Morning Brew Daily - Investors Question Kevin Warsh’s Credibility & People Are Talking Less?

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

#900: A divided Fed holds interest rates but three members wanted to hike it up. Meta shares dip after reporting an earnings miss as it keeps spending money on data centers. Microsoft beat expectations thanks to its partnership with Anthropic. Then, Neal shares numbers on the busiest commercial flight day on record, weed being more common than cigarettes, and why nobody is talking to each other anymore. Finally, NYC just released a short list of property owners subject to Mamdani’s luxury tax on second homes. Got difficult questions? Head to https://www.claude.ai/mbd to answer them.  Get tickets for our trivia tournament! https://caveat.nyc/events/the-morning-brew-trivia-tournament-2026-07-30  Grab tickets to our Performance Revue show! https://www.morningbrew.com/events/brew-performance-revue-2026?utm_campaign=performance_revue_2026&utm_source=mbd 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Good morning, Bird Daily Show.

I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Wall Street staged a revolt after the Fed meeting. Then a meta and Microsoft reported earnings and they're still spending on AI like they stole their parents' credit card. It's Thursday, July 30th. Let's ride. One of the most bizarre business stories of the past few years has reached a resolution. This week, eBay agreed to a $56 million settlement with two Massachusetts journalists who had been harassed in stocks by company's security personnel in 2019. The TLDR is back then, eBay was catching heat from an activist investor.

and this couple, the Steiner's, who ran the website e-commerce bites, were posting unflattering articles about the company. Then the freaky mail started showing up. For a period, the Steiner's began to receive packages of live cockroaches, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, and a book on surviving the loss of a spouse. Turns out, this campaign was all orchestrated by some eBay executives to get the couple to shut up. eBay has apologized saying what the Steiner's were subjected to by former eBay employees in 2018 was wrong, reprehensible, and should never have happened.

I remember covering this story when I first joined the brew five or six years ago. It was crazy then, and it's still crazy now. It also got me thinking, though, we talk a lot about companies on this podcast. Who's going to send us live cockroaches and a bloody pig Halloween mask? The only answer I could come up with was Chipotle, not because of what we say about them, but because of how many times I've mispronounced it, Chipotle Lee, Chipotle lay, Chapotle, if any Chipotle execs are listening to this, a Cardina's burrito instead of a bloody pig Halloween mask please, which now that I think about it are actually

kind of the same thing. And now a word from our sponsor, Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Toby and I tackle a lot of hard-hitting questions here at Morning Bird Daily. Like, who keeps stealing my lunch? No, like will AI take people's jobs? Anthropic, the Public Benefit Corporation behind Claude heard questions like that over and over in more than 120,000 interviews about people's hopes and fears around AI. So they published contingency plans for the hard unemployment scenarios, not just the rosy ones. And they just launched Claude Core, a $150 million fellowship paying 1,000 people full salaries to work at nonprofits while training for AI-era careers.

So if you've got your own hard questions about AI, head to clod.a.i slash MBD to submit it to Anthropic and explore how they are answering them. That's C-L-A-U-D.A-U-D. The Fed held its meeting yesterday to decide what to do with interest rates, and it feels like we're in a situation ship with Kevin Warsh, given how deliberately bad at communicating he's been about his plans to tame inflation. Markets expected the Fed to do absolutely nothing and hold rate steady, but there was still a roughly one-and-three chance of a surprise rate hike. In the normally predictable world of central banking,

it made for an exciting lead-in. In the end, the Fed voted 9-3 to keep race. rates the same, but that three is the headline. Three officials wanted a quarter point hike. The first time since 2016, that three policymakers have dissented in the same direction. You can understand why there's a split. Data shows that the economy is still growing at a solid pace. The labor market remains stable, and recent inflation readings have cooled slightly. But inflation has also been above the Fed's 2% target for more than five years now, while tariffs in higher energy prices from the war in the Middle East are a constant inflation

threat. For new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, the split Fed also puts his communication experiment to the test. He's been very vocal about not being vocal, deliberately trying to wean markets off the Fed's traditional forward guidance, and yesterday it was no different. The statement the committee put out was much shorter than traditional Fed statements. It was almost identical to the one release after last month's meeting, frustrating some who wanted clearer commitments he would hike if conditions warrant it. Neil, with so much uncertainty swirling heading into the meeting, the Fed's ended up sticking to the status quo, but it only feels like a matter of time before they're forced to Troy Bolton it and break free of this holding pattern.

