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

0:00This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Good morning, Brudely Show. I'm Neil Fryman. 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. It's Friday, September 11th. Let's ride. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on US soil that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, including 343 FDNY Firemen.

1:05Memorials 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 5th grade and recalled 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. 25 years is a long time, roughly the span of an entire generation. At 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 they 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. 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. On X, there's this account called 2001 Live where they pose as a reporter embedded in the

2:08year 2001 with no foreknowledge of what is coming. And yeah, speaking from experience, it can be chaotic and illuminating in equal measure. Starting 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 say that at a work trip didn't have those. Sounds like you could use business preferences from Hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast, gym access, and more, then future business trips searches automatically surface matching hotels. That way you can book work trips faster. Just say your preferences once and get results tailored to your business travel needs.

3:09Plus get up to 20% off select hotels instantly with member discounts and earn rewards for future travel. Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every work stay at Hotels.com slash morning brew. That's hotels.com slash morning brew loyalty members 18 plus. It's not often that Ted Cruz Bernie Sanders and Cheryl Crow all sound off on the same topic at the same time, but the looming AI apocalypse will bring people together in unexpected ways. Community 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 in-thropic employee Jacob Cox and said that the systems being built by AI companies could cause human extinction. His posts and the general sentiment was confirmed by other employees with one saying, we really do honestly believe AI could kill all humans and put the odds of that happening at greater

4:10than 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 Cheryl Crow posted an Instagram story, weighing in on Cox and his posts saying, people should demand our leaders put aside their greed and prevent this from going forward. To 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. And 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.

5:11Neil, help me make sense of all of this is the end. Nye. If the end is nye, 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. So they have to wipe us out to pursue and accomplish this particular goal. A famous thought experiment is called the paper clip experiment. And it's basically when a super intelligent AI is instructed to maximize paper clip production. So their goal that they have to pursue is make the most paper clips as possible.

6:13And so what they do ultimately is turn every single piece of matter onto earth, including humans, into paper clips. Now obviously, probably that's not going to happen. I don't want to live life as a paper clip. But that is just one way that AI misalignment with human civilization could lead to our demise. And there is a reason why researchers are putting their probability higher than 0% is because we've seen kind of breadcrumbs of both of these scenarios may be 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 inthropic recently put out a risk report saying that they have come across people doing bio weapon related to research on their platform. Now they are not saying that it that was literally what they were trying to do. Wipe out all of humanity with a bio weapon. It could have just been researchers trying to understand pathogens more deeply. They didn't pass judgment on that, but they did say, hey, we have seen people kind of

7:14going 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 their 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 DC and I'm someone with power, 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, congressman, 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

8:14week 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. Again, the idea is about how to regulate AI and prevent this Doomsday scenario is, it's unclear. 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 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 got a bullish bizarrely. S&P analysts, Navin Sama, was asked whether investors care about an AI apocalypse and he literally just said, no, the futures are up as of this morning. It 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.

9:20So 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, we need, if we need AI to protect us against more powerful AI, that means the buildouts get even bigger, hence 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. Digital prices diesel and bond yields all sort as inflation appears prime 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 6% yesterday to $107 a barrel, about 40% higher than before the war. Diesel also continued his rampage higher, hitting $6 a gallon for the first time ever. That's been driven by an uptick in attacks around the Middle East and in an especially concerning development for oil supplies, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels captured a strategic

10:24port city that threatened shipping in the Bob Elmandab straight, a crucial energy choke point. Fearing higher inflation that persists for a while, investors sold off bonds sending the US 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. And that goes up, anything you want to finance, a house, a car, a business investment, becomes more expensive. All 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 threats that higher energy prices and higher bond yields could bring pain to the broader economy. Yeah, looks like the oil shock is only going to get worse. In addition to Bob Elmandab 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 straight of Hormuz and carries crude out to the Red

11:26Sea. If 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 them in 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. I remember we on this 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 straight 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.

