Morning Brew Daily - First Half of 2025: Biggest Story, Biggest Flop, Best Meme and More

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Episode 618: Neal and Toby reflect on the first half of the year in business news. What was the biggest news story? What was the biggest flop? The meme of the year? The guys recap all of that and more and then Toby quizzes Neal on was a headline from 2024... or 2025? Head to https://www.tacobell.com/morning-brew to learn more about Taco Bell’s new Refrescas! Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew, Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, we reminisce about the first half of the year in business news. And then we speculate irresponsibly about what the second half of the year may bring. It's Thursday, July 3rd. Let's ride. Good morning and welcome to a special episode of Morning Brew Daily.

Hope we're catching you just before you've switched off your brain for July 4th. Today, a look back and a look forward. 2025 just crossed the midway point, so we're handing out halftime game balls. What's been the biggest story of the year so far? What about the biggest flop, the best meme? Then we'll gaze into our crystal balls and offer up some extremely informed predictions about what could happen in the second half of the year. I'll share one right off the bat.

The Mets aren't making the playoffs. Toby, I'm pumped to go through these with you. So am I, Neil. I'm also going to be quizzing Neil on some of the events that went down to either 2024 or 2025 to see how closely he and you guys have been paying attention. I hope you all are listening to this in the car on your way to some body of water ahead of the forest. Or if you live in a place where fireworks are banned, I hope you're legally crossing state lines to make things go boom.

Either way, thanks for taking the time to listen. And now a quick word from our sponsor, Taco Bell. Toby, it is hot out here. Yeah, Neil, but I am staying cool with this refresca freeze from Taco Bell. You can't see it, but Toby is wearing sunglasses. It's like out of office in a cup, even when you got to be. be in office. Taco Bell has a full line of new refrescas, including the freeze, along with the aqua refresca, a Taco Bell twist on the beloved Mexican beverage mixed with real freeze-dried

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contain 200 milligrams of caffeine and are not recommended for children, pregnant, or nursing women, or person sensitive to caffeine. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return

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we are picking. So if we choose the same awardees, that is purely by coincidence and evidence that we spend way too much time together. I hope we don't, Neil, but kick us off so we can find out. My biggest business story of the year is tariffs. President Trump's on again, off again, tariff threats in order to remake the global economy have upended business plans around the world and sent markets on a wild historic ride. Stocks plummeted more than 12% when Trump announced Liberation Day tariffs against every other country in the world, including a tiny island that's only home to penguins. Their biggest plunge since COVID and the Great Recession. But when he rolled back those tariffs one week later, the S&P 500 searched 9.5%

in a single day, the best daily performance in 17 years. Despite rollbacks, tariffs are still much higher now than when Trump entered office. The U.S. effective tariff rate is currently 18.8% the highest in 90 years versus 2.4% in 2024. Many companies have scrapped their guidance for the year due to all the policy uncertainty and higher inflation looms. So far, tariffs have have not been passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices in any significant way. But Fed Chair Jerome Powell says he knows of no economists that doesn't expect that to happen later this year. And that's the main reason he's been holding off on rate cuts.

So, Toby, for all those reasons, it is clear to me that tariffs are the biggest business story of the year so far. I mean, it is hard to debate that. The main reason being that if you did a word cloud of the first half of the year on this show, we probably have said the word tariffs innumerable amount of times. I mean, in the hundreds, in the thousands amount, because for a while, every single top story that we were talking about had to do it with tariffs. We had to try to figure out what's a different angle we could possibly talk about just because it did dominate so much of the headline. So, Neil, I had a sneaking suspicion that you were going to pick tariffs.

That being said, I did not pick tariffs. What? Mainly for that reason. I think the biggest business news story of the first half of the year is the same. sell America trade. For the past decades, America has really been the only game in town. Post-pandemic, 41% of all the money in the world that gets invested across national borders flowed into the United States. The magnificent seven alone are bigger than all European stocks combined, but in the first half of the year, that vibe totally shifted. The U.S. dollars at a three-year low compared

to the euro. European stocks have been actually outperforming American stocks until a recent U.S. rally and demand for U.S. Treasury notes as a global safe haven asset has been shaky at best. So yes, tariffs in trade wars were the big story, probably were the biggest business news story, but downstream of those uncertainty-inducing economic policies is capital flowing outside the U.S., which has massive long-term implications for the economic world order. Yeah, the dollar had its worst start to a year since 1973. So I appreciate your attempt to be creative, but I would say that sell America trade is part and parcel. of the tariffs story overall. I think we are on the same page here. This was the biggest story.

