Morning Brew Daily - US and Tech Powerplayers Welcome China & Home Depot’s Impressive 45-Year ROI

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

#941: Neal and Toby discuss the State Dinner President Trump and the US threw for China, and the who’s who from the tech world who were there to welcome Xi Jinping. Then how Oracle is choosing to defend themselves against lengthy payments. Then investors are not impressed with AI agents that impact  consumer inertia and Home Depot proves to be a long-term play. Finally the headlines you should know before the weekend.  Come to trivia night! https://events.morningbrewinc.com/mbdtrivianight-sept2026 Learn more at http://advertising.roku.com/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 Learn more at https://quickbooks.intuit.com/team-management/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the best performing stock in the last 45 years will surprise you. Then what is force majeure and why did Oracle decide it for a data center? It's building. It's Friday, September 25th. Let's ride. Fall definitely announced its arrival this week. The wind is blowing. Jackets are out and the sunsets are creeping ever earlier. One of the best ways to warm up is to hang out with us at trivia.

Next Tuesday evening, we're running back our monthly bar trivia night in Manhattan, where Toby and I will write a bunch of questions. Yes, we actually write them ourselves to sump you and your friends. It's a ton of fun. Bring your coworkers, meet other listeners, and us. What's not to like? Let's warm the brains up then with a little trivia, just as a teaser. Here's my trivia question.

Only two actors have ever portrayed Wolverine, the X-Men character on screen. One is Hugh Jackman, who is the other? One more time, only two actors have ever played the Wolverine on screen in a movie, Hugh Jackman and one other. We will let you know the answer at the end of the show and make sure to sign up for trivia if you want to participate. Link in the show notes. All right, now word from our sponsor, Roku Ads Manager. Toby, when you think of things that only take a few minutes, what comes to mind? Making a coffee, reading an article, getting ready for a run.

Well, launching an ad on Roku can be added to that list with their self-served platform, can go live in just minutes. And to make it even easier, Roku has a feature where you can use your brand's existing videos to create ads. So that Instagram video, your brand posted last week, could be used to create your streaming TV ad today. Right now, Roku is offering a $5,000 match to first-time spenders on Roku Ads Manager. Just head to advertising.orgu.com slash MBD and use code brew 5K.

The leaders of the world's two great superpowers met in Washington, D.C. yesterday in a summit big on pageantry, but small on results. The only actual deal worked out was for a transfer of pandas. Upon arriving at the White House yesterday morning, his first visit to Washington in over a decade, Chinese president Xi Jinping and his wife were received with a red carpet welcome, a military flyover, and in the evening, a state dinner that was the hottest ticket in town. Last week, Trump said he told a lot of very good friends that, quote, you just can't come because it was so in demand. She and Trump had a lot of nice things to say to each other like two pals meeting up after a long period away. After meeting Xi at the airport Wednesday, Trump wrote online, he looks strong, vibrant and fit better than ever. She, for his part, told Trump, I am ready to work with you to steer the giant ship of China-U.S. relations on a steady course toward that future. To that end, he announced he would send two pandas to the

Atlanta Zoo, which is how China shows geopolitical camaraderie. But camaraderie is not how anyone would describe these two countries' relationship, where beneath the photo ops, handshakes, and compliments, lies a heated rivalry. The U.S. and China are locked in an arms race to develop artificial intelligence, granting the winner not only technological superiority, but military dominance. Adding to the tensions, China has been economically supporting Iran, which the U.S. is at war with. the U.S. is selling weapons to Taiwan, which China has designs on controlling, and trade tensions continue to simmer. But of course, you wouldn't really know that from the way Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for Xi yesterday. Yeah, a lot of the word I saw thrown around was diplotainment

instead of diplomacy, where it was very big on just the pomp and circumstance of the entire visit. One of the biggest quotes that was going around is during their meeting, Trump gave Xi a tour of the new helipad. he constructed on the White House South Lawn. He goes, he loves a good granite. So that was the big takeaway from the evening, not the biggest takeaway, but it just goes to show you that they were very chummy and were just kind of paling about for the most part. What actually got done, you could point to the fact that the trade war truce was extended by two months.

