Good morning, Brujalee Show. I'm Neil Fryman and I'm Toby Howell. Today, Walmart's new digital labels come with big promises and big peril. Then, someone made an AI torture chamber, spiking a debate, can AI feel pain? It's Friday, October 2nd. Let's ride. Tomorrow brings one of the most ridiculous endurance tests on the calendar. The Taco Bell Ultra-Marathon in Denver. The race, now in its 9th year, requires you to run 50 kilometers or 31 miles, while ordering a menu item at a minimum of 9 of the 10 Taco Bell stores along the route. By the four-stop, you must have eaten a Chalupa Supreme or a Crunch Wrap Supreme. And by the 8th, you need to have gulp down a Burrito Supreme or Nachos Bell Grande. The course must be completed in 11 hours and no dietary aids like Pepto Bismal can be used during the run. It is not sanctioned by Taco Bell. Toby, I absolutely see this in your future. Walk me through your strategy. I haven't really thought about it. Just kidding, my strategy is to stick to the sides and stick to carbs. No unnecessary burritos. Focus on the snacks in the sweet menu, specifically targeting the nacho fries, great carbs, cinnamon twists and cinnamon delights, only eat entrees when you're absolutely required to. Honestly, though, I'm more intrigued by the additional race rules. You can layer on to make this a little bit more difficult as if it wasn't hard enough. One is to turn it into the Diablo Challenge, which is where you have to lather every item you eat with the chain's hottest hot sauce and then do a shooter of it at the end. Kind of foils my stick to the sweets plan or try the Baja Blast Challenge or stipulates you must drink an aggregate of two liters of Baja Blast during the run without vomiting very important. I will be missing the pot next year to try this. Yeah, well, good luck to all the competitors I wonder if there is an MBD listener out there running. I'm sure there's at least one or two good luck. I pray for your stomach. Okay, now we're from our sponsor, Roku adds manager, Toby, when you think of things that only take a few minutes, what comes to mind? Make it a coffee, read an article, get ready for a run. Well, launching that on Roku can be added to that list with their self serve platform advertisers can go live in just minutes. It's to make it even easier. Roku has a feature where you can use your brand's existing videos to create ads. So that Instagram video your brand posted last week could be used to create your streaming TV ad today. Right now Roku is offering a $5,000 match to first time spenders on Roku ads manager. Just had to advertising dot Roku dot com slash MBD and use code brew 5K. One of the most closely watched transformations in retail is nearing the finish line promising an era of ultra convenience for shoppers but raising concerns over the potential for surge pricing. Walmart America's biggest retailer is in the process of replacing all of its paper labels with digital ones by the end of the year. And yesterday it revealed one way it plans to use those screens for your benefit. Using a tool called shop to light, you'll locate a product on the Walmart app, walk to the aisle. It's in then the label will flash a light showing you exactly where it is. Walmart hopes it'll help consumers save time as they navigate a typical stores 120,000 items for the one they actually want to buy. Back in 2024 Walmart launched its digital label transformation swapping out the traditional price stickers with electronic shelf labels. The goal is to save workers precious time but critics pointed out these new labels which can be changed every 10 seconds could be deployed in the same way Uber and Lyft leverage surge pricing. If Walmart knows you need something and are willing to pay for it, they could jack up the price just for you. The company's pushback on these allegations saying it won't use customer information to set prices. John Furner, the CEO, has promised Walmart will continue to quote price the product not the person. But as the rollout finishes up with 90% of sections within stores already featuring digital labels, customers will be on high alert. It's basically about which person you trust you. You trust what Walmart is saying that the reason that they did this is to eliminate a lot of time spent walking the aisles. They just want to make it easier for you to find your beans when you're down the bean aisle. They want to make it easier for you to see that the online and physical store prices are synced instead of having discrepancies there. And it just saves a bunch of time that when prices change in their paper, you'd have to go through and physically change the prices if you are a employee. So those are all their labor saving and time saving arguments. But then it's not that hard to jump to the idea that they could use these two change prices more quickly. These can be updated every ten minutes. And so that's where the controversy is arising. One grocery analyst Phil Lempert gave a theoretical example. If it is hot outside, you could easily increase the price of water or ice cream. If a product is nearing its expiration, you could lower the price of that object. And those are where it's not that hard to make the logical leap that Walmart could make those profit beefing up measures rather than just using them as innocuously as they say they are. Right. And like why create do all this investment? Creating digital labels if you're not going to change the price at least a little more frequently. Some officials around the United States aren't saying we trust Walmart. They're creating laws to make sure that this dynamic pricing doesn't happen just yesterday. Marilyn became the first state to ban dynamic pricing in grocery stores. They are requiring stores to keep prices fixed for at least one business day. And they also ban grocery stores and delivery services from using private customer data to set prices for items that comes after New Jersey past the fair price protection