Good morning for Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman and I'm Toby Howell today. What's fueling the backlash to flock cameras? Then why Wall Street is choosing Texas? It's Tuesday, August 11th. Let's ride. We've all been on some nightmare flights, but nothing quite like the one experienced by Porter Airlines passengers on Thursday. As a flight from British Columbia to Toronto was preparing to take off, a child refused to sit down and buckle their seatbelt despite desperate attempts by parents and the crew. This kid was stubborn and simply wouldn't do it. So the flight had to be canceled and all the passengers had to leave the plane to make things worse. It was super late past 12.30 a.m. So everyone had to go home and come back to fly out the next day to be they might have to put this family and witness protection. This is the final boss of babies on planes. We've all sat next to one that wouldn't stop crying, but a screaming one that won't sit down and makes you miss your flight. That's some children of the corn type stuff right there. I feel bad for the parents. I mean, a toddler meltdown is an unstoppable force. You can't control wind or where it happens. My mom, true story, once locked me out of the car before I settled down. It was very effective, but obviously Reddit has complained about this in the past. One poster replied to a similar incident saying, I would seriously pay extra to go on adult only flights. At least it was in Canada. So you know, everyone was polite about it. And now a word from our sponsor, Rubric Toby, why are you wearing black? Because I'm in mourning. Cyber security as we know it is dead. Bit dramatic, but the truth is the old model was built on protection, safety nets, recovery plans, systems designed to withstand the last era and maintain the status quo. The AI era demands confidence that you can secure and accelerate your business operations. So nothing stops your momentum. Rubric can give you that confidence. Their platform helps you keep going by securing your data, controlling your AI and protecting your identity built as one architecture, not stitched together after the fact. To learn more about how Rubric rewrote the industry rulebook head to rubric.com slash mb. That's our UBR I K dot com slash mb. This just in Americans don't like being mass surveilled. This summer opposition to flock cameras sprouting up across the country has reached a fever pitch, maybe even surpassing the outrage directed against data centers. In July, more than 20 local jurisdictions cancelled their deals with flock or made plans to the highest amount for a single month on record. In response to public backlash, Los Angeles hit pause on 138 pole-mounted security cameras operated by flock. In other communities, flock cameras have been vandalized and officials have put bags over them instead of renewing their contracts. So what is flock and why is it so controversial? It's a company worth $8.4 billion that leases cameras to homeowners associations, businesses, and most importantly law enforcement in order to prevent crime and track down perpetrators. These cameras run an automatic license plate recognition system that IDs cars passing by and stores the information in a database powered by artificial intelligence. Flock has been super popular with local towns and cities because it's seen as an effective tool to help catch criminals. Currently, 40 percent of all law enforcement departments in the U.S. 7000 of them deploy flock cameras. But for many regular Americans, the cons outweigh the benefits. They warned that flock is essentially creating a dragnet that could be abused by the government to track and target political opponents or be abused by rogue law enforcement members. Toby, I just did this yesterday. If you want to spark a debate in the group chat, you got to bring up flock. Let's dive into both sides and see what the group chat is talking about. The case for flock lies in public safety. Flock argues that it's a very effective crime fighting tool. There's a 2023 study from flock that says it was involved in preventing roughly 700,000 at crimes per year. That's approximately 10 percent of all reported U.S. crimes. A more recent study bumped that number up to one million cases last year. They said that they solved 10,000 missing person searches. But again, the strongest evidence is coming from flock itself. So take that with a grain of salt. But cities have shown that it is helping a Boulder, Colorado is a good example. They claimed a 34.5 percent drop in motor vehicle after they installed 31 cameras. So that is kind of the case for flock is that if you have a lot of surveillance technology that can track license plates and create this net of where a vehicle has been or is going, that makes it a lot easier to apprehend these criminals. That is going to be what you're going to hear from people who defend flock. And that is exactly why there's been such opposition to flock as well because the fact that these cameras are so ubiquitous, there are 120,000 of them across the country creates what people call a dragon or a mosaic of surveillance where they're creating the infrastructure for a government to track you. And they say that well, maybe the intentions are good to prevent crime. The abuses could be so much greater to civil liberties. They point to perhaps ice working with flock. Like flock is denied it works with ice. But critics say it could easily get around that. And then there's just abuses by police officers of law enforcement who have access to this technology can track whoever they want. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm said they counted 30 cases where officers have used flock cameras to guess what stock romantic interest. So they say that there there's too many pitfalls. There's too many possibilities of these cameras, maybe possibly also violating the fourth amendment and just being illegal. So they're mounting a grassroots and a legal opposition that's been actually fascinating to watch. It is also fascinating how bipartisan this is because it's liberals, it's conservative, it's libertarians that are all kind of blending together. Republican commissioner Josh Young described a coalition against flock cameras as we had work boots and Subaru's in our parking lot. And they were united in their position against flock cameras. One of the biggest and most outspoken voices against flock is Tucker Carlson actually. He's really taken the mantle there and pushed it into conservative politics. He calls it the largest mass surveillance operation in history part of becoming in he's horrified about it. So it is a wide swath of Americans who feel uncomfortable with this, which is why you're seeing groups called deflock pop up and are literally either vandalizing cameras or going through the proper channels to get them taken down. Yeah, deflock is very interesting. So it's this app that is a crowdsourced map of flock cameras. It's been downloaded more than 350,000 times. It is super popular. The CEO of flock does call this a terroristic organization, which he later walked back and said I didn't actually mean that. But it is certainly a grassroots opposition that's showing up at your local town and community. It's putting pressure on local law enforcement, towns and cities who have been using flock. And we saw a lot of them cancel their contracts in July. Flux response is that actually this is a vocal minority for every one contract that's canceled. We get another seven that sign up for flock because it is such a useful crime, crime fighting tool. It's probably ends up in the courts, to be honest. The ACLU has sued as bunch of lawsuits ongoing about whether this does violate the fourth amendment. Right now courts have mostly sided with Fox saying not yet because they're not creating this mosaic yet. But once you do create them mosaic, that's where there's the potential for courts to step in and say, okay, maybe we need to regulate this or crack down because right now flock is everywhere, but it is not winning the PR war. Up next, last week, you heard how rivers in Europe are drying up. Now, it's our turn to have a water crisis. Lake Meade, the largest reservoir in the United States, has recorded its lowest water level since it was first created in the 30s with the construction of the Hoover Dam. As of Sunday, the water was 1,040 feet above sea level lower than the previous record set in 2022. It's a culmination of a slow moving emergency that threatens water access to 40 million people across seven states in the southwest, who rely on the reservoir not only for drinking water, but to power households irrigate farms and keep factory lights on. Lake Meade, located on the Arizona Nevada border, is fed by the Colorado River, but years of overuse drought and extremely hot temperatures have depleted its reserves. And the same goes for its sister reservoir, Lake Powell, which is also losing its water. Last month, researchers at the University of Colorado found that combined, Lake Meade and Powell contain less water than at any point in their history. So, how does it sound? We don't know, but it's getting testy. The seven states picking up the Colorado River basin have been locked in intense negotiations on splitting up the remaining water, but they haven't come to an agreement, and in the absence of a deal, the federal government is planning to step in and announce drastic cuts in drawing water from Lake Meade. Toby, you can draw a direct line from the water levels in Lake Meade to the ability for people to live in the southwest, and it's looking increasingly grim. Yeah, Lake Meade supplies water to 20 to 25 million people, and that's just the actual drinking water. There's a lot more things that water is used for like agriculture, like actually powering the dam itself, the Hoover Dam. If Lake Meade falls another five feet, some Hoover Dam turbines would have to shut down the critical number here is 1,035 feet. If it falls below that, then you do have a hydro power threshold that cannot be overcome the Hoover Dam powers electricity to serve roughly 1.3 million people. So, again, it's not just about if you can.
water your lawn or if you can take a shower, it's about if your home will literally have a power. And that's why the shrinking containment of Lake Mead is just such a scary thing right now. - So if you went to Colorado to ski this winter, you notice that there wasn't a lot of snow. And really, snowpack is one of the main reasons why we're seeing such low water levels at Lake Mead last winter. As many people know, the Colorado River Basin had the worst snowpack on record. And that's just not the lifeblood of the economy in Colorado in the winter. It also has huge impacts downstream literally in summer because if you don't have snowpack in the winter then that stuff is not melting and it's not filtering through the Colorado River into Lake Mead. So the big problem is snow. And actually I was in Colorado last weekend on the literal Colorado River Rafting. And we had to look at the water levels because they've been low. There's just been a huge drought all over the course of the past few weeks. And we had to make sure that the water levels were enough because there's just no snow melting from the tops of these mountains. - I mentioned that the scary number was 1,035 feet. The real scary number is actually 900 feet. That is a catastrophic scenario beyond imagination. But that's when it becomes like Mead becomes known as a dead pool. The water level is so low that the reservoir or that the water can no longer flow downstream which really does threaten everything from farmland all the way to the water supplies of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, this