
Pope Leo Calls for AI Safeguards & ‘Doping Olympics’ Offers Multi-Million Dollar Jackpot
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Consider this comparison. PwC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PwC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tech can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at pwc.com us brewai that's pwc.com/us/brewai good
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morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.
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And I'm Toby Howell.
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Today, what is a shibumi and why is it causing so much drama?
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Then does taking steroids make you perform better? The Enhanced Games found out over the weekend. It's Tuesday, May 26th. Let's ride.
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Welcome to the longest so summer ever. Because of a quirk in the calendar, the unofficial start to summer Memorial day fell on May 25, the earliest possible day for the final Monday in May. And Labor Day, the unofficial end to the summer, will arrive on September 7, the latest possible date for the first Monday of September. That means for the first time since 2020, we'll get 106 days of summer compared to just 99 last year. Unless you're more of an astronomical calendar purist, in which case summer is the same length every year. But who has time for that? Toby so much room for activities.
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Not to rain on your long summer parade, Neal, but it looks like at least here in New York City, the weather isn't going to be great for those 106 days, at least when it counts the most. An user trace Cohen ran an analysis over the last six years of weather data and found that Friday is the rainiest day of the week, followed by Saturday. So it feels like it always rains on weekend, which it definitely does. You're not imagining it. It actually does rain at a higher rate, due in part to traffic and pollution peaking during midweek and then that acting as a catalyst for cloud formation and then storms over the weekend. So it stinks that we're having a lot of summer days and they're raining a lot in them. But maybe just go somewhere other than New York City and enjoy your weather there. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Neal, do you know what a bull market is?
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Yes.
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Pope Leo would not be surprised if he started booing when a graduation speaker mentions AI and a landmark encyclical letter, basically the most influential essay in the world. Leo warned of the grave of artificial intelligence, writing that the technology quote threatens to normalize an anti human vision and reduce humans to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency. He also said he was concerned that so much control over AI is wielded by a small group of private business leaders among many other AI thoughts. I mean, this letter was over 42,300 words. Not all of those words predicted in AI Doomsday. Technology is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it, leo wrote, referencing two stories from the Bible. He said the primary choice is not between a yes or no to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem. The Tower of Babel, if you remember, was a total cluster driven by hubris and prophet, while the rebuilding of Jerusalem was characterized by a diverse group of people setting aside their pride and working together to accomplish a goal. So compelling stuff. But you might be wondering, why is the leader of the Catholic Church talking about AI? The is that kind of outside his domain? Apparently not. First of all, Leo's far from the first pope to discuss more secular pursuits like business, economics and technology. Even his predecessor, Pope Francis, hosted a yearly AI summit. And second, since the stakes of AI are so philosophical, so existential, Leo feels the need to weigh in, considering he's a source of moral authority to 1.4 billion people around the world. So I thought. David Strife Field of the New York Times summed it up well, the Pope's message to Silicon Valley slow down, elevate the human machines are not gods.
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And I thought it was interesting that he did it alongside Silicon Valley as well, because he rolled out this large, you know, encyclical alongside Anthropic co founder Christopher Olai. And again, Anthropic is seen as sort of as the good AI company, the more moral AI company, whatever those words mean to you. But the fact that he did it sitting alongside them showed that this wasn't an adversarial piece necessarily. Obviously it criticized the AI industry in a lot of ways, but basically saying that there needs to be a moral kind of look at this AI revolution, not just these technocrats controlling so much of what so many people interact with with this technology. So it was fascinating to see him try to align himself and thread the needle between saying this is what needs to happen to make AI better for all of humanity without overtly criticizing the industry that is developing it.
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And we're seeing this remarkable collision of the worlds of tech and religion. I mean, if you, if you hear technologists, they sometimes talk about artificial general intelligence, which is super intelligence, where artificial intelligence is as smart as a human or even greater, talking about them in terms of God. I mean, you had Gary Tan, who runs Y Combinator, saying people are so ready to make AGI their God. John Lennox, who's an Oxford mathematician, wrote this race for AI superintelligence is to make God and be go. Bill Gates, talking about the future, said you can almost call it a new religion. And you know, when you hear people talk about chat ask chatter, Claude. I need to go to Claude for this. It's not out of the realm of possibility that, you know, you hear people in their deepest, darkest, most, most spiritual moments going to these chat bots.
