Meta, Google Lose Social Media Addiction Trial & NASA’s $20B Moon Base

So, we're aton. The grade is a new morning to the evening.

“Your glutes are for you, the beautiful girl of the world.”

That means, you're the best girl of all. Good morning, Brutely Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how the oil shock is raising prices for food packaging. Then, social media just had its big tobacco moment in court and lost.

It's Thursday, March 26th. Let's ride. Good morning. If you went to Philadelphia International Airport on Tuesday, you probably saw some really long lines. But not all of them were made up of humans. To celebrate national cheese steak day,

organizers said they set the Guinness World Record for longest line of cheese steaks, arranging 1,291 of the beefy sandwiches in a row inside a departure hall to obliterate the previous record of 500. Now, Guinness World Record rules stipulate that all food used in record attempts needs to be eaten or donated.

So, they invited TSA workers who hadn't been getting paid for a free lunch. This is either a genius or extremely lucky SEO play because now in your Google long lines Philadelphia Airport. You get news about cheese steaks instead of TSA. But I do hope it brightened TSA workers days.

“You're not getting paid, but at least you have this two-hour old”

soggy cheese steak from paths to eat, which is better than Gino's, by the way, a little silly lore for you there. They're both worse than James. Okay, now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. Toby, what's the best return on spend you've ever gotten

and can give anything anything at all? All right, this might sound crazy, but easily the life size portion of Dorian Gray hanging in my attic. How so? You see any wrinkles on this face?

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and get a free 250 dollar credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/mbd. That's linkedin.com/mbd. Terms and conditions may apply. Social media companies are under the same scrutiny

that tobacco industry went through and they're racking up L's in the courtroom. Yesterday, a jury found meta in YouTube negligent in a landmark social media trial for running platforms that harmed adolescents and failing to warn the public about the danger.

The two were ordered to pay 4.2 million in 1.8 million respectively in damages to a plaintiff. A 20 year old woman who said her addiction to social media caused her mental health crisis. The case took a novel legal approach arguing that social media

can cause personal injury. And after nine days of deliberations, the jury agreed. The case brought out heavy hitters to the LA court room. The five week trial included testimonials from meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Assyria head of Instagram.

Both execs rejected claims that Instagram could be described as clinically addictive with meta mounting a defense at the plaintiff. It goes by Kaylee suffered from mental health issues from familial abuse and turmoil, not social media.

YouTube's defense was, we're not a social media company at all and our features are not designed to be addictive. But pointing to features like infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations and autoplayed videos. The plaintiff argued the platforms were designed to entice

and hook young people into compulsive use. The verdict was handed down a day after a new Mexico jury in a separate case found meta-liable for failing to safeguard users from child predators. The other jury is still hearing arguments

around whether to impose punitive damages on the companies to go along with the compensation they are sending Kaylee's way. But the bigger question is, does this open the floodgates as the companies face down similar cases scheduled to go to trial later this year?

Yes.

The answer is, yes, it absolutely opens the floodgates.

Big tech critics have been hammering away at these companies for years with very little success. They finally pierce the armor and now they're going to go in for the kill. And this shield was section 230.

The shield that they could not penetrate. This was this law from the 90s that said social media companies can't be liable for the content that's posted on their platform and it provided a very important shield for social media companies throughout the past few decades and it's called the bedrock

of the modern internet. So the plaintiff in this case and many other cases that are about to be coming down the pipeline are not going to focus on the content on the platform because that's protected by section 230.

And instead focus on the design choices on the literal product of social media platforms like auto play, like infinite scrolling. It seems like they've had success here in Los Angeles and they're going to have perhaps more success down the road.

“Yeah, I think the best way to look at this dichotomy”

is that it's no, it's not a speech case anymore. That's what section 230 rests on. It's like can people say whatever they want on our platforms

That was a shield for a long time but you are correct that now that we're looking into this specific design choices.

“That's what makes it addictive as a cigarette”

or addictive as tobacco. That's why we keep kind of comparing it to the tobacco industry. I mentioned that a punitive damages phase is what's up next in the trial and that the plaintiff's lawyer

is kind of going for the jugular. At one point in the courtroom, Mark Linier who is the lawyer who represented Kaylee in charge of M&M saying each piece of candy represented a billion dollars of the company's value

and then he took off one bit of the shell of a single blue M&M and said this is $200 million. They do not want to feel the pain for what they did. So basically he's arguing for much larger damages to come out of this trial.