Just two meetings in, Kevin Warsh already has a credibility problem. Wall Street doesn't believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He says he wants to bring inflation down to 2%. But when asked why they didn't raise interest rates to do that, he really didn't have any explanation. And there was a bit of a revolt in the markets yesterday. the 30-year bond yield climbed 10 basis points after this Fed meeting. And they didn't do anything. The Fed just held interest rate steady, but you saw a huge reaction in the bond market,

the 30-year yield, which is a proxy for long-term borrowing costs across the U.S. economy, rose to its highest level in 19 years, above 5.2%. So we're talking financial crisis levels from the bond market. So this was investors in Wall Street saying, look, we don't believe you. You're saying you're going to bring down inflation by raising interest. rates, but look, you gave us no reason to think that you're actually going to do that. But Warsh is pointing to that bond movement and basically saying, this is exactly what I want. I want the market to actually set interest rates or set borrowing costs more so than the Fed.

This is something that he has been vocal about. He doesn't want the Fed's move to kind of inform which way the economy is going and how markets are reacting. So the fact that rates essentially got higher, effectively got higher, if you are, you know, trying to buy a house right now or you're trying to pay off credit card bills, those rates are determined more by the bonds even more so than what the Fed is setting. So the bond market may be calling its bluff or Worse would argue it's doing exactly what he wants it to. But a lot of people are frustrated because Warsh could have given a good argument about holding rates steady. He could have pointed to the fact that we had a better than expected. June inflation report.

He could have pointed to the fact that maybe U.S. Iran hostilities are thawing. These are all things that he could have said, hey, we're looking at this data and we think it all is pointing towards a hold. Instead, he didn't really say much of anything, which is why you mentioned it. He has a little bit of a credibility problem right now. So looking forward, I mean, inflation, the question facing Fed and Warsh is, is this inflation going to be a one-off shock or is there going to be a percent? problem here. And there are maybe three things that are driving inflation higher. One, which is

kind of new, is the AI boom. We're about to talk about this in the next couple of stories, but companies are spending so much money on AI infrastructure. And that is inflationary at the moment. We've already seen consumer gadgets like iPads and Xboxes all rise because of the memory crunch. And then the other two things are we saw President Trump Institute new 10% tariffs on the rest of the world. That is also inflation. And then the final thing is this war. And you mentioned it that tensions were thawing, but actually, no, they're going in the opposite direction. Iran launched a surprise attack on U.S. forces in Jordan earlier this week. And then overnight, Trump pledged to retaliate. And they're doing so. Oil prices are back up. And as we know, higher oil prices filter across the global economy in the form of greater inflation. So this just got a lot harder for Kevin Warsh. And right now, the markets don't really believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. I mean, we've talked about the bond market, but we might as well mention the equity market as well. The NASDAQ 100, which is a tech focus index, is now down 11% from its June record.

It's now in correction territory. We're on pace for the worst July on record. So no matter what market. A little preview of the week tomorrow. I know, I know. And we're actually going to talk about this a little later as well. All right. Moving on meta reported earnings yesterday.

and it might lose its membership card to the Magnificent Seven if it keeps this up. The biggest question going into this report was how much money is it spending on its AI buildout? And the answer made investors queasy. Total cost and expenses were up 55% year over year, bringing its free cash flow to $784 million down from $8.5 billion a year ago. Good for a cool 91% decline. Its advertising unit is still one of the greatest money-making machines in the world, bringing in 5,9,000. $9.3 billion and beating expectations. But Meta has committed to the AI race at this point, which means spending on data centers will continue until morale improves. And now has three big

data center projects underway, a $9 billion one in Canada, a recently announced $14 billion venture with BlackRock in El Paso, and a monster data center in rural Louisiana that will cost more than $50 billion. Neil, we saw Alphabet go cash flow negative for the first time in two decades this past quarter. But Alphabet has a growing cloud business, something meta does not, which is part of the reason why the market is so much more critical of its spending

compared to the rest of big tech. Shares tumbled 9% after hours as investors cast doubts on Zuck's grand plans. I think everyone was asking, why don't we have more of a concrete plan? That's actually not me saying it. That's a direct quote from Brent Thill, who's a tech analyst at Jeffreys.

