NBA Hands Historic Punishment to LA Clippers & AI Food Slop is Disgusting Everyone

Good morning, Bruce Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman and I'm Toby Howell. Today 5,000 American sailors hit Thailand after 286 days at sea. Well, it could go wrong. Then how a podcaster brought down the richest owner in sports. It's Thursday, September 3rd. Let's ride! How's this for a little inspirational start to your morning? On Monday, Dale Sanders submitted Mount Kataden in the Northern wilderness of Maine to become the oldest person ever to through hike the Appalachian Trail. He is 91 years old, reclaiming a record he first broke in 2017 when he was a sprightly 82. How do you do it with a carefully thought out plan that involved a rotating team of volunteers to help him on his journey? But most of all, it was a mindset. His biggest takeaway from the trail is when it hurts, keep going, it'll probably go away. And it certainly did hurt by his count. Sanders said he fell 71 times while hiking, including one, just 200 yards from the finish line in one fall in Vermont. He was banged up, but he said he didn't rub the blood off. I just kept hiking. Pretty epic. Here's a fun fact too. Sanders was born in Kentucky in 1935. That is two years before the Appalachian Trail was even completed. Guys, legend holds a bunch of other age-related records, including the oldest person to paddle the entire length of the Mississippi River. It's got me thinking what I want to do on my 91st birthday. And now a word from our sponsor, American Express. Neil, I am all go. You're what? I am up the wall. I'm nonstop. I am busy, which is why I appreciate the American Express Business Platinum Card. It's built for businesses that deserve more. With a suite of statement credits on purchases with brands like Dell, Chatchy BT Business, Adobe and more, plus the ability to add up to 99 employee cards, Business Platinum helps you do more business. So while you're focused on running a business that doesn't slow down, the American Express Business Platinum Card is built to back you every step of the way. One more at go.mx/morningbrew and find out your welcome offer, which could be as high as 300,000 membership rewards points. That's go.mx/morningbrew offers and benefit terms apply. The NBA has been sitting on a bomb for months now, and it's finally detonated. Steve Balmer, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has been suspended for one year as part of a rash of penalties levied against his team for circumventing salary cap rules to pay superstar Kauai Leonard in an investigation dating back to 2019. The league's investigation found that Balmer and other Clipper execs knowingly helped Kauai secure some extra cast through endorsement deals, which don't count against a team salary cap and violates league rules. As a penalty, the NBA took away five first round draft picks from the Clippers and suspended the organization's president of business and basketball operations in addition to finding Balmer $30 million. Leonard was also fined $700,000 by the league and released a statement saying he entered into his contract with, quote, "no knowledge of any intent on anyone's part to circumvent the salary cap." He also said, "I accept full responsibility for lapses and judgment by people within my inner circle." The Clippers released their own statement saying they vehemently reject the league's decision. For the past year, we cooperated fully in good faith and will now fight just as hard to demonstrate our innocence. Strong words that don't have as much bite as they might hope, given there is no formal appeal or arbitration process in this case. In fact, according to NBA reporter Shams Shiranya, LA's only outlet to fight the punishment is in court. The old Balmer's tenure as CEO of Microsoft was famously shaky. His Clippers tenure is shaping up to be even worse. Do you remember how this whole thing started? I do. It is as crazy a story as the actual quiet Leonard story. The only reason we know about all of this is a podcaster. Pablo Torre, a sports journalist, formerly with ESPN, almost exactly one year ago, published several episodes on his own podcast about this strange relationship that he found between Leonard and his eco-bank aspiration that showed them paying him tens of millions of dollars, $28 million, but Leonard doing essentially no work for them and the Clippers and Balmer allegedly orchestrated it at all. These were wild allegations sent shockwaves across the NBA. What was a solo podcaster doing taking on Steve Balmer, one of the richest guys on the planet? Along the way, Torre faced a lot of pushback for more mainstream outlets who were like, "This guy is in over his head. He doesn't know what he's doing," but clearly the NBA took him seriously, launched an investigation just a few days after he went public with his findings. Ultimately, Torre won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting and yesterday received the ultimate vindication with this penalty. Reminds me the sports version of serial that true crime podcaster on 2014 when the host investigation caused a real life re-evaluation of a murder case in Baltimore. It certainly assigned that this podcaster, creator, journalist hybrid is now a major force in media. Mark Cuban quoted the breaking news from Sean Sirana saying congrats Pablo. That was a general sentiment is that even though the report was a bombshell and the penalties were huge, everyone was like, "Dang, this is a really validates everything Pablo Torre was doing." One thing that complicates even this penalty is the fact that Kauai got traded recently. He's no longer technically on the Clippers roster. They sent him back to Toronto and that trade was kind of put in limbo as this investigation was cleared. Kauai is