Morning Brew Daily - US Sets EU Tariffs at 15% & Viral Tea Dating App Photos Leaked

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

Episode 635: Neal and Toby discuss the data breach of Tea, the dating app meant for women who can anonymously vet men they’ve dated in the past. Then, the US and EU have reached a trade deal that sets tariffs at 15%. Plus, Target concedes to Walmart and Amazon as they end their price-matching policy. Meanwhile, Astronomer is taking control of the coldplay kiss-cam scandal. And English teachers are still teaching American classic literature even to this day. Finally, a preview of the upcoming week ahead.  Build your Range Rover Sport at RangeRover.com/US/Sport  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 brew daily show. Brian. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Cold Playgate Company Astronomer hired a Hollywood star to seize on its 15 minutes of fame. Then after months of tense negotiations, the U.S. and the EU finally have a trade deal. It's Monday, July 28th. Let's ride. Good morning and welcome back to the week when we'll turn the calendar over to August. I know you've been waiting all weekend for this. You couldn't think about anything else. We are going to reveal the answer to password. This is the game we played with you last week where you received one clue each day to uncover a secret word. The clues were things like it's an anagram of a major city. It has a silent tea and it ends

with a number spelled out. Well, here is the password. Hason. It anagrams to Athens, Greece, and fulfills all the other criteria. Lots of you got it correct most without using chat. GBT, but there can only be one winner. Yeah, what a fun ride this was. I actually want to go through some fun submission data first. On Monday, just 3% of you who submitted got hasten, which is honestly impressive for that 3%. By Tuesday, that number jumped to 48%. And by Wednesday, 79% of unique submissions were correct.

In other words, you are a bunch of smart cookies. But we can only have one smart cookie win the password competition. The winner was picked randomly from all the correct submissions. And that winner is Darren Blechner from Brooklyn, New York. He's submitted on Wednesday, which means he had three chances to win, and he did. Darren, check your email. We'll have some MBD swag heading your way. Neil Password was fun.

We'll definitely run it back again sometime soon. But first, a word from our sponsor, Range Rover. Word association, Neil, what comes to mind when I say sporting luxury? Polo. Not to be a naysayer. Shush. I was just thinking about the Range Rover sport. Each model offers a dynamic, sophisticated,

take on sporting luxury. With dynamic air suspension, you can achieve agility, control, and composure. Take it off the road with adaptive off-road cruise control that monitors ground conditions and acclimates to the present terrain. The adaptive dynamics reduces unwanted body movements to deliver smooth and composed handling. These aren't just the qualities of a good car. They're the qualities of a leader in the industry. They lead by example with comfort, precision, and passion.

So rise to any occasion, build your range rover sport at range rover.com slash us slash sport. That's range rover.com slash us slash sport. You're up. This episode is brought to you by Ultima Replenisher. Health is all about balance, like a salad with fries. So why not have balance in your hydration? With six essential electrolytes and no junk, Ultima provides balanced hydration you can enjoy

every day. That means no sugar, calories, or carbs, and it's not loaded with sodium. Just delicious plant-based flavors you'll actually look forward to drinking. Shop Ultima on Amazon or in store at Target and Whole Foods Market. Trump may not have air conditioning, but they do have a trade deal with the U.S. cooling the trade war at the 11th hour just as temperatures were rising to uncomfortable levels. Yesterday evening, Trump announced the U.S. had reached a deal with the European Union

that would see the U.S. set a baseline tariff of 15% against its biggest trade partner. As part of the agreement, EU countries will buy $750 billion worth of energy products from the U.S. and invest another 600 billion. In more normal times, a 15% import duty on partners that exchange more than $5 billion worth of goods and services every day would be not so good. But 15% is lower than the 30% rate Trump had previously threatened, eliciting a side of relief for some, though still above the 10% the EU was aiming for. It's a very powerful deal.

It's a very big deal. It's the biggest of all the deals, Trump said in announcement, alongside the president of the EU Ursula von der Leyen, who herself said, it's a good deal, it's a huge deal with tough negotiations. Economists are likely to agree with their assessments. The 27 nation block and the U.S. are the biggest trade partners in the world, with a relationship valued at nearly $2 trillion when taking into account both goods and services. Neil, like a lot of the preliminary agreements Trump has announced, no written documents were

provided and details were light. What's the timeframe for the EU's investments in the U.S.? How will those investments be allocated? What goods will be exempt from the 15% levy? But at least this new deal prevents further retaliation from either side and reduces the risk of an economically catastrophic trade stalemate breaking out. Not catastrophic, but not good in the view of many European officials who are blasting the deal today. French prime minister said that the EU had resigned itself into submission.

