Morning Brew Daily - New “TrumpRx” to Lower Drug Prices & Spotify Drops One CEO for Two

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Episode 682: Neal and Toby talk about Trump’s newly launched “TrumpRx” program designed to make more prescription drugs affordable. Then, the federal EV tax credit has officially ended, and some... believe a drastic slowdown in EV sales. Also, Amazon overhauls its hardware and some are saying the Echo is certainly raising eyebrows. Meanwhile, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek is stepping down and the company is adopting the co-CEO model. Finally, Octopuses are eating everything in their path on the way to the English coast. 00:00 - Shutdown coming soon 2:50 - TrumpRx launches 7:45 - EV tax credit is over 12:30 - Spotify trades one CEO for two 18:30 - Amazon overhauls its Echos 22:45 - Sprint Finish! Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Check out https://www.linkedIn.com/mbd for more. Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  Vote for MBD in the Signal Awards! http://bit.ly/3W4e5ik  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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Starting point is 00:00:01 Consider this comparison. PWC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PWC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tuck can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at
Starting point is 00:00:26 pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewAI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today the White House has a new plan to bring down drug prices, Trumprx.gov. Then Spotify CEO Daniel Eck is stepping down
Starting point is 00:00:49 with two co-CEOs taking over the reins. It's Wednesday, October 1st. Let's ride. The government just hung a closed sign on the door right after midnight. The federal government shut down. down after lawmakers failed to agree on a spending bill that would keep the lights on past Tuesday. It's the first shutdown since 2019, which was the longest in history at 35 days and could have a
Starting point is 00:01:16 significant impact on your daily life and the economy, depending on how long it lasts. Toby, how's this going to affect federal services? Can I do Angels Landing at Zion National Park like I planned? Well, I don't know if you're in shape to do that, but what stays open and what actually closes when the government, quote unquote, shuts down. A lot of fun. services actually aren't going to change. Travel will continue mostly uninterrupted with TSA employees and air traffic control workers working without pay. National parks will remain partially open, though anything with a gate or a door will close so you might have to park down the road or use the bathroom before you go. You'll still get your mail to you and social security checks
Starting point is 00:01:55 will be sent out. Unfortunately, though, tax processing will also be unaffected because the IRS has a separate source of funding. So a shutdown isn't a total shutdown. down, but it does get more damaging the longer it goes on, kind of like your last toxic relationship. And now word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Toby, have you ever been the best at something? Best host of this podcast, Up Top. I'm not high-fiving you for that. My point is LinkedIn Ads is the best when it comes to generating the highest B2B Roads of all online ad networks. They also have a network of over one billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. You can target your buyers by job title industry, company role, seniority, skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.
Starting point is 00:02:40 Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash MBD. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions may apply. So when I saw this first piece of news yesterday and read it to Toby, he thought I was joking. The White House is launching something it's calling Trump RX. It's a real thing. Trump RX is a direct-to-consumer website that will allow Americans to pay cash for some drugs at a discount negotiated by the government. Part of the Trump administration's push to lower prices for prescription medications. Standing next to Trump at the announcement was Pfizer CEO Albert Borla, whose company has been targeted by the White House for its drug prices. As many executives
Starting point is 00:03:24 have done before him, Borla leaned into the art of the deal to get in Trump's graces by offering a few olive branches. According to Trump, Pfizer agreed to offer all of its drugs to Medicaid at reduced prices. It will sell some drugs on Trump RX at a 50% average discount, and it pledged an additional $70 billion investment in domestic manufacturing. Pfizer thinks that's a small price to pay to skirt two looming risks. 100% tariffs on branded pharmaceutical products, Trump recently threatened, and a broader crackdown on the pharma industry by the administration. Seems to have worked out for them because Pfizer said it won a three-year reprieve from any tariffs and investors sent the stock up nearly 7% confident that Pfizer was now in the clear.
Starting point is 00:04:07 Toby, now that you know, it's not a prank, what is the expected impact of Trump RX and what do you make of Pfizer's play to cozy up to Trump? Well, first of all, there was a big pressure campaign that led to this point because Trump has been very aggressively going after a big pharma in both administrations saying that the U.S. needs to get drug prices in line with other countries, specifically Europe. He has been pushing them to match most favorite nation drug pricing where he's saying like, hey, if Europeans are getting this drug for X amount over there, we needed to sell it for the same amount here.