It was previously set to expire on November 10th. Now it expires on January 10th. Besson kind of said to that China has been falling through on some of its previous purchases of U.S. soybeans, though they're behind in other arenas. That was probably the most tangible thing you could point to. The one big question mark was AI. Obviously, they were going to talk about it. We didn't get much concrete news. We didn't get much granite news when it came to AI. And it still is kind of a looming position. Trump had posted on true social that they would discuss it. But then he said he had no interest in new regulations and then reiterated that is

China's position also. So that's still a question mark. of hanging in the air. Nowhere was AI front and center than at this dinner, which honestly seemed like every, you know, the wealth in this room was insane. Just look at who was at the table of Trump and she was Donald Trump, Melania Trump, his wife, President Xi, his wife. Then there were three other guys, Elon Musk, former Apple CEO, Tim Cook, and NVIDIA CEO, and his wife, Sam Altman, Open AI, CEO was also there.

So when Trump was like, sorry guys, like, I can't let you. come. I have bigger VIPs. This shows you who the real power brokers are by who sat at his table and who was at this dinner. But maybe the biggest person who came was someone who didn't come actually, which was Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh who was conspicuously absent from that dinner, which he has been one of the biggest vocal critics about AI safety. So maybe that does actually speak volumes to how China in the U.S. are going about this. That safety is probably not front and center. There's no signs of slowing down on the A.I. A.I. front. And what a U-turned spin for Trump? I mean, in his first term, he basically rose to his

position by calling out China for unfair trade practices, launched a big trade war in 2018, and then again in his second term, where just not too long ago, the U.S. and China were putting tariffs of like 150 percent on each other. Then China said, actually, we're going to withhold rare earth exports. That was their ace in their hand. Then that forced the U.S. to back down. They established this fragile truce that was extended. But the fact that Trump and she are so chummy is really remarkable. He met, Trump met she at the airport on Wednesday evening when he arrived. And I know that may not sound important, but that basically doesn't happen.

The only time a president ever receives a foreign leader at the airport is literally the pope. This doesn't happen in modern presidential history for someone to go to the airport and receive a foreign leader. But it may reflect broader, broader views from the American public. about how they are warming up to China. Back in 2023, in the Gallupol, the share of Americans with a favorable view of China was 15%. This year, it is up to 34%.

Maybe we're seeing that reflected in how President Trump is treating China. But that is not to say these two countries just almost, you know, are very much rivals and are building up their militaries to potentially go to war with each other. Yes, at some point. I mean, China has economically supported Iran, which the U.S. is at war with. China is the only major buyer of Iranian oil. They also have these impending restrictions on rare earth. So these two countries, it's a little bit weird. They're frenemies in the sense that they don't like each other, but also their two leaders are best friends.

Yeah, symbolically, they presented themselves as friends capable of managing this rivalry. Substantively, we still got a lot to work out, a lot to hash out on all along all those vectors that you just mentioned. Moving on, Oracle's $165 billion data center project in the middle of the New Mexico Desert has hit a problem. Even AI can't solve. Permitting. Project Jupiter, as the data center is named, is a key part of Stargate, the $500 billion

AI infrastructure buildout announced by President Trump in January of last year, alongside Oracle OpenAI and SoftBank. Oracle's job is to help build the New Mexico Data Center and fill it with computing power, but a company called energy transfer needs to feed them natural gas through a new 17-mile pipeline in order to do that. But that pipeline is stuck in permitting purgatory. Construction was supposed to begin in August, but it's now been pushed to February 27, putting the data centers planned at 2028 opening at risk. So Oracle has invoked force majeure, a clause typically reserved for when things outside a company's control like war or weather delays plans. On a legal front, it aims to

free Oracle from any financial obligations. they are unable to fulfill. What's a little unclear is if Oracle's force majeure notice will actually work and shield it from liability. It kind of feels like Jack Sparrow invoking Parley every time he's in trouble. But the company has reiterated that they aren't abandoning Jupiter just trying to protect itself from potentially having to pay up if the project is delayed. You know, hundreds of billions of dollars of cutting ads computing waiting on 17 miles of pipe.