12:29I am locked in on diesel prices because it is a proxy for the cost of moving everything in America, whether by its attrain or a truck. Every single package, every grocery run that you take is powered by diesel, diesel prices hit $6 per gallon this morning, the highest ever. There's 63% higher than before the war in California, which is the biggest agriculture state in the US. Diesel prices are at $8 a gallon. And gas buddy found five stations in California that have hit their limit, hit their signage limit. And diesel at their dispensers with the highest possible price, $9.99 cents 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, diesel 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

13:32much 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 house plants. I won the pre show coin toss, Tails never fails. So I get to go first and my stock of the week is piecing out of work in the fall. Going on a trip in September, October and even November is surging in popularity, creating a trend known as fall occasions. 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, the at shoulder season is no longer really a shoulder season. It's becoming a peak season unto itself. Another season is a travel industry's term for essentially the spring and fall, those

14:34in between times that bridge a particular destination's busiest period with its most quiet. But 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 Dwomo, not particularly pleasant. Another factor is the metaphorical hot. These popular European countries are simply too busy in June, July, August. People are staying local those months than venturing abroad post Labor Day anticipating thinner crowds. So, you can roll your eyes at yet another cringy travel industry portmato, fall cations, but it does point to a very significant shift. There's so much irony though, and the fact that the rush into September in October is sort of easing the very advantages that made fall attractive in the first place, because if everyone has the same idea of, maybe I'll skip the summer and go in the fall, then the fall becomes more crowded. And Virtue Us' recommendation for avoiding the new fall crowds is go in November.

15:38So, 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. Separately, I found this Airbnb study that showed where people are going and how they are traveling in the fall. And it looks like there are shorter trips, quirkier trips. And actually something called lore tripping. Again, travel industry is full of those kind of lame labels, but they help. Lorde 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 Gibson Town, 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.

16:41That is what's popular in fall right now. Yeah, reminds me of 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 it would be this very smooth curve, but now people are going on much quicker trips 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 tailgate and experience a Saturday college football game. Sounds exactly like something I would want to do. There's white truffle season now in Italy where you go for specifically the white truffles and the 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.

17:43We got fallcation, lore tripping, tailgate travel. What 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 a week right after this. Meet Amazon ads rising star Darryl 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 planning attention to. With the help of Amazon ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names and men's grooming. We've scaled to over $500,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now, you can easily make your voice heard too. Vanguard investor choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your

18:43eligible Vanguard index funds. In just a few clicks, you can have a say on important shareholder topics like executive pay and director elections. Visit vanguard.com slash investor choice to learn more. It'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 good Morgan to do it, Neil. Very good to be. 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. And $200 off Square Hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash morning brew daily. That's squ ari.com slash go slash morning brew daily. My dog of the week is trying to return stuff because frankly, it stinks these days.

19:47Shopping online used to come with the expectation that if things don't fit or sharp truce 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 seven 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. Zara, H&M, Uniqlo, and TJ Maxx all charged between four and $12 for mail and 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 she end 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. Typical behavior from this cohort includes wearing an outfit for multiple days, then returning

20:51it or buying holiday decorations for Halloween. They're returning them as soon as spooky season is over. You know, it 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 a Macy can 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. Fast 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 or return costs on average, 27% of the purchase price and about 9% of returns, $76 billion worth are fraudulent.

21:52That 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. And yet, trust pilot has done kind of a look at this and said, if you have bad return policies, it correlates with a 1.6 star decline and it's five star rating scale. So it is almost existential for a retailer to have a good return policy in place because so many shoppers is 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. We've seen the emergence of this trend called bracket in which sounds like you participate in with your shirt.

22:52That's three sizes too small, but Gen Z is leading the forefront of this. Basically, you order because of perhaps permissible return policies. 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 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 going to maybe order just fewer clothes at a time. I 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 forever. I think I'm an ideal customer for this region. You are. Because I buy once. You know what? I don't even like it, but I'll wear it. Let's return to the finish with some final headlines. August, 2026 will be remembered for being very hot with a worldwide average temperature