Not just the compensatory payment made to Kaylee. So what happens next?

The answer is probably that Instagram

and YouTube met an all the social media companies get sued into oblivion. There's more than 1,000 cases already waiting in the wings. We've got two big federal trials coming later this year.

But because that these plaintiffs have had success going after the product themselves, this might continue until YouTube, the social media companies actually changed their products

or they talk, they're again to this big settlement. This where you're talking about big tobacco. So last century in the '90s, he had Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds also getting sued into oblivion like this

in terms of personal injury. So they got together with more than 40 states and they reached a 206 billion master settlement and after that these companies contracted in a big way

to climb and smoking followed. So there's either going to be a lot of regulation coming out of this or there's going to be a massive settlement perhaps on the level of big tobacco in the '90s. That's a couple more blue M&M,

which is what these lawyers are after. Moving on, the price of a brick is going up. This week, Dow Chemicals told customers, it will double a planned price hike for certain plastic residents as the shutdown at the straight-of-war moves

continues to choke off critical raw materials.

Dow's original 15-cent per pound price hike of polyethylene, a lightweight, durable, thermoplastic that is the world's most produced plastic is now 30 cents, meaning that everything from shopping bags to plastic bottles

is going to get more expensive. It's a reminder that as the war with Iran drives up oil prices, it's not just the gas you put in your tank that gets priceier, but everything that uses

plastic too. Plastic is a hidden inflation driver between 4% and 8% of total global oil production is used to make the stuff that encapsulates our stuff. The odd-bought seam at Bloomberg highlighted

the example of a bag of carrots. To bring a bag to grocery shelves, there's farming, transport, and store costs, all of those require energy of some sort, but the overlooked part of the equation

is a little plastic bag of your carrots come in. If polyethylene prices go up, that bag becomes more expensive. And since your carrots only costs around two dollars to begin with,

any incremental height and input costs is going to cause price heights. The old Tracy Alloway from Bloomberg put it well, there's something kind of remarkable or perhaps dystopian that in today's economy

even when you're buying carrots, you're really buying crude oil. Yeah, think about when you go into a grocery storm and besides the produce aisle with the loose avocados and oranges and apples,

pretty much everything else is wrapped up in plastic packaging and that plastic packaging is made from oil and that plastic packaging is also made from oil and inputs that come from the Middle East, which is now being blockaded.

“If you want to take one word away from this particular story,”

it's feedstocks. Now feedstocks is the very strange word that the industry uses for the inputs that go into making polyethylene and this plastic packaging.

Problem is that the Middle East supplies about 30% of one of those feedstocks which is liquified petroleum gas as well as 24% of a global seaborn NAFTA, which is another one of those feedstocks.

So basically those are not getting to market

which is raising prices for everyone else. And it's been good for DAO's business again. They had this price hike already planned. Prices of these feedstocks inputs were already going up before the war.

Now that the war has exacerbated that DAO shares rose more than 6% on Tuesday after they announced that they're up 25% since the start of the war. An interesting thing too is that

how much does this actually go into effect CPI readings in inflation readings? Like as we look ahead to the next inflation number that shows up. It's going to show up in the food prices.

Energy as a whole when it comes to the index is not a massive waiting. It's just 6.3% of the index. But food prices accounts for 15% of the index. And again, as we said,

you need fertilizer to grow food. That comes through the straight. You need fuel to transport the food. That is going up in cost.

“And then you have to package the food in plastic,”

which is also going up, which is why we could see a chunky inflation rating in the next few months. And it might be worse here than the rest of the world.

Because if you're looking at which type of populations

It's American.

“Some one and everyone else is way down the line.”

The average US resident. This is in 2019 study. Use 255 kilograms of new plastics versus a world average of 60.1 kilograms. So we are a plastic loving nation,

which is going to butt us in the butt right now. Getting losers. We are building a moon base. And our major presentation on Tuesday, NASA laid out concrete plans to build a long-term base

on the moon. And it's not getting around this time. Administrator Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, promised quote,

"There will be an evolutionary path to building humanity's first permanent surface outpost beyond Earth." Since Isaacman took the top job at NASA in December, he's been going full coach Carter

to rejuvenate a struggling agency that's done a whole lot of talking and a whole lot of nothing over the past few decades. He's also someone who's intimately familiar with space having been in low Earth or of it twice

on missions he's financed himself. Okay, about that moon base. It's going to be built in three phases over the next decade with each phase

costing about $10 billion.