Yeah, there's a bigger question here. It's whether the data center buildout is basically built on a house of cars. This project in southern New Mexico is the centerpiece of this $500 billion stargate project between Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank. And it's facing a lot of the similar problems that a bunch of data centers are facing across the country with a bunch of local pushback, the inability to get permits. Oracle has taken on $18 billion in debt tied to this data center alone. and that debt is now in stress territory, trading at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar. Oracle also has this $300 billion contract with OpenAI to supply it with computing power. So Oracle is sort of the maybe, perhaps the canary in the coal mine for the whole data center build out,

which powers the artificial intelligence trade, which is propping up our entire economy. I mean, the House of Cards is called that because Oracle can have the customer lined up, which it does. It has a buyer for the compute. It can have the financing lineup, which it does. It has the land. It has the servers. It has the construction.

Everything is fine. But if one piece of that, which is permitting for a pipeline, falls through, then the entire thing comes crumbling down. So that's where the House of Cards metaphor really starts to take shape. The reason why Project Jupiter is noteworthy and newsworthy is this thing is so freaking big. It is designed to handle 2.4 or 5 gigawatts of. power. And to put that into terms that we can understand, that would power roughly 1.8 million homes at any given moment. So obviously, it's a massive undertaking. It ran into some politics, too,

because when the project kicked off, New Mexicans did not know that it was actually tied to Stargate, did not know it was tied to Oracle or Open AI. And so now Oracle has been contending with local politics. There's a social media account that's named Project Stupider. And so, Project Jupiter got them right there. And so now Oracle's going into the community and trying to, you know, pass out pamphlets and host community days for the Boys and Girls Club. It's, it's really been one of those things where it's of national importance and yet local politics is playing a big role. And now the fact that Oracle is declaring force measure shows how that, you know, maybe obscure legal clause is working its way into the data center build out. It's basically

a pre-negotiated allocation of catastrophic risk. You saw this happen at the beginning of the war in Iran, which is typically when maybe companies declare force measure or there's a big natural disaster. Qatar's liquid natural gas infrastructure got blown to pieces. So Qatar energy declared force major on its contracts. The fact that this is now becoming what lawyers say front and center and all these contracts tied to data centers show that companies are saying, wow, there really could be catastrophic risk here because of all the different moving pieces that go into a particular data center and all of the pushback saying, okay, we need to actually cover our butts in case this things go, in case these things go south, which potentially and increasingly they are.

Moving on, it's Stock of the Week, Dog, the Week time, the segment where we pick one stock that is rounding into marathon shape and one stock that has been tapering for the past three months straight. I won the pre-show game of stone skipping, so I'm up first. And my Dog the Week is any company that benefits from consumers being lazy. A basket of companies who rely on consumer inertia as analysts have branded it are getting crushed. banks, insurers, travel companies in subscription-based businesses have all been selling off in recent days as Wall Street warms up to the fact that AI agents could strip away a lot of the friction that kept people locked into payment plans. That Planet Fitness membership you signed up for in January that you haven't gotten around to canceling,

an agent can tackle it for you. Also, why go through the process of looking for the best flights on booking.com if your agent can save you the clicks. The big shift here is that AI has moved from recommending things to actually doing the things. things for you. Goldman Sachs says industry is built around recurring bills or any that have negotiable pricing could come under pressure as agents improve at handling customer service interactions or fighting bills. Specific names Goldman called out were Planet Fitness, Allstate Netflix, Netflix, Sirius XM, into it, the New York Times and Expedia amongst others. That basket of companies has fallen nearly 10% over the past two weeks. We've seen a similar reaction before when basically the fear of AI replacing enterprise software created the SaaSpocalypse.

Those stocks have mostly bounced back. Now we're getting a similar wave of freaking out over consumer businesses. I've been dabbling with some of these agents. And the first thing, maybe the only thing that I've had them do, is go through my billing and get rid of all the subscriptions that I don't use, which is exactly what Goldman Sachs expects people to use these agents for. They said this basket focuses on industries where customer stickiness is driven less by product differentiation. and more by the effort required to take action,

which just reminds you that there are entire industries, entire companies out there where their entire business models to get you to sign up and then hope that you'll forget that you signed up in the first place or make it so frustrating to cancel that you won't. Perhaps these agents which don't get tired, aren't afraid to talk to people on the phone, aren't willing to have those hard conversations.