Starting point is 00:04:39 So he sent all these letters to the world's biggest drug makers saying, hey, we are going to threaten penalties. We're going to threaten these massive, massive tariffs if you don't fall in line. What the actual impact of this launch may be is a little hard to tell because a lot of these companies already have been selling direct consumer drugs on other platforms. also a lot of different things go into pricing a drug. It's not just, you can't just set the price. Insurers have a say in it.
Starting point is 00:05:05 Pharmacy benefit managers have a say in it. So it's not just a simple, this is what it costs, this is what we'll sell it to you. So it might be a little tough. We'll see what the actual, you know, assortment of drugs that you will be able to buy on the site. Also, this is not a site that it will fulfill the drugs for you. It just kind of allows you to browse drugs
Starting point is 00:05:26 and then you will be redirected to the actual Pfizer's website to receive the drugs themselves. So it's kind of acting more as a middleman, a branded middleman, something that Trump can put his name on to show that we are working to get prices lower. So the actual impact we're going to have to see. Yeah, Canada Fitzgerald, analyst Carter Gold, came out and said that, notice that Pfizer didn't really change any of its financial guidance after the deal. So he wrote that the changes appear, quote, largely benign and health experts came out. one by one yesterday and saying it's hard to imagine that there's going to be any major impact on the market. This is sort of jockeying, as we've seen from the likes of Apple and Nvidia and a bunch of other big tech companies that have gone to the White House and said, hey, we're going to
Starting point is 00:06:09 pledge $500 billion to build factories here in the United States. You know, under the surface, they'd already allocated $475 billion of that to factories in the United States. But it is sort of an art of the deal. Pfizer, many other drug makers have come under pressure. They were threatened with huge tariffs. So you saw Pfizer stock get a lift yesterday and you saw across the pharma industry, all of those other drug makers got a lift yesterday because analysts saw this as a particular blueprint that other companies could follow in terms of securing favored deals from Trump and avoiding the worst of tariffs and a crackdown on drug pricing. This certainly disrupts the pharmacy benefit manager kind of model because that middle layer is what a lot of people blame for the
Starting point is 00:06:53 high drug prices in America. So if you certainly disrupts the pharmacy benefit manager kind of model, because that middle layer is what a lot of people blame for the high drug prices in America. So if you start to push for more direct-to-consumer drug sales, it cuts out pharmacy benefit managers. And so we are seeing that becoming a more normalized thing now in the drug industry. Trump RX is just another instance of that. So some of these PVMs could start to lose some of their influence when it comes to a drug pricing. And then it also is interesting. Like this is the branding exercise here is very intentional. It's almost trying to simplify this very complex market. No one knows how drugs are price. But when you slap Trump RX, you go on this nationalized website. It's almost like the McDonald'sization. It's just you have a menu. It seems a
Starting point is 00:07:31 lot more simple. So part of this is just a political win as well, trying to say like, hey, we are trying to simplify this very complex process that you don't know how it works. Just come to Trump RX and things will be clearer. Moving on. Today is the start of October, which means the beginning of soup season, but the end of something else. The electric vehicle tax. credit. Federal incentives to buy electric vehicles have been around in some form since 2008, but as of today, they're done and dusted as a result of the GOP's tax and spending bill. The federal government had provided a $7,500 tax credit for people buying a new electric vehicle and $4,000 for a used EV in order to spur electrification and curb emissions from gas-powered cars.
Starting point is 00:08:13 With that incentive eliminated, automakers and consumers are waking up to a whole new world today. So what's going to happen? To look forward, you have to look backward. In the past three months, EV demand has skyrocketed as shoppers scrambled to claim the credit ahead of the expiration date. Cox Automotive projects that EV sales hit 410,000 units in the third quarter, up more than 20% from the year before, and accounting for one in 10 of all new vehicles sales, a record share. But the surge of people buying EVs over the summer means there aren't many left to buy them over the winter, especially as the tax incentive goes away. Analysts expect EV sales to plummet this quarter, as everyone who wanted a battery-powered car now has one. Looking further ahead, the outlook looks murky at best for electric vehicles, which automakers had once went all in on.
