Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 🥊 DirecTV vs. Disney
• 🤖 The AI chatbot wars enter a new phase
• 🤔 Can death be reversed?

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~5.09-minute read (1,35 words).

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"Success is built sequentially. It's one thing at a time."

–Gary W. Keller (b.1957)

Millions of sports fans were left saying “hello darkness, my old friend” on Sunday, after Disney unexpectedly pulled all of its stations – which include ESPN, ABC, and live TV on Hulu – from DirecTV in the middle of the US Open.

The move happened during the fourth round of the tennis Grand Slam, and just ten minutes before the start of the highly anticipated college-football matchup between #13 LSU and #23 USC. With 11.3 million subscribers, DirecTV is the third-largest TV provider in the US, according to the Leichtman Research Group, a media analysis firm.

Post-midnight Cinderella isn’t the only one without a carriage. The blackout occurred due to the companies’ inability to reach a mutual carriage agreement. The big sticking points: Disney wants to charge DirecTV higher fees to carry its higher-demand channels (too high fees, per DirecTV), while DirecTV wants more flexibility in how it can package and market Disney’s channels to consumers.

• Fun fact: Carriage agreements are usually scheduled to expire ahead of major events (like the start of the NFL season), so as to give an incentive for both sides to reach a deal.

💭 Déjà vu: This is the second year in a row Disney has pulled programming over Labor Day weekend; the industry giant did the same thing last year with Spectrum, claiming the company had devalued their material. This dispute resulted in an eleven-day blackout of all Disney channels on the platform, with an agreement reached just hours before the first Monday Night Football game of the season.

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🇮🇱 Israeli citizens launched a general protest and strike calling for a government hostage-release deal with Hamas. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of Israelis gathered across the country to protest after the IDF recovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages killed in Gaza this weekend. Strikers shut down thousands of organizations, including schools, universities, and government ministries. Many protesters say Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t done enough to secure a ceasefire deal, which was expected to lead to the release of three of the hostages killed.

🇫🇷🚢 The world’s largest sailing cargo ship is about to complete its maiden transatlantic voyage. The Anemos, a 265-foot cargo ship that set sail from France in early August, is scheduled to deliver 1,100 tons of cognac and champagne to New York today. The Anemos is part of a planned fleet of eight sailing ships that each produce a tenth of the carbon of an equivalent diesel ship, thanks to wind power.

🇧🇷 Brazil banned X for local users. In April, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X CEO Elon Musk to block dozens of Brazilian accounts that allegedly spread fake news. In response, Musk refused the order and closed X’s offices in Brazil. Last week, a Court Justice ordered X to either appoint a legal representative in Brazil or face a ban, which took effect on Saturday after X didn’t respond. Anyone found accessing X in Brazil – which has 22+ million users – could face fines of up to ~$9,000 per day.

Tech giants are increasingly of the opinion that AI, similar to the people it mimics, needs more of a human community. After spending a collective tens of billions of dollars building and upgrading AI chatbots, companies are rushing to put these products in front of as many users as possible.

Several top players in the AI industry recently shared new data showing significant growth in their respective chatbots’ userbases:

• On Thursday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT has 200 million active monthly users, more than twice the number it had last November. Additionally, the company said 92% of all Fortune 500 companies are currently using its services.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday said the company’s Meta AI assistant has 400+ million monthly active users and 185 million weekly users, after first launching across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp less than five months ago.
• Microsoft recently revealed overall usage of its Copilot AI assistant grew by 150% over the first seven months of this year, including a 60+% increase in business customers.

This growth has cost some moolah: Tech companies have spent $196 million so far this year – or half of their entire national TV commercial budget – on TV commercials that were about AI in some way, per data from iSpot.

📺👀 Looking ahead… Your daily whistling sessions could soon include a catchy new AI-related jingle. Many leading AI firms, including Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce, recently launched new TV commercial campaigns touting their respective chatbot services.

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"If I have a heart attack and die tomorrow, why should I stay dead? That’s not necessary anymore."

