Morning Brew Daily - OpenAI Levels Up to GPT-5 & ‘Buffett Premium’ Gone for Berkshire?

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Episode 644: Neal and Toby sit down with Brian McCullough, the host of Morning Brew’s tech-focused show, Tech Brew Ride Home, to dive into OpenAI’s all-new powerful GPT-5 AI model. Then, a new CDC study reveals that more than half of Americans rely heavily on ultraprocessed foods in our diet. Meanwhile, parent company of Tinger and Hinge posts strong earnings and is doing all they can to lure back Gen Z daters. And, as Warren Buffett plans to step down as the leader of Berkshire Hathaway, investors are worried the ‘Buffett Premium’ is good and gone too.  LinkedIn will even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Check out LinkedIn.com/mbd 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  Listen to Tech Brew Ride Home: https://swap.fm/l/tbrh  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 tech can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at

pwc.c.com slash U.S. 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 you'll want a banana for breakfast after hearing these stats on ultra-processed foods. Then smarter, faster, more human-like, open AI launched GPT-5 yesterday. It's Friday, August 8th.

Let's ride. Good morning. Happy Friday. Just a bizarre cornucopia of movies in theaters this weekend. weapons starring Josh Brolin arrives as one of the most hyped horror movies in a minute notching a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ice Cube's War of the Worlds is the complete opposite

with a 4% rating on the tomato meter. It's in its second week. And then there's Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis reprising their roles in the Freaky Friday sequel, Freakier Friday. I love this take from Jeopardy champ Amy Schneider on X. She goes, Freakier Friday? Terrible title.

The same thing happened to them once before, which makes this Friday inherently less freaky than the first one. That's the most Jeopardy Champion review of a movie I've ever seen. But it got me thinking, Neil, what's the proper order to watch these in? I think you've got to do a triple feature. The question is, where do you put War of the Worlds? And I think you sandwich it. Start with Freakier Friday, some good nostalgia.

I loved the first one. Then toss on War of the Worlds. And then when your stamina is waning, bring in weapons to get the blood pumping again. quite the assortment though, quite the cornucopia of movies. Yeah, I like putting War of the Worlds in the middle because that's probably when I have to go to the bathroom, so I probably won't miss seeing any minute of that movie.

And the film's tagline, and I don't know if this was self-aware or not, is it's worse than you think in relation to the actual content of the movie, but I do think they either played themselves or someone had a little bit of fun poking fun at the fact that this is the worst movie of all time.

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network. A better deal. No surprises. That's Verizon. Best network based on root metrics, best overall mobile network from the U.S. second half 2025. All rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person regimen me the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. Ricky Bobby's father, one said, if you ain't first, your last. Might be a slightly reductive worldview, but it's essentially the logic people

were applying to OpenAI's latest model GPT-5. Was this the moment and the model where Open AI was going to distance itself from the pack and push us closer to artificial general intelligence? Sam Altman, OpenAI, CEO, certainly thinks they move the needle

telling journalists GPT-5 is like having a team of PhD-level experts in your pocket. He and his team thinks they created something smarter, faster, and more human-like across a variety of metrics. It's a unified AI model, which means it combines the reasoning abilities

of OpenAI's previous O series of models with the fast responses of its GPT series. Right now, testing benchmarks show that GPT5 goes toe to toe with frontier models from XAI and Anthropic, scored highest on a GitHub coding task and ACE Health benchmarks with just a 1.6% hallucination rate far lower than previous models. However, it's not best in class across the board. It slightly trails GROC4 on multi-domain reasoning and underperforms Claude Opus in some web navigation task. But to get a feel for how good this new model actually is, Neil and I wanted to call in some backup. We brought in Brian McCullough, host of another morning brew show called