Starting point is 00:09:02 Toby, you're about to see what's so-called natural demand for EVs looks like, meaning demand without any sugar from the government. We're not going to quite see it yet because Ford and GM and all these electric vehicle makers, saw this coming, obviously. This date has been circled on their calendars for a long time. So what they started to do is actually starting to buy up dealer inventory when they still had the benefit of getting this $7,500 EV tax credit. And therefore, they can pass those savings onto the customer mostly through leasing. So we're going to see maybe a longer tail here. It's not going to be a sharp cliff that maybe some analysts initially predicted because these companies have been getting their ducts in a row. And by taking advantage of the subsidy when it was still
Starting point is 00:09:48 active, they are going to be able to offer discounted leases to customers. So I don't think that we're going to see an absolute 50% drop overnight. That being said, it is absolutely going to impact it because there's still not price parity between internal combustion cars and EVs. They have around a $9,000 premium to ICE cars. So that tax credit went a long way to make it more competitive. So natural demand, you are right. Maybe it's going to be a longer road off ramp from these tax credits than we expected. But it's certainly going to be an uphill battle once they do fully kind of come to their natural resting place within the market. Yeah, there's no question that EVs are about to face a retrenchment because pretty much
Starting point is 00:10:32 every automaker that had once got all in on EVs, they set up these huge plans. They pledged tens of billions of dollars are now walking that back. They had done it before this tax credit ended and now they're doing it very significantly. Honda just scrapped an electric accurate. Stalances cancels a battery powered RAM pickup. GM is idling factories all over the rust belt. You had Ford CEO Jim Farley come out yesterday and say that EV demand is going to fall by 50% after this tax credit goes away. So they're expecting just a much smaller buyer base for cars that are electric powered. When I once thought this was going to be the future of the industry, perhaps it is 10, 20, 30 years down the road, but certainly not going to be five years down the road, as many predicted.
Starting point is 00:11:16 The brutal part is that the roads were just kind of coming onto par with what the electric vehicle industry needed, though, because charging anxiety, range anxiety was this really big issue for a lot of EV adoption. But that has fallen because infrastructure is coming in place. A lot of corridors now have enough of those charging stations. So it feels like right as, you know, everything else needed to fall in line when it comes to, charging infrastructure is coming online right when the EV credit is going offline. So that is kind of a tough timing right now because this buildout has gone well. Right now, we have moved from 1,000 to 12,000 fast charging stations in a decade.
Starting point is 00:11:58 Now there's very few 100 to 200 mile gaps. There was much more in the past. And it does seem like a lot of roads, you could just go on a road trip with an EV now. So kind of a brutal timing that right when everyone was building things up, allowing you to go on those cross-country road trips in your electric vehicle, the big tax credit is going away. Moving on, Spotify is shuffling its chief executive position with long-term founder Daniel X stepping down after nearly two decades leading the streaming service.
Starting point is 00:12:31 The stock dipped around 3% on the news, despite X saying he's not leaving fully, assuring investors he will stay involved in big strategic decisions. Eck founded Spotify way back in 2006, amidst the heyday of music piracy, and remade the industry in the image of playlists, algorithmic discovery, and subscription-based access. Since going public in 2016, the stock has almost quadrupled in value with Eck remaining the face of the company the whole time. Now that face is gone, leaving behind some very big shoes to fill, and who's the person for the job?
Starting point is 00:13:03 Well, it's actually two persons, Gustav Sodersome, from the product side of things, and Alex Nordstrom, it's. chief business officer are set to serve as co-CEOs starting January 1st. Yes, Spotify is opting for the sharing is caring approach to the chief executive role to replace EC, following in the footsteps of other large companies, including Oracle, Netflix, and Comcasts who have adopted the co-CEO model. You know, first of all, what a run for X? And second of all, co-CEOs, what's next? They're going to start a daily business news show together? Let's talk about Spotify under Eck. I mean, he completely revolutionized this industry, disrupted Apple's iTunes model where you had to pay 99 cents for a
Starting point is 00:13:44 single song. And he said, well, how about you pay for a month and you get the entire world of music at your fingertips? And Spotify for many years had not been profitable. But in 2024, it turned its first annual profit. So he proved that this new business model for music could, you know, make money. So, and he's leaving now. I mean, he still has plenty of shares in Spotify. But he came from this rough patch of Stockholm and now is worth $10.3 billion. Spotify's market cap is now above $150 billion. It's moved beyond music into audiobooks and podcasts and his try and even video now with video podcasts.
