Morning Brew Daily - Biden's Kyiv Trip, Social media pay-to-play, Cocaine Bear hits theaters

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

On this episode of Morning Brew Daily, Neal and Toby discuss Putins's nuclear announcement and President Biden’s surprise trip to Kyiv. They also dive into Home Depot spending over $1 billion to raise wages for workers and why Meta is joining Twitter in paid verification. Also what is going on with the ice coverage in the Great Lakes? That and Cocaine Bear hits theaters this Friday. Listen Here: https://www.mbdailyshow.com/ Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brewed Daily show. I am Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Welcome to the first episode. I'm so excited. We have a great show ahead, but let's introduce ourselves a little bit first. All right. I'll go first.

I am Neil Freyman. I'm the managing editor at Morning Brew, which means I have been overseeing the newsletter for every day. I think it's been almost every day for the past, almost six years now. It is wild. And I know so many people out there who have loved and read the Morning Brew newsletter are probably surprised to hear your voice for the first time. so I'm excited. Here it is. They say it's a good podcast voice.

All right. We'll find out. A face for podcasting and a voice for podcasting. All right. And who are you, Toby? And I'm Toby Howell. I was actually hired to the brew by Neil a few years ago. Huge mistake.

Huge mistake. Look at where we ended up. Originally as a newsletter writer, then I kind of took over the Twitter account and ran that for a while. Then I actually left the brew, but now I'm back to this podcast with my good buddy Neil. Yes, we're super happy you back. So wanted to get into a little bit of what people can expect with this show. And it's going to be five days a week on wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. And we're just going to go a little bit deeper and beyond the headlines that you see in the daily newsletter. We're going to offer some analysis and, you know, we did a bunch of research. So we'll hopefully have some cool facts and figures and a little bit more context to help you understand the day's news. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it is Neil and I read a lot of news. We enjoy talking about the news. So hopefully we provide a little more context and color to kind of your daily commute.

Yeah. So final note is that Toby and I, especially Toby, are really competitive, like sub three-hour marathon competitive. So we're going to work our butts off to make sure that this is a really good show for you. And we'd love to hear all of your feedback. I think that's enough introduction, right? I'm excited.

Let's do this thing. Let's ride. We have good theme music, too. Yeah, I enjoy it. It's rocking. Okay, let's get into the first story, which is a really daring mission by President Biden into Ukraine yesterday. We all woke up Monday morning on President's Day with headlines splashing that President Biden had visited Kiev and Ukraine, which was really crazy. It was historic.

It was the first time that a U.S. president had entered a war zone that was not actively controlled by the U.S. military. Yeah. I mean, some of us maybe traveled home for the long weekend. And President Biden did one of the most daring entries into a foreign war zone ever. So we're not the same. We are not the same. This was really badass. Did you read up on the details of how they pulled this off?

Because presidents don't just travel places. Because I remember Obama came to Maryland when I was there. And the campus shut down. Like for days, they put snipers on the roofs. So this, you know, presidents have insane security detail, obviously. And they have to shut down the entire area that they traveled to. So this was quite an operation. And this was a huge deal for trains, too, because we all know President Biden is a big train guy,

but I actually saw a thread on Twitter written by Alexander Camishon, who is kind of runs the rail network in Ukraine. And this was like their Super Bowl because he traveled. Look at this thing. Biden was in Ukraine for 24 hours. 20 of those hours he was on a train for those hours he was walking around. So the train guy had to be on his stuff because... Totally. So he posted this picture on Twitter, which is a very badass, like, AI rendering of a Ukrainian train with the...

It looks like Mission Impossible Fawn almost, and it says, Rail Force One. It is so good. And I cannot wait for the movie. There is definitely going to be a movie because people love train dramas. The Pelham Station, I think, is one. So I'm excited for Hollywood to get its hands on this one. Some of the details about his trip are really interesting because it was super secretive. People in the White House didn't even know.

Yeah. So they just told a few journalists and a medical team that Biden was leaving really early in the morning. The journalists were actually, there was two of them, and they were told to come to the White House and all the details for the trip under the subject line. What was it? The golf tournament? Yes. It was something about a golf tournament. Yeah.