In the future, the only thing certain in life may be taxes. Sam Parnia, associate professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, believes death could one day join BlackBerry as a relic of the past.

As detailed in his new book, Lucid Dying, Parnia cites studies from the last five years that suggest human brains remain salvageable for days after death.

• In 2019, researchers at Yale University published a study detailing how decapitated pig brains had been revived up to 14 hours post-death (research the science world labeled “Frankenstein-style”).
• A 2022 study (also out of Yale) used technology to restore blood circulation and other cellular functions in pigs a full hour after their deaths.

Parnia’s death-defying methods (for now): Using extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machines (ECMOs), which take on the function of the heart and lungs when the body is unable to do so. Another method: Providing patients with a cocktail of drugs similar to those proven to preserve pig organs following CPR. Parnia believes his team is the only one of the world providing human patients with these drugs; in 2012, resuscitation rates following cardiac arrests at his hospital in New York were 33% (compared to a US average of 16%).

👀 Looking ahead… A few people have been revived from clinical death in the past (example). But Parnia doesn’t believe these need to be one-offs: “I have little doubt that, in the future, people who would be declared dead today will be routinely brought back to life.”

• ☝️ RMS Titanic, Inc., the company that owns salvage rights to the Titanic’s wreckage, recently made its first unmanned dive to the site in 14 years; the nearly month-long expedition resulted in 2+ million high-resolution photos of the sunken ship.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Slumber

• 💰 US markets rose in August (S&P: +2.3%; Dow: +1.8%; Nasdaq: +0.7%); the S&P notched its fourth-straight winning month.
• 🏨 ~10,000 hotel workers went on strike this weekend; more are expected to join in the coming days; affected hotels include those operated by Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott. | ⚖️ HP is continuing legal proceedings in the UK that seek up to $4 billion in damages from UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch's estate.
• 📈 Costco’s membership-price hikes took effect on Sunday.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏈 College football: #1 Georgia defeated #14 Clemson; #7 Notre Dame beat #20 Texas A&M; and #23 USC upset #13 LSU; see other highlights from the weekend (link). | 🎾 US Open: The men’s and women’s quarterfinal matchups were finalized after yesterday’s action; betting favorites Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic were upset early on the men’s side, while Coco Gauff was upset on the women’s side. (Dive deeper) | 🏀 Angel Reese, rookie forward for the Chicago Sky, broke the WNBA record for most rebounds in a season (with eight games remaining).
• 🙏 NHL star Johnny Gaudreau, 31, and his younger brother were killed by a suspected drunk driver while riding bicycles on Friday; Gaudreau, aka “Johnny Hockey,” was a fan favorite who played 10 seasons for the Flames and Blue Jackets.
• 🌭 Joey Chestnut defeated Takeru Kobayashi in Netflix‘s Unfinished Beef hot-dog eating contest; Chestnut broke his own world record by eating 83 hot dogs and buns, while Kobayashi set a new personal best with 66.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Asutra

• 💉🦠 People who took semaglutide, the active ingredient in weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, were 33% less likely to die from Covid in a series of new studies; semaglutide users could still contract the virus, but suffered fewer adverse effects.
• 🧑‍🚀 NASA said the “strange noises” astronaut Butch Wilmore said he noticed coming from Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft appear to have come from a speaker feedback loop.
• 🔋 An energy startup plans to build the world's biggest battery in Lincoln, Maine; it aims to store 130 million times more energy than a high-end laptop; the project received $147 million in grants from the Department of Energy.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🎓📲 The University of Texas at San Antonio is offering a new major for aspiring influencers called Digital Media Influence.
• 🇻🇪✈️ The Justice Department seized Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro’s airplane – described as the country’s equivalent to Air Force One – after determining its acquisition violated US sanctions.
• 🏢🚨 The city of Aurora, Colorado, is seeking an emergency court order to shut down apartment buildings the city’s mayor says have been overrun by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

CLICKBAIT

• 🤔🥩 What happens to meat as it's cooked?