Starting point is 00:14:21 So he really built quite a massive company. And then what is the deal with co-CEO is becoming a thing in corporate America? They're not quite as rare as you might expect. Actually, it is relatively rare, fewer than 100 companies out of 2,200 and SMP 500. and Russell 1,000 had co-CEOs over the last, you know, 24 years. There's been some major failures, but there's also been some successes. One of those successes is Oracle, which just recently put two co-CEOs to lead that company. They also had co-ceos before from 2014 to 2019.
Starting point is 00:14:57 The stock ended up rising 33% during that period. It did lag the broader S&P 500, which gained 49% over that time. So doing some research into does this co-CEO idea actually work. Harvard Business Review found that it kind of does. They looked at 87 co-CEO companies and found an average annual shareholder return of 9.5% compared to 6.9% for peers with only one CEO. So maybe there's something in the water here. Maybe the modern corporate landscape demands people to divide their attention, one with a product focus,
Starting point is 00:15:31 one with a tech focus, or one with a business focus. so maybe they are on to something here. Perhaps. I mean, big companies now are just so complex. They have so many moving parts. And perhaps it's not possible for one person to be in charge of it all, at least in certain circumstances. You know, I look back to Netflix from 2020 to 2023. That was a period where they grew like crazy.
Starting point is 00:15:52 It was probably some of their best execution over the past few decades. And at that time, they had two CEOs. They had Reed Hastings and they had Ted Sarandos. And one way that these companies are playing this co-CEO thing is to have a smoother succession model. So when one steps up to be a co-CEo, the other can step down, move to the executive chairman role, and they kind of learn on the job. So it can be this really productive left-brain, right-brain thing. And there's going to be so many Harvard Business Review articles written about the co-CEO phenomenon and whether it, you know, is successful or not.
Starting point is 00:16:25 And I guess the conclusion is that it can be. It can't be. You just have to do it right. Up next, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about Amazon. 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
Starting point is 00:16:55 with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.com slash college PC. Amazon is not a company you think of when it comes to beautiful hardware, often overshadowed in popularity and quality by peers like Apple. But yesterday at its fall hardware event, it announced some new gadgets and gizmos a plenty, including upgraded Kindles, echoes, and speakers. Among the headliners were two brand-new redesigned echo speakers complete with a dynamic lighting system that Bloomberg's Mark Germann said shows ears when listening, eyebrows when processing, and a mouth when speaking. Think of them as a direct competitor to Apple's home pod speakers. It also unveiled two upgraded Echo shows the version that comes with a
Starting point is 00:17:41 screen attached with reviews praising the new leaner look with thinner bezels and less harsh LEDs. Powering all the devices is the juiced up AI-infused version of Alexa called Alexa Plus. Alexa Plus rolled out last March. Alexa Plus rolled out in March and sits at the center of Amazon's new devices strategy. For instance, the ambient AI system kicks in as soon as you approach an echo combining AI with built-in sensors to recognize who just walked up to surface that person's preferences like a favorite podcast or a photo slideshow. It's all part of the plan to turn devices from a lost leader for its e-com operations into a profitable business unit on its own. Neal, the general consensus was
Starting point is 00:18:21 Amazon hardware is moving upscale away from the cheaper plastic shells and patchwork design that used to characterize their devices. And it's all because of one dude, a guy named Panos Panay back in 2023. Amazon poached Panet, who was running Microsoft's product team. And they said, you are really good at your job. We suck at our devices division. Well, we're okay. We have a huge penetration because every Amazon Prime Day, we basically give away echoes.
Starting point is 00:18:51 So everyone has them in their home and they have an Alexa. But no one's exactly excited to have. No one is super pumped to show them off to, everyone who comes in their house. But Penae has a reputation for developing much higher quality products. So they went over to Microsoft. They said, we'll pay you a lot more than Microsoft's paying you. And then he came over to Amazon, took a bunch of people with them, assembled the team. And this is his first product lunch. And reviewers were so impressed by what they saw. Yeah, it's kind of a reframing of Amazon's entire product division because it used to be something
Starting point is 00:19:22 disposable because they were selling Echo devices for 20, 30 bucks. Like these were not upscale products at all because they were a loss leader. The vision originally for this division was that you could do shopping on them. Like you would say, hey, Alexa, or I just probably triggered a bunch of Alexis in homes around the country, but order me like paper towels, order me this, order me that. And they thought that it would feed into their e-commerce ambitions, which it hasn't necessarily been as successful doing. So Panos-Penay came in and said, what if we just made the stuff good and stand on its own? Now it's more of an aspirational product. It's more of a division that you would feel proud having it sit on your counter. It looks better. It performs better.