Moving markets, moving business decisions for the first half of the year. No question. Okay, let's head to our flop of the year award sponsored by WeWork, where we choose something that wished H1 of 2025 was just a nightmare the wake up from. Toby, who is your flop of the year so far? My flop of the year is Doze. Think about the amount of oxygen and ink and airtime that we devoted to Doge's activity in the first few months of the year. Elon was omnipresent in these cabinet meetings. We all learned way too much about his teenage accolites, including big balls who got access to sensitive government data.

Prognos were being cut left and right. People were getting laid off in the emails. The list five things they did in the past week email will go down in infamy. But now that the dust is settled in Elon and Trump are on the outs, what is there to show for it? The most optimistic of trackers coming from Doge itself put the savings at $180 billion, dollars. Most news outlets could only verify around $70 billion of that, which seems like a lot of money. But the government spent nearly $600 billion in April alone in the Congressional Budget

Office estimates that Trump's big, beautiful bill alone would add nearly $3.3 trillion in budget deficits over the next 10 years. So Elon's goal was $1 trillion in cuts. He could barely manage a tenth of that. And, I mean, Tesla's stock price was plummeting as he was doing his business in Washington, D.C. It does give a lot of credence to critics ahead of this initiative saying many administrations on both sides of the aisle for the past few decades have tried something similar to Doge. The bureaucracy, the red tape, the amount of disorganization or organization in Washington, D.C. is just so complex. It's so impenetrable that we've had initiatives like Doge before. They've failed for the most part. And it looks like this one is just in a long list of, you know, failed.

attempts to streamline the government. We probably did mention the word Doe's second most two tariffs in the first half of the year. What's your flop? My flop of the year is Apple. It sure it seems like this iconic company has lost its mojo. It's far behind rival tech companies in terms of AI capabilities with the much type Siri update delayed indefinitely. The features that it has rolled out as part of its Apple Intelligence Suite have been underwhelming. And don't get me started about the disappointing Vision Pro Virtual Reality headset. Meanwhile, it's losing smartphone market share. in China due to local competition. Its app store, Walde Garden, has been broken open by regulators, and it's losing over $1 billion a year on its perplexing investment on Apple TV Plus. So it's no

surprise that Apple stock is down more than 17% so far this year. Compare that to Microsoft up 18%, meta up 22%, and InVIDIA, which replaced Apple as the world's most valuable company up 17%. It is hard to argue with that. The vibes around Apple are not good right now. I remember early on in the show, I was constantly being accused as being like way too pro-apple, mainly because I was pretty excited for the Vision Pro to come out and, you know, the cool technological advancements that it would bring. But it really hasn't lived up to any of the promises of the updated Siri of the Vision Pro itself. I am totally on board with you. And I think emblematic of that was at its last worldwide developer conference, which used to be this big thing where a lot of new, exciting updates were

introduce. All they did was just change their operating systems visual aesthetic look. And everyone's like kind of emblematic of what Apple is right now. They just paper over it with glossy aesthetics, but nothing really of substance underneath. So I think it's absolutely deserving of the flop of the year award. Meanwhile, the chief designer of the iPhone and so many more of its iconic historic products has jumped ship. He left Apple in 2019. But instead of going back to Apple to design hardware for the company he worked with for decades, he is now linking up with Sam Altman. Joni I've got paid, or his firm got paid $6.5 billion to link up with Open AI to develop a potential competitor to the iPhone. So things are not looking good for Apple. I don't know if

you have an Apple prediction for the second half of the year, but hopefully they can turn this ship around, but the things, you know, the walls are closing in just a bit. Okay, it's time for our science category. We're picking one advancement or breakthrough that happened in the first half of 2025, that would absolutely dominate a middle school science fair. Toby, what blew your mind scientifically so far this year? And you can't say your new lava lamp. My biggest scientific breakthrough is the dude to let himself get bitten by hundreds of venomous snakes to create a sort of universal anti-venom. The guy, Tim Freed, is just a normal fella from Wisconsin who started letting snakes bite him back in 2001 with the aim of building up his own immunity. At first,

it was just a hobby because who amongst us hasn't dabbled in some king at cobra brides. But as he became more committed, he wanted to help the over 140,000 people who die of snake bites every year and the more than 450,000 who are injured. The actual scientific breakthrough here was a paper published back in May where researchers say they were able to create an anti-venom that offers unparalleled production against 13 lethal snakes and partial protection from six others with the help of freed's blood. So it is the biggest dudes rock story of the year while also potentially saving hundreds of thousand lives in the process.

