Morning Brew Daily - Stocks Have Their Best Quarter Since 2020 & ‘Supergirl’ is a Super Flop

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

#879: It’s the first day of the second half of 2026, which means it’s time to wrap up the first half of the markets! A new study shows heavy AI adopters are actually expanding their workforce. DC Studios’ Supergirl flops at the box office – is this a worrying sign for the reboot plan? Then a special Wednesday edition of Neal’s Numbers (cause we’re off Thursday) on a new ‘hot girl’ accessory, Biscoff is booming, and old content is still tried and true among movie watchers.  Get 10% off using MORNINGBREW10 at altrarunning.com/morningbrew  Grab tickets to our Performance Revue show! https://www.morningbrew.com/events/brew-performance-revue-2026?utm_campaign=performance_revue_2026&utm_source=mbd Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When demand slowed for Hydrojug, Amazon Ads Rising Star Hayden Wadsworth pivoted. When our bank account hit near zero, my brother Jake and I had one last shot to save Hydrojug. So we engineered The Traveler, a leakproof, cupholder-friendly Tumblr. Amazon Ads enables a business to be able to expand their product shelf because of the visibility and the reach you can get. Each week, our new-to-brand customers make up about 95% of all of our sales. Watch Hydrojug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell.

Today, Supergirl flopped hard. Time for DC to panic. Then the first half of the year is over. Let's go through what happened in the stock market. It's Wednesday, July 1st. Let's ride. Good morning and welcome to July. Some bittersweet news. This is our last standard news show of the week. The brew is closing down tomorrow ahead of July 4th. But fear not, we have recorded two fantastic special episodes coming your way Thursday and Friday so you can still get your MBD fix while traveling to a body of water or doing all the physically demanding chores your parents say for you when you come home. Neil, I got to say the greatest summer of all time continues.

We got USA World Cup game today that goes straight into a long holiday weekend, at least for the morning brew. Now, the fact that 73 million Americans could experience 100 degree heat thanks to this big old heat dome, that could put a damper on things. But whenever you feel like complaining about the heat. Just remember what it was like when it was cold out and how that stunk. Give me triple digits any day of the world. Tell me you grew up in Florida without telling me you grew up in Florida. I'm pining for the fall right now. It's way too hot. That's why you're you head to a body of water though. You just, it's still hot. You go in the body of water. You come out, you dry off five minutes later. You're like, I need to go back in. I'm sweltering. But yes,

it's going to be actually dangerously hot for a widespread part of the United States. So please stay cool. And now a word from our sponsor, Ultra Running. Toby, you run a lot, right? Oh, I run all right from my emotions up top. No. For those of you running for fun, fitness, or any other reason, Ultra has shoes for you. They actually make shoes shaped like feet. What a concept. Most running shoes are narrow at the toe, but Ultra has more room for your toes so they can spread out and your feet can stay in a natural position. The Ultra Fit is designed to give you room for your toes, comfort, balance, and strength. So whether you run on the road, sidewalk, trail, or gym, Ultra has a shoe that can fit your foot and your lifestyle. Use promo code Morning Brew 10 for 10%

off your first pair of Ultra running shoes at Ultrarunning.com slash morning brew. That's A L-T-R-A running.com slash morning brew. The stock market is finishing up its ninth hole in making the turn to take on the back nine. So let's take a pit stop at the snack shack for some hot dogs and a recap of how the first half of the year has gone. It's been mostly birdies so far. The NASDAQ finished up 21% this past quarter. Its best quarter since the second quarter of 2020. The S&P 500 in Dow were hot on its heels up 15 and 13% respectively,

good for their strongest quarter since 2020 as well. But look a little closer and you see that AI has split the market in half. For the past few years, it was the magnificent seven tech stocks like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon. which powered the market to record highs. But investors have narrowed their focus. Instead of rewarding the companies spending hundreds of billions on AI, Wall Street has taken a liking to the companies selling the picks and shovels to the big

spenders. A key semiconductor index is up 81% this quarter, lapping the wider market, while memory-focused names like Micron and Sandus have risen over 300,760% respectively. That has come at the expense of the Mag 7, which are looking like Lightning McQueen and Cars 3. Microsoft has fallen 20% Invidia 13% and Apple and Amazon down 8% all in the last month. Neil, a fantastic quarter overall, but mainly if you owned semiconductor or memory stocks. Yeah, let's hand out some halftime game balls go through the top performing stock so far in 2026.