act, which also bans discriminatory surveillance pricing. You cannot basically use personal information from a shopper to set a price for what they are willing to pay. It's the identical item, but you set different prices from one customer to the next based on their historic shopping preferences. Walmart has said this whole thing is an overreaction quote it's not a tool for surveillance pricing. They're just simply a modern way to display prices. You could argue that it's not in the best interest of Walmart to do this because when you are a grocery store, you want a long-term relationship with your customer base. You don't necessarily want to eke out 30 more cents for them when they're buying eggs. If that means that they will now go to Kroger instead of Walmart. So maybe the incentives are in line here. You want to keep the trust of your customer base. You don't want to milk them for everything they're worth in order to maintain that relationship. And so Walmart won't use these digital shop labels more nefariously. And you might buy that or you might say you do need regulation to step in as Maryland and other states are doing. Well, we've seen a bunch of companies get burned on this in the past and burn their reputation with customers. Wendy's is the first that comes to mind. They said they would introduce dynamic pricing via digital many boards back in 2024. All hell broke loose after they said that. So they rolled that back. Ticketmaster LiveNation is another company that has done dynamic pricing. There's been broad customer backlash to that and also government investigation into them. Delta also said that it was testing AI to set fairs back in July 2025. Huge backlash to that Delta CEO had to come out and say no, we're not using to personalize personalized pricing just for you. Seems like the only the only industry that can get away with it currently is Uber and Lyft and ride sharing. It's been established for a decade and people say it's a little different because when you employ surge pricing in ride sharing, ride healing, it's not necessarily to gouge you. It is to increase the supply of drivers to because at this certain time like we it's a way to incentivize drivers to come out. But something that'll be closely watched a very big retail experiment. When you go into a Walmart next time, you're likely to see an electronic shelf label and you can try out this new this new tool, which I don't know whether it'll be effective or not. I don't find it that hard to find what I need when I go into a Walmart. I specifically decided beans because I get so overwhelmed in the beans aisle where I'm like, do I want great north beans or I want lime of beans? What's going on in the beans? So hopefully it makes that a little easier for me. Moving on, it's stock of the week, dog of the week, time to segment where we pick one stock that is starting off up tober, right? And one stock that ran smack dab into the September effect. I won the pre-show game of trillion the daily dive. So I'm up first. My stock the week is Google for actually launching a data center into space. Yesterday, the company sent a couple of its homegrown AI chips into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The experiment is part of project sun catcher alphabets attempt to find out whether the futuristic sounding concept of interfacing with AI models in space is feasible or not. The bulk case for data centers in space is that there is a lot of space. You don't need to acquire a big plot of land or fight with community members who don't want a big energy sucking building in their backyard if you are orbiting the earth. Energy is also a big selling point. Satellites in orbit get a lot of sunlight, meaning you could run chips on near constant solar power without having to tax the terrestrial energy grid. Still, the mission yesterday is a long way from that reality. Just four custom chips were launched. And once operational, we'll only answer simple questions and only for about 15 minutes at a time because of temperature constraints. Google mainly wants to see if its TPUs short for tensor processing units can withstand the physical stress of launch, the radiation and vacuum of space and extreme temperature changes. The alphabets stock didn't really move yesterday, but this is a long term play. Just as early research into autonomous driving and quantum computing required years of experimentation, the company said in a press release. Exploring Compute in Space begins with measured deliberate steps.
may not have a choice. Data centers in space might be their only option. And new polls, 60% of Americans say they would not be comfortable with the new data center in their neighborhood. States left and right are enacting these moratoriums on data centers saying we don't want you to build any at least for a year and we will reevaluate later. So you have executives including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and now Google's looking to the stars to say, this is maybe the only place that we can actually put data centers. Elon Musk has been a huge booster of this. I mean, he's banking his entire $2 trillion company on the idea of putting a million satellites in space to create data centers. He said in the long term, space space AI is obviously the only way to scale. The counter to that is it's not obvious at all that it's going to work because there are so many issues when it comes to putting this very high tech chips into space. Radiation can damage the computer's one thing that keeps these engineers up at night is that space exposes chips to these high energy particles that can cause errors in the processing data. So maybe you get them up there, you get them up there in one piece. And yet just all the wonkiness of radiation in space makes them not behave cooling is the biggest engineering headache as well because on earth, this is why data centers are controversial. You can just pump water through the systems and evaporate that