Morning Brew Daily - Neal’s Numbers Mega Recap: Death of Partying, 2 Escalators in WY, and More

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Episode 747: Neal and Toby revisit some of their favorite numbers throughout the year, including the death of partying, Americans are very rich but also miserable, ChatGPT changing the way we speak, and people hating cars that have too much tech. Then, the selection of the next pope caused a resurgence in pope content. Don’t forget, Wyoming only has 2 escalators and mosquitoes show up in Iceland for the first time ever. Finally, why Din Tai Fung is absolutely crushing in.  Check out https://www.public.com/morningbrew for more. 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 Paid endorsement. Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Not investment advice. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and investment values may rise or fall. See terms of match program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the most fascinating facts and figures from the year. It's a supersized version of Neal's Numbers. It's Wednesday, December 31st.

Let's ride. Good morning and happy New Year's Eve. One of everyone's favorite segments on the podcast, and I'm not just saying this because it has my name on it, is Neal's, numbers. It's the segment we run on Thursdays where I share three stats from the week's news that will save you from the most awkward small talk encounters. For this special holiday week episode, we're going to pick out the best of Neal's numbers for 2025. Our team poured over

every stat or figure I discussed in Neal's numbers from the year and picked a couple that stood out from the pack, either for representing a broader theme from the year or just because they were so bizarre. Toby, are you ready to go? Do I have a choice? Yes, I'm ready. Let's do this thing. But before we do this thing, a word from our sponsor, Public. Neil, remember when we said we'd start doing more adult things this year? Yeah, and I've been pretty good. I've been meal prepping, getting better sleep, and hitting the gym. All right, brag.

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paid for by public investing, full disclosures in podcast description. Now here's our episode about Neal's numbers. As I was reviewing all the Neal's numbers from the year, I found that many of them fit into distinct themes or buckets that speak to what the world was like in 2025. And Toby and I are going to run them down now. The first clear theme that emerged was the death of partying, especially among young people. The writer Derek Thompson has been beating this drum for a while and put together some

jaw-dropping stats to highlight what he describes as the anti-social century. Between 2003 and 2024, the amount of time Americans spent hosting or attending a social event plummeted by 50%. Among Americans aged 15 to 24, they spent 70% less time partying than they did just 20 years ago. And the list goes on. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every one hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her. than she spends in face-to-face contact with human friends. And since the early 2000s,

the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has dropped by more than a third. Toby, we are becoming a nation of homebodies. And I don't think you can ignore the downstream effect that's happening in the alcohol industry as well. I mean, partying and alcohol inevitably go hand in hand. And only 54% of Americans said that they imbibed in adult beverages.

That is the lowest number in Gallup's 9%. 90 years of polling. So people are drinking less. They're hanging out less. They're spending more time with their pets. A big issue, too, for kids is that their parents are actually watching them more. They're paying more attention to them. That was something that Derek Thompson highlighted in his piece about the lack of parting.

Mother's time with child care increased by 200 minutes a week. Father's time spent on child care increased by 240 minutes a week. So you're kind of getting this combination of none of the youths are drinking anymore. their parents are watching them more closely, not necessarily a recipe for a great party. No, as Thompson, right, Americans used to have more kids whom they watch less. Now they have fewer children whom they watched more. And he chalks up this quote, unquote, anti-social century to three main factors. And they're fairly obvious.

It's not reinventing the wheel here. It's greater professional ambition. So people are delaying marriage and having kids in order to pursue their career, prospects, more intensive parroting, as we talked about, and lavish entertainment abundance. You can't ignore the screen factor in all of this. As American socialization has declined over the last few decades, there's been an increase in not only television, but social media. Every study that you find finds that we are spending more times in front of our screens instead of interacting face-to-face with humans. It's just this culture of anxiety, too,

because if you spend more time alone, when you do go hang out with people, it makes you a little bit more on edge. You feel like each interaction is more high stakes because they are less frequent. So you get fewer reps, and it's just like anything else you do in life. If you don't practice it,

you're not going to be good at it. Now that is the same thing that is happening with socializing right now. So then your avoidance increases in the cycle deepens. So I hope people hear this and go, let's, you know, have a party, invite their friends out

because right now it's not. happening too much anymore. And this next number meshes pretty well with the idea that people aren't parting anymore. And that is that America is very rich, but also very unhappy. The data comes from Douglas Harris and economists at Tulane, who assembled 14 scholars from various political backgrounds to create a national report card for countries around the world. And the U.S.'s report card shows that our economy is performing better than any of our peers pulling away from Europe in Japan. And yet the report also found that the U.S. fairs worse and basically everything else.

