Morning Brew Daily - Waymo’s Are A Lot Safer Than You Think & Meet Italy’s ‘Berkshire Hathaway’

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Episode 728: Neal and Toby discuss Trump’s proposal to slash fuel efficiency standards, rolling back a Biden-era policy. Then, Spotify Wrapped is upon us. Get ready for everybody showing off how basic their music tastes are. Also, a little known private equity firm Bending Spoons just swept up Eventbrite for $500M. Meanwhile, Neal shares his favorite numbers on Waymo cars, Boston rent, and how we commute. Finally, the search for the tragic missing Malaysia airplane is back on.  Check out https://www.linkedIn.com/mbd for more. Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning brew daily show. Brian. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how Spotify Rapped got its groove back. Ben, who are these mysterious Italians buying up old internet companies? It's Thursday, December 4th. Let's ride. Spotify Rapp took over the

world yesterday, but we're not here to ask you your number one song and why it was ordinary. As a podcast on the other side of the data curtain, we got a glimpse of how many of you listened to the show this year on Spotify, and it was a lot. I got the stats for you, Neil. In total, 500,

11,000 different people listened to the pod with 240,000 new listeners joining this year. So I hope you choose to stick around. Here's a number that's hard to wrap your head around. You guys listened for 286 million minutes, which translates to spending 544 years with Neil and I. That is too much time. Go hang out with someone in the real world. But here's the stat that really blew us away. We were a top five show for 239,000 of you. And number one for 87,000 of you. That's enough to fill an SEC football stadium, and we could definitely start a moderately successful cult, something to think about. So thank you to everyone who listened this year, including on all the platforms not named Spotify. We see you and we appreciate you all. And now word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. Toby, what's the best return on spend you've ever gotten? It can be anything, anything at all. All right, might sound crazy, but easily the life-sized portrait of Dorian Gray hanging in my attic.

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celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. After pulling the plug on electric vehicles, President Trump just dug his key into their side. Yesterday, he announced the U.S. would slash federal fuel economy rules for passenger vehicles, gutting a Biden-era rule that incentivized EV production. The administration touted the plan, which will go into effect next year, as a way to drive down car prices when the cost of new vehicles crossed $50,000 for the first time ever in October. Under Biden's measure, carmakers needed to average about 50 miles a gallon for vehicles by model

year 2031. Trump's plan cuts that to just 34. The oil industry and automakers celebrated the move, evidenced by the fact that the CEOs of Ford and Stalantis flanked Trump at his announcement at the White House. They considered Biden's rules overbearing and out of step with market reality, forcing them to roll out EVs and hybrids that consumers haven't taken a fancy to. Environmentalists had the complete opposite reaction, saying the lowering of fuel economy's standards will lead to more gas-guzzling cars on the road and force consumers to pay more at the pump over the lifetime of their vehicles. Other critics noted this means the U.S. is basically waving the white flag in the global EV race against China.

Toby, gas is so back. What this means for automakers is that they are probably going to go back towards the sirens call of the auto industry, which are more pickup trucks and more SUVs. These are the cars that unsurprisingly sell very well in the United States. They're also great for automakers because you can make more money on them because they're more expensive. under the Biden administration rules, they were forced to put a lot of money towards building out their EV operations

because to reach that 50 mile per gallon marked by 2031, that's a blended number. So it's not like gas combustion engines are certainly going to be getting Prius-level miles per gallon numbers. It was the fact that if you sell more EVs, that drastically increases your miles per gallon that you're getting as a whole company.

Now that that has kind of been rolled back a little bit, you can start selling these gas gloves. again, which is going to be difficult to resist. A lot of CEOs, Mary Barra, came out and said that, hey, we're going to still commit to our green energy vehicles, our electric vehicles. But if you see what they're actually going to start selling, it's hard to resist the fact that let's sell the big inexpensive vehicles that customers clearly like. Yeah, she's the CEO of General Motors.

Here's the risk, though. This makes them vulnerable to a big price shock in gasoline. And we hit a milestone this week in terms of the price per gallon of gasoline in the United States. It fell to $2.99. So below $3. It was just a few years ago where it topped $5. It was that was the highest price ever for gasoline. So right now, the Trump administration can definitely make this big play into gas because gas is really, really cheap.