Meta is spending so much money along the lines of Microsoft and Google. and Amazon, as we'll see who's reporting later today, but they don't have this cloud unit to monetize. So right now, how do they monetize is through advertising and WhatsApp and Instagram and things like that. But they're building all this compute capacity by building huge data center projects. And investors don't think that they need all of that capacity to run Instagram and Facebook and do all the AI on those particular apps. And they don't exactly have a plan to sell that to other companies. Zuckerberg did mention it on the call.

he said, look, we think we're going to have some left over, and we have a few customers in the pipeline. He didn't really mention that or any specifics, but investors will want to hear more specifics if meta stock wants to get a bump. Yeah, one of the issues is they did get specific in one category that people didn't really want to hear about, which is their 2026 CAPEX guidance. They previously had a range of 125 billion to 145 billion. There was a little wiggle room there. Now they've revised it upwards to 130 billion to 145 billion. So they are narrowed. narrowing in on record spending, and that's not what the market wants to hear right now, especially because you're right. Meta has maybe the most tenuous story to tell when it comes

to their AI, because, again, if you are a Microsoft or if you are Google, you have a cloud business that you can service other customers with, and they are, meta is dipping their toe into that, but they're way, they're years behind, decades behind when it comes to building out a cloud business, so they're burning cash with not exactly a great story to tell to investors of how that cash is going to pay off. Microsoft, on the other hand, is keeping its Mag 7 membership card for now. It also reported earnings yesterday, and like meta, the big news is that it is spending a lot. It dropped 41 billion on capital expenditures last quarter, up nearly 70% from a year ago, as it continues its own buildout of data centers. It expects to spend roughly 190 billion on

CapEx this year. But Microsoft is actually turning it into a business. Microsoft now has 30 million paid subscribers to its co-pilot AI assistant up from 20 million just one quarter ago and well ahead of what analysts expected. It also has a rip-snorting cloud division. Azure revenue grew 43% with unit topping $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time. Microsoft is also sitting on a staggering $678 billion backlog of revenue it hasn't yet recognized, which, sounds sweet until you realize that a lot of it comes from contracts with Open AI, the company it owns 27% of. Neal investors punish meta because it's spending billions on AI without a cloud business to directly monetize that investment. Microsoft is almost the perfect counter-example.

It is spending even more aggressively, but Azure is accelerating, co-pilot is expanding, and the company is still cash flow positive. And stock grows 8% after hours, which in this market is a huge win. It's a mirror image of Betta's earnings call. Microsoft's cloud unit Azure grew the fastest pace in four years and even topped expectations, 43% versus 40%. If the question from investors to these executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Satya, the CEO of Microsoft is, are you making money from AI? Are you making money from spending $190 billion a year to justify all of that investment? Meta could not answer that question. And Microsoft absolutely did because they're saying, hey, look, we got a lot of workers. employees using co-pilot now because that's our AI service. And we have a bunch of companies paying us for server space because they're using our cloud offering. So they have a much more compelling story to tell of how they're making money from all these

AI spending. Still, despite this good earnings report from Microsoft, the stock is still down around 17% this year. And I just want to zoom out for a second. The Magnificent Seven has been the force that has powered the market to all-time highs over the last decade or so. But now that narrative is cracking a little bit, the equal weighted S&P 500, where every company gets the same weight, that has rallied to an all-time high, which shows that the market is broadening a little bit. It's not just the magnificent 7 in everyone else.

And we're actually seeing that in this latest crop of earnings reports. Yesterday, outside of Big Tech, Starbucks and Chip Chipotle reported great earnings and raised their guidance. They say they're seeing broad-based gains across all incomes and all consumer age. groups. So consumers are being resilient right now. And investors are shifting their intention to these consumer stocks, honestly, and away from big tech, because while you guys are doing your AI thing, these companies are just servicing people who want coffee and burritos. So maybe that's the next story that we'll be talking about is how big tech is no longer the thing. Magnificent 7 is no longer the narrative. It's about the other players in the market right now.

All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Neal's Neal's Numbers right after this. Finding the right shoe is no small feet. Enough with the foot-sized jokes. That wasn't a joke, but Ultra's running shoes are designed to give you room for your toes for comfort, balance, and strength. Ultra has more room for your toes so they can spread out and your feet can stay in a natural position. Ultra does actually make shoes shaped like feet. What a concept. Use promo code Morning Brew 10 for 10% off your first pair of Ultra running shoes at ultrarunning.com slash Morning Brew.

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Welcome to Neal's numbers, the segment where I share three stats in the week's news that will have you talking. And you'll see what I mean in a bit. For my first number, the skies are busier than a traitor Joe's on a Sunday afternoon. According to Flight Radar 24, last Thursday was the busiest ever day for commercial aviation with 153,359 flights tracked. Imagine telling someone this in the spring of 2020 when airports were ghost towns. They think you were crazy. It's not a coincidence that the record-setting day happened in the summer. During the warm months in the Northern Hemisphere, airlines jack up the number of flights

to accommodate the increase in vacationers like Toby going to all of his weddings. But the record was not a given, high fuel costs from the war in Iran, lower consumer confidence, and questions around spending made for an uncertain summer travel season. From the looks of it, though, overhead bin space is more precious than ever. When you count all aviation, so not just commercial aviation, the number is even more absurd. On July 23rd, flight radar tracked 287,000 flights because when you factor in military and private aircraft as well, that's what makes a number higher. There was also a big aviation events taking place across the country, one in Farnborough and then one in Oshkos. Sorry, yeah, Farnborough is in England.