You'll notice there's a theme. So the best performing stock was Sandisk of 857%. They do memory. second micron up 303% they do memory then it's Intel 278 chips Western Digital 271 storage Seagate 250 storage Marvel 250 chips Dell 250 243 servers so if you are in the supplying data center business this has been a historic run up so far in 2026 and let's take away some game balls for people what do you what do you do for the worst performance I know what happened with you in you and soccer when someone get mad at you, your coach.

I would just get bench. All right, let's, yeah, let's bet some players. The biggest reversal came in the energy market, actually, because Q1 energy stocks were ripping because higher oil prices were kind of dominating geopolitical issues. So energy stocks soared 37%. As those fears in the war in Iran have kind of mellowed a little bit, energy stocks fell 13% in Q2.

So that was the worst performing sector in the S&P. because of hope that the U.S. Iran conflict will settle down. But the worst performing stock in SP 500 is actually not an energy stock at all. It's the software maker into it, which is down 55%. Remember, a lot of fears around anthropic models rolling out that were replacing legacy software companies. That is still lingering at the bottom half of the market. So into it, you are benched right now, as are all of the energy stocks. And when you're going beyond stocks, the big theme of the first half of 2026 was the unwinding of the debasement trade. So the debasement trade dominated conversation ever since Liberation Day in 2025. And this was that inflation was going to go

out of control because of tariffs. So was government debt. And in effect, you'd have gold and other commodities surging, other precious metals, and you'd have the dollar falling. And so that's what we saw. We saw gold surging last year. And we saw the dollar falling. Well, the first half of 26, 2020 has brought about a reversal of that. Gold just had its worst quarter in 13 years, and it was up 175% in the past two years. But this past quarter has been bad. It's down 11% just in the past month. Meanwhile, the dollar has been surging.

So you're seeing that investors have faith in the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, to not let inflation run ramp. And he really hammered that home in his first press conference as the Fed chair saying, like I will get inflation under control. And that eased investors worries that the debasement trade would spiral out of control. One caveat for the back half of the year is that it's a midterm election year. And that tends to bring a lot more volatility to the stock market. If you go back since World War II, midterm years average a 17 and a half peak to trough correction. So that is a very large swing. Usually there's a big run up, but there's also a big correction somewhere in there.

adding the fact that in a four, in the fourth year of a bull market, which we are in right now, that averages a 13% gain, but typically experiences larger drawdowns as well. So basically expect some volatility on the horizon because the bulk case going forward is the market that already survived the worst shock that it might receive, which was a war in a spike in oil prices. AI spending is going to continue to remain strong. And history has shown that if you start the year off well, then you start the, you finish the year well.

The bear case is that AI valuations are ahead of their skis. It's already become too crowded in this big rally that we've experienced and that all the money going into the AI spending will ultimately not produce any profits. So those are kind of the bull and bear case looking ahead to what should be a pretty volatile second half of the year. Moving on, this next story is going to be more surprising than learning that there were still woolly mammoths around when the Great Pyramids were being built. Yeah, that is true. Look it up. Anyway, on to the other surprising fact, a new study found that corporations spending the most on artificial intelligence hired humans faster than their peers.