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And I think that he really wanted to talk about chatbot relationships and fake empathy, because it appears that the Pope really is concerned about people using AI campaigns instead of friendships. He's very concerned about AI therapists replacing human care. Emotionally vulnerable people bonding with these chat bots is a, is a big theme as well. So again, the Pope wants to center humanity in a lot of what he does. And the fact that these chat bots are coming in, in the most, you know, targeting the most vulnerable people in some regards was a major theme here as well. One other theme that he spoke very hard line on was war. He said that humans need to be responsible for all weapons decisions that should not be outsourced to a chat bot. So some of his hard line stances were when it comes to the most human things we do, which is when you talk to people, when you talk to a therapist, when war breaks out, this is what he was focused on rather than, you know, some of the nitty gritty things that policy might get more caught up on.
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And you can't talk about this. Leo's encyclical without, without talking about the other Leo. And I'm talking about Leo the 13th. Who a pope in the 19th century. Now this Leo, Pope Leo took his name from that leo in the 19th century. And that Leo released another very major encyclical around business and economics and industry that was happening at the time. He called it Rarum novarum published on May 15th in 1891. That's called of new Things. And it really promoted safe working conditions during the Industrial Revolution when there was a lot of concentration on wealth. And this Leo released his encyclical on May 15 as well. He did the big presentation with the Anthropic co founder yesterday. But he did release it on May 15, which was the anniversary of that other encyclical back in 1891. So there, the parallels there are very clear. He draws a lot of inspiration from Pope Leo the 13th.
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I'm glad that you could read the Roman numerals after their names because I
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was going to hit I.
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Exactly. That was an easy one. All right, let's move on. How would a world class athlete perform if they had access to any performance enhancing drugs they wanted? It's a fun hypothetical that was put to the test this weekend in Las Vegas as the Enhanced Games officially got underway. 42 athletes competed for a chance to win $25 million in prizes. 91% were on testosterone, 79% were on HGH and 29% used anabolic steroids, among other pharmaceutical enhancements. All roided up. The athletes set out to break world records in swimming, running and weightlifting with a $1 million bonus on the line if successful of the steroid Olympics, one record broken in the 50 meter freestyle by 8/100 of a second. In an ironic twist of fate, several clean athletes also won events, undermining the concept altogether. While the results in times were pedestrian, for the most part, this was not just an athletic showcase. Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr are investors in the Enhanced Games, whose parent company recently went public at a valuation of over $1 billion. The idea is to use the intention garnered by the Games to sell experimental therapies from peptides to supplements, cashing in on the rising longevity and MAHA movements. Neil I admit I was curious to see how these athletes would perform when they were free to use any chemical advantage out there. And it just wasn't that good. Fred Curley won the 100 meter dash in a time that wouldn't even win at some high school track meets. Maybe there's more to human performance than what you can get out of a drug cocktail.
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Yeah. Perhaps the highlight or the lowlight of the event was Thor Bjornsson. Now if you watch Game of Thrones, you know, Thor as the mountain, is a big guy, 6 foot 7, and he's a big strong man, lifts very heavy weights. He got up there, tried to break his world record of deadlifting 510kg, which is over 1120lbs, and he couldn't do it. And that that was emblematic of the entire Enhanced Games where these guys got up there all roided up or with testosterone and tried to break these world records and they just couldn't do it. And Thor after said, look, sometimes you got it, sometimes you don't, but you go down the line. For all of the events, only one world record was broken. A little bit of embarrassment for the Enhanced Games.
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The central argument that people put forth on social media was that this just shows that all athletes already are doping. Because if these athletes had access to these performance enhancing drugs and could not beat any world records, the cynics say that, oh, that's because everyone else is doping. So that was one kind of interpretation of it. The other is a lot of these athletes came from a very narrow pool of one, they were either already banned for performance enhancing drugs in the past two, they were past their primes and were trying to, you know, get one last, you know, hurrah out of their bodies by using enhancement drugs to try to break world records. So maybe those were a bigger factor and doesn't undermine the entire concept that enhanced athletes can perform faster. When it comes to that world record, though, the 50 meter swimming, perhaps a bigger influence on the outcome was the fact that he was wearing a band high tech swimsuit. I don't know if you guys remember like the 2008 Olympics when they were all wearing those body suits that just make you more efficient through the water that probably did more to shave off, you know, tenths and one hundredths of a second than any PDS you took. So just interesting that the main storyline here was just the fact that no one did that well and the fact that Fred Curley, you know, barely broke 10 seconds in the 100 meter dash. He came on and said, like, I'm going to break Usain Bolts world record. So it's talking a big talk. The walk was not a big walk.
