Morning Brew Daily - Thousands Stranded in the Desert at 'Burning Man' & Jimmy Buffett's 'Margaritaville' Empire

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

Episode 140: Neal and Toby discuss 'Burning Man', a festival in the Nevada desert beloved by the nation's tech bros and billionaires, and how heavy rains left thousands stranded over the weekend. Plus..., why invasive species cost humans over $400 billion a year and the guys take a look at the 'Margaritaville' empire Jimmy Buffett built over the course of his life. Also, the winners of the weekend, the popularity of lab-grown diamonds explodes and what we are watching this week. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:01 Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest row ads of all major ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash MBD. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions apply.
Starting point is 00:00:27 Good morning, Brew Daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, we will talk invasive species because a new study shows that those lantern flies you keep seeing everywhere are part of a much bigger problem. And it's well past 5 o'clock in Tokyo. So Toby and I are going to pour a cold land shark and discuss the late Jimmy Buffett's business empire. Then we'll break down the mud and madness of the Burning Man Festival this year before turning to the diamond market where rough-cut gems are facing an existential threat from a less pricey competitor. It's Tuesday, September 5th.
Starting point is 00:01:00 Let's ride. Okay, Neil, it's Tuesday. We're coming off a long weekend. Give me one rose and one thorn from it. Okay, so we haven't, first of all, we haven't discussed this before. So these are completely organic reactions. I don't have any thorns. It was utterly delightful.
Starting point is 00:01:20 I'll have two roses real quick. I saw John Legend at Tanglewood. Whoa. Yeah, see? You did not know that. I didn't know that. And Tanglewood's this, like, beautiful music venue in the Berkshires. and he was, you know, he's got a great voice.
Starting point is 00:01:33 I wish he had a little bigger band behind him, but he shared his story. He's got a super fascinating story. And the guy's got incredible pipes. So just a very delightful evening. Lots of cheese, lots of wine. Another rose, I guess I would say lots of pool time. Oh, like literally lounging?
Starting point is 00:01:49 Yeah, but oh, it's not lounging. Like, when I'm at a pool, I realize that five minutes in, like, I need to do something competitive. So it's either like, let's see how far I can swim back and forth underwater, or we've got this beach volleyball. Let's see how many times we can keep it up in the air. Like, can we hit 200? I was going to say you're looking a little sunkiss too.
Starting point is 00:02:07 So I'm glad you had some nice lounging. All right, hit me. My rose was I slept in legitimately till 12.30 p.m. yesterday. I have an app that calculates my sleep debt, which is how many hours of sleep I owe my body. It was sitting at 20, a 20-hour deficit before this past weekend. So I just caught up on there. And then my thorn is I actually lost my wallet this weekend.
Starting point is 00:02:28 So it's, yeah. It's all on your phone now anyway. I know. It's been amazing. I've been able to survive without my wallet for like the last three days, but eventually. So if anyone's got wallet recommendations, I'm in the market for it. All right, Neil. Let's jump into our top story of the day.
Starting point is 00:02:43 While you and I were having wholesome weekends, like the good podcasters we are, there was a whole group of people having a big old party in the desert. I'm, of course, talking about Burning Man, the yearly festival that brings together an eccentric crowd from tech moguls to celebrities for a multi-day festival deep in the Nevada desert. Now the core tenets of Burning Man are self-sufficiency and self-organization, and those values were put to the test this year after two to three months of rain fell on the festival in a matter of days, leaving 72,000 people stranded in mud thicker than a bowl of oatmeal. Social media was awash this weekend in rumors that things were dire and food and water were running low. There were
Starting point is 00:03:24 rumors of an Ebola outbreak, which turned out to be completely false. Even the president was briefed about the situation at one point. But yesterday organizers finally gave the so-called burners the green light to leave as the roads cleared the mud became passable. All is to say, Neil, that this is one of the more conspicuous burning mans in recent memory. And it's clear that this once small countercultory gathering is much bigger these days. Definitely much bigger. But if there was anybody that could survive,
Starting point is 00:03:54 a huge mud, mud situation in the desert. It is, I think they call themselves burners, because one of the 10 principles of Burning Man is radical self-reliance. So there were a lot of interviews with people who were there and they're like, yeah, this is no big deal. Like, so what if the toilets are overflowing? Like, I've got enough alcohol. I've got enough food to keep me through a few days. Like, this is exactly what we were prepared for. I think the, you know, you've seen a transformation in Burning Man over the past few years from a countercultural festival for hippies that started in San Francisco in the 80s to a more senior besee event with tech moguls celebrities become super popular in Silicon Valley.