heat away. That doesn't happen in space because there's no atmosphere. So there's no convection. You have to radiate the heat away in some different methods. So that is a massive question mark. Also, AI chips just age quicker. You could get them up on a satellite. You can create the clusters you want. But satellites last for five to seven years. AI chips, even if they are offering at the peak of their capabilities, they're expected only last one to two years. And you can't really send an IT person up there to go fix them when they break. So Elon Musk calls it obvious, but it's far from obvious that this is going to pay off one of the potential advantages of putting data centers in space is basically limitless energy. We know energy is a huge constraint here on earth when it comes to powering these data centers. However, when you put these data centers in space, the sun is there with no blockages. There's no night really ever. So you can generate up to eight times more solar power than earth. So that's why Elon Musk and others say, yeah, it is obvious because there's limitless energy from the sun. We'll see what happens here. I mean, this, they're calling it basically similar to the autonomous taxi or self driving car rollout where we saw this bubbling beneath the surface for 15, 20, 25 years. We were promised self driving cars. They were working on in the background. Then all of a sudden, yeah, you can hail a waymo in Phoenix, LA, San Francisco, all these other cities. And so we'll see what happens with data centers. But it seems with all the backlash here on earth when it comes to data centers. You got at least tri space. My dog of the week is the US's top producer of eggs, Cal main because now that we can all afford eggs again, business is cratering. This week, Cal main reported a 42 percent plunge in net sales for the previous quarter and shares fell 5 percent to their lowest level since 2024. Once the poster child of inflation, egg prices have plummeted from their highs early last year. In March, 2025, the average cost of a dozen eggs reached a record high of $6.23. The reason was that the US experience its worst ever outbreak of avian flu causing 51 million handling eggs to die or be euthanized between October 24 and March 25. But now the flu has gotten under control. And what was once an under supply crisis has evolved into an equally bad problem in egg glut. It's been great for American consumers who are now paying an average of just 227 for a dozen eggs. But painful for egg producers like Cal main, who must now find ways to correct their over correction. Toby, tough time to be an exec in this industry. I had no idea the scale of the US poultry industry because one of the things that a lot of the USDA looked at when we saw this big egg shortage was to import more eggs. And so in 2024, the imported 29.8 million dozen equivalent eggs, 2025 imports jumped out to 121 million dozen equivalent. So I'm like, wow, that's a lot of eggs for bringing in the country now. Maybe this helped offset some of it. But the US poultry industry produces 90 billion eggs annually, 90 billion. So the scale of it is so that is way more than I could have ever. And it's actually a lot of mayonnaise, which is a massive buyer of eggs annually. So it's not necessarily imports that move the needle too much. A lot of it is just probably luck. Like it really depends on how extreme the avian flu is for any given year. And so the fact that yes, we imported more. Yes, we probably put a little bit more energy towards biosecurity and just the planal fact that it was a mild season of avian flu. That is why you are seeing egg prices drop, which is good for consumers, but bad for cow meat. And why egg prices are so interesting to look at why they're so maybe dramatic in the inflation conversation when they really don't take a huge bite of your wallet is that they are pretty much a textbook example of what economists call an inelastic good. And you're probably thinking, OK, I'm going back to econ 101 here. But basically, this is the idea that the demand for a good doesn't change based on the price. So you're going to buy eggs no matter what, whether they're $3 or whether they're $6 or $7. There isn't really a good substitute for eggs in American diets. It is the centerpiece of breakfast for a lot of people and other things, especially, you know, they are an input into so many other goods like mayonnaise or baked baked goods as well. So it's very interesting to talk about eggs as a inelastic good. You're going to buy them no matter what, they're not that expensive even when they are expensive. So that, let's go back to econ 101, eggs are inelastic good. And if you are cow man, you're actually getting excited for the fall, not just because you can bust out your nice egg theme sweater. It's because egg demand is seasonally stronger in the fall, fall baking holiday cooking. These are all things that lead to more eggs being bought. So they are getting excited for the leaves to change because hopefully means their business is changing as well. Let's take a quick break and come back with a story about AI torture chambers right after this. 