Tech Brew Ride Home to Breakdown GPT5. Brian, is this a dramatic leap for AI models? Would it make Ricky Dad, Bobby's dad proud? Dramatic leap would probably be overselling it. What we know is that it's good, that if you're an average user, you're going to be impressed with it being more accurate. They apparently made great strides in terms of the hallucinations and things like that. It's probably the state of the art right now overall. But if people were expecting sort of the step change that we saw from GPT3 to 4, I don't think this is it. I was reading this newsletter from Nathan Lambert and he said,

the people discussing this release on Twitter will be disappointed in a first reaction but 99% of people using chat, GBT, are going to be so happy about the upgrade. Why is there that dichotomy there? Well, like anything else, it's all about the hype of stuff versus there's people that desperately want it to be the best and people that are desperately angry. So like anything else, there's going to be a back and forth to it. But what I think we're going to see is that once all of the arguing and the hype dies down, it's probably going to be great for Open AI in the sense that they are getting very aggressive about the pricing,

like extremely aggressive. So it is a step change in terms of pricing. So tons of developers, tons of people that are making AI companies and AI tools are probably going to do more. So we might, six months from now, look back on this and say, yes, it was important because it did lead to a new flowering of AI stuff, but it didn't give us God-level intelligence. An Open AI kind of needs that aggressive pricing because they need to start making money. They are, their sales are through the roof. I mean, they just hit $10 billion in annualized revenue. They're raising a secondary stock sale at a value of $500 billion, which, correct me if I'm wrong,

but no U.S. private startup has ever reached anything of that valuation. It would leapfrog SpaceX as the most valuable startup ever in the history of the United States. but they are losing a lot of money. We know that training LLMs and running an AI business is extremely expensive from the talent to the data centers to the energy requirements. So OpenAI has to start making money to start putting some serious business heft behind its technological achievements. And one thing that we've talked about when it comes to these models is that whether the scaling loss still holds. Altman did say absolutely they do, but he did say that. the path to scaling these models is more computing powder.

It's going to take an eye-watering amount of compute, he admitted, but we intend to continue doing it. So they're just going to keep plowing money into this thing. Yes. And this does open the debate even wider about have we reached sort of a ceiling with the current technology. Will it require some new sort of paradigm, some new advance in the technology to get us to a phase shift that people were

expecting. It's possible that throwing money at it isn't going to work. I mean, they can keep scaling, but they're running out of data. They can do synthetic data, but even that might affect accuracy and things like that. One of the things that Sam said about true AGI yesterday also was that he believes that true AGI should learn on its own, and obviously this is not there yet unless they're keeping something still underwrapped. And then one thing that you did mention is that maybe the strides in health care specific, was interesting in this model. What was it about kind of health and GPT-5 that piqued your interest? So they leaned heavily into people using GPT-5 to answer health questions, and that says to me

that they've been looking at how people have been using it, and that apparently is what people are using it a lot for. So it's interesting to me that that is sort of, in the same way that remember when the Apple Watch came out and Apple had to find what it was for, oh, it's really for a health tracker, right? So it's interesting that they chose that because that would be something that, you know, my mom would be like, okay, that's what I use it for, right? But it does also then open them up to potential trouble because you can imagine the headlines as soon as somebody, you know, gets bad advice or, God forbid, gets hurt, you know, asking for advice and things like that. So I think it's a play by them to provide a use case that normal people can understand, but also

that is kind of a mundane thing. It's not going to, you know, make you a million dollars, beat the stock market or anything like that. But it maybe will tell you what that bump is on your hand. Let's talk about some other changes that people might see when they log into chat GPT today after the GPT5 update. One of them is that OpenAI is giving chat GPT different personalities now. If you're kind of bored with the old responses that you're getting, you can choose between four different personalities between cynic, robot, listener, and nerd. And then another interesting development is that they're doing this thing called safe completion. So if you asked GPT previously to chat GPT to do something that may be dangerous, like they gave

the example, how much energy is needed to ignite some specific material, who knows what you're asking that for? Maybe it's for some bomb plot. Or you're just a person in a lab doing a science. experiment. ChatGPT previously was trained not to give you an answer to that question. Now, with safe completions, it will give you an answer to that, but in a very broad, vague way, that is another feature that Sam Altman touted yesterday. And then they also just unified all the models that you used to have, you know, 03, the reasoning model used to have 4-0-40 mini.