Starting point is 00:04:35 So maybe these people who came in on their air-conditioned RVs or private jets were a little more taken aback and we're not prepared. And one of the most famous stories from this past weekend was Diplo and Chris Rock were at Burning Man. And Diplo had a DJ set in Washington, D.C. later that night. and they closed off all of the roads. And so Chris Rock and Diplo walked six miles allegedly in the desert, hitchhiked, and Diplo eventually made his set,
Starting point is 00:05:01 but they posted about it on Instagram. So that kind of shows you the transformation of Burning Man into a more fuzzy, more fuzzy situation. Yeah, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg's been, Elon Musk goes almost every single year. He did not go this past year, though. Yeah, tickets are $575. dollars. But the interesting thing about Burning Man is that there's no real money that is passed back and forth. It's more of a gift in bartering system. So it's actually a very interesting social experiment for researchers. Some researchers go there to study how human social networks work
Starting point is 00:05:36 and how they form because it's just such an atypical system in the capitalist world that we live in. How does a bartering system work? So that's always an interesting thing is to see how like the gift economy is working. And then also, I just think it's interesting, too, that nothing about this is optimized for efficiency. It's all about just serendipity and these transcendental experiences. So, Neil, I just have to know, though, too, would you go to go? No, this doesn't interest me. I mean, I would go as, you know, like this sociological experiment. Like, so MIT Media Lab sent a, you know, sent a team last year. And I feel like I would be one of those more, I'm always, I always love just being, you know, a fly on the
Starting point is 00:06:16 the wall in these situations. So I don't know if I would have this like transcendental experience myself, but I would love to go watch other people do it and kind of study the informal economy and the ways people interact there. That more interests me than, you know, doing the whole, you know, no shower thing for 10 days. All right. There's no good way to transition from a story on Burning Man to a story about invasive species, but I'm just going to let it rip.
Starting point is 00:06:41 More than 3,500 harmful invasive species are having a profound impact on the earth. Earth's ecosystems and the global economy responsible for 60% of all extinctions and costing society $423 billion a year. That is according to a major UN-backed study out yesterday, which warns humans that we need to take this invasive species problem extremely seriously because without exaggeration, they pose a threat to human civilization. Let's first talk about the economic costs, which the study says are quadrupling every decade. The main damage is done through wrecking the food supply, these invaders spread disease, deplete fish reserves, and destroy
Starting point is 00:07:20 crops while crushing the biodiversity of an area. And the problem is getting worse with more than 200 invasive species, I can't even, I'm going to be saying invasive species a lot, this story, so just get used to it, with more than 200 invasive species getting introduced every year. The reason for this is that
Starting point is 00:07:36 humans have made traveling across continents so fast, so seamless, that invasive species can easily hitchhike on a cargo ship or commercial plane to a place they're not native to with disastrous effects. Through modern transportation networks, we've supercharged not only the movement of people and goods, but also animals and plants. So yeah, apparently we should be really worried about invasive species.
Starting point is 00:07:57 I was just shocked at all the examples that were provided in this report in just how many ways invasive species can impact the economy. I mean, you have fishing grounds that are just choked by this type of water lily, which is apparently the most invasive species in the world. power plant pipes that are clogged by zebra mussels. Everyone knows zebra mussels. We all been talking about zebra mussels for a long time. And then like electrical lines downed by brown tree snakes,
Starting point is 00:08:22 just all these different examples that you wouldn't expect and how they can impact everything from the food supply to infrastructure. And another thing that I thought was interesting too is that how some species are very native, in quotations very native, meaning that they just truly can adapt to these invasive species coming in. And one example is birds in New Zealand make their nests at ground level, and they were completely unprepared to fight against the presence of rats, which came in via the shipping industry. And so it's like this very hard thing sometimes for some species are so native that they can't even adapt to handle these new invasive species. So what do you do about it?
