Morning Brew Daily - The Fed Slashes Rates Again & Big Tech’s Endless AI Spending

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Episode 703: Neal and Toby recap big tech earnings coming from Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Then, the Fed makes its 2nd rate cut for the year as well as ending the effort to reduce its balance sheet, all while acknowledging the data blackout from the government shutdown. Also, ‘A House of Dynamite’ might have just made a big boom…but in the wrong place as the Pentagon vehemently rejects how the US missile defense system is portrayed. Next, Neal shares his favorite numbers on the fried chicken wars, animal actors, and PTO.  Learn more at disneycampaignmanager.com  Can you climb the MBD Ladder? https://forms.gle/VQEAuctf696J9uzn9 Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  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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Good morning. For your daily show, I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how one sentence by Jerome Powell sent markets tumbling. Then Netflix's new movie is a ruffling feathers at the Pentagon. It's Thursday, October 30th. Let's ride. Imagine coming out of a work meeting and thinking, wow, that went even better than I expected.

Hasn't happened to be, but it did just happen over in South Korea, where President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a summit and agreed to lower the temperature on the trade war. I would say on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12, Trump said, in a sentence that has never before been uttered in human history. That's because Trump announced that he would lower tariffs on Chinese imports by 10 percentage points to 47 percent,

and in exchange, China would delay restrictions on those key rare earths minerals for a year and resume purchasing American soybeans. That's what he said. What did she say? Both sides should focus on the bigger picture and the long-term benefits of cooperation, rather than fall into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation, according to a readout. You may have been locked in on the meeting and the de-escalating trade war,

but I was locked in on something far more important, the length of Trump and Shea's handshake. I was cruising prediction market site, Calcey yesterday, and saw a market for how long the two leaders would shake hands for. Six to 10 seconds was by far the favorite. But when they actually met, the handshake went on for 24 and a half seconds. That is a long handshake. Maybe there's a direct correlation between the quality of the meeting, the de-escalation of tariffs, and the length of a handshake.

All I'm saying is next time they meet, shake hands for a minute and see what happens. Maybe tariffs go to zero. They were just holding hands for the majority of it while taking pictures. So I don't know if that's technically a handshake because they weren't moving in an up and down or back-and-forth. There was a movement. There was a little movement going on. I might take this up with Cal Sheep. Okay, now a word from our sponsor, Disney campaign manager.

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365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate 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.S. slash college PC. Yesterday after the bell, there were so many tech giants reporting earnings, I needed Red Zone to keep up with them. But if there was a theme to Microsoft, meta, and Google's reports, it was this, more compute needed, because these companies said that demand for their AI infrastructure is way outstripping supply. Capital expenditures, not revenue or profits, was the metric investors were watching

most closely from these tech firms because it's seen as a barometer of interest in AI, which all these companies are betting the farm on. And let's just say there's going to be a data center moving in near you if there isn't one already. Google raised its projections for CapEx this year to between $91 billion and $93 billion up from $52.5 billion last year. Meta previously said it planned to lay out $72 billion this year. And it said, 26 spending would be, quote, notably larger, and Microsoft announced it would double its total data center footprint in the next two years. The reason these companies are able to wager so much at the AI casino is that money simply grows on trees for them. Microsoft's Azure cloud

business already massive grew 40% in the latest quarter. Meta's ad unit keeps chuggling along, bringing in a record $51 billion in sales last quarter, up 26% from the year before. And for the first time in history, Google Parent Alphabet topped 100 billion. in quarterly revenue. Toby, these three behemists kicked off the most consequential two days of earning season with Amazon and Apple up tomorrow. So far, it looks like the AI boom is rolling on, no matter how many times you call it a bubble, but investors are getting a little bit angsty about all this spending. Yeah, let's just start at the top with what Meta said. Zuckerberg keeps saying that Meta needs more compute, more compute. He says a significantly larger investment is probably

coming because compute is very likely to be a profitable thing. Obviously, why would you be plowing this many billions of dollars into it if you didn't think it was profitable. He says that the worst case for AI spending is just building too far ahead. He says, eventually we are going to be using this compute. So even though you're getting a little antsy right now that we're putting so much percentage of our revenue into this CAPEX, eventually we're going to use this because the A forecast demand being that high. And he's also just pretty optimistic on meta, specifically winning this super intelligence battle.