Yesterday, tech startups ramp and Ravellio Labs released the findings of their research of 22,000 U.S. firms from January 2021 to February 26. And they discovered that the most intense AI adopters, companies that spend around $34 per employee a month on AI, increased their headcount by about 10.2. percent in the two years since they rolled out the tech internally. Companies that spent less on AI had no statistically significant change in headcount. Your job might drop even more when learning about what happens to entry-level jobs, those junior roles that were supposedly most vulnerable to AI disruption. Among the top AI adopters, entry-level hiring grew even faster

than the baseline, 12% to 10.2%. The authors use this data to push back on the apocalyptic narrative pushed by many in the AI industry that this tech revolution could wipe out up to 50% of white-collar jobs. Still, they're asking people not to draw too broad of a conclusion. They write, this paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs, but it does counterclaims that AI will lead to broad job losses. I think the caveat here is that the companies that are spending the most on AI tend to already be growing. So you have to separate those two facts because if you're looking at a cohort of large VC back companies that are in hyper-growth mode and then saying, look at all these companies that are adopting AI because they're newer companies that are on

the forefront of technology are also growing the fastest. That might be more of a correlation thing rather than a causation thing, which is why they did say, like, this is not prove that AI creates jobs. That being said, there are some economic theories here that could suggest that AI is creating more work, not less. There is Jvon's paradox, which we've talked about before, which is when something becomes cheaper or more efficient, people consume more of it. So apply that to AI. Maybe that means if you go to the legal industry, for instance, you have cheaper legal research. That's going to lead to more legal research, not less legal research, which means there's

more employees that are needed to be brought into the organization. That's one of them. And then the other one is the lump of labor fallacy, which says there's actually not a fixed amount of work in the economy at any given moment. Making workers more productive actually creates new demand. That's like the other aspect of this is that it's not a net zero game, the job market, when it comes to AI. Injecting it into it can create more jobs, not less.

What I appreciated most about the studies at the end, they had this advice section. They were like, okay, so we did this study. We found these results. What are you going to do about it? How can you take this data and apply it to your real life? So they had a few pieces of advice. I would say the most important one is they were talking about young people entering the labor market. And they said, so if you're this kind of person, you're just looking for your first.

job and you're choosing between two similar firms, choose the one that's using AI. It's more likely to grow faster. And even if you're an engineer who's worried that AI is going to take your engineering job, we've seen this be one of the biggest use cases of AI. They say their evidence says AI adopters are hiring engineers faster, not slower. Then they talk to business owners that who maybe have tried AI who dabbled in spending some enterprise money on AI. And they don't see the gains. They say keep at it because you have to reach a minimum threshold of spending to see the gains. And then finally, I thought this was kind of funny. They said, if you're reading headlines where CEOs blame layoffs on AI be skeptical. And we've already seen 75,000 jobs

be cut with references to AI. There were murmurs at the time of skeptics, people saying, like, I don't actually think this is too, this is a result of AI. I think you're just blaming and scapegoating AI. And this research supports that. Still, I could lob you back many papers that argue the exact opposite thing, as we've covered on this show before, Goldman Sachs estimates that AI has contributed to roughly 16,000 net job losses per month over the past year. We are staring down the worst entry-level job market in many years. Entry-level professional jobs are down 29% since January 2024. Workers' ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations have seen their employment fall 13% since 2022, according

to Stanford. So it really is read a wide swath of research, honestly, and maybe the reality is somewhere in the middle of those two camps. Moving on, Supergirl saves a lot of people in her comic book appearances, but she's costing her studio a lot of money in her big screen debut.

DC's Studios Supergirl came out last week, but I won't fault you if you missed it. It debuted to just $37 million domestically. For a film that costs somewhere in the range of 170 million to make and another 120 million to market, that tepid opening means it's staring down a $100 million loss depending on how things shake out. What went wrong?

Well, Supergirl isn't Superman. And analysts say that having a lesser-known central character caps the movie's blockbuster potential. Also, superhero movies in general just ain't as super as they used to be. The performance of Thunderbolts, the latest Captain American movie, and now Supergirls show audiences are a lot more discerning when it comes to the genre than previously. It's also a big stumble for James Gunn, the director who helmed multiple successful Marvel movies before DC wrestled him away and gave him the keys to reboot their own extended universe. This flop puts the DCU even further behind the eight ball. Neil, it's not over for DC, but Supergirl has been really bad so far. Remember Morbius,

the awful Jared Leto's Spider-Man spinoff movie? Even that brought in more money in its first weekend than this movie. Every superhero has an origin story and every superhero studio also has an origin story that's worth exploring. So if you're not cut up on all this comic book movie drama going on, so this is what happened with the current iteration of DC Studios. Basically, it was not doing well while Marvel was doing very well. It's rival. So in 2023, they brought in two big guns, Peter Saffron and James Gunn to lead DC Studios. James Gunn is best known for directing Guardian of the Galaxy. And they said, we're going to shake things up. We're going to take a script-first approach that would give priority to quality over volume. And so under this remix DC