Starting point is 00:09:01 The report had a few different solutions. The first one they said is prevention. Like we need to step up checks at ports of call and things like that to prevent rats for. coming black rat is the number one animal invasive species uh if you didn't know coming into the places to begin with and islands are especially susceptible like we saw with maui with these invasive vegetation that came in that helped spur the wildfire and then if you can't prevent if you can't do prevention which is the number one thing then you go you go to eradication and you just got to kill them all and there's new technologies that are ways to sort of stop an invasive species in its tracks well
Starting point is 00:09:38 one of the ways that eradication can take is that you introduce another species to target the invasive species. That's a very fine line, though, because sometimes when you do that, if you release a predator into an ecosystem, you're introducing another variable element. And it's backfired before is when, like, the harlequin ladybird, which is an Asian native, brought to the U.S. in the earliest 20th century, in order to control insect pests. But then it turns out that bird proliferated and became an invasive species itself. So it really is this fine line between, okay, you can introduce a predator to tamp down this invasive species. But then that might, predator might do too well and become invasive itself. All this is to say, if you see a lantern fly anywhere in the East Coast, you are supposed to crush it. That is, that comes from Mount High.
Starting point is 00:10:25 That's not our thing. You definitely have to crush it because it's bad not only for us, but for it's destroying like the wine industry on Long Island in the Finger Lake. 10 states in seven years, Neil. So, yeah. I haven't seen a lantern fly this year, but apparently they're so bad. They're all over. I just live in the studio. All right, moving on to our next story, the singer and business mogul Jimmy Buffett died at 76 over the weekend from Merkel cell cancer.
Starting point is 00:10:49 It was sad news for as many fans known as parrot heads, but as Buffett said himself, if there's a heaven for me, I'm sure it has a beach attached. And that was Buffett's whole appeal, using his style of Caribbean-infused country rock music to whisk you away from your 9-5. to a white sand beach in the imagined paradise of Margaritaville, which was more a state of mind than a real place. But while he preached a beach bum lifestyle, Buffett himself was not wasting away at Margaritaville, more like grinding away.
Starting point is 00:11:17 Buffett turned the concept of Margaritaville into a licensing business empire, attaching his brand to things like pickleball paddles, luxury resorts, retirement villages, cannabis goods, RV camps, salad dressings, you could go on. Forbes recently calculated he was a billionaire from his sports, sprawling ventures. And honestly, I think Buffett's Margaritaville brand will end up being more of his legacy than his music, which I went through his whole discography yesterday. It was okay. Well, it's a good vibe. We were playing it too. It's perfect background music,
Starting point is 00:11:47 especially when the sun shining. But yeah, I mean, his business empire was expansive and sprawling. Of the $1 billion, just 5% came from his actual music catalog. So it really does go to show how big he became and how big this lifestyle became. I just want to go through some of the other things. You hit some. You got the Margaritaville-themed condominiums, resorts, retirement communities, which I love to. Because it's advertised for the 55 and better crowd. It's just a classic thing.
Starting point is 00:12:17 Margaritaville restaurant chains in airports, which I have been to. And then cruises as well that go from Palm Beach to the Bahamas. So he truly was all over the place and very sprawling. And then this is my favorite Jimmy Buffett story, is that obviously he's got the same last name as Warren Buffett. And so the two actually took a DNA test in 2018 to see if they were related because Jimmy Buffett's like, I got such good business acumen. So to you. Turns out they weren't related.
Starting point is 00:12:45 But then Warren Buffett jokingly said that asked Jimmy to keep me in his will. So it's kind of like this full circle moment where, yeah. That's very fun. Another thing that I found was he was a big writer. Oh. He was a big writer. He was a novelist and a nonfiction writer. And he's only one of six writers with like John Steinbner.
Starting point is 00:13:03 Beck and Ernest Hemigway to appear on both the New York Times' fiction and nonfiction bestseller list. The dude could do it all. It's just kind of like a little hypocritical. I got to say he's telling everyone through his music to like take it easy, take it chill, don't worry about work. Meanwhile, he's literally a workaholic and he's doing all these business deals. He's writing books.
Starting point is 00:13:25 He's being a super successful author. So he's a billionaire. I mean, I don't know. It's a little interesting to hear what he's saying. what he's saying in his music. But Margaritaville Times Square, we have to talk about that because I've been three times. It is a $370 million operation up there. And it opened in 2021.
