those things.
So it's just been a little bit of an awkward marriage.
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Chapter 6: What does recent research say about indoor plants and stress levels?
And now potentially this is an even more awkward marriage. Like, what do you mean we're going to scan something on my phone. A robot's going to get it from the warehouse. Isn't grocery shopping already easy enough? Just go pick something off shelves. They're definitely trying stuff here. We'll see how it succeeds.
I'm more bullish on the Chicago experiment than the Plymouth meeting one.
Moving on, Google thinks it has an idea to solve the growing demand for AI data centers that are devouring both land and energy at an alarming rate. Toss those puppies up into space. Data centers are power hungry and heat intensive and already use one to 2% of the world's electricity. A number Goldman Sachs thinks could double by 2030.
That's why some engineers are asking, what if we just moved data centers off Earth? Yesterday, Google unveiled its latest moonshot proposal called Project Suncatcher. The vision is to put a network of orbiting processors in space that powered entirely by solar energy. You can see the logic.
Putting chips on satellites allows you to harvest continuous sunlight with greater efficiency than anything on Earth. There's also no zoning battles or NIMBYs who don't want ugly, noisy, and energy-hungry build-outs in their backyards.
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Chapter 7: What were the viewership statistics for the recent World Series?
Now, of course, there are some complications with this idea, namely, space is a really unforgiving place for anything, let alone sensitive, high-performance AI accelerators. You know, this is why Google calls these things moonshots, There's a long road ahead and lots of engineering challenges to solve, but the payoff is clear.
It sounds crazy, but at the same time, there was this little company within Google 15 years ago that was one of their moonshots. It's called Waymo. And then now we have Waymo self-driving cars driving around a bunch of cities. It's growing like a weed. and we're all going to be in self-driving cars one day. This seems almost as far-fetched as that did.
And you're right, there are pros and cons to this. The pros are that we're running into a lot of problems here on Earth with data centers. There's not enough energy to go around. They take in so much water. You're fighting with local planning boards. So space seems pretty attractive. At the same time, there are a lot of complications in space as well.
The biggest challenge they've identified is having the AI chips communicate in data data centers, terrestrial data centers, it's a lot easier. You can just hook them up with a cable and they need these, you know, they need to be able to communicate very fast. But in space, you basically need to build the most powerful Wi-Fi ever created.
Chapter 8: How is the upcoming tennis match between Arina Zabalenka and Nick Kyrgios being received?
And at the same time, put these satellites more closely together than they've ever been before, which could lead to all sorts of complications. So this is going to take a lot of work and decades of work. But there are a lot of folks betting on this happening because, you know, they think that the best way to scale data centers and AI is in space because there are just fewer limitations.
Yeah, imagine these satellites. They have to stay within a kilometer of each other to provide that optimal arrangement, to provide that optimal power. But also you have to think about radiation from the sun because, you know, super good for Superman, but it's not so good for anything out in space.
So what Google has been doing to test this out is just bombarding these chips with radiation and seeing how they react. And they're like, they actually do pretty okay. They have about a five-year lifespan under intense radiation, which is not bad. And then the other thing that they... need to figure out essentially is what do you do with the repair aspect of this?
Like do these things depreciate so fast? What is the launch cost associated with it as well? You gotta get these things up there. So again, once you start really thinking about it, maybe it becomes less and less feasible, but that's why you toss a name out there like Project Suncatcher. You get people excited because
The logic seems like it makes a lot of sense because it's really easy to get power up there, and it provides a relief from some of these power grids that are being strained on Earth.
You're not going to see a data center in space anytime soon, though, and that's because of the prohibitive launch costs, as you mentioned. Today, it costs about $1,500 per kilogram on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. to take something up to space.
They need that to drop to around $200 by 2035, which could happen because NASA's space shuttle costs more than $54,000 per kilogram to take something up to space. It's down to $1,500 now. So in the next decade, it goes down to $200. That is possible. So Google's going to launch two satellites pilot tests in 2027 to see whether this is even feasible.
And then maybe in the 2030s and 2040s, when we're sitting here, we'll talk about this thing going online for real.
All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's Numbers.
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