One, they just spent so much money on building out their street. Super Intelligence team, but also, too, a lot of people use Meta's AI models because, you know, they baked them into their very widely distributed apps. And he says there's a clear correlation between model improvement and usage. So, again, there is a lot of nervousness from analysts who say, I don't know, meta. Like, you don't have a cloud computing division like a Google does or like a Microsoft does. Why are you spending so much money on, why are you spending so much of your sales on this one thing? But again, Zuck says, breathe easy.

I think we see a path towards profitability here. Who knows who's going to be right? But Zuck is clearly committed to this one particular line of thinking. Yeah, and by investors getting angsty, they sent the stock down 9% after hours. Meta had a few wrinkles in its earnings report. It took this $16 billion tax charge related to the GOP tax bill. So it's got that coming down the pike. And investors were just a little uncertain about the ROI on all this investment,

saying that executives at Meta on the call were just a little bit cagey about whether they were going to see any return on the hundreds of billions of dollars they're investing. Zuck responds that, yeah, $100 billion. If we go over a few hundred billion dollars, it's just, he said it would be, quote, very unfortunate, but still not a big deal in the grand quest to achieve superintelligence. And then going down the line, Microsoft's kind of line of thinking was they can't build fast enough to keep up with AI demand. because remember Microsoft is winning on both sides of the equation here. One, they have Azure Cloud, which AI companies need in order to scale their operation. So that division is absolutely killing it, 40% year-over-year growth. And then they also want to double its data center footprint in the next two years as well.

If you are a Microsoft investor versus a meta-investor, you're a little more, you're breathing easier hearing Microsoft say that because of just this money-making cloud unit. But again, spending so much money on this thing is it was kind of the theme of this earnings call is just analysts saying. Make sure you guys are not getting too far over your skis right now because you don't know necessarily if this demand is going to catch up with all of this supply you're bringing online. So Microsoft stock dipped 2% after hours because of this little investor anxiety about spending probably the best earnings report out of the three was Google. The stock was up 6% after hours. Investors really loved what they heard from the Google executive team. The search division, even as it faces a ton of competition from ChatGBT, BT, from perplexity. It's still growing at a rapid clip.

Search revenue was up almost 15% from the same quarter last year to $56.5 billion. The company said that its Gemini AI assistant has 650 million monthly active users, up 44% from three months. go. So it looks like Google is having its cake and eating it too because it still has that big search business. And at the same time, it's developing its AI and seems to be pretty popular. $100 billion in one quarter. That is a lot of money that you're making. And again, if we go back to meta again, that is why those investors are a little more nervous because you have half the revenue that Google does. You're trying to embark on the same spending spree that Google and Microsoft is doing. And yet you don't necessarily have the same amount of money coming into your coffers. So just a big,

holistic look at what was going on there. I think the name of the game was we are still spending on this AI boom. The AI boom is helping us in the present right now, too. So just kind of a top to bottom, it's still an AI world and we're all living in it. Moving on, in a decision that was about as surprising as Neil's new haircut looking fantastic, the Federal Reserve slash interest rates by 25 basis points marking its second consecutive cut as it tries to prop up a faltering jobs market and deal with an economy cladded by the ongoing government shutdown. The cut was all but certain even before the meeting convened,

as increasingly dowered data from the labor market forced Jerome Powell's hand, but by no means was this a straightforward decision. Two Fed governors dissented again, splitting the vote 10 to 2, with Trump appointee Stephen Marin, voting for a larger half-point cut, signaling an attempt to juice economic activity, while another governor representing Kansas City's Fed voted for no change to combat still stubbornly high inflation. When Powell stepped up to the podium for his post-meeting press conference, he adopted a surprisingly hawkish tone. Before Powell spoke, traders were pricing in about 90% odds of another cut coming in December. But after Jay Powell said a rate reduction in December is, quote, not a foregone conclusion far from it, those odds started to plummet. By the end of his conference,

the market showed just a 60% chance of another cut. Neil, this decision focused on last week's promising inflation data and some state-level metrics like unemployment claims looking better. But it also was the first time a government shutdown forced the rate-setting committee to change monetary policy without complete employment numbers. Despite the double dissents again, this was a relatively straightforward decision given the state of the labor market, but it might have been the last straightforward decision of the year. Yeah, Powell got up to the microphone.