Oh, it was arrival instructions for the golf tourney. That was the email subject line they got to invite them to the White House. Honestly, I would have been a little disappointed. I know, we're big golfing. No way. We were going to the White House to play golf with Joe. So he flew on, not on the 747. He flew on a modified 757 to Germany and then to Poland under nightfall.

It was very surreptitious. Yeah. And what's your Air Force One fact? My Air Force One fact. Everyone should read the Air Force One Wikipedia. is an incredible document. But Air Force One isn't necessarily just a single plane, that's 747. It is any aircraft of the U.S. Air Force that the President travels on.

See, I never knew that. Super cool. So prop plane, get on Joe Biden, Air Force One. Let's do it. So there is a lot of greater significance to Biden's visit to Ukraine. It comes on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the war, which started on February 24th, 22, and he wanted to show unity with Ukraine, and a bunch of people around the world hailed it as a very important moment for the president to visit Kiev.

This morning, Putin responded in his dastardly way, and he basically revoked Russia's participation in the last remaining nuclear arms deal. So he really ratcheted up his rhetoric this morning. Yeah, I mean, it's tit for tat. We see this all the time. I don't know enough. about nuclear international policy to know if this is truly a big deal, but it feels like a little bit of an overreaction, but I guess he had to react in some way.

I mean, he invaded Ukraine in the first place completely unprovoked, so this is kind of part for the course for him. One final fact about this visit is that the sirens, there's an air raid mobile app in Ukraine, and it went off during Biden's visit. Oh, boy. And do you know who voices that app? No. Mark Hamel from...

Star Wars? Who played Luke Skywalker on Star Wars voices that app and tells you when it's okay to come out again. Okay. That is a fantastic fact to drop at the bar this week. There's been a lot of facts. Yeah. Okay. Moving a little bit closer to home, this morning, some of the nation's biggest retailers reported earnings and give us a little more insight into how they're doing and how the American consumer is faring in this era of super high inflation. Those retailers were Home Depot and Walmart. It wasn't great. Yeah. It wasn't great. This earning season has not been good so far, and Walmart and Home Depot

definitely continued that. Home Depot missed Wall Street's revenue expectations for the first time since 2019, and Walmart offered a pretty disappointing forecast for the year ahead. There is some light at the end of the tunnel, though, right? Because buried within the not-as-great earnings was Home Depot says that it plans to spend $1 billion to give all their hourly workers a wage, or hourly wage workers are raised. Yeah, I'll get there eventually. So it is interesting. We've talked about how this is maybe like a rich session

where you see all these workers at big tech, Google, meta, getting laid off. But then you see the actual retail workers getting raises, which shows that these workers are still in really high demand. It's still a high labor market. Especially in hospitality and retail. If you want to work at a restaurant or at Home Depot or Walmart, like there are a zillion jobs for you. The unemployment rate has dipped to a historic low of 3.5%. And these companies are still hiring.

I mean, Chipotle, they're hiring. It's burrito season. It's coming up. Burrito season is coming up. We all can't wait for burrito season. Chipotle is hiring 15,000 people ahead of what it expects to be busy times. And Walmart also gave a raise to a bunch of its employees last month as well. by the way i do want to say that home depot workers deserve every penny they get they are the most

helpful retail retail so helpful they're awesome i want to be friends with i want to like impress them i think it's like you're in your dad face already exactly we're like i just want them to validate whatever construction progress there are so many of them too home home depot has 475000 employees they're one of the largest private employers in the country yeah so it is good to see that they are bumping up the the the wage a little bit um i want to take us to a little bit more social media, my domain. Oh my God, expert. Yes. So META is rolling out their new paid verification service for Instagram and Facebook. It's going to cost $11.99 a month for the web version and $4.99 a month on iOS. And my, I cannot believe this is happening again,

but Mark Zuckerberg is just copying, pacing another feature from another social network. After all the hubbub around Twitter verification, meta comes in, charges more, what do you think about this move out of meta? Well, I think it's showing how social media is changing before our eyes. Social media used to be a place where you check up on your high school friends and stay in touch with people. Now it is purely an entertainment medium.

And I think with verification, you're going to get professional content creators paying for this because one of the biggest perks is that you're going to get increased visibility and reach. And if you don't pay up, you are going to be buried in the feed with all the rest of us plebs. And so you're going to get people like you who want to be content creators on the web. You're going to pay because you're going to get to see you. More people will see you. So you think that it's almost a Trojan horse because on the surface they're saying this is going to protect your account.