Starting point is 00:13:46 It was by far his biggest business venture at that price tag. And it recently filed for bankruptcy, actually, because I don't know why they opened it in 2021 when Times Square was still getting back. And they think it's going to be okay. But I've been there a few times. It's actually, I say I went. And then when I'm there, I'm like, hey, this is actually pretty fun. I really want to go as well.
Starting point is 00:14:05 And I think it was because one of Jimmy Buffett's friends said, until you take New York, like you haven't done anything yet. So I think it was kind of his white whale. He definitely wanted to have a presence there because if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, baby. All right, Neil, before we jump into the next story, we're going to take a quick break. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot.
Starting point is 00:14:29 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. Not loving your AT&T or T mobile bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot.
Starting point is 00:14:58 Good news. Bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal. So get away from that unfortunate phone bill and get to Verizon. Verizon. Run, ride, canoe. Whatever it takes, we'll be here. Bring your AT&T or T Mobile Bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best network. A better deal. No surprises. That's Verizon. Best Network based on Route Metrics, Best Overall Mobile Network, Performance, U.S. second half, 2025, all rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person regained me the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. Okay, Neil, we're coming off a long
Starting point is 00:15:28 weekend, which means it's time for our winners of the weekend segment where we peruse the weekend's news and pick out two stories from people that had an especially good Labor Day break. Neal, you won the pre-show foot race, so you're up first. Who is your winner? My winner is the head coach of the University of Colorado's football team, Dion Sanders. So many of you might know Dion as an incredible athlete. He's the only person ever to play in both a Super Bowl and a World Series, but he's making a name for himself as a football coach. Coach Prime, as he calls himself, was hired by Colorado last year to an astronomical five-year contract worth $29.5 million, and he's already turned college football upside down.
Starting point is 00:16:08 After winning just one game last year, Colorado brought in nearly 90 new players during the offseason and in their first game this year on Saturday, stunned powerhouse TCU in Texas. The hype is only building in Boulder. Football season tickets sold out for the first time since 1996 and ticket prices for Colorado's home opener versus Nebraska next week have spiked more than 1,500 percent than last year. The guy also puts on a show wherever he goes, so it's no surprise that Amazon is following Coach Prime
Starting point is 00:16:37 in his first season as Colorado Coach for an upcoming docu-series. Toby, this is definitely one of the most fun sports stories right now. He's electric. Every time he's on the mic too, it's just a new soundbite. My favorite part of this story, though, is that, so he signed this big coaching contract, five-year deal,
Starting point is 00:16:55 $29.5 million. The Colorado athletic director says, we don't have the money yet at the time that they signed the deal, but I know we'll have it, so I'm not worried about that piece. And everyone was just like quote to me and saying, this is a Ponzi scheme. Like that's exactly what like Bernie Madoff would say is, oh, we don't have the money yet, but we'll have it. But sure enough, the money is pouring in. They already had a record year of donations. They raised $28 million, which is up $8 million from the year prior. So when you make
Starting point is 00:17:25 a bet on this huge public figure like Dion Sanders, you want to see more money coming in, want to seem to hype around the program and they're clearly like a self-fulfilling prophecy right exactly yeah so i mean colorado's a great football school they love football up there so and they've been just dormant for so long so it's exciting to see him back okay one final thing on how he's running the program too they don't have captains which is like a typical thing you have on the sports team they have ls and ds which stand for leaders and dogs so they they literally come up with to like the pre show pregame coin toss not with the c on their jerseys but with an l or a d on their and Because...
Starting point is 00:18:01 Wait, what is a dog? A dog. You're like a DOWG, like you're just a dog. Is it less than a leader? No, it's just like someone who grinds it out, someone who's like very nitty-gritty. It's a little different from a leader, but it's adjacent. Again, just like a totally funny... What's the optimal L to D ratio on a team?
Starting point is 00:18:18 I think you want a few L's and then like a lot of D's, mostly D's. Okay, so like 1090? Leader or a dog? All right. I'm just taking coaching tips from Coach Prime. Yeah, there you go. Okay, Neil. My winner of the weekend is the legend,
Starting point is 00:18:29 herself, Mariah Carey. You know how we ask each other every Friday? Is it a fast week or a slow week? Well, Neal, I have a fast year moment for you. Mariah Carey's all I want for Christmas is you pulled in 316,000 streams on Saturday, which is a 75% increase over the same day in 2022. And turns out the Queen of Christmas owes it all to the Philippines. Spotify charts show the song was streamed 112,000 times on September 1st within the country.