Germany's biggest industry body called it an inadequate, compromise that sends a fatal signal to the EU and U.S. economies. Germany's lead of the executive board of the Federation of German Industries said that even a tariff rate of 15% will have an immense negative impact on Germany's export oriented industry. So you have a bunch of European officials coming out today realizing what deal was made. They're looking at that 15% number. And as you said, it is not as high as it potentially could have been, but it will have a detrimental effect on the European economy because imagine you are a store and you used to be able to sell your goods to a big chunk of customers for under a 2% tax. And then all of a sudden

the government comes in. It says actually all of your goods that you're selling to this particular customer, which is a large part of your customer base, that tax, all those goods are now going to be subject to a 15% tax. That is a huge spike. And you are inevitably going to sell less of those things. Yeah, let's go through some other winners and losers here. A big winner actually is Britain because Kare Starmar negotiated this deal previously with Trump at a 10% border line or across the board tariff rate with the U.S. earlier this year. So that is below the 15%. So he's pretty happy with the deal. He struck right there. Another winner is potentially the world economy as a whole because even though the EU is not necessarily happy that they landed at 15%, it's not at a

rate where it's going to kind of burn the global economy to a ground. Trade isn't going to reach a standstill between these two massive trade partners. And then another winner is U.S. defense companies as well as part of that $600 billion number that was thrown out by Trump. Trump said that vast amounts of military equipment would be bought by the EU. So not a precise figure, but it looks like they are going to be a winner. And then some losers are probably Germany because, again, Germany is the leading exporter, the biggest economy in the EU. They export a lot of cars, machinery, steel. None of those were exempt from this 15% duty.

So those are some of potentially the winners and losers of this big deal. And as Trump strikes trade deals with other countries in the past week, we're starting to see a world in which tariffs are much, much higher than they were before he came into office, which economists say would hit the global economy. Bloomberg economics projects that with the current tariff rate being implemented, around the world and they're striking deals per day, it seems like. At the moment, the hit to the world economy will reach $2 trillion by the end of 2027 relative to its pre-war trade path. As you mentioned, economists are saying it's not at the level where the global economy burns down, but

Daniel Heronberg, the lead economist with Oxford economics, said in the end, tariffs may not be high as feared still. They are essentially a tax that puts sand in the wheels of supply chains and global trade. Some of those other trade deals that were struck in previous days were Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan, so big exporters in Asia, they all got a rate of 15 to 20 percent. EU got 15 percent, not as high as some feared. It lacks, you know, it stymies the ability to escalate, but many of these countries, I think you're hearing from industry and other officials that weren't involved in these trade talks. And they're saying, We got hosed here.

Like, this is completely asymmetric. The U.S. is running roughshod all over us. Trump is running roughshod all over us, and we are getting a bad end of the deal. You might start to see some internal dissent with the leaders who did strike these deals. Let's move on. The T app was supposed to make women safer by letting them cross-reference guys they've dated. Instead, it turned into a security nightmare after a group of internet hackers leaked 13,000 selfies submitted by users, as well as 59,000 other images from post or direct messages.

Founded back in 2022 by Sean Cook, former Salesforce PM, he created Tea after seeing his mom unknowingly go on dates with men with criminal records. The app allows women to anonymously share feedback on men they've dated, using the wisdom of the virtual crowd, to point out and ideally avoid men with glaring red flags. Despite being around for a few years, it was only these past couple of weeks that a flurry of social media attention pushed T to the top of App Store charts.

T downloads were up 525% compared to the week before, bringing their total user base to 4 million users, according to the company. It is currently still the number two free app on Apple's App Store. Part of T's rise is due to its controversial premise. One female columnist for the Times of London wrote an op-ed calling it a man-shaming site that relied on vigilante justice of anonymous women. Other reviews of the app say it leads to one-sided pylons, unknowing individuals and introduces a slippery slope that could lead to a sort of social credit

system. Toss in this data privacy snafu, Neil, and teased efforts to protect women seems to have done a little bit of the opposite. These are, this, this hack is exactly what critics of the app were warning about that there's all this information, personal, very sensitive information about men flowing through the T app and it got hacked just to dial in on the, the hack. The company said that it was a hack of data images that were stored on an old IT system that they had upgraded over the past few years. None of the newer images post-20203 were accessed. They just, they said that, you know, we are reaching out to customers and making sure that everything's okay. They're trying to put it past them. But the discourse around this app

is extremely strong. Everyone seems to have an opinion on it. You can understand why it exists. perhaps in its indictment of our current dating situation or dating apps where they're not filling in the gaps where women feel unsafe on every survey says that women, women feel far more unsafe than men on dating apps and they're more prone to abuse harassment, things, you know, terrible things like that. And so they are creating, they are formalizing or commoditizing what are so-called whisper networks. And this is not the first of its kind. There have been Facebook groups that say, are we dating the same men? and those are extremely popular. So you can understand why it exists.