not suspended. His only penalty is basically a slap on the wrist of $700,000. So the status of that deal remains unclear as of Wednesday. It is just a wild story, something that's happened in the past, not to such a large degree, but the big person that you have to know within this case as well. It's Kauai Leonard's uncle/business associate. His name is Dennis Robertson. He was kind of floating a similar sort of arrangement to multiple teams back when Kauai was a free agent. He went to the Los Angeles Lakers. He went to the Toronto Raptors. He was looking for ownership stakes in the team. That's how big of a free agent Kauai Leonard was. Eventually, it landed in Los Angeles with these kind of sweetheart deals on the side, but it looks like he was searching for this far and wide within the league itself. And if you're a Clippers fan, I mean, don't be because this basically cripples them for the next better or so decade to not have five first round draft picks. The Clippers next first round draft pick is in 2034, which means you're probably going to be drafting someone in 2015 and is currently 10 or 11 years old. The Clippers, because of this, I mean, there was the big penalty, but the fact that they're being very much hamstrung from a business and basketball operations perspective. I can't even imagine being a season ticket salesman right now and try to have to call up and get people into that into it, don't. So the people started to add up the total tally that the Clippers actually paid for Kauai Leonard. They are initially sent five first round draft picks just to get them in the first place, including two picks, wops. If you add in the five that they now have been penalized, it is 10 first round draft picks, two picks, wops and Shay Gilgis Alexander, who is a MVP in the league. So shaping up to be the worst trade, not in the NBA history, but the worst trade in sports history, moving on after 286 days without a port stop. The sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln stepped on dry land yesterday. It's not just any land. The nearly 5,000 American service members have docked in Pataya, Thailand, a beach resort known for its nightlife and sex tourism. It's a much needed break. Nine months ago, the aircraft carrier left San Diego and what was expected to be a six month assignment in the Pacific. But when the war in Iran broke out, it was diverted to the Gulf, where it came under frequent missile and drone attacks. Reports emerged recently that the crew was suffering mental stress. Food was running low and toilets were broken, so you can imagine their relief upon getting off that ship. And they couldn't be disembarking in a more notorious spot. The American military has been coming to Pataya for a half century, with hundreds of thousands of US troops arriving there during the Vietnam War for some R&R, sparking a booming local economy of go-go bars, red light districts and sex workers. While that CDNES has since been somewhat replaced by a more family-friendly vibe, that hasn't stopped social media users from cracking plenty of jokes about what sailors might get up to after nine months at sea with unspent wages. US officials are urging them to be on their best behavior, banning them from parasailing jet skiing and consuming marijuana, while reminding them that prostitution is technically illegal in Thailand. Toby, you can smirk all you want, but it's a fascinating story about how one port stop can change the fortunes of a place. Yeah, local businesses are pumped. They see it as this rare chance to generate a lot of revenue and one fell swoop. One gem salesman who owns a gen shop, you're kind of like the main walking street. Describe the visit as potentially the city's best hope. He actually installed a sign welcoming the American sailors and offering them a special discount. So that's kind of the vibe around the more, you know, legitimate business owners in the city. It's like, come one, come all. You have money to spend. We're welcoming you here, especially given like the history of the US military at this one particular port. Yeah, Patai has tried to shed that reputation by getting more family at tourists. And there's a lot of Russians that go there starting in the 90s. They have a cartoon network theme park. They have a lot of families coming from the Middle East as well. So they try to do this rebrand, but still estimates say. that there are about anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 sex workers still in the city. These American service members, they will be spending estimates say that they're going to spend $3 million in the local economy in this particular journey. It's the largest number of US military personnel coming straight from a war zone to Bataya since the fall of Saigon in 1975. It just must feel so good to get off that ship though. We were looking at pictures this morning. The ship itself looks like it's been out at sea for 250 plus days. It's kind of rusty in places. Imagine just the relief of being on dry land, and we did watch videos of them getting off the bus, the local transportation, all smiles. Everyone is pumped to be on two feet on dry land. Moving on, AI Slop oozes out of all aspects of our life these days. A work email with a few too many MDashes here, an Instagram influencer with an extra thumb there. Slop is unavoidable and often offensive to the senses. But no vintage of Slop is quite as offensive or quite as horrifying as food Slop. The latest form of AI generated imagery showing up in bodegas and restaurants around the country. To save some dough on graphic design, owners have started to turn to AI to advertise their food on flyers and menus. It's led to some love crafty and culinary abominations like a strip scampie where the strip look more like many life preservers