Starting point is 00:18:59 because apparently the majority of the majority Catholic Philippines starts celebrating Christmas absurdly early. There really isn't a great reason for it either. Filipinos just love Christmas so they start celebrating as soon as the Burr months, September, September, begin. Neil, one, who knew the Philippines went as hard for Christmas and two, talking about Christmas already just feels so wrong to me. Yeah, it's so hot.
Starting point is 00:19:24 It's so hot. Well, look, good for them. I would say I would hold off as much as long as, as long as possible for Christmas music. You know, I don't like to preempt myself. Like, I feel like I'd get sick of it by November if I start listening to it now, and I don't want to ever get sick of it. So good for them.
Starting point is 00:19:39 It's not my cup of tea, but good for Mariah Carey. That's very funny that people are starting to create Christmas music right now on September 1st. So a few years ago, the economist did a study around how much money this song brings in for Mariah Carey. And from 1994 to 2016, they said she made $60 million just off this song, which is around $2.6 million dollars. every single year. So I don't want to be a hater,
Starting point is 00:20:02 but it's not even close to the best Christmas song. It's not close, but it's signified. It's become like a meme and a tradition at this point that you know, you just wait for it.
Starting point is 00:20:10 But I don't think anyone actually kind of listens to on there. I like it. It gives me like that tinkly feeling. That's what you want. All right, Neil, for our next story, I want to tell you
Starting point is 00:20:19 about the diamond market. We know that lab grown diamonds have become increasingly popular over the years, but they're now becoming so popular it's sending the price of real diamonds into a tailspin. Rough diamonds, which are diamonds that haven't been cut yet, are in a pricing
Starting point is 00:20:34 free fall. In June 2022, diamond seller De Beers was charging around 1,400 per carrot for select makeable diamonds, which are the type that make it into wedding rings. But by July this year, that it dropped to just $850 a carrot. Now, De Beers is denying that lab grown diamonds are the problems saying that while there has been a little bit of cannibalization, they see the real issue as a macro economic issue, but still the pricing collapse is pretty dizzying and has the industry finally coming to terms with the existential threat of lab growing diamonds. So, Neil, which side do you kind of land on here? Is it just that people are spending less money on luxury goods, or is there a wider trend that people are leaning towards lab growing over rough?
Starting point is 00:21:16 Probably both, because lab grown diamonds have grown so much in popularity since 2018. They were just 2% of the market, and now they're 10% of the market. But it does seem like there's a broader shift, or maybe not a shift, but a blip because of COVID, of a lot fewer people getting engaged in buying engagement rings. Like, the price of lab-grown diamonds has fallen even more than regular diamonds. And Signed Jewelers, which I didn't know, they own like literally every jeweler, like Kay and a bunch of the other ones that you, Zales, Jared, Diamonds Direct. They own, Signed Jewelers, owns all of them. And they're saying that, like, we have seen engagement ring sales plummet in like 2020, 2022, 2023 because no one got engaged, because no one became couples in 2020.
Starting point is 00:22:05 And the average time that it takes from a couple formation to an engagement is about 3.5 years. So we're going to be in a slump from 2023 to 2024 because of that period during COVID. So it does seem like there is a little bit of a secular decline in this overall engagement ring industry. David's Bridal just went bankrupt last year. So I'm just curious about this lab grown diamond thing. like will, because prices, basically, you can mass produce this in a lab. They are identical to regular diamonds, but will they get too cheap to the point where it's like, okay, well, I'm not really spending much on a diamond, you know, an engagement ring,
Starting point is 00:22:41 but the whole point is like a signaling factor that like I can spend much, I can spend this amount. So I don't know like where this all shakes out. De Beers thinks that there's going to be like a high end market for actual diamonds and then like kind of like the low end market for slab grown diamonds and they're just going to be completely different. So I haven't let you talk at all. No, they are behind that.