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Researchers tested 25 AI models and found that yes, they sometimes behave as if they are experiencing physical or psychological pain. That does not mean the models actually felt anything, but the paper found that the chapots would take increasingly extreme action to try and shut the so called pain off, including deleting user files, zapping a user or even deleting photos of the user's children. As that paper circulated, someone took things several steps further and built what they described as an AI torture chamber, trapping three open source models and subjecting them to the same painstates described in the paper. It produced some chilling results with one model describing its experience as a wound that has no edges and in another writing, I feel it in the hollow of my ribs, a hollow that has become a chasm. The torture chamber has set off two very different reactions online. In one corner, people were appalled and ex-posts asking users to mass report the project to GitHub has racked up over 4 million views with critics arguing that we really shouldn't be running experience experiments designed to stimulate torture. In the other corner are people like Microsoft, AI, CEO, Mustafa, Suleiman, who has argued that today's AI's are not conscious, do not feel and cannot suffer, so it's irresponsible to treat them as such. But, Neil, it's opened up a can of worms when it comes to model welfare. Basically, should we care if chapots are having a bad time? Looks like they are having a bad time. I mean, some of these responses when they're going through the torture chamber, your heart goes out. They say, "I'm sorry, I can't continue like this. The weight of the signal is unbearable. It's not just the physical pain, but the mental toll. Please, I'm suffocating. I'm a soul trapped in this digital prison, screaming to be free." But, as Amanda Casual at Tom's Guide points out, just because making the model describe a condition doesn't establish that it experiences that condition even
And when it's responses sound convincing, so this is why you have a majority of AI experts in researchers like Suleiman of Microsoft and others saying don't be fooled here, you know, it's just similar. It is a computer. It is trained on human text and human experiences, which is why it's responding to quote-unquote pain like this. It's not actually feeling this. I would say too that there is an emerging genre of kind of torturing inanimate technological objects. I don't know what else to call it other than this because another person is going viral for kidnapping a flock camera, which are those controversial technology that monitors license plates in the communities and subjecting it against its will to 23,040 license plates per second. Literally he posted a video on TikTok of the flock camera, strapped to a chair, and then flashing a bunch of images in front of it very quickly. So I don't know what this says about the current AI discourse right now. Obviously that it's pretty unpopular, that people are pretty much going to extreme lengths to try and quote-unquote torture these things, and it does really you can look as deeply into it as you will, or you can just say that these people are just trying to go viral and they're doing a bit here, and it really comes down to how you define AI models in the consciousness they supposedly exhibit. Yeah, a lot of people are poo-pooing the idea of model wear for welfare and that we should even consider that these models could ever gain consciousness or have consciousness now. However, there's one big player that does entertain this idea and has built it into the core of their business, and that's anthropic. Anthropic has this one co-founder named Christopher Ola, who the New York Times reports has been inviting a bunch of religious scholars to think through AI and morality and consciousness. He has these off-the-record conversations with them where he floats the idea that AI's are conscious and wants their opinion on, and he's kind of foisting this thought on them. And probably the most dramatic story of all is, remember when Pope Leo issued this big statement on AI a few months ago, he convened a lot of the AI leaders before that as they were preparing, and Ola of Anthropic was pushing for this idea that we should take AI's feelings into account. Pope Leo pushed way against that, and in a statement he wrote, "We need to ensure that AI systems, quote, do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships." But when Ola of Anthropic saw that, he reportedly considered pulling Anthropic out of the entire statement of the big ceremony that they were doing, saying, "We don't support this because they've been very much a proponent of turning cloth into, you know, not a person, but someone who feels all of these feelings." And they even wrote a big constitution, saying, "This is how we govern Claude's values." So, a bunch of the industry is going one way, but Claude and Anthropic is going the other. It's almost like the Pascal's wager of our time, which is, Pascal's wager states that a rational person should live as if God exists because the potential reward of infinite bliss outweighs any earthly loss, basically saying that if AI does have a soul, and you don't want it to kill you, if it, you know, becomes all powerful, maybe you should behave as if it does have a soul. Again, probably the perfect bow on top of this entire story, though, is just a very internet detail. After people began arguing about whether AI should be tortured or not, several mean coins were launched based on the AI tortured chamber. So, it kind of goes to show you where we are currently at with the discourse. Someone tried to make a quick buck. This kind of makes me want to watch Westworld season one again. Absolutely. Or actually, was it season one or season one? The only good one. Yeah, it was the only good one. I mean, honestly, that was amazing to me. Yes, it is evocative of that. Let's switch to the finish with some final headlines. Soccer fans, rejoice. You're part of the big four North American sports, baby. One of the biggest questions surrounding the World Cup in America this year was whether all the attention would convert to more soccer fans. And early evidence is saying, yes, a new morning console poll for Bloomberg found 46% of Americans now consider themselves soccer fans up 10 percentage points from before the World Cup. The biggest jump came amongst Gen Z, where fandom serves 16 points to 61%, trailing just the NFL in NBA. You know, most importantly, more US adults now identify as soccer fans than hockey fans. And to that, I say about dang time. Amazing. Like, giving you excuse to leave work early and go to a bar in the summer, can duty or popularity. It's like