There clearly is a gap in the dating app market right now for safety precautions. There are plenty of credits to have come back and said this is not the way to go about it. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people pointed out that it's very similar to a Black Mirror episode. It was called Nosedive where people upvote or downvote each other. And you actually have a real-life credit score. That's something that's also happening over in China. So a lot of people are saying, like, should we have an app that is targeting a group of people? and that you may like or dislike and kind of basically rating them on how they perform in certain

social situations. So that was one of the critiques as well. And then, yeah, this privacy issue was not great because when you are instructed to create account, you have to upload a selfie and they say, we'll delete these immediately, but apparently a few still lingered on the server. So it led to a breach that led to, you know, more safety issues for the same crowd they were trying to protect. So you probably, if you logged on to social media at all over the past week, you saw some take on this discourse. It is a bit of a bummer that security was kind of the through line that finally, you know, made it erupt to a fever pitch.

So not great, not necessarily what you want to see, but definitely a story and an app that really encapsulates kind of the vibes of the times right now. Target is ending one of its most famous customer perks price matching. Since 2013, Target customers could request and receive a refund for the difference between what they paid for something at Target and what that identical item costs at Walmart, Amazon, or Target itself if they found a lower price within 14 days of purchase. Starting today, that price matching policy with external retailers is over, though people can't ask for refunds if they find a cheaper price in the Target ecosystem itself.

In explaining the decision, a spokesperson said, we found our guests overwhelmingly price match Target and not other retailers, which reflects the great value in trust in pricing consumers see across our assortment and deals. or in non-corporate speak, Target's claiming that people just weren't using it. It's not like price matching is par for the course in the retail industry. Many of Target's rivals don't offer it, including Walmart, which stopped offering it in 2019. But some, like Best Buy and Home Depot, still do offer competitor price matching. And by getting rid of this longtime perk, Target is only heaping more pressure on itself to ensure its pricing hits the bullseye or else risk losing customers to Amazon and Walmart where people believe they're getting more value.

And unfortunately for Target, customers are already decamping for other stores. Sales fell 2.8% in Q1, and foot traffic has steadily declined from February through the summer, falling 6.3% annually during the week of July 7th. It's hard to imagine ending price matching will boost those numbers. Yeah, and what's brutal for Target customers, too, is that Target is pricier. If you compare it to others in, you know, the price wars, analytics company Profitero did a study and found that Target's prices are on, average 13% higher than Amazon's, which is the price war winner. And Walmart averages 5%

over Amazon's lowest prices. So Target is at the bottom of the heap when it comes to pricing goods. But technically, full discloser, this is not a very common practice in retail these days. As you mentioned, only a few retailers are hanging onto it because a lot of these companies adjust and monitor competitors' prices in real times and make those adjustments automatically. So you don't necessarily have to price something higher. and put the onus on the customer to go and find that lower price and match it. So this isn't necessarily something that was super common, but just the optics of getting rid of it in a time where Target has had a lot of bad optics.

That's what a lot of people were drilling down on. It's interesting that a number of companies have pulled back on these very popular customer perks in recent months. We had Southwest and its bags fly-free Starbucks and did its open bathrooms where you don't have to be a customer to use its bathroom. Interesting communications play here. How do you go about communicating that you're pulling back on a customer perk? It's very easy to add things like this. It is much harder in the realm of public opinion to remove something.

I guess the idea is that you kind of do it pretty quietly and just hope it blows over in a matter of months and people, as people kind of adjust to the new reality, because there are times as a corporate comms leader that you have to make tough decisions like this from the higher up say you have to communicate this to the people. And you're like, okay, I guess I'll just do it quietly, hope that people just forget about it in a few months. It makes no sense, though, because actually getting rid of price matching is counterintuitive because one target said that not a lot of people were using it.