Well, if your guy is a dude's rock story, mine is maybe the second version of that, a very similar story. Mine is the man with the golden arm. He didn't have to get himself bitten by all these snakes, but he was a hero. An Australian man named James Harrison died in February after having protected an estimated 2.4 million babies from possible diseases or death. That's because his plasma contained a rare antibody that scientists could use to make a key medication, and Harrison donated blood every two weeks from age 18 to 81 to give them a constant

supply. By the time he died at age 88, Harrison was one of the most prolific blood donors in history, having been pricked 1,173 times. Too bad these two guys never got to meet each other. That's what I was saying. If you combine their blood, you would have the most powerful. blood in history. I think I'm going to give you, not that this is fully a competition, but I'm going to give the edge to you there. One, because the nickname the Golden Arm is just so sick. And then,

two, just the scale that Harrison was able to help, you know, puts it over, freeds, less, you know, large scale helping of people who are affected by snake bites, but two dudes rock, two awesome scientific breakthroughs in general. All right, up next, you've heard us talk about a lot of news stories this year, but inevitably, some slip through the cracks, which is why we're giving out the news story you forgot about award to the new story you probably forgot about. Neil, what did that big brain of yours end up remembering that most people forgot? My new story you forgot about is red note. Remember, this was the Chinese app that searched to the top of the app store in January as TikTok users worried about an impending ban known as TikTok refugees came over in droves. What happened next

was a remarkable moment of cultural exchange between Americans and Chinese people who don't often interact due to the internet firewall that's been set up by the Chinese government. China-based users offered Americans tutorials for using the app, and they asked for help with their English homework. However, the camaraderie did not last. TikTok never went away because Trump pushed off the ban, and now Red Note is only talked about in lists of things you forgot about. Neil, I'm not going to lie. Our big brains finally collide on this one. That was Also, my news story that you probably forgot about because it was just such a flash in the plan. It did reach number one in the app store.

So it was a big deal for a very short amount of time. It was very funny seeing the interactions as well. But, I mean, the sign-up instructions for this app were in Mandarin. Like, it was never going to be a long-term thing. But it was funny for just a second to just see these two cultures colliding. So great. I never would expect that this is the one that we would have the same one for. Because that's, maybe it was just, yeah, we both forgot about it.

We're like, oh, wait a second. So we're too smart. Let's just put it at that. All right. Finally, let's give out our meme of the year award to the meme we think captured the essence of the first six months of 2025. Who was H-1's H-1 to a girl, Neil? My meme of the year is Benson Boone doing a flip off a piano at the Grammys. No one can quite get a handle on this moustachioed pop star, despite getting ridiculed by critics.

He had the most streamed song of all of 2024 with beautiful things, and he followed that up with a new album, American Heart, that debuted at number two on the charts. Pitchfork gave that album a 3.6 out of 10, saying that Benson Boone's flare can't make up for the fact that his songs aren't very good and that he lacks a unique point of view. Still, you got to admit, the guy does have flare, and that's made him a perfect vessel for virality in the TikTok age. I mean, I am not a Benson Boone guy. You are more of a Benson Boone guy, but I will.

will say if I could do a flip, I too would be flipping off every single panel I came across. So I'm not going to fall at the dude for flipping. That is an underrated meme for sure, though, because a lot of people kind of introduced to him for the first time at the Grammy. He's like, who is this dude? Why is he constantly flipping? So pretty astute memeory right there. My meme of the year is the 100 men versus one gorilla meme. This meme has floated around the internet for a while now, but it caught fire again in the first half of this year.

One guy on X renewed the debate by setting up the concept of a hypothetical battle between 100 unarmed men versus one silverback gorilla. Mr. Beast joked about asking for 100 male volunteers to make it a reality. Robert Irwin, Steve Irwin's son weighed in on it. And Jake Paul posted a video of himself with a gorilla in the background saying it's time to end the debate. So for me, definitely meme of the year material because one, it was pretty harmless. Two, it was easy to grasp. and three, everyone had an opinion on it. So, Neil, I won't even ask if you agree or disagree with my choice,

but I will ask you to weigh in. Who do you think would win? Well, I'm curious, there were so many threads of zoologists and people who study gorillas weighing in on this. What did they end up saying? Well, a lot of them said that humans' ability to coordinate and cooperate was obviously, it's what makes humans, you know, rise to the top of the food chain already

because we could plan an attack and take turns. turns attacking the gorilla before the gorilla just would run out of energy. But a lot of zoologists did say, if humans were to attack one by one, a hundred in a row, we would absolutely get to moths because the gorilla could, you know, swipe you away. And zoologist did say, hey, we probably have overestimated and over-exaggerated guerrillas' strength. They are extremely strong, but they're not enough to withstand just like the force of a hundred men. So it was a fun debate because you could get really scientific about it, or you could just imagine someone running at it with a lot of confidence.