Studios, the first movie that they released last year was Superman. And it did really well. $618 million worldwide, the highest grossing superhero film of 2025. And the first time since 2008 that a DC film outgrossed every single Marvel release that particular year. So all things were going well, but also the follow-up to Superman was Supergirl, and that was sort of a wake-up call that maybe this new direction of DC isn't going as well as Superman would have made them believe. Here's why it's tough Supergirl flopped. Warner Bros. put a lot into the promotion of this film. They had 80 promotional partners ranging from Kentucky Fried Chicken to American Airlines.

So they really want to show that, hey, we are entering this era of sustained success for DC Studios. they were not able to do that. It seems like they missed the mark on the target audience despite that massive promotional push. Supergirl was meant to appeal to Gen Z women. 59% of the audience was male. 65% was 26 or older. So for whatever reason, it just didn't resonate

with the core market that they were trying to target. So DC Studios, is it time to panic? Well, some say no, this is just one movie. And they have other TV shows and other movies coming out under this new leadership. One that I'm excited about is Lanterns, which is an HBO series starring Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre that's been described as true detective-like take on the Green Lantern mythology. That premieres in August and that sounds very cool. And then also they have a horror movie, Clayface coming out with as a much lower budget than Supergirl, $40 million.

So if they can produce cheaper movies that really hit the zeitgeist right now because what's making movies at the box office is horror, then they might get back on the right. track, but Supergirl was a huge miss in the early innings of this new regime. I'm so confused, though, because they just said movies with lesser known main characters do not do well. Their next movie up is Clayface. Who the heck is Clayface? I mean, if you're a comic book fan, you know who Clayface is, but they're doing the exact thing that they've said hasn't worked in the past.

They are taking a little bit of a smaller shot on goal with that smaller budget. But still, it's just so ironic to me that this is the diagnosis after Supergirl in the next movie up, a no-nameer named Clayface. We're going to take a quick break and come back with a surprise Neil's numbers right after this. Neil, check out my card. This just says thank you. Yes, that's for the dinner you paid for last week, but you should also check out the Verizon Visa card. It helps eligible Verizon customers get more from everyday spending. You can earn 4% rewards on gas, groceries, and dining. Redeem rewards toward Verizon bills or devices with no annual fee and unlimited rewards with no expiration.

For a limited time, new cardholders can get up to $150 cashback. Just head to Verizon.com slash morning brew to learn more. That's Verizon.com slash morning brew. Did you take notes at our last team meeting? Notes? Are you insane? I'm not going to ask you to elaborate. But the even G2 productivity smart glasses could have come handy for that. They're designed to keep real-time support right in view with teleprompting conversation

support real-time translation, AI assistance, and more. Obviously, we are podcast hosts and the built-in teleprompter feature makes it easy to deliver information without looking at a phone or laptop. I'm a huge traveler, so I can't wait to try the real-time translation feature on vacation. Learn more at even realities.com and use code Morning Brew for 10% off even ring 1 and or even clip when you add them to your Even G2 order. The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further.

Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Neal's Numbers, the segment that's typically on Thursday, but we don't have a live show tomorrow, so we're going to roll with it today.

For my first number, what's the deal with the hot girls and the old jeeps? In a fascinating read by the Wall Street Journal, it appears that the latest status symbol, if you're a young, wealthy, good-looking woman, is to rumble around town in a vintage off-road SUV. The numbers tell the story. At the classic car insurance company Haggerty, the number of women under 50 who bought Broncos from the 60s and 70s spiked 82% in the last three years. Renting older SUVs is also popular, especially in beach communities. One couple who rents out vintage defenders on Nantucket told the journal that 80% of their clients are women between 20 and 40.