What happens when the oil market gets shaken up? Oil prices go back up? Gasoline prices go back up. Then the consumers of these gas guzzlers or non-EVs or high. are going to be saddled with a much higher bill at the pump. And that's why you see critics, environmentalists pointing out with this particular plan that Trump has rolled out that this will actually cost more over the long term of your vehicle because if you just look at how much you're going to pay in fuel costs or energy costs from

an EV to a internal combustion vehicle, then if gas prices are higher, then you're going to pay a lot more at the gas station. But the counter argument to that is that these new standards are just reflecting real demand if gas prices do go up, if there is a shock, like you mentioned, then maybe people will start buying more electric vehicles again. It just is letting the market show where the demand actually is going to fall. But car sales in the United States are stagnant. So I would anticipate people going towards the larger SUV in pickup trucks. The final risk here is that the top 20% of households are basically keeping the market afloat right now. They pay the top dollar for these SUVs and

trucks, but there's a limit to how much the market can actually rely on them. So if you said a squeeze happens or any shock happens, that's where maybe this whole theory kind of bottoms out a little bit. If it's a small amount of people buying expensive cars that no longer buys those cars, then the auto market is in trouble. Ah, Spotify wrapped. The time where you have to pretend to be interested as your friend shows you, he was a top 1% listener of Drake again, a time where you have to confront the reality that you really did listen to Manchild, 50, seven times in the span of one week. As the 11th edition of RAPD dropped yesterday,

the usual data insights were there, like your most listened to song and favorite artists. But some new wrinkles this year included showing just how many times you listen to each of your favorite songs. Mine was 23, which apparently is low. There was also a collaborative rap mode where you could compare stats live with a friend to see who listened to that Lily Allen song more.

But probably the standout feature that got people talking was the listener age Spotify assigned people. based off the eras of music they were most fond of. Neil, I won't spoil yours yet, but dude, I am begging you to join us in this century. Overall, the design aesthetic boomerang back towards analog after last year's techie theme and AI intrusions missed the mark for a lot of people. This year, the vibe was hand-drawn and doodily, where everything was meant to invoke a personal CD decorated for a friend, which got positive reviews.

Neil, this thing is a tour day force that is going on 11 years now. if you have the listening habits of a non-inagyrian. Stop. We'll get to that. Spotify wrap, let's talk about that in general as a marketing tactic. It is so back. It went back to the basics, collecting a ton of data on your listening habits and slapping you with a random metric that no one understands, but it's provocative and makes

you want to share it with your friends. I'm talking about listening age. And if you didn't know where your listening age was derived from, here is the methodology. It analyzes the five-year span of music that users engage with more than others in their aged group. Now, if you're talking about my listening age, I didn't know this was a thing, but my listening age was 92. I think it was the highest of anybody I ever saw yesterday. Everyone was asking each other what their listening age was. Mine was 92, and I think it's because I listened to quite a bit of classical music or opera that was published or released these recordings

in the 40s and the 50s because those are some of the best recordings out there. And that's why I have 92. Tell them who your top artist was, too. Wolfgang. Wolfgang, Wolfgang. You hear you. You hear that new amadeus that just dropped. What was your listening age? My listening age was 67 actually, which was on the older side, mainly because I listened to Billy Holiday when I'm cooking in the kitchen. So I think that did a lot of the heavy listening. One thing I found interesting about this year's rap as well, other than the design

aesthetic that people generally liked, they changed from a stories feature where you used to tap through like an Instagram story. Now they switched to a vertical feed resembling something like a TikTok. I didn't see that talks about very much, but I think it's a story. it's a sign of the times that we're moving towards, you know, vertical video. This is just the de facto Ux that people know now. So I thought that was an interesting design shift as well. So along with the personal stats and what you consumed during the year in Spotify,

they also released their top artists and albums. And let's just run through those. The top, the most played artist globally for a fourth time, dethroning Taylor Swift was Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny. He was the most stream artist globally in 2025. He was there over the early 2020s, and then Taylor Swift came in, 23, 2022, and 2024 was the most popular, and now Bad Bunny is back. He also had the most streamed album globally, DeB, Tiram, Must Photos,

followed by K-pop Demon Hunters soundtrack in the U.S. The Most Dreamed album was Morgan Wallens, I'm the Problem. And then the most dream song, anywhere in the world last year was Die with a Smile, Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga. that song was everywhere last year. This year, it is the biggest song in the world. And again, shout out to everyone who posted us on their Instagram stories yesterday. It's a rite of passage when your wrath comes out.