But not a whole lot of plan. Okay, we are going to take a quick break and come back with a business in memoriam segment. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.

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powerful pain relief. I see hot. You're so back. Cue the melancholy music because it's time for our first half in Memorium. No, we're not talking about the people who died, just remembering the products, features, and moments that marked the end of an era. I will go first, RIP, to Skype, which owner Microsoft sunsetsetted in May. Founded in Estonia 22 years ago, Skype was one of the first services to offer free long-distance voice and video calls, which allowed you to chat at no calls. with your friends who you met on study abroad. Alas, Skype failed to seize its golden opportunity when the pandemic sent everyone working from home.

And due to following user numbers, Microsoft decided it wanted everyone to migrate to teams. Oh, that is right. It also is just so iconic with the sounds and everything. Like, we all kind of have a conception of Skype growing up on the internet was one of the first big internet success stories. But you have to say they fumbled just a 3-1 lead, whatever sports metaphor you want to lead.

because Skype was the way to connect over video and what happened during the pandemic, video conversing became absolutely massive. Zoom capitalized on the way, you know, Google Meets capitalized on the way, but Skype couldn't muster up any momentum. So, yeah, it's kind of sad. And I wonder if, you know, in generations from now, people will even know what, like, Skype was or if it will always be, you know, Zoom and Google Meets going forward. Our next in-memorium is dedicated to free bags on Southwest.

As of late May, the iconic Bags Fly Free Plan officially died. Southwest began charging you $35 for your first check mag, marking the end of an era. Though Southwest execs had held firm on the iconic perk for years, even trademarking the phrase as recently as 2023, activist investors in a tough airline industry forced a company to adopt some of the nickel and diming methods of its rivals. The company claimed at an investor day in September that if it started charging for bags, it would only make a $1.5 billion a year compared with an expected loss of $1.8 billion in market share, and yet it did it anyway, Neil. Well, big changes are coming to Southwest.

In addition to getting rid of bags fly free just a couple weeks ago, the CEO floated the possibility of creating airport lounges and also flying internationally. They just fly to Caribbean and some Mexican destinations now. Now they've actually filed a... an application to fly to Europe. So this is part of a broader wholesale change that wants to move Southwest from what it had been for so many decades into just broader norms of the airline industry, which is how you make money.

And that's what this activist investor wanted these management types to do. So lame. I just, I just flyed Southwest and having to go to the kiosk and seeing that pop up was literally an out-of-body experience because that used to be what Southwest is. So maybe it will make them more money. but, you know, it feel like it lost a little bit of its soul. For our next in Memorium, he hasn't left us, thank goodness,

but Warren Buffett is leaving his role as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after one of the most epic runs in business history. At the end of Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting in May, the 94-year-old Buffett stunned the pack crowd in Omaha by revealing he would hand over the role he'd been in for 60 years to his hand-backed successor, Greg Abel. Talk about big shoes to fill. Berkshire stock could fall 99%

and it would still outperform the S&P 500 since Buffett came on board in 1965. That was the best part of, admittedly, a pretty sad retirement announcement, is just going through all the insane stats that Berkshire Hathaway has racked up. I mean, falling 99% still outperforming the stock market, that is insane to stay, just goes to show, you know, the power of compounding. And also, I'm a little bit nervous as to the future the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Investor Conference because this is like business celebrity heaven for a lot of people who follow the stock market. I don't know if it's going to carry the same weight without Warren Buffett there,

kind of dispensing his words of wisdom. Our final in-memorium segment is dedicated to Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death. For 40 years, computers running Windows have displayed the same iconic screen when they run into issues that cause a restart. But the company announced last week that the Blue Screen, screen of deaths will become the black screen of death by the end of the summer. The image has entered pop culture as the go-to mean for everything that goes sideways, but the reason it's meeting its own demise is to improve readability and align better with