But you really think that it's saying pay or will bury you? Kind of. Yeah. I honestly think that it's a Trojan horse to get even more data from us. So basically now Meta is saying not only are we going to mine your data, you're going to pay us for us to mine your data. Because in order to meet the requirements, you have to submit a government-issued ID. Right. Twitter doesn't do that.

Right. Which is why you get Eli Lilly being impersonated and losing billions of dollars in market cap. And we'll touch on Twitter a little bit too as well. Elon just rolled out another feature basically saying that if you don't pay for Twitter Blue, which is their subscription service, you actually cannot use two-factor authentication anymore, specifically SMS two-factor authentication, which, again, it feels so arbitrary, but apparently it's actually costing Twitter a ton of money because SMS authentication is the easiest to spoof and the easiest to scam. It seems like it's not effective anyway. Getting that text message on your phone to put in a code. We all get that. But I loved it.

It was great. That was how I two-factor authenticated. So we're in the authentication wars right now between social media and we're caught in the middle. Yeah, but social media is just becoming a pay-to-play thing these days. It's also important in the context of meta's declining ad revenue. They rely on ad revenue for their entire business right now. And that is not good during these times of economic. uncertainty. So it's looking for another revenue stream and it thinks that direct subscriptions

will be that. It doesn't look like it's going to be a lot of money. So there was a note that written by an analyst yesterday who projected that meta would make upwards of $3 billion at the top end would make $3 billion in revenue from people paying up. And its annual revenue is $117 billion. So you can do the math. I think this is a way to court creators and professional content creators who are just willing to pay, stick around, entertain us on Instagram Reels, and we'll stay on the platform longer. Yeah.

Look at it, you're a little bit of social media expert yourself. I'm a social media consumer, not a producer. There you go. Okay, let's move on to the sports world a little bit. Manchester United, which is my favorite team actually. Really? Yeah, it's up for sale. The two main bidders are the Katari royal family and Britain's richest man.

Or one dude from the family? Yeah. Well, it's kind of a conglomerate. Okay. Yeah. So Qatari or Jim Ratcliffe, who is the richest man in England, who is the owner of this petrochemical giant, Ineos. Activists hedge fund Elliott Management has also said that they'd pledge some money to supporting whichever bid kind of wants to help. And this is interesting.

So the price tag right now is expected to be right in the $6 billion U.S. dollar range. As anything to do with the Katari Roe family, we have to talk about sports washing a little bit. Do you think this is another kind of instance of someone with a lessened seller of human rights record kind of trying to, again, sports wash it and just ingratiate themselves in like this beloved club? I think that ship has sailed. You think? I mean, most, I mean, a lot of the biggest richest clubs in Europe are owned by gold. families from PSG to Man City. And I think Manchester United supporters don't really care at this point as long as their team,

well you can obviously speak a little better than me. They hate the, as long as their team gets back to its former glory, they hate the current ownership group, which are the American Glazer family. And they're looking for their white knight to come in and help save them. What I think is also interesting too is that sports washing always comes up when it is, like Qatari or Saudi Arabia but Ineos who Jim Ratcliffe who has the other

serious bid they're this massive petrochemical company and they're doing their own form of sports washing like they produce 22.8 million tons of petrochemicals each year and I feel like the narrative is not like it like Jim is this nice English billionaire like he'd be great but I think they're engaging in something similar but yeah that's my check on it Our last note on this is that another team that's up for sale on state side, another football team,

the Washington Commanders, has reportedly not received that many bids because Dan Snyder, the owner, wants $7 billion, which would, you know, top maybe a Manu. Which would you rather own Manu or an NFL football team? Manu supporters scare the crap out of me. I would never want to own an English football club because those people, if you don't do a good job, they'll riot on you. Yeah, so I would say take the commanders and restore it back to Washington football team. All right. I want to see it. All right.