So if not a lot of people are using it, just keep it and keep that customer goodwill, because now you don't have that safety net of price matching. Now you actually have to offer competitive prices because you don't have this get out of jail-free car to say, oh, we'll match what you found on Walmart. So it's kind of very counterintuitive in a lot of ways. Why not just keep that goodwill, say that, hey, we're the last ones that do price match. Clearly something in their data said otherwise, but it is just a little bit of a head scratching decision in a year of kind of head scratching decisions for Target.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we're going to come back with our winners of the weekend. Let's head to our winners of the weekend, the segment where Toby and I pick two things that, unlike me, remembered to use sunscreen. I won the pre-show hula hooping contest, Toby. Got to learn how to gyrate. So I get to go first. And my winner is Astronomer, the tech firm at the center of the Coldplay Affair.

Facing an unprecedented challenge, its CEO being caught having an affair with the head of HR on the Kiss Cam at a cold play concert. Astronomer is earning high marks for its crisis communications response. On Friday night, Astronomer published a video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow, who said she had been hired as a spokesperson on a, quote, very temporary basis. In the video, which has been viewed more than 27 million times, Paltrow said that Astronomer has been slammed by questions, and she was hired to answer them. When the first question comes on the screen, OMG, what the actual F? The camera cuts quickly to her responding, yes,

Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow. We've been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data automation. Another question pops up. How is your social team holding, which Paltrow interrupts and says that spaces are available for an upcoming conference? The reaction to the bait and switch video was super positive, with PR pros and amateurs alike, applauding Astronomer for combating this ultra-bizarer situation with humor, while at the same time keeping its name in the actual services it provides, top of mind for potential customers.

Visits to Astronomer's website have reportedly spiked 15,000% since the incident, and it wants to make sure it capitalizes on its 15 minutes of fame. This is one of the most bizarre business storylines of the last few years. No one had heard of astronomer before this. Now, everyone has heard of astronomer, but not for the reason they wanted. So that is probably the hardest PR hand that you can be dealt. And they did it. They played the hand very well because they leaned in to the meme.

You can't out-think, you can't out-PR statement, a meme. You have to just become a part of it and understand that you're in on it, and they did that. It's not necessarily a legal issue they were facing. It's not a product failure or anything like that. So you have to take control of the narrative. here. So just a fascinating instance of realizing what the moment called for, rising to meet the moment, acting quickly enough that the meme didn't pass you by. So I'm right there with them with all the PR professionals saying they absolutely stuck the landing here because, you know, hiring Gweth Paltrow

with her connection to Chris Martin is just, it was too good. The internet absolutely loved it. Yeah, she was married to Chris Martin, who is the lead singer of Coldplay for 13 years. That is certainly the reason why they hired her. I wonder how much, what a rate is. Oh, I know. I hope she got a bag. Or maybe not. Maybe she was just in on the joke as well. I mean, the last time I checked, the video had 37 million views on X. So clearly they got some bang for their buck there. But yes, I hope Gwyneth got her bag. My winner of the weekend is the classics because apparently that's still what the kids are reading these days. A new survey from the National Council of Teachers of English found that the list of the most commonly assigned books in middle and high school English classes is stuck in the past like your friend who still brings up his huddle highlights on dates. Every single title in the top 10 was written more than 60 years ago while six of the top 10 were on the same list of the most top books in 1989. So if you've read The Great Gatsby, the Crucible of Mice and Men to Kill a Mockingbird,

Fahrenheit 451, Knight, Frankenstein, and a couple of Shakespeare plays, you will have plenty of common ground with high schoolers today. Part of the reason for this list's lack of evolution is just sheer inertia. It takes a lot of time and energy to introduce a new book to a school curriculum involving many layers of approval. Plus, you have to go out and actually buy physical copies of the book, then design a new curriculum to teach, which each up more time and resources. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of different teaching guys out there for Romeo and Juliet,

which is partly why schools return to Fair Verona time and time again. Neil, the classics are the classics for a reason, but it's remarkable how bereft of change this list is. Yeah, I don't know if this is the best way to get kids excited about reading. It's kind of like if you wanted to introduce them to movies, you would show them citizen Cain or gone with the wind instead of the social network, interstellar, finding Nemo. You know, those are modern classics. Many books have come out in recent years that are excellent.

Maybe they don't rise to the level of the classics, but the whole point of this is to get kids into literature and exciting about reading and the fact that they're still reading the same books as we did when we were in high school. And we certainly were reading the same books as perhaps our parents did when they were in high school. I don't know if that's the best way to go about it. Another feature, another problem with this is diversity. All of the authors in the top 10 books are white, eight by men, two by women.