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But for the Enhanced Games, they probably will focus more on how many supplements they sell rather than what happened in this particular event. Because they're a public company that this is going, this is their Main business is selling all this stuff that you see these athletes take.
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Moving on, let's hit our winners of the long weekend, where Neil and I picked two stories that had a better weekend than someone who cooked their burgers perfectly medium rare. I won the pre show game of bird watching, so I'm up first. And my winner of the weekend is the horror movie Obsession that is lighting up the box office. Obsession, that's the name of the movie costs about $750,000 to make, but it just crossed the $60 million mark at the box office. Perhaps even more remarkable, it's, it's accelerating. It made $17 million on its opening weekend, then 22 million in its second and 30 million over MDW. Movies, especially in the horror genre, don't typically do that, often petering out as word gets out and plot twists are revealed. But Obsession is bucking the trend because people love it. It's currently carrying a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an A minus on CinemaScore, one of only five horror movies since 2019 to earn that mark. Obsession is the brainchild of someone you've probably seen on your Instagram feed or YouTube algorithm. Director Curry Barker cut his teeth in the mean streets of social media, posting comedy sketches before trying his hand at horror. After a successful debut at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Focus Features bought the rights to the 26 year old's creation for over $14 million and Obsession was off to the races. Neal the plot of the movie is a guy wishes for his crush to fall in love with him. And the moral of the story is careful what you wish for. I'm not sure Curry Barker could have wished for something better than his first full movie to 80x its budget in about a week.
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Yeah, this is almost unprecedented. Movie theater going is kind of like baseball, where if you hit 500 in the second weekend, it's incredible. You mostly lose half of your audience, especially in horror after that first weekend where all the diehards go, then it just drops off a cliff for the second weekend. So the fact that it made 16 million in its first weekend and then jumped up to 22 million its second week and 30% of its debut has has movie industry people being like, what are we seeing here? And then potentially it could make over $100 million at the box office and was made for under 1 million. You can count on your hand the number of films that have worked that were made for under $1 million and made over 100 million. That's, you know, 100x or one of them is the Blair Witch Project. I quiz you earlier and you got this one, Blair Witch Project. You also got Paranorma, which was famously in Hollywood lore made for $15,000 and then Mad Max back in 1979. So it could easily join the pantheon of just truly budget films that made a huge splash at the box office.
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And Curry Barker is an archetype that we are going to see emerging more and more in the movie industry because you go back to horror film, you know, makers who cut their teeth in the comedy world. It's Jordan Peele who, you know, has done very successfully with Get Out. Zachary Craig also, you know, came from a comedy writing background. He did weapons and he did weapons and a lot of other, you know, very scary movies that I can't muster up the courage to go see. And Cory Barker, I knew him well and I literally, when I saw this headline I'm like, this dude is the one who made this horror movie that's going super viral. But there's a lot of, a lot of these directors, you know, talk about how there are similar themes from horror to comedy. But I also saw an interview with Curry Barker that was saying that hey, I come from a YouTube background where if we don't keep your attention every five seconds you're going to go and do something else. Having that sort of mentality and bringing it to, you know, a large screen format does successfully translate, you know, there's no reason why you shouldn't make a two hour movie as entertaining as a 20 minute video. So I do not think that Curry Barker is going to be the last of, you know, the creator economy pipeline to director pipeline that we've been seeing kind of emerge over the last few years.
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So what's this guy up to next? I mean he's a rising star. Probably thinking about how this is last year on his parents health insurance because he's still 26 years old, which is crazy. Well, his star is continuing to rise because he has signed on to direct the next installment of the Texas chainsaw massacre for a 24 as well as a number of other movies.
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I wish I could see any of these movies, but I just, I cannot watch horror movies. Maybe no Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Absolutely no chance. I'm going to that. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's winner of the weekend right after this. Neil, I'm ready to make an announcement.