If all goes according to plan, and that's a big "if" when it comes to space, the habitat will contain the basic elements of civilization, like power sources, complex communications, scientific labs, onsite manufacturing,

and of course permanent habitats for astronauts to live in. There is a long way to go, and 150,000 kilograms of payload to be delivered to the lunar surface in the interim. But this is a big deal.

Instead of treading water, NASA finally has a detailed tenure plan with deadlines, reasonable budgets, and buy in from indispensable private sector partners, sounds like they received a visit from a Kinsey.

Let's go through these three phases that were maybe laid out in the McKinsey PowerPoint presentation. Phase one, go through 2028. They want to basically just send up a relentless brush of private robotic

landers, no humans are going to be involved in any of that. 21 landings total. They want to bring four metric tons of payload to the moon.

These will include things like rovers

“that can explore the surface and look for key resources.”

Phase two goes from 2028 through 2032. Or so, that is when you're going to start to build semi-habitable infrastructure. That comes with 27 landings with the total mass of 60 metric tons.

So you're bringing a lot more stuff to the moon in that phase. And then phase three, 2029 through 2036 or so. That is establishing infrastructure

to support a continued human presence. That is when people are on the moon itself. So again, we are stretching away out into the future, but there is a plan,

which is more than we could have said, you know, a few months ago. I'll go and phase four when they put in TVs with red zone. And I can watch then.

No, so I think the big reaction to this was it's got cheap, right? $10 billion to establish a moon base. Well, each of the three phases that, you know, there's a lot of projects on earth that cost a lot more.

And this has been a big mission of Jared Isaacman to bring down costs at NASA. He thinks there's not a revenue problem but an expense problem during the presentation. He said billions of dollars wasted.

He's talking about his predecessors years lost.

Hardware that never launched fewer flagship science missions.

And he framed this as an existential crisis for NASA in the space industry in general that people weren't getting excited about space because he went on to say fewer astronauts in space means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween.

I don't like it. We have to say that the moon base is replacing a prior plan that was essentially build a orbiting space station above the lunar surface and use that as kind of a jumping off point to make these missions.

That is no longer a thing anymore. And that has caused a lot of riffs between the US and their international partners. Europe is extremely mad right now because they're feeling whip last around.

They had actually delivered a massive metallic cylinder that was going to be this big critical habitation module for NASA back in April. So they were all in on this plan to build basically a mini international space station.

That plan is dead now. It's all about moon base, which some people within NASA are saying, "Hey, this is a good idea."

First, so long we've just been pulled in so many different directions.

At least we know we can wrap our heads around moon base. It's all about moon base over the next decade or so. But it came with some familiar opinions. They'll get over it. That's the biggest date to look for now.

It's actually April 1st, which is in less than a week. And this is not April Fool's. NASA is planning to launch four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth on the Artemis 2 mission, which will be the first time we visit the moon since 1972.

I'm pumped. Let's go. I'm dressed enough as an astronaut for Halloween. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers

right after this. This episode is brought to you by Apple. Neil, there's nothing like your first Mac.

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A lot was uncertain that fall, but I knew I had a dependable sidekick

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No credit card needed. Go to shipstation.com/delishow.com/delishow.com/delishow. Welcome to Neil's numbers. The segment we're at share three stats from the weeks news that will give you lots of conversation material to bring up with the strangers you're waiting in a TSA line with.

For my first number, Americans are feeling really bad about their jobs, like historically bad. In a new Gallup poll, more US workers said they're struggling in life than thriving. The first time this has happened on record. It is a sharp departure from historical trends.

Between 2009 and 2019, the thriving rate among workers was as high as 60 percent.

And even during the pandemic year of 2020, it was 55 percent. Now it's collapsed alongside a bunch of other indicators of confidence in the job market. In the fourth quarter of 2025, just 28 percent of US employees said now is a good time to find a quality job. With 72 percent calling it a bad time. This year's ago, this was flipped. 70 percent of workers were optimistic and 30 percent weren't a collapse of 42 percentage points.