He threw everyone for a loop because they thought that a December rate cut was as much of a lock as this one. And then he said, we're far from making a decision about September. He just talked about the complexity of the situation. He called it's very complicated. And I think everyone who watches the central bank would agree with him that there's basically no path that you can take that would be risk-free because central bankers are thinking, okay, if we cut rates too much, then that risk spurring inflation higher, juicing economic

growth. And we're already at 3% inflation. That's much higher than the 2% inflation that our target is. But then if you cut rates not enough or too slowly, then you risk the labor market going off of Cliff. We just talked about so many layoffs that happened in the economy. The unemployment rate has ticked up over the past few months. So there is a lot of tension here. And that's why you're seeing a 10 to 2 vote where that is very rare.

You know, central bankers typically vote all unanimously. It's usually a pretty clear decision. But you're just seeing a lot of complexity. And it's not made any easier by the fact that there's no data coming from the government. because of the shutdown. So, you know, they are driving through a very foggy morass right now. Yeah. And there was mixed messages coming out of the Fed yesterday because, one, they did cut rates.

That's a very doveish thing. You know, it spurs economic activity. And then they also pause their quantitative tightening that they've been doing on. The Fed has been shrinking its balance sheet over the last few years coming out of COVID. Remember, the Fed, when we say they're shrinking the balance sheet, it means they're just reducing the amount of bonds and assets that they own. they hold trillions of dollars in assets in exchange it basically is they're giving money to banks. When they start selling those assets off or when they start shrinking its balance sheet,

it means they're just reducing the amount of doing it. It is basically a doveish signal to actually hold off on that quantitative tightening campaign. So you had two doveish signals with that campaign winding down and then also the rate cut happening. And then Jerome Powell steps up to the podium and starts adopting this very hawkish tone. Everyone, that was why you saw this, the market for what they were pricing in a rate cut to be in December, start to plummet immediately. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, where is all this energy coming from J-Pal? I thought we were kind of on the same page here. But again, it is a very fluid situation, which is why we are seeing some more uncertainty heading into this December meeting.

Moving on, if you've switched on Netflix over the last week and cruise to the top movies list, you've likely seen a house of dynamite sitting near the top spot. the movie is a new military thriller directed by Catherine Bigelow, the mine behind the Hurt Locker in Zero Dark 30. It's a good movie and clearly people like it, but the Pentagon is not so happy with its cameo. The movie imagines a scenario where a nuclear intercontinental missile makes it through U.S. air defenses and heads to Chicago. But according to Bloomberg, that plot line hit a little too close to home for the missile defense agency, the real life department tasked with preventing that exact scenario from happening. An internal memo from the agency seen by Bloomberg claims the movie vastly underestimates America's defense capabilities, pushing back on the suggestion that the U.S. would only have a 50-50 chance of actually intercepting a missile. So it's a bleeping coin toss, a character says in the movie, that is what we get for $50 billion.

The MDA insists its systems are far more reliable. In fact, in the memo, it claims a 100% success rate dating back decades, which is a little questionable. Neil, the Defense Department is notoriously picky when it comes to films about the military or national security issues because of creative liberties Hollywood takes, sometimes on purpose, sometimes innocent mistakes. But what was it about this specific movie you think caused such a ruckus in the Pentagon? Well, it makes them look a little bit weak and incapable of not shooting down a missile that's headed to a massive metropolitan area in the United States. a bunch of arms experts were, you know, reporters after this came out were like calling up all these arms

experts and asking, well, what do you think? Like, what is the reality here? And they did push back on this 100% claim. Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said to ABC, I don't know of a single technological system. That is perfect with 100% accuracy. And remember, in this case,

we're talking about literally a bullet needing to hit a bullet. Catherine Bigelow, who was behind this film and a bunch of other films about the military, also gave interviews after this news came out and told CBS, I felt that we needed to be more independent. We had multiple tech advisors who have worked in the Pentagon, but said she did not consult the Pentagon specifically. She said this was a work of fiction, but it was based in reality. And her mission, she had a particular mission with this movie. And that was to let people know