Moving on to another story. Junk fees are coming down a little bit, and we'll get into what that means. But the headline news is that United is making it easier for parents and their kids under 12 to sit together. Apparently, I haven't done this in a while. I've been 12 for a while and I don't have kids, so I didn't really know the context of this. But apparently, it's really hard to find seats next to your family. on a plane. And if you want to do it, you oftentimes have to pay an extra fee. So this comes on the heels of the State of the Union

address where President Biden kind of railed against these junk fees that you see in airlines, you see in hotels, you see in concert tickets, and he's putting a lot of pressure on companies to roll them back. And United said, they've been thinking about this for a while, but it does seem like somewhat of a response to the president's Yeah. My thought on this is that I think it's political pandering at a certain point because obviously Biden wants to appeal to the every man who's like, why are we getting crushed by these fees?

But the way these businesses work is that that revenue isn't just going to poof off into, they're like, oh, fine, we're totally fine with sacrificing a billion dollars a year for this. Yeah. We're going to feel it somewhere else. Yeah. Baggage fees are going to increase somewhere. So I do think that it is a political play, and then the companies are like, we're listening to you, Joe, like, we're doing it. So that's my cynical take, but I think that's generally what this means.

It might, yeah, maybe it's a cynical take. But if it happens, I'm happy for families. It seems like a bit of a headache. It didn't seem like a huge headache, actually. I read this report that said 0.38% of all consumer complaints with the Department of Transportation involved family seating issues. So this is a bit of a jarwin. I mean, we're talking about it. Yeah.

But excessive, like, what excessive fee do you hate the most? This is a bag fee. It's ridiculous. It's like $65 to bring a bag on. I need to. I hate like sports tickets. When I'm looking at seat geek, or concert tickets.

When I'm looking at sea geek, at least they have the transparency thing where you can toggle where it's, where it shows with fees and without fees. And, you know, it's about $40 every time. So it really shows you. Maybe we're on Joe's side then. Okay, Neil, this is,

is a new segment that I want to try out for our first show. It is our first show. But this is where I am deep in the TikTok, Robert Hole, deep in like the Gen Z culture, you a little bit less so. So I want to take this time to educate you on a new trend on TikTok. So have you heard of core core? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Okay. I'm going to unpack this for you because it's got a lot of layers. Okay. So it gets its name from the popular usage of the core suffix. So you know, like cottage core, goblin core, emo core, pink core, you get the picture. So this is essentially the core of cores. So it's like a self-referential core. Are you with me still? Sure. I have no idea where this is going, but I get that it's a meta, it's a core meta saying. Right. So the actual

videos you might encounter on TikTok are these spliced cliques. clips from various like pop culture moments or movies or something. So we're playing a video behind us right now. It will show a clip from like, for some reason like Ryan Gosling is very prevalent in these videos of him like yelling in the night or something or like Wally where people are sitting in their, when everyone becomes fat and Wally. And the goal is the clips on their own don't make much sense. But when you splice them together, it evokes a certain.

emotion and it's usually like helplessness or like loneliness or uh about how like technology has isolated us so it's this really interesting thing where you come across it maybe even scrolling for like three hours at night on tic talk it's 2 a m you come across this core core video it's got this melancholy music it's these clips that just like capture this emotion in you and it is taken over ticot in the last few months or so what do you think are you following me i'm following you and i was going to ask sort of what is the ultimate driver of it. What do you think, like what sort of ethos or societal thing that's going on has led to its popularity? It is definitely, I think this is the true Gen Z art medium where it is the only way people are expressing this feeling of maybe

technology has like almost gone too far. Like we're lonelier than ever. We're more connected, but lonelier than ever. And it's, again, this whole thing is very like met and self-referential, I have truly been there late at night where you see one of these core-corr videos, and you're like, that got whatever I'm feeling or whatever this generation is feeling right now. I feel that, but I don't need a core-core video. I know. This is an artistic medium that expresses it. So that's your trend for the day.

Trey's trend of the week. I'm sure many of our younger listeners are like, wow, he did a horrible job explain that. And some of our older listeners are like, I have no idea what he just explained, but that's our trend of the week. I think you did a good job. And I will be on the lookout for those TikTok videos. But right now I'm just getting people making food. That's good. That's all my TikTok.

Food core. All right. For next story, Toby, I have a little quiz for you. Okay. During this time, on average, how much of the Great Lakes do you think are covered in ice? Like mid-February. I want to say, on a typical year, I would like to say like 40%, 50% even. Pretty ghost.

It's 41%. Okay, 41%. And that's not the news. The news is that this year, there's 6% coverage of ice on the Great Lakes. That's really bad. I would assume really bad, right? Yeah. It's not good for a lot of different things.