We'll do everything for you, and these companies are just going to make less money as a result. I mean, think about health insurance. Health insurance is just pulling teeth for people because you do not want to jump on the phone, spend five hours fighting a claim to try and get your coverage approved. But again, an AI agent can do that for you and they don't care because they're an agent.

So businesses have relied on this predictable human psychology to say they're not going to jump through the hoops. They're not going to go through the ringer to cancel these bills. And so we have this lock-in effect. The other aspect of this too that I thought was fascinating, some Bloomberg analysis called Muse and Instinct, these AI agents, toll collectors. So instead of going to the Uber app and saying I'm going to buy, get a ride right now, you'll just say, I need a ride and the agent will route it to the platform that is cheapest or closest to you. Instead of saying, going to booking.com

and saying, I need a hotel. You just text your agent, I need a hotel, and it will go across all those sites. So they become the new middleman. AI agents become the new middleman, the toll collectors. And it could just completely upend these companies who rely on you opening Uber and rely on you opening booking.com. So that's the other aspect to this. I think the one word you mentioned that the most important is could because a lot of people say this is a huge overreaction. They disagree with Goldman Sachs's analysis. We had these fears of the SaaS Poclips that you could vibe code your own sales force earlier this year. Software stocks. That sounds crazy to say looking back, we could vibe got our own sales. That's what people think. So just a word of caution.

that, you know, people still don't trust AI for an agent to do all the things that you just mentioned, you have to give them a lot of access to your personal information. And that's something that a lot of American consumers might still not do. Plus, it could only lock in these brands position even more when it comes to financial firms like Charles Schwab or Raymond James. Like, they have a ton of your data. They could, they're absolutely looking at this and saying, okay, how can we use AI agents to our benefit to, you know, we have a ton of customer data. Let's leverage that to only cement our position as leaders. So there's that side of the equation as well.

Well, the final thing, too, is we're seeing businesses push back already. Amazon is saying, actually, no, you cannot scrape our website. You cannot open a virtual browser and browse Amazon. I've tried this because I saw that Amazon push back against Muse. When I say, like, hey, find me toilet paper on Amazon, Muse comes back and say, sorry, I'm not allowed to access this site. So Amazon thinks it can go toe to toe with meta. It has enough inbound traffic that it doesn't need these agents coming on their behalf.

So that's like the next iteration of this is when the businesses start to fight back against these tollmen against these middlemen. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with our stock the week right after this. Toby, what do you do with a great product, but your brand can't seem to connect with customers? Uh, bag? No, don't beg, but do check out Rising Stars. It's a dokey series that follows small business owners as they create their businesses, face real challenges, and scale their brands with the help of Amazon ads.

Like crowned skin, they couldn't connect with customers in men's grooming until sponsored products on Amazon ads help them reach the right audiences. Now they're doing over 500,000 in monthly revenue. Watch now at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. That's advertising.com slash rising dash stars. That's advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars. Neil, you ever stay in one of those hotels where you sleep in a human-sized bird cage? No.

Well, don't. It's real sad. Sounds like you can use business preferences from hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast, gym access, and more. then future business trip searches automatically surface matching hotels. Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every workday at hotels.com slash morning brew.

That's hotels.com slash morning brew. Loyalty members 18 plus. Neil, you know how I do a lot more than payroll around here? You don't do payroll. Jordan does. Oh, right. I'm thinking of Inuit QuickBooks workforce. It helps businesses by bringing payroll, HR talent, and your financial data together.

in one place. Their auto payroll can make payday run itself. With guaranteed accurate tax calculations, owners aren't second-guessing the math, just approving what's already right. Plus, payroll, AI can catch issues and flag changes before they become problems. When something needs a human and live payroll and HR experts are right there to help out. For more info, head to the link in the show description. For stock of the week, we're broadening the scope and awarding a stock of the half century. The company that's generated the highest return of any US stock over the last 45 years is, drum roll please, Home Depot. If you had invested $1,000 in Home Depot on the day of its IPO in 1981, you'd have about $16 million today, far more than

any other member of the S&P 500 over the same time span. Yes, even big tech firms like Apple. If you had invested one grand into Apple on its IPO one year before in 1980, you'd have about four million now. Home Depot's record setting growth was discovered by the boys at the acquired podcast, which just released a deep dive into America's favorite home improvement retailer. One of their main insights about Home Depot and the reason for its outsized returns is back in the 80s, no one saw hardware as a huge mass market business. Buying power tools and slats of wood, that was niche just for the sicko handyman dads who wanted to redo their own decks.