I mean, three of them are Shakespeare, which maybe we don't know exactly who he is. But if you are looking to have a broader range of voices, then revisiting the Crucible and Great Gatsby, while amazing books that they are, may not be the way to show kids what the modern literary world has to offer. Yeah, if you're competing with TikTok as an English teacher and all you have on your side is the crucible, you're probably not going to win that fight. And we're seeing that in federal data. There was a survey that found in 2023, just 14% of students were reading for fun almost every day. That's down from 27% in 2012 and 35% in 1984. So it is clear kids are reading less. Also, teachers said that, yes, obviously it's hard to introduce a new book to the curriculum because of all the hoops you have to jump through, But it is cool if you can have a newer book and have the author come and speak to your class. That allows them to move from maybe apathetic to more interested if they can ground the book with the author who actually wrote it. So there are a growing number of people who are trying to introduce news stories to the curriculum. But maybe classics are classics. I mean, what was your hit rate on this list?

Have you read, you know, 10 out of 10? The spark notes count? No, spark notes does not. Well, maybe I'll allow some of it. I've read a decent amount of them, but I think my experience probably jives with a lot of other people's experience where that we read it in, we read the Great Gatsby or all these other books in high school, and we had a lot of antagonism toward it because we had to read it, and they were also quite complicated and complex. Then we revisited them 15 years later, and we actually enjoyed them.

We're like, oh, I get it now. Like, this is a really good book. This is why this is a classic. But as a 14-year-old, there was no way I could have understood. all the symbolism or the themes of, you know, Daisy, or what's her name? Daisy. I think Daisy's part of the great gas. Let's just stick with Romeo and Julia that. You remember those two names. I still actually remember the whole intro to Romeo and Juliet. Maybe we need an MBD book club is what I'm hearing around here. Let's move on. It's Monday. Here are the major events you need to know about the week

ahead. It might be the height of summer, but Wall Street will be in anything but relaxation mode. This week is jam-packed with tech earnings, a Fed meeting, a tariff deadline, and a jobs are presenting what investors are calling a moment of truth for markets and the economy. Let's start with the Federal Reserve, which will hold a meeting and announce an interest rate decision on Wednesday. Trump and Jerome Powell's icy and awkward relationship was on full display last week when the two met in person to tour the Fed's renovation project. Trump gave Powell a slap on the back and once again urged him to lower interest rates, though investors expect the Fed to defy Trump and keep them steady at this meeting.

Man, that video of the two of them walking through the renovation project was Cinema. Powell pushed back on the number that Trump was throwing out as to how much it cost to renovate. It got tense. It got awkward. And now we have this rate decision coming up as well. This is peak co-worker drama at the highest levels. Meanwhile, Friday, August 1st, as we mentioned, is that much anticipated deadline Trump has set before jacking up tariffs on dozens of countries around the world. The U.S. has struck deals with the EU and Japan in recent days, but a number of agreements still have to be ironed out, including with major trading partners, China, Canada, Mexico and India. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik stressed this weekend that August 1st was not

a soft deadline. No extensions, no more grace periods. August 1st, the tariffs are set. They'll go into place. Sounds a lot like my approach to homework in high school. Leave it all to the night before, but we don't necessarily, the U.S. government doesn't have your parents who can step in and, you know, help with the diorama project you left. So a lot of deals to be done. We'll see if that deadline is as hard as they're making it out. And the negotiations with China are resuming today in Europe. We will see what happens with that. That's the biggest trading partner that the U.S. still has left to and could deal with. If all that wasn't enough to keep you busy, tech giants, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are reporting earnings. Oh yeah, there's a Q2 GDP number

dropping on Wednesday and a jobs report coming on Friday. ING economist James Knightley told Axios, it is the busiest I can remember in 25 years of working. I thought summer's supposed to be slow for the news, Neil. Good for business news podcast. business, though I tell you that much. So not a lot of chilling going on this summer, a lot of news coming down the pipeline. And then if you need a distraction from all of that economic data, well, the NFL is back, kind of. The Chargers and Lions will face off in the Hall of Fame Game Thursday night, kicking off the league's preseason for a football starved nation. It'll just be a tease. The preseason doesn't start in earnest until August 7th, but it's never too early to start

thinking about your fantasy football roster. I do love some fantasy football. Neil, you don't really play fantasy football. Should we do an MBD listener league or something like that, get you involved? We could think about that. That'd be a very large draft. We'll have to figure out those deep. I enjoy watching just for the pure love of the game. I don't need to find out what Austin Eckler's stats are. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful start to the week. If you have any thoughts on today's episode, send an email with questions, comments, or feedback to morning brewdaily at morning brew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Loo is our

producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup has lots of aloe. If anyone needs, Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great, show did Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.