The U.S. ranks below most pure countries in life expectancy, higher than most in depression, has among the worst income inequality and lags significantly behind in life satisfaction. Bradley Beezer, a historian at Hillsdale College and committee member, put it best. We're so wealthy, but so unhappy. Neil, we are winning the money game and losing the meaning game. We are absolutely winning the money game.

And here's a stat that illustrates that. The per capita gross domestic product GDP in the United States was about 28% higher than in the euro area. Now, that gap is more than 80%. But if you run down things like life satisfaction, happiness, crime, we are trailing in every single category among our peer nations. It dovetails with some other Neal's numbers that I had over the course of the year because this was a distinct theme, right? Americans are doing pretty well economically. They are not doing well in terms of the happiness. And there was the world happiness report that came out. The United States in 2012 was 11th. And now we've slid in the most recent report to 24th in the global rankings. Finland for the

eight straight year was the number one most happy country. And then there was this Wall Street Journal poll that asked about the American dream. And they found that the share of people who say that they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to, just 25%, which was a record low in surveys dating back to 1987. Nearly 70% of people said they believe that the American dream, which is, if you work hard, you will get ahead, no longer holds true or never did, which was the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys. So reviewing Neal's numbers this year, it seemed like there was a distinct theme that Americans are reporting record low levels

of satisfaction even as they're doing okay economically. Yeah, this also reminds me of a story we recently discuss about, an essay from the sub-sacker, Michael Green, who said that the poverty line that the official government recognizes, which is $32,000 for a family four, is way too low. And actually, it's closer to $140,000 a year for a family four by his calculations. He found that by just averaging what costs a traditional suburban family in Caldwell, New Jersey might face when considering things like health care, things like transportation, housing, just the normal stuff that everyday Americans have to pay for. And he found that whatever the official government number,

it's vastly outdated. It's way too low. And it's probably closer to well into six figures, which does reflect some of these anxieties and some of the pressures that a lot of Americans are facing as reflected by all the data that we just mentioned. It also could be this case-shaped recovery we're talking about. And the fact that America is highly unequal. There's a stat that was thrown around a lot for Moody's analytics this year that showed that the top 10% of earners in the U.S. accounted for nearly 50% of spending in the second quarter. You heard it from a lot of retailers in the most recent earning season ahead of the holiday shopping season was that the wealthy are doing okay. They are maybe trading down to cheaper goods, but the people on the

lower income spectrum are doing worse and they're pulling back even more than the people on top who are powering ahead with spending. This is going to continue to be. be a theme going into the next year with the midterm elections. AI was everywhere this year, and it's starting to change how we speak in our daily lives. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute found that since the release of chat GPT, people have tweaked their vocabulary to favor words that are more frequently used by the chatbot. After analyzing 280,000 YouTube videos from academic channels, this study found that speakers use words like meticulous, delve, realm, and adept, all words that often show up in chat.

GTPT outputs 51% more frequently than they did in the three years prior. According to the lead author, using words like delve more is a sign that we've internalized this virtual vocabulary into daily communication. But not only is our vocab starting to mimic chat chabit, so is the way we talk, making our speech longer, more structured, and with less emotional expression, similar to what we read when interacting with the chatbot. As one scientist at the Max Planck Institute put it, Delve is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a, again, a conflict here because replies generated by AI actually found,

it actually facilitated feelings of closeness between participants. When you write more clearly, it makes you communicate better. That is a thing that is pretty obvious. But if people believe that their partner on the other side of a conversation was using AI, it also fosters these feelings of suspicion. And so, yes, we are collaborating and we are connecting more efficiently and more effectively, but these words, these kind of red flags have been popping up in people's conversations, which just makes you think, are they using AI? Which kind of inhibits the entire

communication process in general. So I think a lot of people know what these words are at this point. At this point, AI has been out for so long that people recognize sentence structures. It's not X, it's Y. M-DAS is another one. Delve was the original one. It's kind of weaned off Delve a little bit at this point. But there are just these markers that people have come to recognize, and it's just infiltrated all of our communication. And it's infiltrated work. And maybe this was a Toby's trends. I don't remember. We definitely talked about it. The concept of work slop, a study in the Harvard Business Review found that more than 40% of U.S.-based employees reported receiving AI-generated content that, quote, masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance

to meaningfully advance a given task, which they considered work-slop. They're calling it destroying productivity. So AI, as we're seeing in our vocabulary, in the way we structure our sentences, and in the way we work, has infiltrated our daily lives here, more than three years now after the release of chat GPZ. And of course, it boom rings in the other direction. Now the marker of good communication is a little bit of sloppiness, is a little bit of humanity that is injected into things, especially on things like dating apps, where technically your AI bot, whatever you use, could craft the perfect prompt, could craft a perfect response to someone. And so by, you know, spelling a word wrong or just showing that, hey, there is a human on the other side of this phone.

That is how people are separating themselves in the age of AI communication, AI slop, and just everybody's language kind of converging towards the same thing because all the AIs have been trained on the same things. Up next, as technology progresses, sometimes people don't like the direction it's heading, especially when it comes to their cars. consumers are increasingly frustrated with how complicated modern car tech has become with a survey from strategic vision. Showing the share of drivers who feel their cars controls are intuitive has collapsed from 79% in 2015 to just 56% in 2024. Across the industry, drivers say they actually want their cars to be dumber or at least simpler and more reliable and more intuitive. Neil Automakers spent much of the last few decades laying on the tech, stuffing things like night. vision, ambient seasonal lighting, and augmented reality windshields. But drivers are saying, it's just too much, man.

Give me my knobs and dials back. And the number one thing is actually the door handle. So Tesla pioneered the concept of the electric door handle because, of course, we had to reinvent the door handle. It wasn't just, it was too simple. Just, you know, the traditional door handle complaints to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about doors across all car models, not just including Tesla, jumped 65 percent in 2020.

from the year prior and a separate report from JD Power said that owners of battery electric vehicles, so electric vehicles reported that door handles being too difficult to use at a rate of 3.1 problems per 100 vehicles, which was up from 0.2 in 2020. So it basically wasn't an issue in 2020. Now it is a serious issue and often the top issue for people. There have been numerous reports to safety regulators saying that I've been trying to get into my car or more dangerously. trying to get out of my car in certain situations. And I can't because when the battery dies,

that also renders the door handles dead as well. So I can't leave my car when I need to. That's something that regulators are starting to address. So dumb to just have a door handle that doesn't work like a door handle anymore. Why would you ever need a battery power door handle? It doesn't make any sense. The other thing that probably goes hand in hand with 1A is door handles. 1B is probably headlights.

A study commissioned by the UK's Department of Transportation found that 97% of people surveyed were distracted by headlights from oncoming vehicles and 96% thought that headlights were too bright. That is something that we have seen evolve over time as we've moved from halogen bulbs to LED bulbs, from warmer light to colder blue light. It hurts your retinas. It blinds your retinas. In low light situations, the bluer, the light, the wider the light, if you will,

it causes issues with how you can, you know, see. and if the big headlights are coming down the other side of the highway at you, literally transportation officials are saying, look down and to the left so you don't get blinded by it. They're a lot more energy efficient, and yet there are a lot more annoying as a driver on the outside of the car. I think from knobs and buttons shifting to touch screens, from door handles going from manual to electrification, and from these headlights going from halogens to LEDs, which are much brighter. We're going to start to see some pushback, I think, and then 2026 or the next

few years after that to create a more manual sense of what a car used to be, because consumers are going to balk at this, not only because they find it less intuitive, but also because it drives a car price higher. And already cars are, you know, upwards of averaging $47,000 for a new car. I'm going to go Flintstones and just, you know, manual power, just get rid of absolutely everything. No more electricity at all. Let's just go manpower. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with more Neal's numbers right after this. The world's 1.4 billion Catholics got a new leader this year after the death of Pope Francis in April. But everyone, no matter their religion, was captivated by the spectacle that led to the election of the first American

pontiff, Pope Leo the 14th from Chicago. More than $40 million was wagered on prediction markets like Pauley Market and Kalshi as the secretive concave got underway. and he would have made a killing if you bet on Robert Prevost, who would soon become Pope Leo. His odds hovered between just 1% and 2% before his election, a real underdog story. People also turned to an Oscar-winning movie from 2024 to learn more about the process by which a Pope is elected. Streaming viewership for Conclave jumped 283% the day after Pope Francis died, while another Pope movie, the two popes from 2019, saw a 417% spike. Overall, the conclave did not last long, with the Cardinals requiring just 33 hours and four ballots to send up the white smoke,