When Home Depot IPO it had four stores in Atlanta, raised just $4 million at a market cap of less than $40 million, tiny even about. early 80 standards, Walmart was already valued at over $1 billion at the time Home Depot went public. But fast forward to today and Home Depot turned what most considered a specialty business into one of the biggest retail operations in America. They've inspired millions of regular American homeowners to take on DIY projects reaping the benefits in return. Today, Home Depot does annual sales of $165 billion with a market cap of $300 billion. I think one of the big insights too that Home Depot had was, yes, it seems like a niche market, home improvement. But if you can get someone

in the door to buy a screwdriver, you might actually get them to undertake a much larger remodel. And their secret weapon to getting someone from screwdriver buying to redoing their entire deck was their salespeople. And their insight was, let's hire actual tradespeople who know what they're talking about to be on the floor in the store. So when you walk up to a thing of lumber instead of just seeing a bunch of two-by-fours, a carpenter, a train carpenter would come up next and go, hey, what are you thinking about doing? Can I help you? And that has been a big thing. And then the other thing that they did is give those salespeople, give those tradespeople equity in Home Depot growing from the beginning. So consumers get educated. They're incentivized to do well. It becomes

this gorgeous flywheel. It only works if the stock goes up, which clearly it did over time. But the result that the acquired guys found was 3,000 store floor employees became multi-millionaires because of that equity. So they just created a really smart flywheel that turned one purchase into much larger construction projects. What was their slogan for a long time? You can do it. We can help, which never really washed over me until now. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that makes sense that that that's pretty genius. What's Home Depot up to recently? We know he had an incredible stock run up over the last 45 years. Things are pretty stagnant. Comparable sales last quarter we're up 1.7% thing you know it's trying to get into the professional contractor businesses

buying up a bunch of the companies in that space trying to go more b-to-b the problem as we'll get to in just a few minutes or seconds is that the housing market has been stuck there's just very little housing turnover and when people aren't buying new houses it means that they're staying in the same ones and there's just diminishing returns on how many times you can remodel your own house so without the housing market really getting going, Home Depot will still remain, you know, just kind of stagnant over the past few years. Yeah, the only thing that they're seeing right now

is just the categories that happen no matter what, which is plumbing, electrical hardware, these are things that aren't big renovations. They're just basic maintenance. And until they can get back into the big renovations stays, then you're not going to see their sales grow. All right, let's mention that finish with some final headlines about that housing market.

In the rent versus buy matchup, rent just forced a turnover. The average 30-year mortgage rate just topped 7% this week for the first time since January 2025, nearly two years ago. Mortgage rates have now gained for five consecutive weeks mirroring the rise in treasury yields, which are at levels not seen in decades. The 7% mortgage rate is like if there's a highway you have to cross under to walk somewhere, it doesn't make the journey any longer, but it's a psychological barrier that discourages you from undertaking it. Mortgages crossing 7% is expected to send the housing market into an even deeper freeze than it's currently in. And we're already in the ice age with sales stagnant for four straight years.

February of this year sounds like such a long time ago at this point because we forget. There was actually a lot of optimism going into 2026. Mortgage rates fell below 6% for the first time since 2022. There was this strong flurry of buying entering spring. And there was optimism that maybe the housing market. it would start to unfreeze. The Iran war kind of completely changed that entire trajectory. Spring sales actually ended up being more of a bust than a boom.

And now that we've reached that next psychological barrier of 7%, as you said, it doesn't look like it's going to unfreeze any time soon. And that inventory that we thought would start to be snapped up is still going to remain out there. Most people buying homes, I have never seen a 7% mortgage because before 2022, mortgage rates hadn't hit 7% since 2001. That is crazy. And we're in that cohort, unfortunately, Neil. We are psychologically scared by that 7% number.