supply is basically all of the Southwest. So keep an eye on that number because each inch and each foot it drops since billions of gallons of water that are slowly getting drawn down. I thought a good way to think about Mead and a Powell. This came from a professor at Arizona State. She's at the center for water policy. She described the two reservoirs as the region's savings account and they have been drawing down that savings account for years. It's the same thing that happens with your bank account. If you don't replenish the water from working, if you don't replenish the water from the snow pack, then you do not have it to withdraw from in the future. It doesn't just magically replenish itself. Moving on, Mark Zuckerberg is under a lot of pressure right now. Not only is his old frenemy Eduardo Saverin lining up a move to own part of Liverpool, but Meta's foray into AI has been shakier than the rest of the big tech. So yesterday, the Meta CEO sat down and wrote a long manifesto laying out his vision for how Meta will approach AI while also pushing back against some of the increasingly glooming predictions coming from the industry. The main takeaway is that Zuck is beating the open source drum again. He was an early proponent of releasing the models his company created to the world for everyone to tinker with, but after falling behind and thropic in open AI, Zuck went back to a close approach to get his own house in order. Now that the model's meta is pumping out our more competitive, Zuck is back to his original views that AI should be widely distributed and not controlled by a handful of companies. He also took a different tone from the doom and gloom approach often adopted by Anthropic CEO Dario Amade. Zuck thinks that everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. To reach that goal though, Zuck acknowledges that we're going to need a lot of pretty unpopular data centers and use the letter to announce a $1 billion fund to invest in communities near those data centers. The bigger play here is positioning. As the AI backlash grows, Zuck is betting Meta can become the industry's optimist and hopes to convince everyone along the way that abundance is actually the safer path. Neil, this thing also had an abundance of words 6,500 of them. What did you take away other than Zuck yearns to be an English major? My thoughts immediately turned to not what was in the essay, but why he wrote it in the first place. Because Mark Zuckerberg, busy guy, not sure he's going to spend some time writing 6,500 words unless he thinks he'll make a big impact or there was a calculated strategy behind it. Obviously, I don't think he wrote it all himself. But I think Zuck thinks there's an opening here for an AI optimistic message because you have Dario Amadev and Thropic out here saying, look, we think AI is going to wipe out 50% of all white collar jobs. And Sim Alman is also of open AI has also promoted a more doomer, at least in the past, a more doomer view of what AI will happen. And Zuck thinks there's an opening here for Meta to step in and say, actually, we want to empower you with super intelligence tools to make your life easier. And the subcontext of this is that Meta is not winning the AI race. It is behind. It doesn't have the most powerful model. So he thinks there's an opening here for to promote a more optimistic version. And he said in his essay, I don't understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. And that is a complete sub-tweet of Anthropic and Open AI, which Meta is currently behind. But it thinks with this new vision, it could perhaps leap ahead. Yeah, he's pushing back against the fears. His argument is that humanity has always feared these transformational technologies. They always fear that it would destroy jobs or society, but he believes that ultimately humans always overcome that. But he does talk a lot about who controls AI and who should be responsible for it. He actually wants government oversight still. That's been a big sticking point in the AI industry is that these companies train these models. They go to release them to the public and the government goes, "Wait, actually, we want to review it for 30 days." And he says that is absolutely unacceptable when you have China pumping out open source models. Every single day, AI progress is measured in days now, not months or years. And so he's advocating for the government to be involved earlier within the training itself. And then they can check in at intermittently later than delaying a model after it's released. So that's one big thing. He also doesn't want Mark Zuckerberg making the final call when it comes to the AI models that Meta is putting out. He wants the board to have more authority over AI. He says, "I do not think it is in my Meta or the world's best interest for me or anyone else to be the sole decision maker on how super intelligence is deployed." Again, probably a sub-tweet of Dario Amade in Sam Altman who are running a more closed operation. But yeah, you can read between the lines and everything he says and also see how it benefits Meta on the other side. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends right after this. There's two rules to becoming a new financial center in America. One, you need to create a welcoming climate to financial firms and their employees. And two, you need a funny moniker that sounds like Wall Street. Texas has nailed both growing a new financial district with the nickname Yall Street, a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. You're just as likely to encounter a Patagonia vest as a cow hide one in Dallas these days. But it's not just the smell of barbecue that is pulling the suits down south. Lower taxes, laxer regulations, and aggressive courting from state political leaders has led to a finance-bro explosion. Finance jobs in Dallas have grown 23% since 2020, outpacing New York at just 6% growth. As of June, finance insurance and real estate employed 317,000 people in Dallas, which accounted for, 10% of the total employment in the city. Residents need only look out the window to see the roots of finance spreading. Goldman Sachs is building a 800,000 square foot Dallas campus schedule to open in 2028. Bank of America is setting up shop in a 30-story office tower right next door. But no one has embraced the Lonesaw state quite like JP Morgan, which now employs more people in Texas than in any other state, including New York. Texas even has its own stock exchange these days, the Texas Stock Exchange, which began training this summer in an attempt to create an alternative to the traditional New York establishment. Everything from the politics to the policy have been set up to attract this industry. Ella Langley is the only one who's choosing Texas. - If you've read Liars Poker, which is the 1989 book from Michael Lewis about Solomon Brothers and Wall Street, then you know the phrase equities and Dallas. And it wasn't a term of endearment. It was a pejorative phrase where if you work for Solomon Brothers, and then they told you to go work in Dallas, then that was seen as they're putting you in the penalty box in timeout because you would just have a back office role. So back then, just a few decades ago, working in equities in Dallas, working in the stock market or on quote unquote, Wall Street or Yall Street in Dallas was seen as a demotion, but now it's seen as, you know what, maybe it's a pretty good way of life. You have a huge mansion in the Northern Dallas suburbs and you've got to, maybe your work life balance is a little bit better. You have all these tax advantages that Dallas and Texas brings to you. So not only are finance firms expanding there, there is a growing sense that you can actually work in finance and be the top dog also in Texas. - Why is Texas so dang attractive to finance? Outside of, you know, the taxes and everything of a one, it's growing. It has a growing appopulation. That means that there's a larger hiring pool there and you have also a larger potential client base. That's one thing. And then two, there's migration, corporate migration that is, Texas now has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state, including more than California, more than New York. Tesla is kind of the big one and I guess SpaceX at this point set down their roots. Elon Musk is a fan of just the lighter touch regulation that Texas affords you. And if all the major companies and all the major executives are moving to Texas, then the financial institutions that serve them have, you know, an incentive to put important bankers
is right nearby them as well. So it's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle right there. The more that companies are interested in Texas, the more that financial firms are going to follow them. - And if US Texas officials about why this is happening, they'll say it's not a coincidence. We actually put our thumb on the scale in. We made laws and a marketing campaign that actually changed things and it made our state more attractive. Yerney Johnson, who's the Dallas mayor, it basically called Dallas a sanctuary city from socialism and wanted to juxtapose Texas's way of life and its laws from New York and California, California is perhaps imposing a tax on billionaires and Zaron Mamdani, the mayor of New York hasn't been exactly friendly to business. They also say, look, we actually pass laws through the state legislature that makes it a more appealing destination. We shield executives and directors from shareholder litigation, which they definitely don't do in Delaware, which is where many companies are incorporated. We have this capital markets package that went through the Texas State House, that bans taxes on securities transactions. So if you don't, if you're an executive, you don't want to be sued by shareholders, you don't want to pay as many taxes as you do in other states, come on down the water's fine. - I like Yal Street, I think it works. It's a little on the nose, but it just kind of plays and they're actually thinking of making the symbol of Yal Street, the charging bowl, but with Alasso around his neck, which, you know what, pretty good branding right there. Let's switch to the finish with some final headlines. In video, it announced a partnership with all of Wall and Yal Street yesterday, including Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo, KKR, Brookfield, and Goldman Sachs to assemble a $500 billion funding packets for AI infrastructure. Half a trillion dollars is roughly the size of Thailand's entire annual economy, which would make this one of Wall Street's most ambitious financing efforts ever. The idea is to turn AI compute into something investors can borrow against. This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class in video CEO, Jensen Huang, told CNBC. The AI buildout is getting so expensive that even the richest tech companies are feeling the strain rather than forcing them to fund every GPU purchase from their own balance sheets, Nvidia wants institutional capital to come in and pick up more of the tab. Neil, for Nvidia, this means one very useful thing, making it easier for customers to keep buying in video chips. - Some have pointed out that Nvidia is trying to turn its chips into airplanes because if you're an airline, you never pay cash for an airplane. It's not like I go up to you and say, "Hey, can I have 10, 7, 37s bowing?" There's this whole complex financial system where investors buy planes and airlines lease them from them, the ticket revenue services, the debt, and then there's enough of a resale proposition that protects the lender. I think the biggest question people have about this deal is the resale value of chips, the