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Head to iherb.com mb daily and use code mb daily for 20% off your purchase. That's iherb.com/and be daily. My winner is Shibumi's, because when Memorial Day weekend arrives, Shibumi's begin their yearly summer takeover. Shibumi is, for the uninitiated, are those canopies that provide shade on the beach, essentially a minimalist tent alternative to an umbrella. Shibumis are ubiquitous on the sands of North Carolina, where the company's based, and they could be coming to a shoreline near you. Shibumi's founders say their structures have been set up on at least 800 beaches around the world, but not on Myrtle Beach, S.C. or Delaware's Rehoboth Beach. And that's where this story gets spicy. According to the Wall Street Journal, a number of American beaches ban canopies like Shibumi, only allowing umbrellas. This is for three main reasons. One, Shibumi take up too much real estate on crowded beaches, where every grain of sand is a battleground to their size and billowy nature restricts views of the ocean. Three, they can be very loud, flapping in the wind. Local pushback isn't the only speed bump that could slow Shibumi's explosive growth. As you might imagine, tons of lower cost copycats have sprung up on Amazon, where shibumi start at 230 bucks. The company told the Journal they've sent cease and desist letters to almost 200 rivals coming with receipts of 15 US patents and sued two of them. Toby Shibumi might be a victim of its own success.
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I don't think I've gone to the beach recently because I had never heard of these things, but apparently they are everywhere. They look like a big old windsock. Like, they are so billowy, it looks like a flag that's horizontal to the ground. And as long as there's any modicum of breeze, they do spread out and, you know, they give you a lot of shade. But you said they're a victim of their own success. One of the reasons that that may be true is that beaches became so crowded with shibumi, especially in, you know, around North Carolina, that parents complained kids couldn't find their families anymore because they were all the same, you know, distinctive blue color. So imagine you just see a sea of shibumi blue, and you just don't know where your family is. Their pitch is that, one, we're actually taking up less space than a tent. Two, we're safer than umbrellas, which can become projectiles in the wind. I have seen that happen before. It is really scary when those umbrellas get going. These work again with the wind instead of against it. So they are pushing back against a lot of the pushback coming their way. But I can also see why people are up in arms because those things are flapping in the wind. They seem like they're taking up a lot of space, even though Shibumi says not as much as a tent.
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Well, they. They do take up a lot of space. And I was at the Jersey shore last year and we set up. I don't know if it was a shibboomi, maybe it was a knockoff or something. And these guys came by and they were like, you can't do that. We need one point of contact on the ground. And for these various reasons, that was the first time I had heard of it. Yeah. So it's pretty interesting watching this company develop in real time because it was started by three UNC grads, two brothers and their friend. And they called it Shibumi because for two reasons Actually it's a Japanese term for effortless perfection. I think that maybe describes. It's just like a polyester sheet on a pole that goes into the ground. The design is very cool. It was also the name of the apartment building where they lived in Chapel Hill. It's interesting to seeing them struggle, go through the challenges of building a startup. They do it very publicly. One was the blue and teal problem where they only made one color for simplicity's sake because it resembles the ocean. But you couldn't find anybody because everyone, especially in North Carolina, has this blue and teal. The other problem is that if it's still air, which doesn't often happen at the beach, there's usually wind, but if it's not, this thing doesn't go. It doesn't work basically. So what was their genius decision was to, was to sell a wind assist kit for $28. In addition, that will basically allow your, allow your sheet, your Shibumi to create shade even when there's no wind.
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But the wind assist is them just coming out to the beach and just blowing on you, just getting a little extra wind there.
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Yeah, it's funny to hear him, this executive talk about what he does as a startup leader. And it's basically two things. He goes to local beach organizations, tries to lobby them to get shibumi's unbanned, and then the second is just root out all of these lower cost rivals on Amazon because there's so many copycats. Because yes, the design is simple, but at the same time anyone can kind of make it on their own. And if you go to TikTok and say make my own Shibumi, people will tell you how to do it for 30 to $50. So it's a constant legal battle. And you can imagine this seems like the most shark tank startup you can imagine where I would go in front of the sharks and they would say like, what's your competitive advantage here? I know you have some patents, but what's to make somebody, you know, what prevents someone else from just making a Shibumi on their own?
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Yeah, that's the question. Is it a fad that is going to sweep across a very specific part of the country or is it just a product category that eventually everyone else is going to wave into? And, but I mean, maybe we'll just call it a Shibumi forever. It's similar to like how we call a tissue a Kleenex. Maybe we'll just get that, you know, nominative association and just keep ripping from there.
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I just love beach wars.
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I thought you're going to say I love the word shibumi.
