Morning Brew Daily - Losing Weight for Less $$$ & You Can’t Pay People to Have Kids

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Episode 397: Neal and Toby discuss Eli Lilly’s newest form of Zepbound, their blockbuster weight-loss drug that is half the price of its predecessor. Will this eliminate the competition? Then, Mark Zuckerberg writes a letter expressing his regret for demoting Covid-19 content during the pandemic as it felt ‘pressured’ from the Biden administration. Next, the Kelce brothers just scored a massive $100M deal with Amazon to take their podcast to… new heights. Meanwhile, birth rates around the world are falling and some countries are trying to pay people to start families, and it’s not working. Also, dinner sausages are becoming more and more popular as price-conscious shoppers shift to cheaper meats. Lastly, brutal heat waves sweeping across the country are forcing outdoor workers to wear high-tech cooling systems to survive.  Visit https://www.massmutual.com/ for all your financial planning needs Get your Morning Brew Daily T-Shirt HERE: https://shop.morningbrew.com/products/morning-brew-radio-t-shirt?_pos=1&_sid=6b0bc409d&_ss=r&variant=45353879044316  Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Listen to Money with Katie's podcast on "The Messy Economic Truth that the "Birth Rate Panic" Reveals" Here 00:00 - Shirts at the US Open 02:40 - Eli Lilly Cutting Prices  06:30 - Zuck Covid Content Regrets  09:45 - Kelce Mega Podcast Deal 16:00 - South Korean Birth Rate 20:00 - Sausage Impact on the Economy 23:20 - Ice Pack Work Vests 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, Mark Zuckerberg accused the government of censoring Facebook posts about COVID. What's behind this surprise admission? Then the Kelsey Brothers are the latest podcast to land themselves a mega deal as a yapping into a microphone continues to be a very viable career path. It's Wednesday, August 28th. Let's ride. Happy Wednesday.

You know, I thought I worked pretty hard, rise and grind. all of that. But then, Toby, you showed me a clip of American tennis player Francis Tiafo playing at the U.S. Open Monday night. And I felt like the laziest person on earth. Tiafo brought 20 backup shirts with him to the match, 20 in case he sweats through the mall and needs to swap them out. I haven't gone through that many wardrobe changes since getting ready for my first party in high school. You're probably sweating as much as Tiafo did as well. What's funny is Tiafo is no one for his shirt changing, but there's no real rhyme or reason. The New York Times analyzed it, and they said that he'll grab a fresh shirt out of his bag at the end of a set, but maybe he'll also change

multiple times during a single set. So it is a superstition, but it's not as regimented as you might think. All tennis players are just superstitious as well. I mean, Raphael and the doll needs to have two water bottles by his bench, positions diagonally from each other with the logos facing the court. So in the grand scheme of things, Tiafos' shirt-changing habits is not the weirdest thing a tennis player has done. Tennis is just like a mental challenge with yourself. Well, Tiafo is playing again today at 1.15 p.m. And it's supposed to be 95 degrees out here in New York.

So I wonder how many shirts he's going to bring with him. I'm setting the over under at 32. I'm hammering the over there. And now a word from our sponsor, Mass Mutual. Neil, remember the time you decided to splurge on that fancy coffee machine? I thought I was going to be whipping up lattes left and right. Yeah, and how's that working for you? Well, I'm still a regular at the local cafe. But hey, it's about investing in yourself, right?

True, but maybe put some of that energy into your financial future. So you're telling me my latte art skills won't cover my retirement? Not quite. But that's where Mass Mutual can step in. They've got the expertise to help you brew up a solid financial plan. No lattes required. So they can help me plan for my future while I figure out how to use that espresso machine? Wait, you've never even used it? Whether you're just starting out or looking to fine-tune to your financial strategy, Mass Mutual's got you covered. Check out massmutual.com and start planning for tomorrow today. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179 like the next grill three burner

gas grill or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies, see Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Some weight loss is coming to the weight loss drug market in the form of lower prices. Eli Lilly just dropped a new version of its GLP1 weight loss drug called Zepbound for about half of its old monthly list price. It's an industry shaking move that aims to increase access for patients while also undercutting the market for generic knockoffs. Zepbound will now set you back as little as $399 per month.

for the smallest dose as long as you go through its direct-to-consumer website. Compare that to the list prices of other popular weight loss drugs like Novo Nortes's Wagovi, which come in at around $1,000 a month before insurance and rebates. So, Neil, everyone from name brand producers to generic drug makers now have to respond to this new lower price or else get left behind. It's a bit of a power play from Eli Lilly. It really is. This is a move to intended to bolster market share.