Even among the broader doom and gloom, a few groups stand out for being the biggest Debbie Downers. American workers with higher levels of formal education were far less optimistic about the job market than those who spent less time in school last year. Meanwhile, younger workers were less hopeful about the labor market than older workers, which just won in five workers age 18 to 34 saying now is a good time to find a quality job. To be these aren't just vibes, the reality on the ground is miserable too.

As New York Times reported, this is the worst hiring spring for young degree holders since the depths of the pandemic. Debbie Downer, but I'm just going to continue piling on. A recent zip recruiter survey also found that over a quarter of new hires are taking pay cuts when starting new roles. So even if you can find a job, it's usually for less than what you were being paid at your previous job. And then one more data point to throw into the mix too is that this survey was conducted during the final few months of 2025.

That is before the Iran War broke out before oil and gas prices started so maybe it's even worse out there than this survey actually painted the picture. For my next number, let's do something more fun. An AI version of love island starring fruit has taken the internet by storm and it's become more popular than the show itself. This is real, a TikTok series called Fruit Love Island has surpassed the real love island, which is the US's top reality show in terms of followers on the platform. And it's wrapping up more viewers per episode than the non AI version according to tech investor Olivia Moore.

Yes, 15 million people are tuning into bite size made for mobile AI fruit love island episodes to see whether Buna Nito and AI generated banana will find his match.

AI Kitchen Slop has been percolating on social media for months when people began posting benign educational videos of object sharing life hacks like how to remove a wine stain. I was weird things got only weirder from there with an entire ecosystem emerging of talking AI fruits finding themselves in emotionally fraught sexually charged situations. And one video which received 1.8 million views on Instagram, a homophobic Clementine kicks his gay son also a Clementine out of the house when he caught him messing around with a strawberry into this AI fruit milieu the love island knockoff was born and is absolutely exploded.

Yeah, it might be time to log off. No, I'm logging on. I need to know what passionna and razolina are getting up to and the fruit love island.

So I think the larger take away other than just how weird you know and like it's sexually charged a lot of these videos are is that every piece of popular entertainment is now just going to be have a kind of a weird mirror image in the fruit world and that we can't create anything new anymore.

“I do have to just stress how bad these videos are to I mean the dialogue is sometimes non-sensical their outfits are changing from frame to frame. It is not a highly produced series at all. It is slopp in every you know aspect of the world.”

And yet so many people are watching it, which is a little hard to explain, but also not hard to explain at all. The reaction online has mostly been scoring one very viral tweet by one person said this may sound extreme, but I am fundamentally superior to those who watch this. I think you can have that adopted mentality, but one people are tuning in because they want to tune out of everything else that's going in the world. They literally do want to turn their brains off. And then to the emotions that are being portrayed in these fruit videos are you know very intense emotions like you're getting kicked out of your house like sometimes it's you know unexpected pregnancies like people tune into and are attracted to drama regardless of what the people or the fruit on screen actually look like.

For the real world from my final number the NBA is in an all-out tankathon and by that I mean the worst teams are losing and enjoying every minute of it coming into this week.

The three worst teams in the league the Pacers Wizards nets lost a combined 39 games in a row. There have been three separate 16 game losing streaks this season alone and at one point earlier this month the bottom 10 NBA teams were on a collective 40 game losing streak. The losing streaks are a feature not a bug of the NBA's misaligned incentives when it comes to draft order. If you're already a bad team you actually should lose even more because the lower you finish in the standings the better odds you'll have of securing a higher draft pick and landing a future superstar the following season.

Taking has been a strategy for decades with NBA teams unashamed to sit out star players and games to put themselves at a willing disadvantage. But this year is turned into a doubt right epidemic presenting an existential crisis for the league and its promise to offer a competitive product of fans.

“Speaking at the NBA's Board of Governors meeting yesterday commissioner Adam Silver vowed to take action on the taking issue he said it has business implications it has basketball implications it has integrity implications for the league.”

So it's one that we take very seriously and we are going to fix it full stop and I want to say that directly to our fans.

It feels like the NBA's in a precarious position right now because you have the taking problem. You've had these gambling issues that have affected the league this year. You've had you know the clippers kind of doing this weird cap circumnavic circumvention all these controversies are hitting the league at the same time while it seems like other sports are sending. We talked about how baseball is kind of back in you know the public's good graces at this point. But the taking issue is just something that Adam Silver has thrown everything at and it hasn't been able to solve it yet.