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I love the word shibi. I love beach drama. It's just so spicy. Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Can't imagine you were glued to Iran war headlines over the long weekend. And great news if you weren't. Despite a whole lot of chatter around closing a deal, we're kind of back to where we started. On Saturday, President Trump said an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was near finalization. The next day he directed his negotiators to not rush into a deal. Then yesterday he said discussions were, quote, proceeding nicely even as the US Military conducted what it described as self defense strikes on southern Iran. Investors have been here before, michael Every of Rabobank told the Wall Street Journal. It just seems to be this endless loop of Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. Every single time it's oh, this time is the breakthrough, this time the energy will flow and at any one given time it could be right. But so far, repeatedly, it hasn't been.
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So over the long weekend, oil prices did start to chill out based off of, you know, these flip flopping back and forth. On a deal Yesterday, Brent crude futures dipped below $94 a barrel even though they're inching up again this morning. Stocks will not stop going up though. It's now been eight straight weeks in the green and futures are up again this morning. While Brent crude is still more than $20 a barrel above where it was trading pre conflict, The S&P 500 is up nearly 18% from its wartime low. So that parallelism right there shows how there's a lot of optimism, you know, infecting the markets right now. It's been a tech driven rally, whereas the energy markets are still trying to parse through the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. As of now, Ferrari has gone 100% electric for the first time ever and people are not 100% sure if they like it. The Ferrari Luci was unveiled yesterday, a $640,000 EV developed with the help of former Apple design chief Johnny I've. It caters to purists by amplifying the natural vibration sounds of the four electric motors to give the car a familiar rumble. That is part of the appeal of driving a Lux sports car, but the design has been extremely polarizing. First of all, it's a five seater sedan, already an odd look for the supercar crowd. Luci is Italian for light and the Car's distinctive glass roof certainly will let a lot of it in. But on people spent a lot of time comparing it to a $35,000 Nissan Leaf. Neil Ferrari's first electric vehicle was always going to be controversial, but getting compared to a Nissan is probably not what Jony I've and the design team were going for.
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Not even Nissan, but also Hyundai. There were so many good jokes about this. Chris Backy on said, imagine accidentally hitting this car in a parking lot, having a moment where you go, well, at least it was a cheap Hyundai getting out of your car and realizing it is an $800,000 Ferrari. Great jokes, but it's not a joke for a Ferrari spent a lot of money on this and is trying to go where no luxury vehicle maker has gone before. Because a ton of other luxury carmakers said they were going to make EVs Mercedes, Porsche, Lambo. But they all pulled back or delayed or postponed. Lamborghini clearly scrapped its plan to launch its first EV by 2030 because just flies in the face of what you want with this car. It's so heavy because of the battery pack and doesn't make that noise. They try to simulate noise, but, you know, this is just a huge zigzag from where the rest of the industry has gone in recent years. As you know, the EV drawdown has been widespread.
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Do you like it?
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No.
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You don't like the look of it now? I didn't like the look of it either until someone adapted it and put an apple logo on it and made it black and white. And then everyone's like, this is the car Johnny I've wanted to make for Apple. But then he eventually went and made it Ferrari. And then I did think it was cool, though, so maybe it was just,
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well, you like it as an apple car, not a Ferrari.
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I know, but why is it? Just because of the brand association with
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it, I think so. You know what I do like is the trunk. It's the biggest trunk that Ferrari ever has, 21.1 cubic feet of space, which I'm just thinking, how many golf clubs can you fit in there? But the big thing, we can talk about this all we want. It's really what shareholders think, investors think, because that is all Ferrari cares about. Its Ferrari shares are down 6%. So this was a nervy launch, shall we say?
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Finally, what if I told you that in the battle between Coke Zero and Diet Coke, Coke Zero is quietly eating its more famous cousin's lunch. We all know that everyone loves Diet Coke. Gen Z calls it A fridge cigarette. The president literally has a button installed in the Resolute desk that he can press to summon a Diet Coke at any moment. But it's Coke Zero that grew nearly 5% in the first nine months of last year. Diet Coke only 1.3%. Even though they're made by the same company and both have zero sugar, their fans will defend them to the death. Coke Zero loyalists say that its taste resembles classic Coca Cola and think Diet Coke tastes metallic and fake. One Diet Coke defender told the Wall Street Journal that Coke Zero doesn't have the refined, refreshing taste with a subtle buzz that I get after cracking a Diet Coke. Neal the original cola wars were Coke versus Pepsi, but now it's Coke on Coke. And not going to lie, I had no idea that Coke Zero was even remotely in the ballpark when it came to Diet Coke in terms of sales or popularity. But it's gaining ground.