Starting point is 00:20:02 It is top of the line now. It goes toe to toe with what Apple is offering. And it has this juiced up version of Alexa that maybe is a little bit more efficient or better than a Siri competitor like that. So kind of has remade the entire division in his likeness and trying to make it just a full design culture reset. Let's make these things a little better looking than they were in the past. And if they're successful, then Alexa Plus will be the AI of the smartphone, which is really the bigger fish that everyone wants to fry here because there's a huge, you know, device war heating up right now. We have meta with the smart glasses. Apple has the smart phones and it also is trying to build out this, you know, this smart home environment. And then you have open AI,
Starting point is 00:20:43 which hired Joni Ive to come in and try to make its own AI powered device. So how are you handicapping it? Well, Amazon doesn't have any mobile device. That's sort of its one big black mark. It owns the home. It's doing really well in the home. But once you're on the move, there's nothing really that Alexa has. The one thing that they did just buy, it's a startup called a B, which is a wearable bracelet that is kind of another ambient AI thing that listens to your conversation. It sounds very black mirror, very dystopian, but they just snapped that up to maybe add something to the person that goes along to complement the home environment because you are right, right now. It does have all the speakers that exist. It has the fire TV stick that plugs into your
Starting point is 00:21:24 TV, but you don't have anything you naturally bring with you. Maybe B is its answer to that, even though it sounds like a very creepy thing that's always listening to you. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. You know when someone makes fun of your sweater so much that you go out and buy a new one? That's apparently what Boeing is doing with its scandal-ridden plane. The aerospace company is reportedly planning a new single-isle airplane to replace the 737 max, which suffered two fatal crashes and has never reached the goals Boeing set out for it. Building a new plane, plane from scratch on an entirely new platform may sound like a lot of work, and it is.
Starting point is 00:21:59 It's a bold bet by new CEO Kelly Orpberg to go on offense when most of his time at the company has been in cleanup mode trying to fix a broken safety culture. But if he pulls it off, a state-of-the-art new plane could help Boeing catch back up to Airbus, which leapfrogged it as the world's biggest plane maker by sales. Toby, Boeing's staying mum about this new plane. But if they announce it, it would be the equivalent of Steve Jobs talking about Apple's next big thing. It is the next big thing, but they got to think about all the things in the rear view mirror as well, because they still have a backlog of 6,000, over 6,000 planes to deliver
Starting point is 00:22:33 right now. So a lot of analysts are looking at this and going, are you sure Boeing? Like, you can't even get your ducks in a row now, and now you're already looking ahead to the future. But they are saying that, hey, narrow body jets are the backbone of the aviation industry. These are the workhorses of the aviation industry. If we can roll out a new one, get ahead of this cycle, while not. just looking in the rearview mirror, maybe will help us retake our throne from Airbus, who has caught up recently. So I don't know, it seems like from the customers Boeing has had, they've been saying that we've seen an improvement in time and quality, and it looks like things
Starting point is 00:23:08 are turning around. I don't know if it's wise to throw a bigger wrench into things just as you're trying to getting this turnaround on the right direction. So quite the rumor that's going around. I know as a plain nerd, you're excited to see what new narrow body comes to, you know, fruition, but kind of wild to see them have this big clean sheet gamble that they're going for. Open AI is coming for TikTok, rolling out a short form video app yesterday, powered by its new SORA 2 video generation model. The standalone SORA app lets you generate AI videos that you can then share to a TikTok style algorithmic feed. Specifically, you can insert yourself or your friends into videos you generate as well. Open AI brags that this new model is a massive leap from its
Starting point is 00:23:52 previous one, making more realistic videos that are a lot better at following the laws of physics. Examples they posted showed AI-generated clips of a beach volleyball game, skateboarders doing tricks, and even a gymnastics routine, which has notoriously been a difficult sport for past models to capture. It looks like this model is certainly more powerful than the last, but I've also seen people call SORA another infinite hyper-slot machine that makes it easy to get lost in a whole of AI-generated videos with no end in sight. It's invite only for now. But what do you think about OpenAI finally getting into the short form video app game? Well, it is funny because this is the first quote unquote social media app that comes with guardrails that bars people under 18 to infinite scroll.