instantly making Prevost the most famous White Sox fan in the world. I think the funniest understory of all this is that the Cardinals themselves were watching Conclave as well, because they didn't want a guidance on how to actually carry out a conclave in a real life. That's because the majority of them were appointed by Pope Francis and haven't been around along enough to know how it all works. So how funny is it that they're like, thank goodness this movie just came out with a very, you know, intricate and pretty by all accounts, a fairly accurate representation of what actually goes down. The Cardinals themselves were just sitting down, turn it on the TV and going, okay, so that's how I'm supposed to vote. And everything was coming up Vatican City this year in terms of Neal's numbers. There was this viral post on LinkedIn that talked about the country with the most CFA charter holders and Blueberg Terminals per capita, CFA charter holder.

It's someone who is a certified financial advisor and is just considered more of an expert in all things portfolio management and investment management. Well, with four CFA charter holders, according to Bloomberg, the Vatican has the most CFA charter holders per capita in the entire world. Of course, it is a very small country, but it is number one with four CFA charter holders. The next largest is the Cayman Islands. And then it also is number one, the Vatican, in two other finance metrics. 12% of the total population Vatican city work and finance. That's more than Luxembourg's 10% in second place. And the Vatican also has the most Bloomberg terminals per capita of any country with 17 for 882 people, more than four times as many as Luxembourg, which comes in second place.

It makes sense. The Vatican has a very sophisticated asset management operation. The Catholic Church brings in a lot of money, and so they have a lot of money to manage. But also banking and accounting, as we know it, emerged from Ruffington. Renaissance era, papal banking, the papacy needed financial networks to

manage its revenue. So basically everything that we know about modern finance today had its origins a little bit in this neck of the woods. So there were so many memes around this too.

I remember when this stat came out where people were generated images of, you know, cardinals sitting at terminals saying this is who you're trading against. Like good luck.

They literally have God on their side. So a very interesting, I mean, just the Pope in general has been a very fertile news cycle, especially for Neal's numbers. The other thing that I'm remembering, too, is remember Topps is selling Pope baseball cards because the Pope is a very big baseball fan. I mean, you already mentioned that he is a Chicago White Sox fan.

So his trading cards outperforming like LeBron James and Victor Wambayama rookie cards at this point because he's the Pope. I mean, come on. How are you going to trade again? He's an American Pope. He's an American Pope at that, yeah. It was a lot of Pope mania this year. Okay, now let's relive some Neil's numbers from the year that are just plain fun facts, perfect for breaking the awkward silence during a dinner party or a Zoom meeting.

First up, I didn't believe this one at first, but it turned out to be true. There are only two escalators in the great state of Wyoming, both at Banks and Casper. There used to be a third at the JCPenney building in Cheyenne, but that building was renovated and the escalator was removed. And that speaks to why there are hardly any escalators in Wyoming. at all. There are barely any malls. There are only three shopping malls in Wyoming, Frontier Mall in Chaiyan, East Ride Mall in Casper, and White Mountain Mall in Rock Springs, and none of them has an escalator. Another place you might find an escalator is a stately office

building, but there aren't many of those in Wyoming either. In fact, the tallest building in the state is the Wyoming Financial Center, which towers 11 stories into the air. There's just not a lot of people in general in Wyoming. I mean, 583,000 people for two escalators. It's kind of like the Pope or the Vatican stat that you just mentioned per capita rates go crazy when you don't have a lot of people. The function of escalators in architecture, though, also doesn't jive very well as what's going on with Wyoming. They're kind of middles of the road are considered that in architecture because installing and maintaining escalators is less expensive than an elevator, but obviously a lot more expensive than just stairs. So typically you need a building with a very high

occupancy rate. You need a lot of foot traffic to justify the cost. Wyoming, has none of the above, hence the crazy fact that there's only two escalators. Okay, hold on to your bellies for this next fun number. Do you know which restaurant chain that makes the most money per location in America? It's not Chick-fil-A, a steakhouse, or even Nobu. It's Din Tai Fung. Yes, the dumpling shop obliterates all challengers when it comes to an average unit volume, bringing in over $27 million per restaurant nearly double its next closest competitor.