Oshkosh is in Wisconsin, which meant a lot of planes were just up in the air. And flight rate are only surpassed 200,000 total flights on June 29th, 2025. Now we are getting closer to 300,000 flights. So a lot more planes are taken off these days. Yeah, and I want to focus on one plane, actually, because another record was set in aviation this week. Qantas and Airbus A350 1,000 ULR, which is a modified Airbus A350, just completed what is believed to be the longest ever commercial flight.

It took off from Melbourne, Australia, and landed in Toulouse, France on Tuesday. And I mentioned that because that is a far distance, but it took this plane 24 hours and 24 minutes to make this journey. It purposely went the wrong way across the Atlantic and Pacific. And this is Qantas testing its project sunrise, which is coming next year, and they're launching long flights. Very long flights from Australia to England. So this is part of the testing phase. But yes, these pilots, there's nobody on board. There are no passengers on board.

But this plane was in the air for over 24 hours. Oh my goodness. I hope whoever gets on a 24 hour flight, I hope the person in front of you does not recline their seat. All right, for my second number. Next time someone asks you for a light, it's probably for a joint instead of a cigarette. More Americans now use marijuana on a daily or near daily basis than cigarettes for the first time ever.

The data, which come from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, found that 21.4 million Americans aged 12 or over used marijuana every day in 2025. That's more than the 19.9 million who smoked cigarettes regularly, and the 17.2 million who frequently drank alcohol. This changing of the guard was inevitable if you looked at the trend lines. Daily pot use has surged 21% since 2021, while tobacco and alcohol, alcohol use is down 28% and 24% respectively. To be clear, overall, far more Americans drink than use cannabis, 129 million per month compared to 43.8 million. But when it comes to regular daily

or near daily use, popping a gummy after clocking out of work is more popular than grabbing a beer. What I found interesting is that at the same time that marijuana is becoming broadly more popular, teen marijuana use is falling. And the reason why the number is going up and team use is going down is that more adults, 26 and older, are using into their 30s, 40s, and 50. Cannabis is now a daily or near daily thing for them. And that is actually a big win for proponents of legalization because a lot of critics of legalization said that this is going to mean more kids are going to be smoking weed.

And in reality, it's actually adults that are smoking more. So maybe a win for the broader legalization, the federal legalization movement. But opponents of that movement will also point to the data I just mentioned and say, this is a problem because we're talking about daily use here. And even the CDC says it's estimated that people use cannabis have about a 30% likelihood of becoming addicted. So they say that marijuana addiction is real. So we're looking at these numbers and like, well, actually alcohol, people who drink alcohol, they don't drink it that much. They drink it a few times a month. But the users of marijuana actually do so every day or almost every day.

and there's a big fight right now over whether we should be rescheduling marijuana as a much less dangerous drug. And the DEA actually just finished its public hearing on the matter in July 15th, so we'll find out a decision soon. From my final number, people are speaking way less than they used to. Writing in the Atlantic Olga Kazan details a recent study that found participants spoke about 338 fewer words per day than they did the previous year. Over the experiments span from 2005 to 2019, the decline in speaking was 28%. She shocks it up to two trends. One, people are spending more time alone, so naturally, they are speaking to others less. Another paper found that the portion of free time Americans spent by themselves rose from 44% to 49% from 2003 to 2019.

The other factor is, unsurprisingly, digital communications replacing in-person conversation. Think about how you used to make a restaurant reservation. You stop by and chatted with the host or you picked up the phone and called them. Now you use resi in silence. And that's just interacting with strangers. Text messages and group chats have also revolutionized the way we keep up with friends and family, prioritizing written over verbal communication. Kazin says,

less time talking to people is a worrying development, stunting social skills, harming mental health, and neglecting parts of your brain that need exercise. Toby, I resonate with this. Sometimes, say a Saturday afternoon, that I mostly spent around my apartment, sometimes think to myself, wow, I haven't, I haven't said a word out loud today. You could always call me, Neil.

We can always have a conversation on the phone. But actually, it's not the same as what we're doing right now, which is talking face-to-face. You mentioned that talking is a brain workout. We are in the gym every morning, Neil, because when you are conversing with someone, you have to remember what the other person just said. You have to hold what you plan to say in your working memory. You've got to formulate a response in a real time. You have to actually listen to what comes after as well.