Windows 11 design principles. Again, the end of an era, Neil. At least it went out with a bang. Remember last year's crowd strike, uh, cyber security outage where screens across the world at airports and train stations and computer desktops from home. Hong Kong to the United States all flashed the blue screen of death. So it went out, you know, with a huge display that everyone in the world saw what it just, what it meant by the blue screen of death. It was an introduction to many and it was a farewell for others. All right, let's move

on. And now we're going to look ahead to the second half of the year and offer up our own predictions for how things are going to shake out. Neil and I, again, have not told each other these yet. So I'm excited to see how hot your taste can get, Neil. I'm, thinking you're more of a Tabasco sauce level guy rather than a Carolina Reaper take artist. But maybe you'll prove me wrong. Give me your first prediction, Neil. This one is going to break the Skullville scale. I predict that a judge will force a breakup of Google.

Remember, last year, Google was found to have an illegal monopoly in search. And later this summer, the same judge who made that decision will be announcing Google's punishment. The DOJ, which brought the case, has asked the judge to split Chrome and Android from Google and bar it from receiving $20 billion a year from Apple for Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices. I think there is a good chance that happens. Wait, this is so perfect, Neil, because my first prediction is Google ends the year

as the most valuable company in the world. And let me tell you why. Right now, Google is worth $2.2 trillion, and Vida is worth $3.8 trillion. But Google is trading out a PE of only 18. If it were to be valued the same way as Microsoft and Apple right now, It would be a $4 trillion company, and I think it will eventually catch, the market will eventually catch onto that because right now, AI is a money-burning enterprise.

A leader in the space Open AI is a private company with access to a lot of money, but Google is literally the most profitable company in the world with $11 billion in annual net income. So who do you want to back in the most capital-intensive arms race the tech world has ever seen? Open AI who needs to call up Daddy Masayoshi's son from SoftBank for a couple billion. every other week, or Google whose core business spits off $110 billion in a profit. I know who I am taking. Well, you're ignoring all of the threats Google is facing from these regulatory pressures to the fact that OpenAI and Anthropic and perplexity have all these search tools that are supposedly

eating away at Google MarketShare. Just for my own experience, I'm using Google a lot less and turning to AI, but you don't seem to think that's a big deal. I think it's going to win the eventual AI arms race because, it has enough money and it has the research talent to, you know, compete with Open AI at the top end of the models in, you know, the LLM arena, which is where people anonymously grade chatbots against each other. Google is winning right now. Gemini 2.5, I think Flash, is right now the top model in that arena. So already I think it has caught up and even surpassed Open AI.

So I'm just taking the company with a lot of cash flow, a lot of cash to burn, because you can't beat Google in a money-burning enterprise. Okay, let's move on to our next prediction. I'll go. I think we are going to see at least one big, shocking, mass layoff that a company attributes to AI. If you listen, CEOs are already laying the groundwork for this, so it won't come off as such a huge shock. Last month, Amazon's Andy Jassy said that the company will need fewer people going forward

because of AI's efficiency gains. Mark Benioff just said that AI is already doing up to 50% of the workload at Salesforce. that doesn't add up. If automation is now doing 50% of the work, why would you need all the human employees you had before? It doesn't make financial sense. So I think very soon we may reach a tipping point where a big tech firm like meta or Google cuts like 10% of its engineering workforce because AI can do it. So you think it will come from engineers, that specific part of the work source? That seems to be from what I'm hearing from CEOs. It seems to be that is the aspect of their business rather than marketing or sales or any other department. Engineering is the one where they're

deploying AI the most and where they're seeing the most efficiency gains. And what is a big job cut to you? You said 10%. But I feel like we've already seen those announcements happening from Microsoft and we've, when over the past couple of years or so. Okay, like three years ago. Okay. So yeah, that was due to like pandemic over hiring and then they cut 10 to 14% of their workforces. I'm saying they're going to cut at least 10% of their workforces and say this is because of AI. Okay. So it's the. because of AI. Yeah, yeah, that's the big prediction here.

And I think that's going to set the world on fire. Okay, probably a Tabasco's scale take right there, but I like it. I like it. All right, my next prediction is I think one of either the Olympics or the World Cup gets postponed, delayed, or moved. With the U.S. standing amongst global peers deteriorating, I could see boycotts coming down at the pipeline, tossing the administration's aggressive immigration policies. And I think there's a real possibility that one of the two meg events, either the World Cup,

which is next summer or the 2028 LA Olympics is shifted around. Yeah, that's not going to happen. There's way too much money that's already been invested into these events up, you know, $10 to $20 billion. Companies from all over the world are, you know, sponsoring these things. They're making new arenas and events and construction projects are going. This is just not the kind of thing that could not take place. There's just too much money going into it.