that we are surrounded by 12,000 nuclear weapons. And she is sort of advocating for anti-nuclear proliferation here with this movie saying, Like, yeah, anything can happen here, and the Pentagon is probably not as ready as they want you to think. And the other subtext here is Trump wants this Golden Dome plan to come to America as well, which is basically like an expanded version of Israel's Iron Dome that he wants to protect the entirety of the United States. That is something that potentially is the subtext of the Pentagon issuing this memo because they want funding to build this golden dome system, which is still a little ill-defined right now. And then I also can't help but think of the Streisand effect, which is when you call it. attention to something that was relatively minor, it ends up bringing more attention to it. I don't know if a lot of people were going to be thinking like, ah, the Pentagon doesn't have

these capabilities without this memo being circulated to its internal employees, without, you know, Bloomberg discovering it. So I think they might have done the reverse effect of what they were actually trying to achieve here and are now calling more attention to their capabilities. And then just the final thing is this 100% claim. Everyone's like, why do they even pick that? It was kind of a cherry-picked data set where over the last decade is what they said it has been 100%. There's only been four tests. Two of those were the only ones that actually had sort of active, realistic circumstances to it. So technically, yes, it has had a 100% success rate in closed testing environments over the last 10 years. But beyond that,

it gets a little murkier. And they say, actually, it is closer to a 50-50 chance because it is hard, you know, shoot down one missile with another missile. And it's just another chapter in the Pentagon's love-hate relationship with Hollywood. There were times when it loved Hollywood, go back to 1986, and Top Gun. Top Gun helped boost Navy recruitment by 8%, because how can you watch that movie and not want to become a pilot? And the Defense Department worked closely with Top Gun Maverick to supply it with F-18. So they're looking at certain movies, and they're saying, are you going to portray us the military in a positive light? Sure, we would love to work with you.

We will even look over your script to make sure everything's accurate. And then there are certain movies that portrayed the military in a much more negative light, and the Pentagon tends to work with those. I'm thinking about Apocalypse now, which came out seven years before the initial top gun. Francis Ford Coppola was not able to secure any aircraft or equipment from the U.S. military. And then

he wrote to the Pentagon, I can only assume that the military uses its control of these aircraft as a means of dictating which films can be made and which films cannot be made. So in the Pentagon's ideal world, this movie on Netflix, which is now the number one movie watched by more than 20 million accounts was never made at all.

we're going to take a quick break and come back with Niels Numbers. Good sleep is everything. That's why Ali's science back support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-D-A-Nine for both kiddos and grown-ups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. You're racing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Ollie's sleep solutions for the whole family at ollie.com. That's OLL-L-Y.com. It's time to refresh your yard during spring, backyard.

days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill three burner gas grill, or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th, Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. Welcome to Neal's numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will help you face your fears this spooky season. My first number helps explain why KFC has been slumping hard. Boneless chicken is hot and demand for bone in is looking downright skeletal.

According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. fast food menu listings for bone in fried chicken meals, the kind that KFC specializes in, have plunged 72% in the past four years. Meanwhile, boneless wings, tenders, and other meals of that style have spiked 29%. It's led to a kernel in crisis. KFC's same store sales have decreased for six straight quarters in the U.S. And it's dropped to fourth in the rankings of U.S. fast food chicken restaurants. Next year, it'll fall to fifth when Wingstop leapfrogs it. KFC's pain has been others gain.

The company's more hit to the boneless trend, Chick-fil-A foremost among them, have surged as demand for poultry rises overall. Raising cane sales jumped 32% last year compared to 2023, while Dave's hot chickens soared 57%. Toby, it's clear people are increasingly avoiding the messiness of eating bone-in wings and thighs while embracing cleaner, more convenient boneless nuggets

and fried chicken sandwiches. But at what cost, I thought we were a proper country? Well, first of all, when you read this story, you said, Toby, you're a boneless guy, which was rather insulting to me. You know, I like the bone-in feel.

I'm a traditional wing guy, but I think one of the reasons why we're seeing this trend emerge is because a lot of customers are eating food in their cars. 26% of customers eat fast food meals sitting in their cars. and what is easier to eat, a boneless wing.