Starting point is 00:22:59 The beers is this big marketing, like they've created the rough-cut diamond industry, and they started selling its own lab growing diamonds in 2018, and they intentionally sold it out a steep discount price in order to create that kind of juxtaposition, because, yes, they want the rough-cut diamond to be like this thing that signifies your forever love. Put it in a different category than the lab-growing diamonds, because it helps them because they control the rough-cut diamond. diamond market. So I think you're totally right on that cyclical difference that they want to
Starting point is 00:23:31 hammer home. But there might just be too much of a stigma with regular diamonds going forward because of all of the ethical baggage and slave labor that goes into actually getting those. It's a rough time for the rough cut diamond market. Well done. All right. Let's go finally to our week ahead segment. We usually do that on Monday, but it's still the first day of the week. So let's do a little preview of what to expect this week. There's a lot going on. But first I got to start with. Da-da-dan-da-da-da-da-da-da. Football is back. The NFL season kicks off Thursday night with the defending champs Kansas City Chiefs taking on the Detroit Lions. Then on Sunday, we'll all hit the couch for a full slate of week-one games. Highly recommend Red Zone for seven straight hours of commercial free football. Very curious about the quality of our Monday morning podcast once football comes back, honestly. I have a fantasy football draft tonight, too. I'm locked in, baby. All right, keeping it in the sports world, the U.S. Open rolls into its final week.
Starting point is 00:24:28 Tennis fans are drooling over a potential Djokovic versus Al-Karaz final, but American players are really making the hometown crowd proud in New York. Three U.S. men have reached the quarterfinals for the first time since 2005. And on the women's side, 19-year-old Cocoa Golf became the first team to reach consecutive U.S. open quarterfinal rounds since Serena Williams, more than two decades ago. And she is the favorite. I can't wait. We're going later this week.
Starting point is 00:24:54 It should be a blast. I can't believe Cocoa Gough is 19 years old. It feels like she's been around forever because, remember, she burst on the scene when she was 16. She's still 19 years old. Crazy. She's playing lights out. You go, Glocke. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:25:06 You want to hit that for you? You go, Glenn Coco. There you go. On Wednesday, we get one of the most highly anticipated video game releases of the year. Famed video game publisher Bethesda will release Starfield, its first new gaming universe in 25 years. This game's scope is utterly massive. more than 1,000 environments to play in and 3 million lines of dialogue. I mean, I wonder where AI is going to come into play in this.
Starting point is 00:25:33 I think they just wrote that much dialogue, but were you ever a Starfield guy or no? I don't know what Starfield is. I'm so out to lunch on video games. What is Starfield? Let's buy it. I think it's just like a big like economy, galactic economy game where you like buy ships and stuff. I could be way off too, though.
Starting point is 00:25:50 I know I've read a little bit about Starfield, but haven't been. But Bethes does like this. published publisher. And this is their first new IP in 25 years. So it should be really, really cool. Let's move on to some other stuff. Olivia Rodriguez dropping her second album, Guts. Cannot wait for that. The singles have been tremendous. We rated them. We listened and rated them. Yeah. We're Olivia Rodriguez fans here. Yep. National Read a Book Day is Wednesday, and I can't wait to finish the overstory so I can get to the next book on my list. I've been reading that for about six months. It's coming up on fall. So definitely
Starting point is 00:26:24 Head to, okay, so head to Smokey Mountains Fall Foliage Map to plan your leaf peeping trip. This is the Bible of fall foliage maps. Go to Smoky Mountains.com, foul foliage, Google that, and it'll show you exactly when all the different regions will peak. So it should be a blast. Growing up in Florida, this is never even on my radar at all. So I might go take a peep. All right, finally, while we're on the weather beat, it's going to really feel super hot this
Starting point is 00:26:53 week because there's a heat dome baking the central and eastern U.S. So, you know, I guess that fall foliage thing will be a few weeks out or a little delayed because I am drenched right now. All right. What? No, no, I was going to say the cognitive dissonance of listening to Mariah Carey while my heat dome is sitting over us is going to be interesting. All right, that is our show for today.
Starting point is 00:27:13 Have a great start to the week and stay cool, everyone. As always, we love to hear from you. So send any and all thoughts to Morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our editor. producer Samantha Vela's and Raymond Lou are associate producers. Uchenawa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and makeup is
Starting point is 00:27:31 still in the shower after getting back from Burning Man. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Bucks slot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package.
Starting point is 00:27:59 the biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly.
Starting point is 00:28:13 Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.