Olympics have been boycotted before, though, so I do. think that there is a possibility that if the U.S. becomes increasingly unpopular on the global states, that maybe a critical amount of companies could boycott it. So that's where that prediction is coming from. All right. I like where your thought process is, but I just think these things are almost inevitable at this point. My last prediction is that Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift are going to get engaged and Kelsey will announce his retirement. Oh, are those connected? So it will be engagement than retirement or retirement because engagement? I don't know if in that. announcements will be in conjunction, but they will be connected to each other as Travis Kelsey just wants to stop playing football and keep his head about him as he, you know, goes and marries this pop star.

You think that they're meant to be? Sure. I've never talked to either of them. I only know grainy photos of them entering like random restaurants in New York City. I'm rude for them. I'm rude for that too. All right. My final prediction is very similar to your final one, Neil.

We find aliens between the James. Between the James Webb Telescope making its first discovery and exoplanet outside our solar system to the Veri-Ruban Observatory, creating that insane, high-resolution image of the cosmos. We have enough eyes looking at the skies that we're going to stumble upon to something. We just haven't had the tech to find aliens yet, but now we do, and so we're going to find them. And then secondary prediction, I think they're going to be nice. You're so naive. You don't think we've already found aliens before, and they're just hiding it from us. Come on, Toby.

I like that. All right. We're either going to find aliens or see a marriage between Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift. All right. Since we are halfway through the year already and time is a construct that blurs together, we're going to finish off this H1 episode with this segment I'm calling Neil. Did this happen in 2024 or 2025? Are you ready, Neil? Let's do it. Up first. New York City enacts a congestion charge for vehicles entering lower Manhattan, becoming the first city in the U.S. to do so. That was in January. January 5th. 2025. All right, up next, Warner Bros. Discovery rebrands its streaming service. Oh, that could be 2022, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2024, and 2025. I wasn't finished as HBO Max. I think that happened a few months ago. But that certainly has been a long-running saga where

it's gone back and forth multiple times, much to the delight of internet users. Yeah, I left that open-ended on purpose. All right. The Notre Dame Cathedral reopens to the public after previously being damaged by a fire in 2019. Well, I was there last year and it had a ton of scaffolding around it. So I think they were still working on it. I'm going to say that it was reopened this spring. It was December 7th, 2024. We covered it.

It was a big deal because, you know, so much money had flown in. So, yeah, it was right on that cusp. I was there in the summer. I guess they were just tidying things up. Yeah. All right. American Airlines rolls out a new boarding process. process tech, which sounds an alarm if someone tries to board a flight before their group is called.

I have no idea. Let's go with last year. That was last year in October, actually. That felt kind of recent to me because I have been looking at airports to see if there are line cutters. It's still kind of a smaller test, but I hope they roll that out to the wider public because getting buzz, as I said, bring shame back to society. And I think that is a great reason and a great method for doing it. All right, Panto names Moka Moose as the color of the year. Okay, so when they announced the color of the year, is it the year before?

Is it 2025 color of the year or 2024 color of the year? Or 2026? Let's go. I don't think Moka Moose was this year. I'm going to say 2024, the fall. Technically, it was named in December 5th, 2024, but it is 2025 color of the year. Are you seeing a lot of Moka Moose around?

No, I haven't seen any of it, but I just picked it because it is right on that borderline. technically I would have accepted both answers. Okay, one more question before a rapid fire segment. The Florida Panthers wins Stanley Cup finals, beating the Edmonton Oilers. Also another trick question. That was both years, Toby. That was both years. Okay, here is my final rapid fire.

23 and me files for bankruptcy. This year. Party City files for bankruptcy. This year. That was last year December, 24, and Joanne Fabrics files for bankruptcy. This year. That was January of 2025. All right, Neil.

Thank you, Toby. Good job. Thank you so much. Thank you all for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed our hot takes. If you want to weigh in, make sure you send us an email as well. Neil, hit us with our credits. Yes. If you have any thoughts on today's episode, send an email with questions, comments, or feedback to Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Loo is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup thinks Toby's predictions. Couldn't be more wrong. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

Great. Show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. When the job gets tough, you need equipment that's built to handle it. The Cabota Construction lineup, featuring the versatility to do more, durability to keep going, and increased comfort for long days on the job.

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