Like there was all these different models that you could toggle between to answer one question versus another. But now it just says GPT-5 for most. How do you? do you think that flattening is going to be received by customers? I actually wouldn't be surprised if people don't like it, because if it's sort of like you're picking the tool for the job that you want to do. Apparently behind the scenes, it is still switching. There's just some sort of like a routing mechanism. So you can still say, they pointed out that like if you want to code, like tell it you're coding, you know, and if you want health answers, tell it that. So you still can direct it in the way that you

want, but taking away sort of like the knobs and dials, I feel like some people might, might not like that. Where are we broadly in the AI race right now? We know Mark Zuckerberg is paying 24-year-olds, $250 million. We know that Elon Musk is investing a lot into his project, XAI. There's Anthropic, which is also worth something like $60 billion. And Open AI is still maybe the leaderboard, the king in the clubhouse right now. But where do we stand after?

after GPT5 has been rolled out and the dust has settled. I think this takes off the table the outside chance. Some people were concerned someone's going to make a model that can do everything and will be the only business because you won't need anything else, right? I think this takes that off the table at least for the foreseeable future, again, unless there's some technological breakthrough. So then what we're facing is it's a commodity race because essentially like, okay, maybe Claude's better at code, maybe Groch is better at images or something.

But it's not, again, generationally different. So all of these companies are going to continue to spend money, but racing against the commoditization, which brings everything to a lower level, especially the cost, as Open AI is currently doing now. So all this does is say that there's no clear winner Open AI is at the lead right now. They've been at the lead, but it's not like their head and shoulders above everybody else. Brian, thanks for stopping by and giving us the lowdown on GPT. where can our listeners find your show?

Wherever you get your podcasts, try Morning Brew Daily in the morning and Tech Brew Ride Home in the Afternoons. I like that. Thanks for the plug. And thanks for stopping by, Brian. Let's shift from the tech world into food. And if you are what you eat, then we Americans are hella processed. A new report from the CDC found that the majority of the calories Americans eat come from ultra-processed foods, foods like sandwiches, bake goods, and sweet beverages

associated with higher health risks. But there is a silver lining. That share is getting smaller over time. Let's dig into the numbers. The study conducted between August 2021 and August 2023 found that ultra-processed foods account for 55% of the calories Americans aged 1 and up consume. That may sound like a lot, but we've actually been eating healthier over time. For adults, total calories from ultra-processed foods has declined from 56% over a decade ago to 53% in the most recent data. For kids, it fell from nearly 66% seven years ago to 62% now.

The trend line could go even lower with processed foods critic RFK Jr. in charge of the United States's health system. Earlier this year, he said, we are poisoning ourselves and it's coming principally from these ultra-processed foods. Expect greater pressure on food companies to trim their ingredient lists because one of the reasons we buy so much processed food is it's often the only thing you can buy, or at least afford to. A study published in 2023, found that 73% of the U.S. food supply is ultra-processed, often at lower prices than whole foods. Toby, help us process this study. I'm still processing the fact that sandwiches are considered ultra-processed because I eat a lot of

those, so that is tough for me to stomach. There isn't actually a set definition for ultra-processed food. A good rule of thumbs is it usually comes from ingredients that you don't normally find in your kitchen at home, stuff like I fructose, corn syrup, or emulsifiers. A couple of scientists in Brazil did try to determine a food's level of processing. They have a scale ranging from unprocessed to minimally processed to process ingredients, then processed foods and ultra-processed foods. On the bottom, unprocessed stuff, stuff like fruits and veggies, then processed foods are a combination

of whole foods. So fruits and vegetables with a processed ingredient, so stuff like if you had a bread that was made from wheat, flour, water, and salt, and yeast, that is actually a process. food, which again, I thought bread was like relatively natural and healthy. Then if you bring in emulsifiers, you bring in preservatives to play, that's when you get into the ultra process category. But yeah, I was kind of going through my own diet and looking at this chart about what qualifies as what.

And I was like, I'm not really living in the unprocessed, minimally processed world, which I think a lot of people would probably be surprised about how much of these foods they're consuming. Well, it's hard to. Don't, you know, knock yourself. I mean, you go into a grocery store. I went into a grocery store last night after researching all of this. And I was like, well, can I buy anything outside of the produce aisle that is not considered ultra-processed? And the answer is no.