I mean, there was supposed to be a lot of reform where it didn't reward the worst ministers as much as years prior that hasn't really changed. They added a play in game to give more playoff spots to people so they had something to play for that hasn't changed it that much. The issue is is that if Victor Wambin Yamma is out there.

“You should do everything in your power to get him on your roster because that completely ulcers the trajectory of your franchise which is losing.”

Yes, so you have to lose as much as possible to get the best chances it's just like one player can can absolutely alter your your fate so much that it's going to be difficult to ever stamp this fully. It'll be interesting to see, you know, the kind of reforms that they make and they might get creative, but into all of these challenges the NBA is only expanding at this NBA Board of Governors meeting yesterday.

The owners voted to explore adding teams in Las Vegas and Seattle, which means it probably is going to happen. These would be the first new franchises in over 20 years.

So it looks like this supersonic are coming back to Seattle and then in terms of Las Vegas there might have there it's coming up completely new franchise. So you're going to have to figure out a name and one of the best names that I've seen this was by the athletic is the Las Vegas Joker. That's really good until you start losing and then you're the jokers and it just doesn't look so hot. Okay, let's run to the finish with some final headlines. The boy who lives lives again yesterday HBO released the first trailer for its upcoming Harry Potter series, which will have its season one premiere during Christmas this year.

And people have a lot of thoughts. At least from the trailer, the show seems awfully similar to the movies like to the shot except without the iconic John Williams score and with a darker bluish tint that HBO prestige dramas are known for. It starts Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, and he's also known for being an airvester as Ron Weasley and Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger alongside established adult actors like John Lythco as Dumbledore. So I think the main vibe to this trailer was why do we need this when we have the movies. And I think that'll be answered by the massive amounts of people who watch at this winter.

There was a rumor going around that they were spending $100 million in episode on this, which would be the most expensive TV show of all time. It looks like that is overstated, but it is similar to the game of thrones treatment and the last few season. So 15 to 20 million dollars in episode. So it's a big swing for them.

“Do people still care this much about Harry Potter? I'm not sure, but you're right. We are going to find out.”

Speaking of fantasy franchises getting a reboot, a new Lord of the Rings movie is in the works, and you'll never guess who is writing the screenplay. Steven Colbert.

The film tentatively called the Lord of the Rings Shadow of the Past will be co-written by Colbert and his son and follows Hobbit Sam Mary and Pippin retracing their initial adventure. 14 years after the passing of Frodo. Colbert actually was the one who pitched the idea to direct her Peter Jackson saying he had re-read chapters 3 to 8 that were not included in the fellowship of the ring and thought there should be a film about him.

“Plus, Colbert is going to have a lot more time on his hands when his late show goes off the air and may after CBS cancelled it.”

Colbert is a self-described Tolkien addict. So you know he's going to be bringing a lot of passion to the project.

Though many skeptics were dubious about his screenwriting cred. My mind immediately went to if I was kind of let go of the podcast and I had a lot of free time on my hands what fantasy book series would I want to adapt what fantasy series would I want to bring to the big screen and the two obvious answers in my mind or Eric on which was just like the book series that I absolutely grew up on defined by youth or red rising which is a little bit more of a modern series that has kind of been adopted by every reading bro on instagram at this point.

But those two would definitely slap. Eric on has been adapted but someone needs to give another chance on it.

Yeah, that's all dragons right right I've been stalling for you too because I know you have an answer. No, well, I've been thinking about it and I'm happy to step in for George R. Martin if finishing game of thrones is becoming too much. Which seems like it is because we haven't seen a book in a very very long time another book that I love growing up that would be really fun.

“Into a movie and I don't know if it has been Artemis foul. Yeah, I think it has been but I love that world as well. So that'd be fun to bring to this.”

That is a great one and now I'm going down memory lane. I'm thinking about Rangers apprentice at this point. There's so many good books out there. Let's make some movies. Maybe it'll be like a bonus. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. So be your headed to the airport best of luck with the TSA lines and stop some deals numbers on them. And maybe you can do a little chat and cut. If you like to reach us, send an email to morning [email protected] or DM us on instagram @mvdallyshow.

Let's roll the credits and we'll learn is our supervising producer. Raymond Lou is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Her make-up is tanking. Devon Emory is our president and our show's a production of Morning Brew. The Ray showed an email. Let's run it back tomorrow.