than edible crustaceans or perhaps I could interest you in the barbecue joint whose AI menus showed its protein options covered and what appears to be bugs. Despite being cheaper than a graphic designer, the results can be revolting. The New Yorker notes that most of the establishments that rely on the sort of triggering imagery tend to be deli's bodegas or food carts where the quality of the product is secondary to the speed and price at which you can get it at. That hasn't stopped customers from voting with their wallets and sometimes spray paint cans. One San Francisco coffee shop was vandalized by graffiti in reaction to using AI images on their menu. Screens in the middle are graphic designers who have seen their wages dry up as businesses choose the good enough outputs of AI over a more pricey human touch. Neil, I think food Slop is one of the more revolting and triggering forms of AI Slop out there today. It certainly is. When you see these images at the bodeg and I've seen them everywhere or deli's and you just get this pit in your stomach and many have waxed poetic about why that is. Why is food Slop so different than the other AI Slop that we encounter? Here are some interpretations. The New Yorker says a nauseating nightmarish quality defines AI's insectified interpretation of human cuisine as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon. These images violate science, they mock life itself. National Geographic also took this more biological approach. We see it as avoiding a potential threat. The imperfections in a human replica as a sign we might be these foods might be physically ill or a potential source of contagious illness and that triggers our discussed response. And then finally a lot of people have just said it's kind of basically trepophobia which is this aversion or physical revulsion to the site of clustered small holes, bumps or repetitive patterns which a lot of these AI food images depict. I feel nauseous already. One other reason why is that humans are uniquely attuned to things that look almost normal but slightly wrong. This is a very well known phenomenon called uncanny value when it comes to human looking things. We can tell when something kind of looks like a human but isn't quite there. Something applies to a hamburger. If it's a cartoon we understand that's a cartoon. If it's just close enough that's when our brains send off warning signals. Have you seen the polar express? Yeah, exactly, very uncanny value right there because you're right. It does maybe signal something like an illness, a disease. And the problem with AI generated imagery is that technically they almost go into too much detail. Like they know that a chibata bread should have holes in it and yet they make the holes too perfect. Too many of them and that is what makes your brain just go ill, gross, disgusting. That's why this feels so different when compared to all the reforms of slop. What are you going to understand why it's happening? These are restaurant businesses that are operating on very thin margins. Why do this whole photo shoot spend a lot of money when you can just have AI take the picture for you? It's not like the stock images for bodegas and delis were great beforehand. Like they all look disgusting but now they look amazing. And I'm like, please just give me that back because I know it's not real. It looks super fake but that's better to whatever this alternative is. And all these articles did point out that food photography wasn't real to begin with. Like every time you see mashed potatoes, it's probably ice cream. Every time you see syrup on pancakes, it's probably motor oil. But at least they were trying to make it look good. Now it just looks bad is fake and didn't require a human at all, which is why you're seeing this visceral reaction to it. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Niels numbers right after this. Niels, do you know where AI actually creates an advantage when it comes to deals? Finding coupons? Wrong kind of deals. Data site and FD longitude recently heard from 1000 deal makers to understand how AI changes the way deal makers do deals. More than half of respondents say human only decision making is no longer enough for complex deals. Our competitive edge is knowing where AI can have the biggest impact and where human judgment still makes the difference. Go to datasite.com/brew for a full breakdown of the results that's datasite.com/brew. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the company's 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 eligible 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/investorchoice 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. Every year during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, e-commerce stores welcome a wave of first-time buyers. And how do you keep those first-timers coming back all year long? Woo commerce brought together marketing leaders from Clavio, Sephora, and fanatics answer that question. In a recent webinar, they discuss how to build loyal customer relationships during the upcoming holiday season. They also share why trust matters more than discounts, how first-party data, power's meaningful interactions, and more. You can watch the on-demand webinar and download the free modern customer marketing playbook at WooCommerce.com/loyalty. It's time for Niels Numbers, the segment where I share three stats in the week's news that will make your knees weak, arm sweaty. For my first number, would you consider yourself working class odds are yes. In a new survey from Pew Research, about 60% of American adults identify themselves as working class. That's a big uptake from the 54% who described themselves as working class just two years ago. The self-labelled working class cuts across the