And so you just get a little greasy. Like the bones are hard to deal with. So I understand why this trend is happening. But it is remarkable to see anyone who serves tenders, absolutely killing it. Anyone who serves nuggets killing it. No one really is in this bone in the game anymore. I guess wing stop is. So maybe they don't have a, you know, fully get out of jail free card here if you're KFC.

But fascinating to see that, you know, I think it's a young person thing too. They love boneless swings. You were kind of asking around the office. here. There was a generational divide. Gen Z likes boneless wings and us elder millennials do appreciate a good bone and wing. All right,

for my next number, an industry you might not expect is getting disrupted by AI animal actors. Yep, there never might be another real life lassie. The owner of Bonaise Burden Animal Rentals, which supplies films with animal acting talent, told the Hollywood reporter that her business

has plunged to just 40% of what it was before the pandemic. Elsewhere, the Los Angeles area, Rocco, a Bernard Boxer mix, whose credits include Jane the Virgin, Veronica Mars, and The Morning Show hasn't booked a film or TV gig in years. Studios are increasingly turning to AI-generated animals added in post-production to suit their animal talent needs. Just look at the most famous movie dog of 2025, Superman's sidekick Crypto. He was a digital version of a real dog that got scanned for the role. It's not just dogs feeling as washed up as anyone who's been on Dancing with the Stars. Benet Carp, who runs

that struggling animal rental company said, I don't think I've had a call for a woodpecker in probably three or four years, maybe five years. I have a flock of seagulls. I think I've only gotten one job for them in the last year where they used to work all the time. Toby, this industry is going through an existential crisis. I can't think of a single movie with a woodpecker in it, but maybe I need to increase my catalog. I feel like I'm uniquely situated to comment on this trend because I just watched Superman, which has the digital crypto dog in it, and then also anatomy of a fall back to back where a dog plays a very big role, a real dog plays a really big role in that movie. And it is night and day. I mean, first of all, anatomy of a fall, if you haven't

gone and seen it, this dog is acting in it. I don't know how a dog acts sick or I don't know how a dog, you know, has a presence on camera, but it absolutely did. And it's just different than like crypto. Obviously, Superman is a very CGI movie in general, but there is obviously a massive divide between those two things. So some animal rights activists are saying, yeah, it's actually good AI is helping replace animals, you know, being abused in the entertainment industry

while other people are saying, this is a real livelihood for people, and you probably get a better emotional response when you have real animals on screen. So interesting divide in one that I just experienced with the last two movies I watched. And you come down on the side of the animal actors being an actual important role in these movies.

I'm telling you, watch this dog act. It acted its butt off. It was incredible to see. The Daniel DeLewis of K-Nines. Yes. All right, for my final number, a lot of you are due for some PTO. And a new survey of 3,000 U.S. workers from flex jobs, almost one quarter said they hadn't taken a single vacation day over the past year.

That's despite 82% of respondents saying they do have vacation leave through their work. This is supported by other studies about Americans' hostile relationship toward PTO. An appews survey from 2024, almost half of American workers said they didn't take all the vacation days they've been allotted. So what gives? Why are Americans clocking into a neon lit office on days they could be drinking biodynamic wine on Corfu? Researchers say a lot of the PTO hesitation can be chalked up to what's known as vacation guilt, the idea that you feel bad taking time off because it will make your teammates do more work or make your boss think you aren't dedicated enough to the grind. In the flex job survey, 43% said they had too much

work to justify taking a vacation. 30% were concerned about falling behind and 29% said they feel pressure to appear committed at their jobs. Toby, it's pretty striking. There's so much emphasis on health and wellness in this country, but that does not carry over to the office. When it comes to actually taking a break from work, vacation seems to add only more stress. That is kind of what camp you came from as well, because if you work on a team and you go

on vacation, you do feel a certain level of guilt because you just increase the workload of your team members. I think we just come from a workaholic society. I mean, the OECD found that U.S. employees log 59 hours more across 36 developed economies than on average. So we just are a country of workers. Like, I don't think that's surprising to anyone. What is surprising is the fact that zero vacation days over that span of time is a little alarming. But yeah, maybe it is just even when you go on vacation, you can't even unplug at this moment.