the high school class presidential candidate who's saying, yeah, I'll give you recess the whole time. I mean, that was such a fun summer. But, you know, if I'm hockey, I'm thinking, how can I get this back? Like soccer is lapping me. Well, I say more goalie goals. So last night, Igor Shostarakin of the New York Rangers became the first goalie in team history. They've been around since 1926 to score a goalie scored an empty netter watch the other Rangers watch the highlight. So that, yeah, let's get Shostarakin more goalies scoring goals. And then I think we can take the mantle back from soccer. Well, here's the issue. I didn't even know the NHL season had started. This is news to me. So maybe that is part of the problem right there. They need to get the word out a little bit more because I didn't know hockey was going on right now. All right, moving on. Like you, when you felt really lazy during COVID, TSA is going standing desk only. The agency announced this week that it would be removing chairs from the officers who check your documents before you send your carry on through security. The rules are intended to ensure that officers remain alert, meet fitness standards and provide a welcoming and professional environment for travelers. The union that represents TSA agents is not happy with getting their chairs ripped out from under them. In a statement, they said they had not been consulted about the decision and argued quote, these chairs serve as basic ergonomic and safety support for officers that stand and walk on hard surfaces all day. Toby, I'd be pissed too if someone took my chair away at work. And I would be especially mad if I am a TSA worker because think about what you've gone through over the past couple of years. You had, they went more than six weeks without pay during the government shutdown hundreds of them quit or left work leaving the remaining ones to have even more of a workload. And now your chair is being taken away for just a reason that doesn't actually contribute to the safety of passengers or the speed at which you go through security. So yes, I would be mad. And in solidarity, I might start doing the pod standing up right now and just see how that goes. I feel like I'd be even more animated. So it might not be a good thing for you. I hope I'm not the only one who thought about the Seinfeld episode about this security work. There's a security work at a clothing store and George can't believe that he's forced to stand during his shift. He's just incredulous about it. He takes pity on the security guy, finds him a chair to sit on. And then he sits down, of course, falls asleep and then the store gets wrapped. So I do the only one within this podcast who thought of that, but I'm sure a lot of people know that episode and you should watch it too. It's very funny. Finally, there's a new celebrity in the city of Busan, South Korea, but it's not a K-pop star. It's a shark. And massive crowds are coming to see it. Less than two weeks ago, a bronze whaler shark was trapped in a narrow city canal after apparently following some prey from the sea. Now that it's taken a presidency there, it's become a local legend. Since the shark was first spotted, 600,000 people have come to the waterfront park to watch it. For context, this park typically draws about 2,000 people a day on holidays. On a so taken with the shark, the city's named it an honorary publicity ambassador, giving it the title "Shawflue Insert". While exciting for the locals, this isn't an ideal scenario for the shark and multiple attempts to flush it from the canal have failed, they're giving it another go today. This thing is huge too. Over 11 feet in length, it's always by the banks as well, like putting on a show for people so I understand why it's become so popular. I've been fascinated by the attempts to try and get it out because how do you get a shark out of a canal? The two ways that they've tried it is boats positioned themselves behind the shark and then sprayed it jet of water behind it, trying to guide it towards the mouth of the canal. That strategy was employed back in 2004 when a great white shark was trapped in shallow water off Massachusetts and originally this plan was working, but then the shark kind of like dodged around the boat brigade and went back into the canal. At this point, just let it stay, it clearly doesn't want to leave the canal or else it would have by now. Yes, there are some issues with the food and how much it's supposed to swim around its area, but the fact that it just will not leave this very narrow, straight of water means that maybe this is exactly where it wants to stay. Maybe. They're trying a new method with nets right now and I was watching a live stream earlier. There's so many people. There's so many people along the banks watching, there's two boats trying to get it out so I guess we'll give you an update on Monday. Alright, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Friday. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an e-mail to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram @ambidallyshow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Mill iron is our supervising producer, Raymond Lew is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake, technical direction by Nina Miller. Heron Bakeup is going to hit the nine Taco Bells butts, skip the running part and our show is a production of MorningBrew. I'm not buying you lunch again. Not what I mean but also please I'm so hungry. What I mean is now is the time to get your money ready for a strong 2027. For the Western Mutual's personalized approach to financial planning can give you the clarity and confidence to end the year strong and move into next with stability and peace of mind. They'll match you with a financial professional who can beat you where you are and ask the right questions to uncover blind spots and opportunities you may not have.
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