But it really, this is a phenomenon that's happening across North America where unseasonably warm temperatures have led to less ice coverage. And it's really impacting a lot of different things beyond shipping hydropower energy, fishing, things like that. It's affecting pond hockey. The most cherished of New England traditions. Okay, I'm from, I just want to say I'm from Florida, so I never got to

experience this pond hockey, but it does seem like it is affecting you. Oh my God. Yeah, it is affecting me deeply because I grew up in Massachusetts and my neighbor had an ice rink in our backyard. Yeah. And it froze over every year and we would play hockey on it. I just have the most beloved memories.

When we got into high school, we started playing broomball when people couldn't skate and we just tapped each other to pieces. And I saw this happening over the course of my high school. Over the course of high school, we stopped building the rank because it would just remain a swimming pool for the entire winter. It's sad. And we have the numbers in front of us.

So Lake Superior, 4.6% covered Lake Michigan, 7.2, Huron 10.5. Erie, 0.09%. Like, Erie is a swimming pool right now. That means, like, one guy has, like, one piece of ice in front of his dock. And then Ontario, 1.6%. So, um, seasonably warm, no pond hockey. Second order effects are crazy.

All the things you mentioned are affected by this. New Hampshire canceled the pond hockey tournament that brought a lot of money into the local economy each winter. Vermont had to cancel an ice fishing competition after three people died after they fell through the ice. Ottawa has the world's largest open air. Cating rink, pond rink, and they haven't been able to open it this year and don't expect to. So this is a really big thing. beyond my romantic childish dreams. That's important, too.

Okay, final segment for today's Tuesday, by the way. We had the day off yesterday for President's Day, but every Monday we're going to do a quick preview of the week ahead and things to look out for. So what I'm looking forward to, I don't know if I'm looking forward to it, but it's happening is there's big inflation data that comes out on Friday. And basically there's a couple different types of inflation readings. there's CPI, the Consumer Price Index Report, and then there's PCE, the personal, let's see if I get this right,

the personal consumption expenditures report. Honestly, you nailed it. That was really good. I think I nailed it. And the Fed is super snobby, and they look at the one that comes out this week, PCE rather than the rest of us look at CPI. And it'll be really important to see what happens because inflation seems like it's not going down like it had been over the last year. Still hot? Still hot.

Speaking of hot, spring training. You're going on Friday. I'm going down to Florida. I'm going to a Yankees. I don't like the Yankees, but I'm going to a spring training game. I love spring training when it comes. Anything that has the word spring in it is good news. We're in the middle of, I mean, yes, it's been really warm, but we're still in the

middle of February. And just to watch, you know, warm climbs, sun, the people throw in baseballs. It gives me a little fuzzy feeling. I'm jealous, but I will not be watching any springtime. because the thing I'm looking forward to this week is cocaine bear the movie is coming out on Friday. Cinematic event of the millennium, I think. I am so excited. It's directed by Elizabeth Banks, which just adds a layer of intrigue that I'm so pumped.

So everyone goes to see Cocaine Bear on Friday. And then actually, Friday is also my birthday. So it's something else. Happy birthday. I'm looking forward to. How old are you turning? 26. Damn.

You're going to phase out of Cork Core Videos very quickly. Pretty soon we're going to need to bring in another person to educate me. and you on TikTok trends. But that's the week ahead. Actually, today is my half birthday. That just reminded me. Happy half birthday. Thanks.

I don't really celebrate my birthday, so I'm definitely not celebrating my half birthday. Yeah. Well, happy birthday. We'll do something special for you coming up on Friday as I'm heading down to Florida. I'm actually going to play golf with your dad and take all of his money. I'm excited for both of you. I think that's it for our show.

This was a fun one. First one. First one. I don't think we messed up too hard. We hit a lot of interesting news topics. Please let us know your feedback. Before we go, just want to let you know that, obviously, Toby and I, while we're on air, we're just the lead singers of an incredible band.

I just want to read them off. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. The producer and editor is the great Emily Milliron, audio engineering and sound design by Dan Bousa. He also wrote this theme song. The show's technical director is Elias Alba. Supervising producer is the man himself, Bryce Belloff, and Devin Emery, is our chief. content officer. We'll run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the

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