On Long Island, an event-focused rental car owner said similarly 80% of his bookings are women, mostly booking cars for photo shoots. Celebrity culture is no doubt a factor. Sidney-sweeney drives around L.A. in a 1969 Bronco. She restored herself. Kendall Jenner owns an 89 land cruiser and Alps. Alex Earle is also a fan of older trucks, as evidenced by all the pictures she posts with them. And like in fashion, which SUV you go for also says something about you.

One owner of a restored 1987 mint green defender told the journal, a G-Wagon is for a rich girl who does Pilates and a vintage defender is for a girl who has edge. Toby, women will literally buy an old Bronco instead of going to therapy. The appeal is the fact that these are imperfect cars. Because what have modern cars done over the past few years? They've eliminated all the headaches of old cars, and yet cars with no air conditioning, with loud tires, with crank windows, with no turning radius or backup cameras. That's what's in the zeitgeist right now.

Now, it is a bit of a misnomer to say that these are old cars inside because a lot of them are resto mods. They have modern drive trains. They've been updated for modern safety regulations as well. And part of the status symbol as well is not just the fact that they're edgy, the fact that they cost a lot of money to restore. I mean, if you want a custom 1977 Bronco, that'll probably cost you $300,000 to restore.

So, yes, you can talk about the edginess factor. Yes, you can talk about the fact that you'd rather be seen in one of these than a G-wagon. But these costs almost as much as a G-wagon when it comes to restoring them soup to nuts. My next number is that a cookie brand you all know but rarely think about is absolutely crushing it. Belgian food company Lotus Bakery stock is up 49% so far this year and 600% over the last decade, thanks to surging sales of its Biskopf cookies. Famously offered as an underwhelming snack on airplanes, Biskof is taking the world and social media by Storm Bloomberg reports. Between 2014 and 2014, sales have risen an average of 17% each year, and the pace seems to be picking up.

Sales grew 30% last year, thanks in part to a viral Japanese cheesecake trend on social media, where you pair a Biskopf cookie with yogurt. That Asian influence is no coincidence. Lotus opened up a new factory in Thailand to win over the continent's vast consumer base and expand its global reach. To put this hockey stick trajectory in context, Bloomberg intelligence analyst Ignacio Canals Polo said, you can compare it to Oreo when that was growing drastically.

People seem to like it everywhere they go. That's the most important part to understand about Lotus bakeries. Toby Biskopf is now in the world's top five for cookie sales, the little biscuit that cut. I don't like it. I know you don't like them. Whenever it comes my way on a plane, it just does not, that's not what I want on a plane.

Like it's so dry and it makes my mouth hot. You dip it in some yogurt. I know. It's just fascinating, though, to see how big this company is. There's no way that I thought Lotus Bakery would trade at 46 times forward earnings. That is more than double the valuation the broader global food sector gets. So clearly investors are psyched about its growth trajectory. That being said,

there's definitely headwinds on the horizon. Anytime we talk about snacks, you have to mention GLP1 drugs as well. That could reduce snack consumption. That being said, Lotus has hedged their bets a little bit. They're not just Biscoff. They have tried to jump on the health train as well.

They've bought brands like Trek in naked bars. The natural food division of its company now accounts for 25% of its company revenue. So they do have this moneymaker in Bisccoff cookies, but they also are saying, hey, we're going to spread our breaths around a little bit and try to survive this kind of GLP1 era that we are in right now. For my final number, think about the last time you opened up a streaming app, say HBO Max. Did you begin your rewatch of Sex in the City or fire up the latest episode of House of the Dragon?

For the vast majority of you, it's the rewatch. According to Luminates Retro Revival Report across nearly all streaming platforms, older classics from the catalog trounce new original content as a share of viewing hours. And by trounce, I mean on Disney Plus, it's 95% to 5% in favor of the catalog. On Peacock, 94 to 6, Hulu, 94 to 6, HBO Max, 93 to 7. The only exception is Netflix, where the library is still more popular than the originals, but only by a 60 to 40 margin. A similar back to the future trend is playing out in music.