People love showing what they are listening to. But I tried to respond to as many people in the Instagram DMs as possible. But if I miss you, because there were a lot of you, I try to toss everyone a little bit of a let's ride. But again, shout out to you all and we see you. Moving on, I got to tell you about these guys over in Italy who are buying up a bunch of internet companies from a bunch of internet companies from a bygone era. Think names like AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, We Transfer, all part of the portfolio.

The new addition, as of this week, is the events platform, Event Bright, which they sold out $500 million for. The company goes by the name of Bending Spoons, a tech conglomerate that thinks it's stumbled upon the next great PE roll-up strategy. Benning Spoons was born 12 years ago after the founders of a failed scrapbooking app pivoted to acquiring online businesses and completely rebuilding them. The process goes like this. Identify a business with solid name recognition and cash flow, but that's no longer growing. Buy that business on the cheap.

Event Bright, for instance, was valued at $1.76 billion after its IPO in 2018. Then lay off most of their existing workforce. Bring in your super team of young Italian coders, start shipping features like crazy, and hopefully restart the wheels of growth. Reclusive CEO Luca Ferrari, yeah, that's actually his name, has told reporters that bending spoons looks to find the quote, unexpressed potential of unsexy businesses left for dead. And he's not in it for a quick buck either. The company invests in long-term growth aiming to hold forever and that has yet to sell any of its acquisitions.

So, Neil, they are building a sort of internet-era Berkshire Hathaway in Milan, Italy to extract value out of names that others had long ago cast the bargain bin. Bending spoons. Sick name, interesting concept. My first question was, where are they getting the money from to buy these companies? The answer is Andre Agassi. So they have a weird mix of investors, including celebrities like Andre Agassi, Ryan Reynolds, and The Weekend, along with Google's former leader, Eric Schmidt. They raised $270 million in a recent funding round that valued them at over $11 billion. So they are one of Europe's most valuable startups.

They also raised $2.8 billion in debt financing. So it seems like they have a lot of big players betting on them to make acquisitions and do their whole Italian coding thing and then make these companies and put these companies back into growth mode. Let's talk about what they would do at a particular company and why they would buy any company. Like, let's go into AOL. Or actually, I'm going to go into Evernote because that's a note taking out that I grew up using actually a little bit. When they bought Evernote, they fired more than half of its staff immediately. Then they raised prices steeply, 63% increase on personal plans.

They shut down all U.S. operations and moved operations over to Europe. and then they rebuilt the tech literally from the ground up. They said they rewrote every single line of code. And it depends on who you ask how this went. The actual former Evernote co-founder said, hey, I'm still a daily user. They did make good features. I'm glad to see them putting investment back into the platform. If you go to Reddit, a lot of people are very mad because obviously when a personal

plan shacks their price up 63%. You're going to have some annoyed users. But CEO Luca Ferrari said, you're never going to hear from satisfied users. so we basically just ignore the noise. We try to see what the actual price ceiling is. And by all accounts, it's been a pretty successful, you know, rebrand and rewriting of the code. So that gives you a glimpse into what they try to do on most of their businesses. Maybe it's successful.

Maybe it's not, but they're making a lot of bets. Finally, a note on the name bending spoons. You're like, what does that refer to? Well, it's that scene from the matrix where they use the power of the mind to bend spoons. So that's what they're calling here. I don't exactly know. how it goes, how it relates to the business world. You're changing reality, I think.

Changing reality. I thought it was going to be, you know, the parlor trick where you breathe on a spoon, you go, and then you're sticking on your nose. When you ask me that, and you're like, no, it's from the Matrix. So much cooler origin story right there. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neal's Numbers. Welcome to Neal's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will make you feel 19 again, at least in Spotify years.

For my first number, a technological innovation is potentially ushering in the biggest public health breakthrough in decades. I'm talking, of course, about self-driving cars eliminating traffic deaths as a top cause of mortality in the United States. In a widely shared piece in the New York Times, neurosurgeon Dr. Jonathan Slokkin presented some astonishing safety facts about Waymo's self-driving cars. In data covering 100 million driverless miles in four American cities, Waymo's autonomous cars were involved in 91% fewer series. injury or worse crashes than human drivers on the same roads. Waymos were involved in 80% fewer crashes causing any injury and a 96% lower rate of injury causing crashes at intersections. Slokin says in the trauma bay he's seen firsthand the quote staggering amount of suffering and loss of human life we except from car accidents. More than 39,000 Americans died in car crashes last

year, more than homicide, plane crashes and natural disasters combined. And it's the second leading cause of death overall for young adults and children. Toby, this was a call to action for politicians to support and not resist the self-driving transition since robots that don't get drunk, check Instagram, or feel tired could save tens of thousands of lives on the road. Yeah, Slokin framed it in terms of a medical trial. In clinical trials, you stop a study early for two cases. One, there's unexpected harm.

