Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, when the going gets tough, Waymo stops working.
Then the third Avatar movie made a lot of money, but not as much money as expected.
Chapter 2: What happened with Waymo cars during the San Francisco blackout?
It's Monday, December 22nd. Let's ride. Let's ride.
Good morning and happy Monday.
Chapter 3: Why did the new Avatar movie underperform at the box office?
Give yourself a pat on the back because you've made it through the darkest timeline. Yesterday in the northern hemisphere was the winter solstice, marking the astronomical start of winter and the shortest day of the year in terms of daylight. There will now be a little more sunshine every single day until June, so that's something to look forward to.
And one of these years, I got to make it to Stonehenge for the solstice celebration. Thousands of people dressed as pagans and druids make the pilgrimage to the stone circle every summer and winter since the monument was built to align with the movement of the sun on the solstices.
I think you could pull off being a druid, Neil, or a pagan, either or. We are so back, though. I looked this up. Amongst the middle-est latitudes, a.k.a. not near the poles, we are getting an extra... 20 to 30 seconds of daylight now that the solstice has passed, which is plenty of time for activities. I'm talking one additional golf swing depending on your pre-shot.
Maybe two points in pickleball if you have a good serve. And I think you could get an entire ski run in if you don't turn. I don't recommend that, though. So make sure you budget that additional time effectively. We've made it through the darkest timeline. And now a word from our sponsor, Public. All right, Neil, big milestone. I opened an account with Public.
Chapter 4: How did the winter solstice impact daily life in the northern hemisphere?
Incredibly responsible of you, Toby. I'm impressed.
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It was a scene from a dystopian novel. Large swaths of a major American city suffering a power blackout. Traffic lights were down. Hundreds of self-driving robot cars malfunctioned in the middle of the street, creating gridlock. But this wasn't science fiction. It was San Francisco on Saturday.
A power blackout hit around 125,000 homes and businesses in SF, impacting about a third of the city due to a fire at a substation at Pacific Gas and Electric Company. But this being 2025 in the most tech-forward U.S. metropolis, the blackout had some bizarre knock-on effects, like rendering Waymo's self-driving cars inoperable.
On Saturday, people shared tons of viral videos of Waymo's stalled out at busy intersections, one after another, causing major traffic jams behind them. As of last night, Waymo had resumed its robotaxi service, but the reputational damage was done. The company said that its problems stemmed from all the traffic lights going down.
A spokesperson said, while the Waymo driver is designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops, the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections. This contributed to traffic friction during the height of the congestion.
It's not a good look for a startup that was just starting to win hearts and minds in San Francisco and beyond after working hard to overcome initial skepticism from human drivers. Toby, this debacle will only fuel the critics who say robo taxis aren't ready for prime time.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Waymo's robotaxi service issues?
There was no pilot in charge of the craft. It was fully automated, which Blue Origin thinks is the future of space tourism. As for how Benthouse said the ride was, she told the New York Times she laughed during the ascent and called it the coolest experience she's ever had and joins Gayle King, Katy Perry, and Jeff Bezos as fellow passengers on Blue Origin's New Shepard program.
Neil, I was surprised by this. Blue Origin has sort of quietly flown 92 people total to space across 16 missions. It generated a lot of headlines when Katy Perry got out of her capsule and kissed the ground, but As Bent House's trip shows, the program is expanding to include a lot more people and people beyond the rich and famous.
Yeah, I thought this was pretty cool that they didn't actually have to make a lot of adjustments to the spacecraft to accommodate her, according to the company. And that's because they said they designed the capsule with accessibility in mind. They also mentioned that they've taken other maybe non-traditional astronauts to space through this particular program. They took
two 90 year olds becoming the oldest people to ever go to space and others with limited mobility and impaired sight or hearing so pretty interesting to see that they didn't have to make super so many tweaks or accommodations to uh to fit this wheelchair user and as for michaela she said her goal was not only to make space accessible to disabled people but to improve accessibility on earth too you could
You know, putting her space flight side by side with Katy Perry's. And first of all, it's crazy that Katy Perry's was this year because that seems like an eternity ago. Seems like Blue Origin has a little bit of a PR win with this.
And they've kind of kicked up their entire organization into high gear. They were always known as a very slow and deliberate culture, you know. very by the book engineering process. But now a new CEO has come in and say, hey, we got to iterate a little bit faster here. And they want to go toe to toe with SpaceX, specifically when it comes to the moon.
They think that obviously SpaceX dominates in launch cadence. It dominates in space transport. It's been dominating crewed missions so far. But the one area where they think they can weasel their way into NASA's plans going forward is the moon. So they're saying that, hey, we have a blue moon test, blue moon mark one, which is a near-term test to reach the moon in 2026.
They want to land a small lunar cargo lander there. And they also want to invest in technology that will lead to a longer-term presence on the moon where they've been developing solar cells, they've been developing power transmission wires that do well on the lunar surface, saying like, hey, we're your moon guy. SpaceX can do everything else, but look to us when it comes to the lunar surface.
All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's winner of the weekend. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. I'm a person who really appreciates simplicity. And when it comes to credit card rewards, the simpler, the better. That's one of the many reasons I have an Apple Card. The rewards are super straightforward.
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