there have been a ton of these Canal Street version of these weight loss drugs coming into play because the FDA has ruled that these drugs are in a shortage, which allows for others to get in the game and make legally these compounded versions, that's what they're called, that are essentially copycats or knockoffs, and they're charging a lot less than Eli Lilly and Novo Nortis, the two companies that are in the lead of this weight loss industry. And the move is saying, We're going to lower prices to, first of all, undercut our biggest competitor, Novo Nordisk, and to protect ourselves against all these knockoffs that are coming into the market. And the reason why they're able to price this new version so low is that the injection system is different.

So in the past, patients have had these auto-injector pens, which you can direct directly under the skin with the click of a button. You've probably seen some version of it. It's a very simple, not a minimally invasive way to inject the medicine. These new system is different. You have to use a syringe and a needle to draw the medicine. It gives you a single dose vial, and so you are essentially administering it to yourself. So it differs. They say that they can create additional capacity much easier of these vials.

So it's a big shift in the actual delivery mechanism, which allows them to change the price like they have. Right. And this is a card that Novo Nordus can't play, which may give Eli Lilly a leg up here. because when you're looking at these shortages of these medicines, Eli Lilly's main constraint has been the injectable pens. They can't make enough of these pens to deliver the treatment. Meanwhile, Novo Norris big shortage is actually the active ingredient in Wagovi and Ozempic, which is semi-glutide.

Eli Lilly has plenty of their active ingredient, which is terza peptide. Well done. Thank you, Toby. I know you didn't believe me. I could do that. I saw it in your eyes, but I nailed it. So Eli Lilly, the main constraint, yeah, it's like the injectable pens, but they found a way around that by going with these vials, which allows them to cut the price in half. I should add, this is just for the lowest two doses.

There are six different doses of Mangaro or Zepbound, and this are just the lowest two doses. So if you're on a bigger dose, then this may not be for you. Right. And clinical trials have shown that about one out of every three patients won't have the weight loss results that they're looking for at the. lower doses. So that's one pushback. It's not going to be for everyone. And then two, the other pushback is they're still pretty expensive. I mean, $399 for the lowest dose that might not give you the results you're looking for is still pretty pricey. But it's good to see that more competition is coming to this market. Prices are driving lower and that these, the big players are trying to

make it more affordable for a lot more people. Meanwhile, shares of Eli Lilly are up, 21% over the past three months, 64% this year. It is close to being a $1 trillion company, and it would be the first non-tech American company to hit a $1 trillion market cap. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a break from his burgeoning fashion model career to call out the Biden administration for, quote, censoring COVID-related content during the peak of the pandemic a few years back. Yeah, this was quite a surprise and exposed a rift between Zuck and the government that hadn't been made public before. So what did he say? In a letter address to the the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg wrote that in 2021, senior officials from the Biden

administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams four months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Zuckerberg said, with hindsight, he made decisions about removing posts that he regrets and would push back if something like this happens again. He also reiterated that ultimately the company made the decision to pull the content and they weren't being compelled to. The White House responded that it stood by its actions saying that its communications with tech companies encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety. Toby, with this unexpected admission, Zuck dug up old skeletons to raise fresh questions about free speech

and social media moderation policies. Yeah, if we go back to August 2021, Facebook said it removed more than 20 million posts related to COVID-19. So it was just a much different time. There was a lot of pressure coming from the White House. It is interesting, the timing, though, of releasing the letter now. Like, why is Zuck doing this? A lot of people said that he was giving maybe Republicans a political win by publishing this letter right before an election season.

But another interpretation is that Facebook has this anti-trust suit that is coming, that has been looming for a while. it dates back to 2021, where they say they were illegally crushing competition. So maybe that is still top of mind for Mark Zuckerberg. So he's trying to dive, dov, Dutch, and whatever the five D's are through this election season. So maybe he's more, more than likely looking out for Facebook's or meta's own instance. Seems like he's hedging his bets. Social media content moderation has never been more top of mind. This goes back to 2021. But really, just in the past few weeks, we've talked about the EU pressuring Elon Musk and X and investigating his content moderation

policies, which have been extremely lax. And then just this weekend, we had Pavel Dura, the CEO of Telegram, being arrested in France in a very dramatic episode. France is accusing him of allowing very serious criminal activity to fester on the Telegram app. So really, there's never been a more relevant time to talk about social media content moderation. I should add that what Zuckerberg is talking about with the government pressuring him to take down post was litigated in the Supreme Court, right? There was a couple states that filed a lawsuit against the government accusing them of illegally censoring information.