It's a lot. Once I started perceiving that, I couldn't remember what you were saying, actually, as soon as I started going down that rabbit hole. So, yes, you need to talk to people. It doesn't have to be deep conversations with people you know. It can actually just be small talk with the cashier because those interactions too are not only good for your brains.

They're just good for society as a whole. They boost well-being, make people feel more connected to something larger than themselves. It's exactly the feelings that you have when you're stuck in your apartment. You're like, I wish I was participating in the fabric of society. So yes, this is a real issue, and it's accelerating downwards every year. We're just talking less.

All right. So next time I go get a coffee, I'm going to not use the Dunkin app to order, and I'll actually just go up to the cashier. But good to know we're working out, and that's my excuse for not going to the gym. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. New York City Mayor Zoranamundani is once again beefing with the city's 1%. Anger is mounting after the mayor's office last week published a list online of property owners who may be subject to a new tax on pricey second homes, known as a pita tear.

The list, which contains names, addresses, and the market value of properties included homes owned by Trump's niece, Mary Trump, filmmaker Darren Iranovsky, and other big-time names among the 960,000 properties released on the web. Businesspeople lashed out at the decision to release the list, accusing the mayor of doxing celebs and implying they were targets for doing something wrong. Stephen Phillips, CEO of the influential business group partnership for New York City, said the mayor's already won the election. He doesn't need to govern by singling people out to make a political point.

Yesterday, Mamdani tried to play cleanup, responding that the list was required by state law and that ultimately a small fraction of these property owners would face the new tax. Still, as tax attorney Adrian Diaz told the Wall Street Journal, a shorter list, something more targeted would have been more appropriate. Yeah, the biggest problem here is that he kind of created the impression that almost a million homes could be hit by the tax, even though it's only going to hit a tiny fraction of them. The city ultimately mailed out just 17,000 notices to owners.

So the public-facing list that they published was 56 times larger than the actual pool receiving the notices. And that's the main criticism here. Mom Donnie was saying that this was procedural, but when it comes to just public perception, that's why this got a ton of backlash. Finally, if you feel someone pounding on the back of your seat on your next Delta flight, it might not be because you reclined too early, but because they lost a sports pick. Draft Kings and Delta have teamed up to launch Skypix, a new sports contest that allows customers 21 and over to engage with sports while they travel.

If that's a weird way of describing what feels like a sports betting partnership is because betting is still illegal on commercial aircrafts. These Skypix game instead is a free contest you play over Delta Wi-Fi on your phone that lets you answer sports-related questions like who will score first or what team will win for a chance to win a Delta gift card. Neil, reactions to this were not positive. In the Delta subreddit, the second top comment was, gambling is a cancer and it's everywhere.

The first comment was, Delta needs to worry about consistent, functional Wi-Fi first. Okay, so they say, quote, no wagering, no deposits, no risks, it's just a fun contest. But when I'm looking at the questions that they're asking, I'm like, where have I seen that before? It's literally sports betting on the Draft Kings app. The fact that you need to create a Draft King's account to use the product tells you that they're using this for Legion. Who will score first? Which team will win? What will the final score be? I mean, those are all prop bets that you can find on Draft King.

So they're looking for their new generation of customers here. The only way that this is okay is if you're allowed to play against other people in plain for the right to their seat. If I could win enough bets in a row, a parlay that lets me move from my typical seat by the toilets in the 30th row to first class, Now we're talking. We also have anarchy in the skies. Do you believe you have the skills to upgrade? I would move further back somehow. They're like, you actually have to sit in the bathroom now. Well, it's the same. You either lose $1,000 sports betting and you don't get any, you know, maybe you get a first class ticket or you just pay $1,000 to actually get a first class ticket.

All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. We're excited to see a bunch of you tonight at our trivia contest where you all are going to go up against Toby and me in a trivia night. Usually we're the ones asking questions, but this time we're going against you. Are you nervous, Toby? I don't think we're favored, by the way. I think we're going to lose.

We have some pretty smart listeners, so I hope we lose, actually. All right, so there's still a few tickets available. So head to the link in our description to buy your ticket, and we'll see you there tonight. I think there are still a few tickets available. So if you want to join us and are still free tonight, head to the link in the description and grab your ticket. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else,

send an email to Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lou is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham, and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller.

Hair and makeup doesn't have a problem with talking. Let me tell you. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow. If your pack could use a change of pace, get to one of Great Wolf Lodge's 22 locations. Splash away in the indoor water park where it's always 84 degrees. There's a massive wave pool, a lazy river, and tons of water slides. There's also a bunch of great dining options and complimentary daily events like nightly dance parties, all under one roof.

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