Moving on, Starbucks is closing more stores. The coffee giant will shut down 250 locations across the U.S. and Canada this week, roughly 1% of its footprint, targeting spots that either aren't profitable enough or can't deliver the coffee house experience. CEO Brian Nicol is trying to bring back. It's become something of an annual pruning. Starbucks cut is North America.

American store count by about 1% around this time last year as well. The goal is to put more money into its surviving stores to make them feel more like places you'd actually want to hang out in with at least 1,500 cafes set for cozier redesigns by the end of 2026. And there are signs that the strategy is working. Same store sales jumped nearly 8% last quarter crushing Wall Street's expectations. Neil, it feels like we're starting to see Nichols' big brain plan come to fruition. Fewer bad stores, more good stores, smart plan.

Here's my plan for Starbucks. Close the underperforming stores and put more stores in airports. Because I've never seen a longer line. We talk about lines for frozen yogurt here in New York City or maybe the buzzy new cookie or a $60 loaf of rye bread. I've never seen longer lines than Starbucks and airports. They should just litter airports with Starbucks. They're going to make so much money. That is my one particular plan.

But if not that, they are doing something else that is pretty interesting to me is that you have all these smaller format stores like Dutch Bros taking over the West Coast. and they're expanding seven brew. This is the new type of coffee chain that are the fastest growing in the United States far faster than Starbucks. Starbucks is also developing that smaller store format that it's about to roll out in the U.S. to kind of get you your drink on the go. You just do a drive-through. Don't actually have to go in.

So we'll see how Starbucks plays defense against these faster growing chains. Finally, in today's edition of billionaires, they're not like us, Envidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted he does not know his home address. In an interview with Ezra Klein released yesterday, Huang was talking about all the skills that can be offloaded to AI, then drop the bombshell. My first confession, he said, I actually don't know my address. Klein gives him a blank stare and then responds, I don't really believe that to be true. Jensen confirms, quote, it's completely true.

Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you, appearing to gesture at his assistant and his wife. He goes on, one day I had to pump gas. It was a few years ago. They needed my zip code, and I panicked. I didn't know my zip code. didn't know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

Toby, new level of wealth unlocked. You don't need to know where you live. I just don't buy it either. Okay, the one thing I will say is every so often, I mean, I've lived like four places in New York City. Sometimes someone says, where do you live? And I just mentally go through that whole Rolodex all of a sudden. But I don't think that's what Jensen is referring to here.

This is the same vintage of Soundbite that people are branding billionaire brain. some others in this vintage that I like, our Palantir co-founder and CEO, Alex Karp, never learned how to drive. And he explained that to the New York Times in an interview saying, first I was too poor and then I was too rich. That's similar levels.

And then we were talking to another tech CEO recently and he said that he doesn't own a credit card and hasn't owned a credit card in over a decade. So again, these are problems that no normal person could ever comprehend outside of maybe a toddler who is learning their address for the first time. but crazy to see the level of billionaire brain that these people have.

All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Friday to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else. Oh, Toby, you got to what's the answer to the trivia question? I was wondering. I was literally just going into autopilot. The answer of the who has played Wolverine on screen other than Hugh Jackman is actually Troy Savon, who is now a singer primarily, and he played a young version of Wolverine. as a kid. So there are only two actors. There's going to be a third one eventually because

Hugh Jackman will return. But right now, it's only been Troy Savon and Hugh Jackman. All right. If you want more questions like that, uh, come to trivia on Tuesday. Or fewer questions or fewer questions like that. All right. Now, now I can go. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lute is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham. And our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller.

Hara makeup confirmed they do know where they live. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great. So did I, Neil, I wish you all well. Neil, what's your plan for managing your money? Good one, Toby. Tell me another. Listeners, please don't take after my co-host. Northwestern Mutual's comprehensive planning approach can give you peace of mind in an uncertain world. Whether you're just getting started or wondering if you're on the right track,

They'll match you with a financial professional who will meet you where you are and ask better questions to uncover blind spots and find new opportunities. Get started at nm.com. Plus, to better understand your finances, tune in to the award-winning podcast, a better way to money. That's nm.com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.