Among U.S. consumers, age 13 to 24, those who listen most to music from the 90s or earlier, jumped to 44% in 2025 from just 18% in 2021. Thought the music industry executive Lawrence Perrier had an interesting take on the retro revival study in his blog, quote, this is not a report about nostalgia, despite being framed that way. It is evidence that cultural products have become non-perishable, and the entire entertainment industry is still priced as if they spoil. He added every legacy assumption in music and video rests on a decay curve, a song or show is most valuable at release and depreciates from there.

Today, however, we have a market for culture where the product no longer ages. I think that it is this arena where each piece of content battles against their previous piece of content. And it is really hard to beat things like friends or suits or the office. Those are comfort shows that are great shows. So for a net new one to take their place, they have to be at least a certain percentage points better, which is why I think you are seeing them kind of last so long in the cultural zeitgeist. Netflix is a very interesting case study here because they're the only ones that are bucking the trend. They have spent roughly $135 billion on licensing and original programming over the past decade.

They have invested continually while other companies have pulled back a little bit. And it's kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact that Netflix has continued to invest, has brought them a lot of money and allows them to continue to invest. And I don't know if any of these other brands will ever be able to catch up or match Netflix's output. is Peacock going to be spending billions of dollars on content going forward? Probably not. They have to return to profitability for shareholders at some point. So I do think that old content libraries are going to be the vast majority of streaming going

forward in only the very upper echelon of companies like Netflix are going to be creating that new content. That's kind of the future that we are plowing towards that. Maybe an alarming rate. Maybe they're not alarming rate. Yeah, so interesting to think of a piece of content as non-perishable. Like its shelf life is forever. We never thought about it that way.

And that's why I thought this guy had an interesting tape because we think it's, oh, you pine for the nostalgia of your youth. I want to watch The Office because I remember that when I was watching it with my friends in college or in high school. But at this point, no, it's not really nostalgia. It's just the fact that this content can live on forever. Movies from the 60s and 70s. And actually, it's mostly the 90s, but those pieces of content and songs as well. We obviously, music is a big part of that, that their shelf life is just infinite. Let's move to the finish with some final headlines.

Anthropic is back. After abruptly blocking access to its most advanced AI models just two weeks ago, the Trump administration has lifted export restrictions on the company's flagship, Fable, and Mythos models. Anthropic was forced to throttle the release of Fable and Mythos after receiving a directive from the Commerce Department to limit access by foreign nationals. But following negotiations, the U.S. has now given the okay, saying Anthropic put the proper safeguards in place,

clearing the way for the models to return. Neil, this top-down directive from the government fueled a bunch of fears that U.S. companies might become tied up in regulatory infighting while its Chinese rivals were free to race ahead. Open AI also limited the release of its most advanced model under the same pressure. But at least for now, those fears seem to have been mitigated.

Yeah, it's certainly relief for the tech industry, for anyone who cares about this, for these two, the U.S. government and, to bury the hatch. Many consider this a self-defeating move by both sides to be feuding like this. But I think there are still widespread concerns that the U.S. is putting its thumb on the scale of AI development and AI releases to American innovation technology innovations detriment compared to China. We just reported earlier this week that China has a couple of models now that go toe to toe with mythos, which was blocked from being released in the United States.

So I think while maybe this particular battle has been resolved, the overall concern that the U.S. government and the Trump administration has now taken a very activist, a very interventionist approach in AI policy, worries those who are looking at China and saying, wow, they're releasing new and better models by the day. They are six months behind. Who knows what's going to be like in a couple weeks? Up next on July 1st, just like January 1st, a bunch of new state laws go into effect. and one from California could affect your TV experience anywhere you live. Starting today, it'll be illegal in California for streaming platforms to play advertisements louder than the content itself. The bill was sponsored by state senator Thomas Umberg, who said he was motivated by, quote,

every exhausted parent who's finally gotten a baby to sleep, only to have a blaring streaming ad undo all the hard work. Streaming platforms push back, saying it was technically difficult for them to normalize volume levels, especially since people watch on so many different types of devices, from phones, tablets to TVs, but comply they must. And experts believe that if streamers figure out a volume fix in California, they'll probably roll it out to the rest of the country as well. We need it because, gosh, watching the World Cup, there is nothing worse than you're in the

flow, you're hearing the sounds of soccer than just this massively loud streaming ad comes on. We've all been there. We're like, why aren't these volumes matched whatsoever? Really, what this is doing is closing the regulatory gap. This has been a thing in normal commercial broadcasting cable TV since 2010. And there is the commercial advertisement, loudless mitigation act. Calm act right there.