For comparison, one Dintai Fung makes as much as two cheesecake factories, almost as much as four Chick-fil-Ais and about the same as seven McDonald's. The average Dintai Fung location would rank as the 15 largest standalone restaurant in America. Neil, these things absolutely rip. According to a restaurant business journal, a restaurant needs to do three things to generate unit volumes of what Dintai Fung is doing. It's got to be big. it's got to have a lot of real estate so you can fit a lot of people in there. You have to have customers spending a decent amount of money. Their average check size has to be high. And it has to be busy. So it has to be packed from the time it opens till the time it

closed. Dintai Fung checks all three of those boxes. Its check averages are about $45 per person, which is interesting because the individual dishes rarely go above $20. You just kind of order a lot of them because there's so much good stuff. You have to have this type of soup dumpling, this type of wanton, this type of salad. And so all. All of these things are conspiring to create this astronomical number where each restaurant brings in 27 million, which is kind of insane to think about. They're also very strategically paced. A lot of them are on the West Coast, which has a larger Asian American population. And they're in Disneyland, in California.

And then in New York City, where there's been a huge heralded opening over the past year, was in Times Square. When you're talking about foot traffic, there is no other. I remember when you found this number and you quizzed me, you're like, all right, what do you think the largest restaurant chain is? And I just always thought it was Chick-fil-A. Like, I thought it stood head and shoulders above everything. But, you know, Din Tai Fung is laughing at Chick-fil-A four times as much as a normal Chick-fil-A. So it is just fascinating how, one, Asian sit-down chains are also having a little bit of a moment right now.

Others on the list did include Nobu. Benny Hana was a little further behind at $6.46 million. But you kind of see these Asian concepts gaining steam right now. and you just have this unmatchable throughput, this unmatchable, you know, size and just an awesome menu. What we can put some respect on Chick-fil-A's name, though, because when you're looking just at American fast food chains, Chick-fil-A does do the most sales, average sales per location, 7.5 million.

It's not 24, but it is 7.5. And then you get Raising Cains in and Out Burger, Waterburger, and then McDonald's Chipotle, Kava Zaxbys are all the way down the list, if you like those places. Finally, this was a number that seemed to scratch and itch. For the first time ever, mosquitoes were found on Iceland, which was one of the only places in the world they had not been discovered before. The other is Antarctica.

An entomologist confirmed the sightings of three mosquitoes reported by a citizen scientist in October, who wrote on Facebook, at dusk, I caught sight of a strange fly. I immediately suspected what was going on and quickly collected the fly. It was a female. And Iceland will never be the same again. However, people who study mosquitoes said it was only a matter of time until the biting bug showed up on Iceland, which despite being cold, has plenty of marshes and ponds, perfect breeding habitats for mosquitoes. And while the Arctic region is heating up at four times the rate of the rest of the globe, scientists said it was still too early to link the mosquito settings to global warming. After all, they're found on many of Iceland's frigid neighbors like Norway and Greenland.

So it was just a matter of time before they made the leap to York's birthplace. This is one of those numbers that stick in your head like a mosquito. I remember talking to my mom and she's like, for whatever reason, I will always remember the mosquito in Iceland story because it just feels so in organic. Like it doesn't feel like a bug that I have in Florida should be in a place like Iceland. But a lot of scientists say, hey, we are entering the age of the mosquito right now. One of the few beneficiaries of a warming planet is a mosquito because they flourish in heat, humidity. So yes, it was only a matter of time. If we see a mosquito on Antarctica, though,

that's when you get... That's when we go up to the moon or Mars is beckoning at that point. But yes, Hall of Fame, Neal's number right there. Okay, that is all the time you have. What a year for Neal's numbers. Thank you so much for listening. And Toby, your commentary is also a key part of what makes Neal's number successful. So I want to thank you for that. And thank you for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful rest of your day. If you want to get in touch, send a note 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 executive producer. Raymond Lue is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake.

Hair and makeup is riding the escalators in Wyoming. It's not taking them that long. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great. Show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T Mobile Bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal. So get away from that unfortunate phone bill and get to Verizon. Run, ride, canoe. Whatever it takes, we'll be here. Bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best network. A better deal. No surprises. That's Verizon. Best network based on

root metrics, best overall mobile network performance U.S. second half 2025. All rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person who gave me the deal. Additional terms, conditions, conditions, and restrictions apply.