socio-political spectrum from lower earning workers to high-income families. About half of college grads consider themselves working class as do half of families who earn at least $155,000 per year. Both the majority of Republicans and Democrats say they're working class, but more Republicans or Republican leaders, 67% do when compared to 55% of Democrats. The results may reflect the merciness of the term itself, working class, which doesn't really have a clear definition. Pew says the term generally describes people without college degrees who earn below a certain income and who work in service or blue collar positions. Clearly, many Americans take a more expansive view when asked about how he defines the term self-described working class champion New York City mayors are on Mamdani said those who are working to try and afford the basic dignities of life and aren't able to do so. I think that is also working class. Part of the issue is that inflation has been eating into wage growth recently in the last few months that number has kind of switched. Even though over the last two years, wages have been beating inflation from Q1, 2024 through Q1, 2026, median weekly earnings grew 8.4%, while prices only rose 5.5%. So technically, people should be feeling better off. That is not the case at all. Clearly across every swath of income, people are feeling strained and it goes to show that working class has become more about your identity and the fact that you have to work at all rather than the financial hardship of your everyday life. But those numbers were staggering, especially the fact that more people in the upper income, 155,000 plus identify or a very similar amount, identify as working class as the lower income under $51,000. It might be time just to retire the term. Clearly, people don't know everything and nothing. Yes. For my next number, Spaniards aren't doing that late night dinner like they used to. A culture known for regularly hitting restaurants after 10 pm, the Spanish appear to be changing their habits to eat at a more normal time. As the New York Times reports, half of the dinner bookings on a popular Spanish reservation platform are for before 9 pm compared to just 27% a decade ago. On another platform, the fork, 10 pm reservations have been cut in half and 8 pm bookings have nearly tripled since 2019. Overall, the typical dinner out in Spain today begins an hour earlier than before the pandemic. And that might be a key factor behind the shift. On October 2020, Spain imposed a nationwide 11-1-1-1. P.M. Curfew, forcing the population to shift up their dinners, at the same time the custom of Tardéo, or hanging out and eating in the late afternoon, saw a revival, and those behaviors appear to have stuck around six years later. Other reasons cited for the decline of the late-night dinner, an increase in foreign tourism and foreigners in general, coming to Spain, as well as the rise of wellness trends that promote better sleeping. In 2013, a government commission found that Spaniards got about an hour less sleep than the European average. Still, the 9 p.m. dinner, the 10 p.m. dinner, aren't going anywhere, and a lot of it is just due to the social pressure around eating it too early. Some people told New York Times, like, "I want to suggest an earlier dinner." Like, it makes me feel better. I can get more rest. I can feel better in the morning, and yet they feel so much anxiety around even suggesting that to their group of friends, and yes, Isabel Kenoe, a 23-year-old who talked to the time, said, "It's just not the Spanish spirit." She described an early dinner as "unthinkable," and said, "If someone invited her to dinner at 6/30, she would tell the person to wait, like, just have a muffin," she said. So it is very much social pressure, as well. It's fascinating, because I thought this was around for hundreds of years. This developed through the culture for a long time, but no, it's actually very recent, this particular tradition. It dates back to World War II, when Francisco Franco, the dictator, then pushed clocks on the Spanish mainland an hour ahead to align with Nazi Germany. So now it's official time runs much later than its geographic position. Like, right now, Madrid is west of London, but, right, it's an hour later than London. So the sun sets later, and that might push people to eat dinner later. So very interesting that it's just a pretty new phenomenon, as of World War II. Looks like maybe it's breaking the pandemic, broke it a little bit, but they're still going to eat their late dinners because, apparently, it's taboo to do so. All right, for my final number, during their epic NFL dynasty from 2001 to 2019, the New England Patriots made 9.4% more of their field goals than their opponents, while no other team even hit 4%. How is that possible? A new discovery reveals head coach Bill Belichek was even more diabolical than we thought, giving the Patriots a major home field advantage when it came to kicking field goals. According to Ryan Paganetti, a former strategy and analytics coach in the NFL, the Patriots in the 2010s would execute a supremely clever trick when their opponents were kicking field goals at Gillette Stadium, their home field. As the opposing team lined up to take the kick, the jumbo screen behind the uprights would show a mirror view of the kick live, with the screen's yellow goalposts slightly offset from the actual ones, disorienting the kicker even more when the wind was hailing the flags on the video would blow in the opposite direction. Paganetti said he found dozens of examples of the Patriots using this tactic against their opponents, but in 52 Patriots field goal attempts he reviewed, they of course didn't deploy it at all. During that era, Belichek has been accused of scurrying the league's