Yes, you nailed it. So they're basically lawmakers are saying, why does broadcast TV have to follow these rules when streamers do not? And this is kind of the dominant way a lot of people consume media at this point. Add supported subscription tiers are the most popular on all the big streaming services. So this is going to affect a lot of people. We usually didn't have to worry about commercials when watching soccer. I know, I know.

Don't bring up the hydration break. It's just going to get me mad all over again. Okay, finally, we close out every show, every Wednesday show with suggestion box, where Toby and I give you recommendations to get you over the hump of the week. Toby, I'll hand it to you first. My recommendation is related to the heat wave and is to try and put yogurt on your windows. So we covered this last year, if you remember. But if you don't, researchers at a UK university found that coating your windows with Greek

yogurt can reduce indoor temperatures by up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit. the yogurt works by forming this thin, light-colored film that reflects some of the solar radiation, reducing the heat that comes into your house. And given that we are in the midst of a big heat wave, I want someone to try it. I don't want to try it because I don't want to be the guy smearing yogurt on my windows, which is why I'm putting it out to the MBD listeners. Someone will be braving us to do this. Be my yogurt guinea pig, please. All right, my recommendation, it's less of a recommendation, more of a did you know. We have to talk about hot dogs ahead of July for it, specifically hot dog buns. People might not be aware of this, but there are two different

types of buns out there. You have side sliced, which is the slice in the side, obviously. That's the standard for much of the country, but from where I grew up in New England, I didn't know this, but we have our own style. It's top slice. It's New England style. So that works. Like, think about a lobster roll or a hot dog with a lot of fixings on it, right? You got onions and sauerkraut and all the, a ton of toppings, you may want a New England style bun that's cut in the top because it catches more of the dog, where if you just want hot dog and ketchup, that's it, or mustard, then you might want to go with the side split version. So I'm not making a judgment here. I obviously have a lot more familiarity with the New England version, but I just want you to know that there are two common types of hot dog buns. Okay, I must be confused because I'm thinking about the top bun. That's way worse.

There's less depth to it. And so how can it hold more topics? Is that the New England style bun that you're talking about? Yeah, it's like, you know, like the more brown part, the toasted part on top, they just cut it right there. But there's like a lip on the sides that keeps the hot dog and all the fixings in there. I'm just saying, what do they use for a lobster or there's a ton of stuff that it has to catch? They use the New England style bun. Yeah, maybe I'm just not a New England guy.

I was just watching a hot dog video as well on Instagram where everyone cooks her hot dogs too quickly. You want the fat to render inside the dogs. You've got to bring it up low and slow. Like, I'm talking 20 minutes per hot dog. So the casing should be, you know, very firm. And you can see a gloss of the fat on the surface. Most people scorch their dogs or don't even get me sorry about boiling your dogs. But treat your dogs with respect to this holiday weekend because they'll just be a lot more delicious to eat.

That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Wednesday and an even better holiday weekend. and share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Loo is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham, and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical Direction by Nina Miller, hair and makeup, which is everyone a happy July 4th. Our president is Devin Emery, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show to Daniel. Let's run it back

tomorrow. Toby, what do you think about how the music industry is reckoning with AI? Well, I reckon it's been a doozy. That response is exactly why Morning Brew partnered with PWC to create a new podcast called The Intelligence Shift. It was made to help industry leaders understand what's happening around AI, why it matters, and what to do about it. Posted by PWC's chief AI officer, Dan Priest, this eight-episode series skips the noisy hype and gets right to what really matters to business leaders. A top-tier roster of guests joins Pris to share real stories and real lessons learned. Topics range from AI in the music industry to HR's use of AI and scouting top talent. Hear the stories for yourself.

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