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Well, the Diet Coke fans are so much louder. Yes, they, they're just loud people. The Coke Zero people don't like to talk about it for whatever reason. I can't accept, explain that. But personally, I don't have a dog in this fight. I don't, I haven't drank either or I don't because I hate Diet Coke. I think it's disgusting. That doesn't necessarily mean I like Coke Zero either. I think we have some in the office fridge, so I'll have to do a taste test myself. What I, from what I understand, I mean, this must be like a non sports fan seeing a sports rivalry. People are so intense about this, they call the others names. They're saying, I don't understand how you can like this. It's so, it's so bad. But from what I gather, Diet Coke is trying to be its own thing in terms of flavor profile like you are, you know, you're drinking a Diet Coke where Coke Zero is more trying to simulate what an actual regular full sugar Coke tastes like.
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I think you're right with the loudness of fans. It's not that diet cook fans are louder. Well, maybe they are, but they're just more culturally relevant. Like Diet Coke was named after the Devil Wears Prada. It's very chic, you know, it's very, you know, fridge cigarette. Coke Zero is more like backyard barbecue. People in middle America who don't like the association of drinking something diet and they like just the good old fashioned taste better. And you can tell from the branding too that it's exactly what you spoke to. Diet Coke wants to be something different. Coke Zero just wants to be the same Coca Cola taste with zero sugar. I sound like I'm doing an ad read right now, but I agree that the loudness of Diet Coke made me not even consider that Coke Zero was a thing that had fandom at all
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altogether, but they came out in droves here. Just to profess, when this article blew up online, people were going to Tibet go. They were going to war for Coke. Zero will do a taste test later today. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Tuesday. And you know what's happening next Tuesday. That's right, another Morning Brew trivia night. If you're around New York and want to hang out with friends, meet other listeners, meet us and get your brain turned into a blender. Sign up for free at the link in the episode description and to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morning Brew daily at Morning Broadcom or DM us on Instagram at me Daily show let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our supervising producer. Raymond Liu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller. Hair, makeup is on Team Diet Coke. That's what they told me. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
C
Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow. I don't know about you, Neil, but I'm spending every possible second outside this summer.
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Me too. And we're doing it in style with Vuori. Vori's products are built for comfort and performance, so you look and feel your best year round.
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Get 20% off your first purchase@vuori.com MB Daily and discover the versatility of Vuori clothing. That's Vuori.com MB Daily. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
Episode Title: Pope Leo Calls for AI Safeguards & ‘Doping Olympics’ Offers Multi-Million Dollar Jackpot
Date: May 26, 2026
Hosts: Neal Freyman and Toby Howell
Today’s episode of Morning Brew Daily dives into the collision of technology and ethics with the Pope’s sweeping new call for AI safeguards, explores the fascinating—and somewhat underwhelming—results from the debut of the Enhanced Games (“Steroid Olympics”), and takes a lively look at business and cultural stories, from viral horror movies and beach gear drama to Ferrari’s controversial new EV and the Coke Zero vs. Diet Coke rivalry. Neal and Toby blend news, analysis, and humor in a fast-paced discussion.
[03:04–08:21]
[08:26–12:26]
[12:26–16:33]
Picked by Toby
Picked by Neal [18:03–23:34]
[23:34–30:19]
Pope Leo’s AI Caution:
“Technology is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” – Pope Leo, quoted by Neal [03:38]
On Tech and Religion:
“People are so ready to make AGI their God.” – Neal referencing Gary Tan [05:37]
Enhanced Games Reality Check:
“Fred Curley won the 100 meter dash in a time that wouldn’t even win at some high school track meets.” – Toby [09:35]
Shibumi’s Growing Pains:
“Parents complained kids couldn’t find their families anymore because they were all the same distinctive blue color.” – Toby [19:54]
Ferrari Luci’s Divisiveness:
“This was a nervy launch, shall we say?” – Neal [27:39]
Cola Wars Fanaticism:
"Diet Coke fans are so much louder... Coke Zero people don’t like to talk about it for whatever reason." – Neal [28:48]
"I sound like I’m doing an ad read right now..." – Toby [29:11]
Neal and Toby maintain their signature witty, fast-talking banter while delivering sharp business and cultural insights. The episode’s through line—how technology, business, and everyday culture are clashing and changing—offers listeners practical takeaways with plenty of humor and skepticism. Whether it’s the ethics of AI, the realities of “enhanced” performance, or the latest consumer battle, the show offers both information and entertainment—no caffeine required.
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