The Supreme Court ruled earlier this summer, as we talked about on this show, that the plaintiffs just didn't have standing to bring that case in general. What does 527 pounds of mass and a microphone add up to? Apparently $100 million if the balls of muscle speaking into the mic are NFL star brothers Jason and Travis Kelsey. The duo signed another mega podcast deal worth nine figures this time with Amazon's Wonder Unit for their podcast, New Heights. Started just two years ago, New Heights is part professional chatter about football and part pop culture debrief thanks to the presence of a certain singer in Travis's love life. New Heights is also emblematic of this next wave of podcast growth, where the biggest show, are attracting larger slices of the audience and larger ad deals because of it.

Neil, I thought we just went through a podcast boom a few years ago when Spotify bought the ringer and handed out mega deals to the Obamas and Prince Harry and Megan. But in the last three months, we've seen multiple $100 million deals from publishers. So things are clearly booming once again. They really are. I think I'm calling this the podcast Wars 2.0. And 1.0 was back in 2020, which you talked about Spotify, inks Joe Rogan to that mega deal. deal to bring him exclusive on the platform. They gave Harry and Megan $20 million. The model of that initial land grab for podcast didn't totally work out for these companies favor because Harry and Megan got paid $20 million. Megan produced 12 episodes in

total and then they broke off the deal. Eventually, Spotify also made Joe Rogan not exclusive to Spotify and put them out across various platforms. So it seems like there's a new war model brewing business model for these podcasts where you pay a lot of money. I mean, Sirius XM just last week signed Alex Cooper to a $100 million deal, but you don't make them exclusive to your platform. You just buy up the ad rights and the merch rights. So you can monetize them, but they're also across all platforms so people can access them and distribution is key. Just getting them in as many earbuds as possible. Yeah, this time around publishers are becoming a little bit more wiser. They're adding in a few more guardrails when it comes to these.

because they went through that really costly boom and bust cycle that we spoke about. The biggest sign, though, is Spotify still has a bit of a strategy shift underway. Remember, they spent a billion dollars on their first podcasting push. So these mega deals, it seems like they're pouring in thick and fast, but it really is, like they call it the power law of the internet where all the money is concentrated at the top 1% of the 1% of podcasts. And we're seeing that, I mean, New Heights is the number one sports podcast in the world, especially when it comes to football season, which is coming up.

But you're right. It looks like exclusive distribution deals are a little bit on the outs. They want to just blast this out and just take a cut of the ad revenue. That seems to be the business model that is more in vogue these days. Also, we just got to get a shout out to how much Travis Kelsey has been doing recently. I would be wary of drafting him in fantasy football leagues because his play on the football field is maybe the last in his list of priorities. I mean, he's got T. Swift. He's kind of a Hollywood guy. He's been top to host Amazon Prime's new game show. Are you smarter than a celebrity? He's in talks to start and a new comedy from Lionsgate. So the man is busy and his day job is still catching footballs. If you have any money riding on your fantasy leagues, I would maybe stay away from Travis Nelson. It's kind of becoming like the next Dwayne Johnson a little bit, going from an athletic career to just this Hollywood celebrity. But yeah, this shows the fact that these two football players, these two football players, these

two brothers are making $100 million on their podcast, that there is an alternative to life after football from going into, if you want to go into media, the traditional route has been, all right, you got to audition on CBS or NBC or in the studio for ESPN ahead of Sunday night football or something like that. Now you can start your own podcast and really JJ Reddick, the basketball player, pioneered this format where he sidestepped the media and launched a podcast in 2016, offering more unfiltered personal opinions. There have been a lot more very successful podcast and shows coming from athletes ever since. Bustin with the boys.

Pat McAfee. Morning Brew Daily. That one too. So this has been a very lucrative path for certain athletes that are more media savvy can talk really well into a microphone. And yeah, Jason Kelsey and Travis Kelsey are absolutely getting that back. Up next, how big of a deal is declining birth rates? Not loving your AT&T or T-Mobile bill.