23:53of 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the hottest month ever recorded globally, barely etching out July of 2023 by a 100th of a degree Celsius. In the US, things were even toaster 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. The culprit is a climate change in El Nino tag team. El Nino is adding roughly 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius to the record temps, but scientists say the much bigger driver is decades of greenhouse gas emissions. You know, 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 to be by some portable fans. Shout out, Willis Carrier. 1902, he invented modern air conditioning. This particular plant that there's a paper plant was getting too high and he was like, we need to cool this down and we have all benefited from it as these temperatures continue

24:55to warm this summer. The US recorded 1,541 monthly record highs set or tied. There were 87 record lows. If you thought this summer was hot, it looks like it's going to be the hottest ever. There's a greater than 90% chance because of El Nino that 2027 is going to be even hotter, so get ready and thank Willis Carrier every single day to keep you cool inside. Up next, people in England are going crazy over a tapestry, but it's not just any tapestry. On Thursday, the British Museum welcomed visitors to a new exhibit featuring the Bayou tapestry, a work believed to have been made by English women in the 1070s, yes nearly 1,000 years ago. Depicting William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066, the 220-foot-long tapestry had been chilling in France before being moved to England in mid-July. And the hype has consumed the British public who waited 80,000 people at a time to buy tickets to what's being called a once-in-a-decade exhibition.

25:56One reviewer wrote it was, shivers down the spine, tell the grandchildren sort of stuff. I don't know if it goes that far, but maybe you've got to be there in person to see just how long and how fantastic this thing is. There is a little bit of controversy as well, which I appreciate. Should it have been moved at all? So obviously, this thing is very old. We're talking about the 10-hundreds. I don't even know what you call that. 1,000s. It's extremely fragile and a lot of French art experts say that transporting it wasn't worth the risk at all. And they did find two small new breaks along its millions of threads. Each break was around a few millimeters long, so it's not big. But the French were like, I see, we told you so. You should have moved it whatsoever. But maybe two tiny millimeter long breaks were worth it for hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of people actually to enjoy this fantastic tapestry. If I were to go to London for the tapestry, would that count as lore-tripping or lore-cation tapestry? I don't know. I think I'm considering it because this thing looks really, really cool.

26:58If I can get a ticket, it seems like they're kind of all sold out for now. Finally, Princess Diana's famous revenge dress is heading to the auction block for the first time in nearly 30 years. Diana wore the black Christina Stambolian mini dress to an event in 1994. The same night that Prince Charles admitted on National TV that he'd cheated on her. Diana later sold the dress for around 40,000 pounds in 1997, with the proceeds going to charity. Now, Sotheby's expects it to fetch between $150,000 and $300,000 when it goes up for auction in New York later this year. You know, this is a case where the context around the dress is just as famous as the fabric itself. This dress has its own Wikipedia page. This is not going to sell for $300,000. That's the upper limit of what they're expecting. But in 2023, there was a ballerina length evening dress that Diana worked to a dinner in 1985 put up for auction. It was sold for $1.15 million, which was 11 times more than expected a record for one of her dresses.

27:59I'm not an auction person, but it sounds like this thing. It has its own Wikipedia page is going to go for more than that. There's so much lore around, keep going back to this one. A lot more about Diana's fashion. Obviously, she remains a fashion icon decades later. There even is an Instagram account called Lady Di Revenge Looks. That is more than 100,000 followers that post her various outfits set up in 2018 and just attracted a huge audience. That's just one of many different accounts and web pages that are dedicated to her fashion. Vogue describes the dress as the progenitor of Revenge dressing, saying that she basically invented the genre of reclaiming the narrative. I'm sure someone had a revenge dress sometime before then, but absolutely fascinating. I was unaware of this. Maybe obviously I'm not right up on my princess diet lore again, but very cool to see that this is getting a second and now third life with probably a very expensive auction. That is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Friday.

29:01Sean Attova to everyone celebrating the Jewish New Year tonight. May it be happy and sweet to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else. Send an email to MorningBruDally at MorningBru.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Mill iron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lue is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Leak. Technical direction by Nina Miller. Hera makeup and shirt we wore are Revenge outfits today. Devon Emory is our president and our show is a production of MorningBruD. Great Saturday, Neil. I wish you all well. Push your limits. Train with precision. See the results at Equinox. That's high performance loving. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.