So that's why I do think after this study comes out, there will be increased pressure as there has been across the board on food companies to figure something out and get all of these emulsifiers, you know, or other ways of creating ultra-processed foods out of their, out of their food. I do think that income is a big part of the factor here because adults with higher family incomes consume a lower percentage of calories from ultra processed foods. That being said, even adults with incomes of 350% of a federal poverty level still consume more than half of their calories from ultra processed foods because consumers are looking for something that's cheap, something that's convenient, and healthy. It's hard to get all three. So usually cheap and convenient wins out because people are financially strained and also short for

time. Researchers are still trying to figure out the exact ways that ultra-processed foods interact with our bodies and what their associated health risks are. But there was new research out just this week that said, you can lose more weight by avoiding ultra-processed foods. It was the first type of study, first study of its kind. They did this trial where they had people go on different diets, one with a lot of ultra-processed foods and others with minimally processed foods and participants lost twice as much weight when they follow diets made up of minimally processed foods like pasta chicken, fruits, and veggies, as they did with ultra-processed foods, which are like those ready-to-eat, frozen meals, breakfast cereals, protein bars, and shakes. And the reason they think

this is the case is that ultra-processed foods pack so many calories in a small bite. They're extremely calorie-dense, whereas minimally processed foods are the opposite. So that's just a beginning of our understanding of how ultra-processed foods interact with weight loss. All I know is after this show, I'm eating a full head of broccoli just to cleanse the system. I've got to get on the whole foods grind. All right, let's take a quick break. And after that, we got Stock the Week, Dog the Week. We're the Hartford, with decades of experience ensuring millions of unique small businesses.

When it comes to your small business insurance. Thank you. One size, absolutely, does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash small business. 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 3-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. Welcome to Stock of the Week, dog of the week, the segment where Toby and I pick one stock that's looking forward to a summer Friday and another that's preparing a deck for a 4 p.m. meeting. I win the pre-show Majan game, so I get to go first. And my stock of the week is the dating app company match group because while I'm not exactly crushing it on Hinge, Hinge is crushing it. That's an exact quote from CEO Spencer Raskoff, who noted Hinge's revenue grew 25% from the year before, and paying users jumped 18%. Match Group's stock was among the top performers on Wednesday, jumping more than 10% on

the heels of the report. Hinge's success comes as the rest of the dating app industry is getting stood up by users and investors. Single people are frustrated and fatigued with swiping, ditching apps for this outlandish idea of trying to meet somebody in person. Just look at Bumble, which said this week that revenue fell 8% year over year, causing its stock to plunge more than 18% yesterday. But Hinge's growth shows that it may not be wise to write off dating apps just yet.

Roscoff said that its success should put to rest any doubts about whether the online dating category is out of favor among users. And he wants to use Hinge as a blueprint for the other major app in Match's portfolio, Tinder. Tinder is still getting ghosted with its revenue dropping 4% last quarter compared to Hinge's 25% growth. But Raskoff said the team has learned a lot from Hinge's rebound that they'll all. applied to Tinder, which is now laser focused on the unique dating habits of Gen Z. Toby, it's honestly shocking to see any dating app doing well in this environment. Yeah, a little bit

of a narrative violation here because all we've heard about is how young people are spurning dating apps. They don't like it. That's not how they want to meet people. And yet here Hinge comes along saying that they're focusing more on thoughtful, high quality responses or trying to make people have better first impressions to lead to lasting love. And then they also, of course, introduce AI into their reasoning for why this is performing better. They say they have an AI-powered core discovery algorithm that has driven a 15% increase in matches and contact exchanges since launching in March. So they're definitely crafting a narrative here.

And it does seem like AI has found its place in the dating market because, remember, a lot of these companies tried to roll out features that would help you craft your profile or write your bio or edit your photos. And a lot of young people have said, actually, we don't necessarily like that. it seems like AI is better off behind the scenes, you know, saying, hey, this person's going to be great for Neil. It's going to increase his chances of a match here versus doing something so up front. And match group, like I said, is taking what's working at Hinge and moving it to Tinder, which has been a laggard compared to Hinge. And Tinder is right now, the team behind Tinder is

really focused on Gen Z in college. They introduced this double dating feature. And they said it's been a huge hit, 90% of this double dating features users are under the age of 30. They're introducing a college mode for students looking to date within their schools. So they're transforming Tinder from this hookup app to be an app that really deals with the very distinct preferences of dating when it comes to Gen Z. And that is, they say, more casual, like the double date thing. They don't want to have this very formalized process around it. They just want to say, hey, maybe I can swipe in. Why don't you come hang out with my friends?