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South Korea has tried just about everything to get its younger people having babies to reverse what has become the world's lowest birth rate. But nothing is sticking. The demographic crisis is only getting worse, and sociologists have a theory why. South Koreans in their 20s and 30s just love treating themselves and having a baby would get in the way of their personal hopes, dreams, and purchases. Reuters spoke with a bunch of millennials and Gen Ziers in the country who said they ascribe to the YOLO mentality, you only live once, and being happy right now is more important than getting married and raising a family. Much of that yoloing involves going out, shopping and

dining out to boost their social status, researchers say. The share of spending at high-end department stores by South Koreans in their 20s has almost doubled in the last three years. Sales at a restaurant serving an Instagramable All You Can Eat Strawberry Desert spiked 150% from last winter, even after it raised prices. But travel not so far away to Australia and 25 to 29-year-olds there are cutting their spending 3.5% in the first quarter of this year. Toby, the young people of South Korea are prioritizing their own fulfillment over parenthood.

And it seems like nothing the government can do is going to change that. Right. You have these two conflicting powers filtering through the economy, right now because South Korea continues to set new records for having the world's lowest birth rate. But at the same time, even amongst these very aggressive interest rates hikes over the past three years, they haven't been able to rein in spending whatsoever. The savings rate for that people in their 30s declined in the first quarter compared to five years ago, literally for all other age groups in the same period. Central Bank data shows that it went up.

So it really is just a specific generation that is taking the YOLO mindset that are spending on, they're the biggest per capita spenders on luxury brands in the world. So it really is this cultural phenomenon where they're saying, I want to live my life. I do not necessarily want to think about having kids. If it happens, it happens. But right now, I am focused on me and having a good time while I'm here. And governments around the world are scratching their heads. They're thinking, we have declining birth rates. What can we do to spur, you know, to spur people to have more babies? Because this is a huge economic. threat looming in the future when you have fewer workers, you have fewer people pitching into

social welfare programs that support retirees. This is a, this is top of mind for a lot of governments. And it must be disheartening to look at what South Korea is doing and what other countries are doing and saying, and seeing that just spending money, giving people a ton of money is not working because they have money and they're spending. I mean, look at Hungary, way different than South Korea, total family subsidy spending there. the amount of money they're spending on spurring people to have families amounts to 5% of total GDP or more than double what Hungary spends on defense. And they got a little bit of a tick up from 1.23 children per woman in 2011 to 1.59 in

2020. But that has stagnated. So that totally isn't working anymore. Taiwan has spent $3 billion. All these other countries are spending so much money giving out all these handouts to support child care, even though Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Norway, which are known for having very robust family leave policies, supporting parents financially, are seeing declining birth rates. So there does appear to be larger cultural forces like what's happening in South Korea at play

that is styming government's efforts to spur more babies. Governments might just have to accept the fact that they can't control how many kids people are having and just do their best to take care of your population's needs, just make it a better place to live in. That seems to be the only way that you can truly incentivize people planning for the future because it's very hard to do it from top-down policies coming from lawmakers. A new economic indicator could signal that we are heading towards a recession and it smells a lot like pork. If you look closely at the Dallas Fed's Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey, you'll see a slight uptick in dinner sausage consumption. And according to a comment included in the

report, this category tends to grow in the economy weekends because softs. is a good protein substitute for higher-priced proteins, aka when times get tough, consumers turn to sausage to stretch their budgets. The producer price index commodity category for sausage and deli meats has climbed by roughly a third since the start of 2020, so consumers are definitely hunting for more bargain brots these days. But Neil, you know how the saying goes?

You don't want to know how the sausage is made, but you definitely do want to pay attention to how the sausage is being sold. Yeah, this drove a lot of conversation, but it came from just a single comment in this very random manufacturing survey. So the Fed goes to various Texas manufacturers over the course of the month. And each month, they publish several quotes from manufacturers to talk to, and they kind of dish on what they see happening in the economy. And just this one manufacturer said, as the economy weekends, we are seeing modest growth in our category of dinner sausage. This category tends to grow when the economy weekends, as sausage is a good protein substitute for higher price.