Starting point is 00:24:37 And it will nudge even adults if you're spending too much time on it. So they do kind of understand what they are putting out here. There was a lot of backlash to this saying Open AI, you may have built the most powerful machine ever created, the most powerful technology that could wipe out here. humanity that could solve so many, you know, pressing problems for us. And instead, you put out, you know, a video feed of AI swap. Like, what are you doing? And at the same time, other people are calling this a lawsuit machine because Open AI
Starting point is 00:25:05 has played very fast and loose with copyright when it comes to images and videos. They're doing a sort of asking for forgiveness, then permission from these copyright holders. So basically, there's going to be a huge amount of lawsuits that come from this. Because say, you or I just go in and say, make me a Disney character or something like that, it will do that and that means it will be sued a lot. I'm just so curious as to who this is serving because what is the market demand for AI generated videos? Like, is it going to be something that instead of hopping on TikTok, you go and scroll
Starting point is 00:25:38 SORA? I don't know. Like, maybe people are enjoying these AI videos, but I think Slop is the word that just keeps coming out here. It's like, why do we want more slop? Why are these companies meta also just put out a short form video app as a well that is focused on AI video. So I'm very curious to see why they think this is the adoption behavior that's going to happen of people saying, you know what, AI video is something I want to
Starting point is 00:26:01 fill my idle time with. I'm a little dubious about that, but now it's two companies in a row making this same bet. So we'll see who wins or if it pays off whatsoever. The key may be that you can insert yourself in the video and that might be compelling. I don't know, what if I send a video of me pitching in the world series or something? Maybe that's pretty cool. So maybe Maybe that's like the edge factor that could lead you to open up SORA to see yourself and all your friends doing weird stuff instead of opening, you know, TikTok or Instagram where you're seeing real people do more mundane things that AI can't generate. Finally, England's seen its fair share of invasions from the Romans to the Spanish Armada. But in those times, they were just dealing with two-legged creatures. This summer, Southern England's been hit by a swarm of octopuses.
Starting point is 00:26:47 And it's been upending life in the harbor town of Brickson, home to England's, largest fish market. Fish and crews have been shocked by the amount of tentacles pulled up in their nets with one fellow telling the New York Times, he's netting an additional $13,000 a week from his octopus halls. Murals of octopuses have gone up on buildings around town, and restaurant menus have been overhauled to include octopus alongside the more traditional fish and ships. Scientists say that climate change and the warmer ocean water it's brought is the likely cause of the octopus invasion, whether it will become more of a standard thing every summer, no one can say, but at least for now,
Starting point is 00:27:22 Brickson is an octopus's garden. That is not even the most surprising part of this story is that octopus are coming to England. It's the fact that the plural of octopus is octopuses and not octopi. That absolutely blew my mind, but there's a lot of economic upside to this because
Starting point is 00:27:37 octopus obviously fetch a higher premium, especially abroad places like Spain or Portugal where demand is really high, but there's also some downside because the shellfish industry is like, you don't understand, guys. Octopus are voracious predators. They eat absolutely everything in sight. So while you guys are hauling up big halls of octopus, we are pulling up empty pots because an octopus got in there and just ate every
Starting point is 00:28:00 single shellfish in there. So it's just, there's always a trade-off here. But also, I just think it's fascinating, too, that when you start pulling up octopus in England, and it's too much to serve the demand within your area, you start shipping them abroad and just a new market is created. So maybe it's a short-term thing. Like, this is only going to be a one summer thing. that the octopus descend upon these waters, or maybe it's just a long-term industry that just cropped up overnight. Still thinking about octopus versus octopi, though.
Starting point is 00:28:30 That's all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. Toby, aren't we nominated for an award or something? Oh, yes, we have the Signal Awards, which are kind of like the Oscars of podcasting. We've been nominated for Best Business Podcast, best commute podcast, and Best Daily Podcast.
Starting point is 00:28:47 fans can actually vote in these awards. So if you want us to bring home some hardware, we'll have a link in the show notes. I haven't won a trophy since my middle school spelling bee. So these would go a long way to my self-confidence and look mighty nice on a trophy self. So go to vote.cignaward.com or head to the link in the show description
Starting point is 00:29:09 to vote for Morning Brew Daily. If you have any feedback on today's show, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at morningbrew.com. 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 are my co-CEOs.
Starting point is 00:29:25 Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.

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