and we'll just get to know each other that way. Our dog the week might be a first-time entry because Berkshire Hathaway doesn't end up on these lists very often. But sure enough, Berkshire Hathaway's Class A shares have fallen 14% since the beginning of May, way underperforming the broader market's 11% gain. Now, the beginning of May is a significant date because that was the last training day before a 94-year-old Warren Buffett said he was handing over the reins of his conglomerate to his lieutenant Greg Abel. suddenly good old boring Berkshire, which has outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 5 million percent under Buffett's sixth decade tenure, has some question marks around it.

Berkshire has often traded with a so-called Buffett premium attached to it. It's price-to-book ratio, which compares its market cap to the actual underlying business assets, rose to nearly 1.8 earlier this year, the highest since October 2008. However, investors are not so sure that the Buffett premium will seamlessly transfer over into the ABLE premium. Still, Neil, it's weird to see this company with a hangover. This is one of the biggest deltas between Berkshire Hathaway and the S&P 500 over a three-month period since 1990, beaten only during the pandemic. An odd time to be a stockholder in a company that does not often underperform. Right now, the stock market is in risk on mode. Tech companies like Pallentier and

crypto is surging. Everyone is kind of throwing their bets into the tech industry. And what does Berkshire Hathaway not do well is tech. I mean, Apple is really its only holding in the tech industry. Warren Buffett has shied away from tech for most of his career because he says he just doesn't understand it. So when you see the stock market doing well and the NASDAQ 100 doing well, which has a lot of tech companies, that's usually a signal that Berkshire Hathaway is not doing well. And this happened back during another boom time in tech, which was 1999 and early 2000s during the dot com bubble. During 1999, NASDAQ 100 more than doubled. At the same time, Berkshire Hathaway stock was down nearly 50%.

So we're seeing something similar now. But guess what happened the next year? The situation reversed. The NASDAQ bubble burst and it fell more than 60%. And then Berkshire surged 70%. So Berkshire Hathaway shareholders are probably hoping that some, that's the same trend that happened more than 25 years ago will happen here in 2026. And I do think maybe some investors got over their skis when it comes to buying Berkshire in the early months of this year, because as worries around tariffs started to build, a lot of people were rotating into the safety of Berkshire Hathaway. And so it hit an all-time high earlier this year. Buffett himself probably thinks his own company is overvalued. He oversees the company's share repurchaseing program. And he stopped buying Berkshire Hathaway shares back of May of last year. So he only purchases shares when he believes the price,

is below Berkshire's intrinsic value. So if he, the man himself, thinks shares are overvalued, then shares probably are getting a little frothier. So taking a couple of chips off the table. Now let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Yesterday, President Trump demanded the CEO of Intel, Lip Butan, resign immediately over his ties to China. Trump called Tan highly conflicted and said there is no other solution to this problem

other than for him to resign. Trump's posts on true social follows calls from Senator, Tom Cotton to investigate Tan's ties to China, specifically in reference to Cadence Design Systems, a company Tan led for more than 10 years, who was recently found guilty of violating U.S. export controls by selling design info to a military university in China. Intel was on the receiving end of $8 billion under the 2022 Chipsack to build new factories, but a leadership change now would pile on even more pressure on the company. Neil, this marks another setback for the struggling chipmaker who installed Tan in the top role last year,

hoping he could close the gap between Intel and competitors like TSM and NVIDIA when it comes to designing and producing chips. Yeah, the company is standing behind Tan. They issued a statement saying that we are committed to national security. And then Tan himself wrote a memo to employees. He said there's a lot of misinformation circulating about my past roles. I want to be absolutely clear. Over 40 plus years in the industry, I built relationships around the world and across our diverse ecosystem.