depreciation, because you can have a plane that lasts 30, 40, 50 years. Maybe we don't want to fly on them, but they do exist. The chips do depreciate rather quickly, so they might lose their resale value, which kind of breaks the whole thing, but Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang thinks that's not a big deal. Fans of the Buffalo Bills have dealt with a lot of misery over the years, but this latest offense is certainly the most expensive. When the team opened up its $2.2 billion stadium defense, many found that their seats were obstructed by a railing. Over the weekend, nearly 52,000 fans piled in to the new high-mark stadium for the team's practice, and while much of the venues designed did earn high marks, hundreds in the Bills Mafia reported they were blocked out of seeing the entire field because of railings. Images of the obstructed views went viral on social media, with many noting that not only did the stadium cost $2.2 billion, but was also funded with $850 million of taxpayer money. The Bills seemed to read the room. In a statement, they said we are currently addressing internal and external feedback regarding the facility's operation following the first event. We'll utilize the next six weeks to refine any details as we prepare for the home opener on Thursday, September 17th. - First of all, football fans are crazy 'cause what do you mean 50,000 fans showed up to see a practice in a stadium, not a game? Secondly, Bills are definitely in damage control mode at this point. They said they had only heard from less than 1% of season ticket holders. And I also do actually ascribe to the fact that they said that the shots that you were seeing on social media were not indicative of the seats themselves because you can angle your phone in a way that does make something seem more obstructed than it is. That being said, I have been to a sporting event with an obstructed view at actually Everton's old stadium. I was like my first Premier League game ever. I sit down, I am just behind a pole. But eventually you just kind of get used to it. It's kind of reminded me of the halo in a Formula One. You know, there's a big thing in front of drivers like how can you see? Eventually you kind of forget it's there. This might be me coping a little bit and Bills stadium personnel feel free to steal this. But I really do think that eventually you can get around any obstructions that are in your way. - I think when you're taking 850 million extra tax payers, you don't want to crane your neck to see it. Clearly you've never been to a baseball game at Fenway Park because I grew up going to those and there are so many seats where you're either facing the outfield or you're behind a pole. So it's not exactly the mo-- But that was built in 1912 for far less than $2.2 billion. It's not the best experience. I would like to see the stadium. But what is cool about the Bills stadium and people liked a lot of other parts of it was that they built a folding table into this stadium. Did you see this because Bills Mafia is known for their tailgate jumping on top of stadiums and break of tables and breaking them in half. So they put it literally into the stadium and I think that's a great use of taxpayer money. Finally, this is just too good. A $580 million power cable project linking the UK and Ireland has been forced to change its route after complaints. It would have desecrated the grave of Dobby, the house health in Harry Potter. Speaking on a podcast, Simon Ludlum, the CEO of the Energy Company behind the project, said that he received hundreds of calls from distraught Harry Potter fans. Once they learned, the cable was planned to sit underneath the beach in Wales where Dobby is buried. Ludlum remarked, apparently we're going to go straight through Dobby's grave. I said, "Dobby, who's Dobby?" For those familiar with Dobby, you know, he was laid to rest on freshwater West Beach in Pembrokeshire Wales in the Deathly Hallows Part One. Well, he is not actually there in real life. Fans have left a memorial of stones on the beach, which they did not want disturbed by electrical wiring. The CEO said after hearing the Dobby fans out, they switched the route. He noted a lot of people were very happy about that and the project is now going ahead and Dobby's happy. I cannot believe they moved this thing. Not only did they move this thing to avoid Dobby's grave, but Ludlum said that actually we went quite close to some real Bronx age remains, but we avoided Dobby's grave. So they literally opted to get closer to human remains than to Dobby's fictional remains that don't even exist. - You watched your tongue. - Just a very funny story overall. And I'm glad, I guess everyone is happy because more people care about Dobby than whatever happened in the Bronx age. - Maybe some data center opposition people should take a page from this and just say, "Hey, you're about to build this data center on some hallowed land because my favorite fictional character is buried there." Kind of work for this particular power project in the UK could work here too. That is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Tuesday. There are just a few spots left for our trivia night tonight in Manhattan. So if you don't have plans after work, wanna meet us and have an awesome time for free answering some questions, head to the link in the show notes to reserve your place. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Mill iron is our supervising producer. Raymond Loot is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham. And our associate producer is Olivia Leak. Technical direction by Nina Miller. Hera makeup is a free elf. Devon Emory is our president and our shows are production of "Borning Group." - Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. (upbeat music)
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