rules to gain any sliver of an advantage, but this field goal tactic appears to be 100% kosher and resulted in a significant edge at home. It's just so unlike the Patriots trying to find an edge like this, I just never expected this ball club would push the envelope. Sounds like a jealous. There's lots of home field advantages across a home field advantage tricks across the NFL. One of my favorites is the Miami Dolphin Stadium is built. So the roof casts a shadow on their sideline, but leaves opponents in the sun. The opposing sideline can get up to 30 degrees hotter, plus the dolphins usually wear white at home while the opposing team has to wear a darker color. So they're just baking in the Florida sun. I did do some research though to see which teams have the biggest home field advantage you might think Denver, because it's mild high. But this analysis looked at penalty advantage dating back to 2018. So offensive pre snap and offensive holding calls home in a way penalty per game average splits. Can you tell me the number one home field advantage in the NFL, Neil? I first team that came to mind, I don't know why the chiefs it was close. They were actually in the top five, but Pittsburgh terrible towels number one by far actually they have the number one advantage in generating pre snap and holding penalties on visiting teams. Plus the biggest split between home and away. So those terrible towels in Pittsburgh, they give you an advantage. This is the shame they switched from what Hines field to a creature statement like we don't yeah, we don't even know how to pronounce that. Okay, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Uber announced its biggest layoff since the pandemic yesterday, cutting about 3,300 positions equivalent to 10% of its entire workforce. The focus, according to CEO Dara Cazrasahi, is to reduce management layers and become quote, simpler and faster to trim layers. The layoffs will result in the number of managers at Uber falling by 20%. Though managers could be assigned to individual contributor roles. And in another blow to remote work, Uber is requiring more employees to come back to the office and allowing just 1% to work from home going forward. Wall Street gave a polite golf clap to the news sending shares up almost 2%. The interesting part of this announcement did not mention AI at all in the memo, which is much different than what the rest of big tech has been doing. The AI equivalent for Uber though is self driving. They are making this gigantic push into autonomous vehicles. They want to spend $10 billion on Robotaxi partnerships in the coming year. So even though they didn't specifically mention the letters A and I, it kind of, you just go down the road, they want to free up some of that cash and make the organization more nimble so they can attack this Robotaxi problem with full force. Finally, like Neil who shows up to flights 3 hours early, Southwest is looking to get into airport lounges. In a major break from its bare bones model, the carrier is building out its own network of airport lounges set to open late next year. The first four on the list are Austin, Baltimore, Honolulu and Nashville and will sit on top of Chase's Sapphire Reserve lounges network with a Southwest branded chase card also granting you access. Southwest has come a long way from the model that made it famous. In the last year, it has eliminated open seating in favor of assigned seats, started charging customers to check bags and is now in the premium lounge game. It's promising big things to literally after observing others in the industry, CEO Bob Jordan said their main takeaway was to make their lounges big enough. Sure enough, Baltimore and Nashville will cover some 30,000 square feet. Neil, you're my lounge guy. It's a big shift for Southwest. Is it the right one? You don't have to expose me. It's like that. You love a lounge. I do. But this is, of course, the right decision. It's what you need to do to make money in the airline industry these days. It's basically a ploy to get people to sign up for this upcoming co-branded credit card with Chase. These days, if you're an airline, you're basically what they call a credit card company with airplanes. The Delta partnership with AMEX brought it $8 billion of revenue last year. That's about 12% of its total revenue. This is one of the best stats ever on the planet. Spending on Delta's co-branded AMEX cards accounts for almost 1% of the entire GDP of the United States. So if you're Southwest, you don't have this premium credit card currently. You absolutely need to launch one. They're doing one with Chase and they're building these network of lounges. It is quite funny to think about Southwest lounges, but they're coming in order to learn people to get this credit card so they can actually start making money again. And they're trying to go tippy-top in terms of quality. They're signature bars. They're chef-inspired males. They're trying to make it on par with Chase's existing sapphire lounges. There's only one way to find out if they pull it off. Come 2027 when they open. Let's go for a little lounge tour. I just wish they had it when I was flying out of BWI during my Maryland days every single couple of times a year. So a little too late Southwest. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Thursday to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else. Send an email to Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com or DM us on Instagram @NBDailyShow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lut is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake, technical direction by Nina Miller. Her makeup is taking a siesta. Devon Emory is our president and our show's a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow. [BLANK_AUDIO]