proteins and can stretch consumers food budgets. This is a phenomenon that economists call trading down, and it happens a lot of times during recessions. We've seen it happened over the past few months, too, where retailers like Walmart and Target and other companies are saying that people are not spending on those luxury items anymore. They're just replacing it with maybe the brand, the generic brand version of what they would use to buy. So that is sort of the phenomenon that's happening here. I will say other certain commentators looked at the Texas manufacturing outlook survey and say, this is pretty anecdotal. This is anecdotal. I wouldn't take this one manufacturer's word for what's happening in the broader economy. This survey has

also been sort of criticized before for hyperbole when in 2016 one company went totally off about millennials slacking at work and that they were super lazy. So that sparked a big uproar back then. So I'm not really ascribing to the sausage index, but there are a lot of other, but it does add to the pantheon of great other recession indicators that take these sales of like a particular item in the economy and try to extrapolate a lot of trends from it. I don't even think it's the best food-based economic indicator out there, though. I prefer to look at the bake beans sales indicator, which shows that it posits that the sales of baked beans increased during economic downturns. People look for more affordable, more long-lasting foods. There's

also the buttered popcorn index. It suggests that during economic downturns, people go to the movies for escapism, leading to increased popcorn sales. There's all sorts of weird economic indicators out there. I mean, you can look at the grittiness, quote, grittiness of Marine Corp ads, because that tends to correlate with economic challenges as well. Recruitment's easier during tough time. So pick your economic indicator. Pick whichever, if you want to be food base or not. There's plenty to derive from even the smallest little changes in how things are priced. It is clear, though, that people are moving away from beef, which is increased in price, and trading down to chicken and perhaps sausage. Finally, this sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel,

but things have gotten so hot here on earth that companies are giving their employees high-tech ice packs to wear under vests so they can stay cool when working in searing temperatures. If you head to a drive-thru at a Shake Shack or Dutch Bros in Arizona, don't be surprised to see a taking your order wearing an ice plate, a product from the company core performance, designed to fit neatly into vests and prevent the human body from overheating. Dutch Bros uses ice plate vests at its 29 locations in Metro Phoenix, while ShakeShack uses them at 33 drive-through locations in 17 states. The Wall Street Journal explains that on-body cooling systems have been around for decades,

pioneered by the British military and NASA, but as intense heat becomes more, widespread, the ice plate and similar products have begun popping up in daily life, from fast food workers standing in the Maricopa County heat to warehouse workers to mascots at theme parks. Toby, is this dystopian or an innovative use of technology? It's definitely a little bit of both. And the first person I thought of when I read this ice vest story was Francis Tiafo actually, because clearly he is sweating a lot and could use this cooling system. But yeah, these technologies have been popping up. It filtered down through the military over years to now more commercial use cases. The funniest use case, too,

is so there's one version, which is actually ice packs, where it has physical frozen water within a contoured plate under a vest. But then there's also makes use some other companies make use of phase changing materials. Think about going to, maybe you had it in your lunchbox, those ice packs that they can, they're big advantages that they can become cool. at a temperature that's higher than the freezing point of water, so it's a little bit more comfortable when it's close to your body. And the company, the person who is behind pioneering that is, I'm not kidding, made it for the furry community,

who they wear these full-body animal costumes, and it's very hot under there. And so they created this phase-changing vest that is a little bit more comfortable. It's since been used in theme parks and mascots around the country. But shout out to the furries, I guess. they are pushing the scientific kind of body of work forward when it comes to cooling vests. And final note, I did mention that this felt like it comes out of a sci-fi novel. Well, it actually did because Neil Stevenson, the sci-fi author, in a 2021 novel Termination Shock,

he wrote about the fact that Earth had become so hot and humid in Texas that people would wear space suits, but call them Earth suits to keep them cool. And so something from a sci-fi novel is actually popped up in real life. It's just a question of whether it'll come to the broader population. People not working in

super hot Phoenix in the asphalt that can reach 150 degrees or working in these super hot warehouses or donning mascots at theme parks. We'll end up wearing them just for daily life to keep them cool. I mean, it's going to be hot out today. And definitely maybe we'll see tennis players wearing them as well. Let's wrap it up there.

Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Wednesday. Getting in touch with us is super, super, super easy. Just open up your email and send a message to morning brewdaily at morningbrew.com. We love seeing your messages roll in throughout the morning. And don't forget, you can make your friends smarter for free by letting them know they can start their day with Morning Brew Daily. And if you're not sure who to share the pod with, Toby might have an idea. I want you to share it with your old college roommate. You probably haven't spoken to them in a while.

Use it as a chance to reconnect. They probably miss you. Harry, I miss him. All right, I'll get in touch with him and let him know that I host this podcast now. Okay, let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer.

Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Yuchinawa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio. Hair and makeup is making sausage for dinner and everyone is invited. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of one. morning brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San

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