So why even go at all? You carry slack with you. you carry teams with you. A lot of people do that. So very much a symbol of the cultural attitude towards work in America. I do think vacation guilt plays a big role in this. I mean, I feel it myself. I'm going on vacation in two weeks.

I'm feeling a lot of guilt about how much our team is going to work a little extra. And I know everyone is going to say, oh, it's fine. Like, we want you to take vacation. But you still feel it and you cannot feel. And I think that does dissuade a lot of people from going on vacation. I think the one way to build a culture that promotes vacation, is for the boss to take vacation, because if my boss is not taking vacation, that I think I'm going to feel extra pangs of vacation guilt,

compared to if my boss is working the whole time and I feel like a little bit of a slacker. So that's just my two cents. All right, let's spread to the finish with some final headlines. Starbucks might finally be turning around its business. The slumping coffee chain reported its first increase in same store sales in nearly two years, a sign that new CEO Brian Nichols' revival plan is starting to show results. The sales growth mostly happened in international markets where sales rose 3%. U.S. revenue was mostly flat, but even that was better than expectations of a slight decline.

Nickel, a corporate prodigy, dubbed the retail messy, joined Starbucks from Chipotle more than a year ago to make Starbucks great again. The journey back to growth has been a slog that's tested investors' patience with shares down 7% this year coming into the report. But much like the Jets' first win of the season last Sunday, you just need a little something to build on. Yeah, they are building in the right direction, but one interesting wrinkle to this earnings report was that Starbucks has put millions of dollars into making its stores a place where you want to stay longer. But in 2023, more than 40% of visits lasted longer than 10 minutes. Today, that share is down to about a third. So less people are staying long, which is the exact type of environment that Brian Nicol is trying to create. So there's still some progress to go on that front. Still, I think Brian Nicol is probably happy with his decision. to take the Starbucks jobs because the company he left, Chipoli is a dumpster fire right now. It cut its full year out like for the third time this year. It says it's losing ground with Gen Z and millennial customers

due to all sorts of pressures on their wages, on student loans coming back, and unemployment claims kind of rising. So after that lousy earnings called Chipoli stock fell, 18% is down 33% year today. So Nicola is out of the frying pan, into the fire, but actually the frying pan was a much worse. place to be. Finally, Snowflake, the cloud-based data management platform, needs to give their

employees a little more PR training. The company's in hot water with the SEC after its chief revenue officer, Mike Gannon, disclosed unauthorized financial information about the company in a man-on-the-street-style interview with a popular social media creator who goes by the handle, the School of Hard Knox, Knox with a Z. When asked about the company's revenue, Gannon said that Snowflake is set to do about $4.5 billion in revenue this year, and we're, quote, getting to $10 billion in a couple of years. The video, which currently has $2.5 million views, forced Snowflake to file an 8K with the SEC to remind investors that Gannon is not a designated spokesperson, authorized to disclose financial information, then reaffirmed its previously issued sales guidance

of a little over $100 million less than Gannon's estimation. Neil, a good reminder, if a creator who goes by School of Hard Knocks puts a mic in your face. Don't disclose financial information, especially again if that social media handle Knox ends with a Z. I mean, I get it. You're a multimillionaire. You just had a huge quarter. Some influencer sticks a camera in your face, calls you the best things since sliced bread,

and you let a few sales projections slip. Who among us, you know? It's just funny to think about all the meetings that had to be scheduled and the lawyers that had to be called to clean up this mess from a man on the street. Instagram video. There was a lot more work that was put on their plate because of this guy just slipping up and saying, yeah, we're going to do, he just got high on his own supply and he said, yeah, like I'm bragging. We're going to do $4.5 billion in sales this year. And then the company had to say, actually, we're going to come in, maybe $100 million lower than that.

It is straight out of succession and a wonderfully hilarious story. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. This week is flying by. For any feedback on the show or you want to just get in contact, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com or slide into our DMs on Instagram at MB Daily's show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron

is our executive producer. Raymond Loo is our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Yuchinawa Ogu is our technical director, extraordinaire. Hair and makeup evidently does not feel vacation guilt. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back

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