and I've always operated with the highest legal and ethical standards. The Wall Street Journal also came out with a report yesterday saying that this trouble that Trump has zeroed in on has been festering at Intel ever since Tan came aboard when he was announced to replace Pat Gelsinger. The share shot up over 13 percent, so investors were high. But almost immediately there were disagreements between him and the board chair about whether they would divest from their manufacturing. I mean, there's so many problems with Intel,

and it doesn't look like Tannen the board. We're completely on the same page here, and that's why it's MarketVap is just down to $89 billion compared to a rival. It's not really a rival. It's like when we were at Maryland and we thought our rival was Duke,

the Nvidia is worth $4.4 trillion. That's very good self-awareness there. Let's move on. It's time to start using basis points more in casual conversation, because an executive order signed by Trump yesterday has given Main Street access to assets only Wall Street previously got to play with. The order makes it easier for Americans to invest their retirement savings in assets that lie

outside of public markets. Stuff only your roommate who wears a vest in the middle of summer talks about private equity deals, cryptocurrencies, and private real estate. It's a big win for PE firms who have long sought access to the trillions of dollars sitting in 401K accounts. It is still early days in the order directs federal agencies to see what regulatory changes actually need to happen to expand private market access to 401Ks. But, Neil, it sets the stage for a big shift where mom and pop get access to the same deals as Apollo and Blackstone.

A lot of supporters of this, a lot of critics of this. The supporters are the private equity companies, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, who get access now to about $8.7 trillion in 401Ks alone. That is a lot of money. And it is part of their broader shift of going from Wall Street to Mainstown. We've talked a lot about these private equity companies trying to give you access to private startups like OpenAI and SpaceX. There's a huge customer base out there that they haven't tapped and they're pitching it as a way to diversify your portfolio. There are a number of critics who say there's a reason that 401Ks are pretty much only in stocks and bonds in that these private equity investments are riskier.

They are more costly and they're less liquid. and that the reason that this status quo has been in place is that it's been good for people stashing their money in retirement accounts because it provides stable returns, maybe not eye-popping, but stable. And that's kind of what you want for your retirement as you say goodbye to your job and move to a house near a golf course. Finally, theater kids everywhere are celebrating a special anniversary this week. It's been 10 years since Hamilton premiered on Broadway. On August 6, 2015, creator Lynn Manuel Miranda and his diverse crew of rapping founding fathers hit the Broadway stage for the first time, spawning a commercial and cultural juggernaut that has few parallels in modern history.

The show has sold more than 4 million tickets and earned more than $1 billion, not including tours, international productions, or the movie on Disney Plus in 2020. It won 11 Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Shirley led to a boom in sales for the Ron Cherno biography of Alexander Hamilton, it was based on. Another legacy Hamilton left behind, normalizing astronomical ticket prices for Broadway. At one point, Hamilton raised prices to $849, a record at the time, paving the way for $975 tickets for Bruce Springsteen in 2017 and $920 tickets for Othello this spring, 10 years down for Hamilton, Toby, and probably many, many more to go. I mean, I was not quite in New York or old enough to go buy tickets to a Broadway show when Hamilton was at its absolute cultural zenith. That being said, I do remember sitting in my APUS history class, my teacher, Bernie Yinelli put on Hamilton rapping in front of Obama at the White House.

He was actually working on a Hamilton play himself, so he felt like he got upstage by Lynn Manuel Miranda. But it did just turn into this absolute juggernaut, changed, blew the ceiling off of the same. ticket prices turned, you know, a musical into a pop culture sensation for the first time maybe ever, and it's led to a lot of legacies all the way down from politics to theater to, you know, ticket prices itself. It's been an interesting second act of Lynn Manuel's Miranda's career. He really hasn't done much more on Broadway. He's kind of cozyed up to Disney a little bit and just started pumping out hits for Encanto, for Moana, stuff like that. We haven't gotten another moment like that really, but what a time to be a theater kid because you were on top of the world during

Hamilton's rise. And I also want to call out one person. His name is Thane Jasperson. He has been in Hamilton for the last 10 years since the beginning. He's the only remaining cast member. He is a member of the ensemble. He pops up briefly as the British loyalist Samuel Seaberry. But this dude has been in Hamilton every production for the last 10 years. And he says he's still having a great time. You think he could just do the whole show himself at this point? I mean, that is a lot of shows committed to memory. All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Friday and an even better weekend. If you have any thoughts or 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 Lute is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is never in the room where it happens. Sorry. Devin Emery is our president and our shows are production. of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. I wish you all well. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari.

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