🏘️ Stat of the Day: If 1960s America had a theme song, it would be “I Like to Move It.” But as the decades progressed, Americans have slowly changed their tune. The proportion of US residents who move each year has fallen from ~20% in the 1960s to 8.7% as of 2022, the lowest figure in recorded history, according to data from the Brookings Institution. Analysts attribute this trend to a combination of demographic, social, and economic factors, including an aging US population, housing prices that outpaced inflation, and the rise of dual-income households.

🤔 Did You Know? Humans are living closer to when Tyrannosaurus rex last walked the earth (a ~65 million year-gap) than the T. Rex compared to when Stegosaurus last walked the earth (~79 million years).

📰 Worth a Read: Young People Are Taking Over the Workplace, and That’s a Problem for Bosses → (WSJ)

On Friday, we covered how California’s State Assembly overwhelmingly approved a bill establishing first-in-the-nation safety regulations for large artificial intelligence companies, in an effort that’s received mixed reactions from major industry players.

❓ Our question to you: Do you agree with California’s proposed regulation that would require companies to thoroughly test their advanced AI models for safety prior to public release?

• 👍 Yes: 66%
• 👎 No: 15%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 19%

Click here to read the most thoughtful longform responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 3,715 votes and 396 longform responses.

Here are five stats from this past week that made our team go “whoa.” Hopefully you will, too.

• 🏛️🗳️ 20% of Americans say they wanted to be president as a child – but only 8% say they want to be president as an adult. (Read more)
• 🏫 Nearly a third of US K-12 students were behind grade-level for the school year ending in June (32%), per a new survey by the National Center for Education Statistics. (Read more)
• 💼 The share of Americans who disapprove of labor unions currently stands at 23% – the lowest level since September 1967, per Gallup data. (Read more)
• 🇺🇸 Around 90% of US children born in 1940 were ultimately better off than their parents; that figure stands at ~50% for those born in 1980, per economists from MIT and Harvard. (Read more)
• 🙏🏈 At least seven middle and high school football players across the US have died in August, either at practices, games, or after a practice. (Read more)

Twelve-year-old Daya recently attended a camp at the MacPhee Centre for Creative Learning in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. She wrote her grandma a postcard while away, and was heartbroken when she realized soon after sending it that she forgot a stamp. 

A quick-thinking counselor attached the above note👆 to the mailbox where Daya mailed her postcard; it asked the mailperson if they could try and find the missing letter and attach a stamp for the youngster. 

• The counselor and camper were pleasantly surprised when there was a note written back the next day from an anonymous postal worker: 
• "Found it and stamped it! Have a great day!" it read. Daya's letter arrived at her grandma's house a few days later. ❤️ 

+Note: This story first appeared in Positive DONUT, a weekly newsletter delivering awe (and awww) inspiring stories you won't hear in the news. Sign up for free here.

🏈 Argue: Ranking this year’s top-10 college football tailgating scenes.

🦉 Adore: This burrowing owl becoming a moist owlette.

🥇Paralympics: The hype of the Olympics has run its course, and the Paralympics are in the middle of all their events; however, is the current approach the right way to ensure everyone’s able to compete with the same attention?

📧 Read: TLDR is a great newsletter supplement to The DONUT, with quick-read stories on startups, tech, and programming.*

📨📢 Noisy inbox: It’s easy to lose control and even miss your favs (🍩)…. but not anymore! The Meco app is built for reading so you can enjoy your newsletters and keep your inbox tidy.*

*A message from our partners.

Guess the definitions of the following Greek/Latin root words.

1. Ab
2. Capit
3. Condi
4. Dulc
5. Fun

Working your way towards a sweet tumbler? Airpods? The $100 gift card? Good news – prizes stack, so when you’re emailed to claim your prizes, you don’t have to wait. Just reply to this email for more info or with any questions🍩✌️.

1. Ab = Away from (e.g., abstain)
2. Capit = Head (capital, capitol)
3. Condi = Season (condiment)
4. Dulc = Sweet (dulcet)
5. Fun = Do (function)