Or two, there's overwhelming benefit, meaning continuing it becomes just unethical because there's so much benefit showed by one side of the equation. So his argument is that Waymo's results are overwhelmingly beneficial. If this were a pill or something, they would call off the trial right now and say, all right, we need to stop doing the placebo, which is driving people driving cars. We need to move over to this treatment, which is Waymos, because it's just saving so many lives. So when you frame it that way, it seems like a public health, no-brainer that you should push people towards self-driving cars. Now, something funny that's been going on with Waymo as well in San Francisco is they have,

this reputation of being extremely cautious drivers, maybe even too cautious. But now they've tweaked the software to become, quote, confidently assertive. So people in San Francisco are seeing Waymo's crisscrossing each other in tunnels and changing lanes in places where no human driver would. So they're becoming a little more aggressive driving, a little more like human drivers. Waymo's executives say this is actually safer because sometimes you need to cross a double yellow or else you're going to create a lot of traffic. And maybe we were too cautious before. but now you're seeing them, you know, getting a little jazzy on the roads. A little brazier with it. Confidently assertive, though.

Kind of how I try to live my life. So good advice for everyone out there, be a little bit more confidently assertive. For my next number, the Patriots might be the only thing worth celebrating up in Beantown where the real estate market has gotten very soft. The average asking rent in Boston fell to about $3,000 in October, according to Real Page, which is the first decline since 2021. Vacancies, meanwhile, have risen to their highest rate since the pandemic. Yes, this is good news for renters who are paying some of the highest housing costs in the country in Boston, but it's also a clear sign of the city's recent economic struggles. Boston's economic engine is powered by, one, the biotech industry and two, its elite colleges, but both are facing significant

headwinds. After a cash influx in COVID times, biotechs have seen funding dry up in the era of high interest rates. And as for colleges, the Trump administration's immigration crackdown has resulted in 17% fewer international students this fall, taking a financial toll on universities like BU and Northeastern. It all amounts to landlords scrambling for tenants by lowering prices, allowing pets, and even doing the unthinkable, accepting undergrads. Yeah, there was this Bloomberg piece that dove into it, and it profiled one landlord who said,

I'm willing to do basically anything to fill it, which was so funny that undergrads was tossed out in the same sentence as that. The other thing to consider is supply. whenever you see rents dropping, you say, well, did supply increase? This is something that we've seen in Boomtown cities like Austin, where they just put a lot of housing on the market and that pushed rents down. And Boston has seen a moderate shift in the supply. They Boston Metro added 8,600 units in the past year. That is 20% above their long term average, but it's still not enough to justify the price decreases that we are seeing because so many other factors are contributing to it. I mean, for renters, this has been a long time coming because, Boston is just absurdly expensive. A quarter of renters there were spending more than half their salaries on housing. So you're basically paying New York City prices for Boston. And no shit on Boston.

I think it's an amazing city. But the housing costs were extremely elevated. If you're a renter there, you're probably pretty excited to see rents come down a little bit. My final number is 78 minutes or 1.3 hours, which is how much you travel on the typical day. And by you, I do mean all of you, humanity. A new international study looked at personal and work-related travel across 43 countries, representing more than half of the world's population, and found remarkably that populations, no matter where they live or how rich or poor they are,

or what mode of transportation they use, travel about 78 minutes a day plus or minus 12 minutes. That's probably caused by the desire to get where you need to be or see your surroundings without spending too much of your day going from point A to point A to point A. Besides just being an interesting stat, the 78-minute rule has significant, implications for policymakers and people who think about how communities are arranged like urban planners. According to author Eric Galbraith, the most important finding is that people don't travel less when speed or efficiency increases. Instead, they travel farther. You saw this with the growth of the

suburbs after the automobile came along. People could commute faster in a car than a trolley, so they moved further away from their workplace. So you think this holds true for you, 78 minutes on the move? Well, I'm a little closer to the office. Thank goodness for that. But a lot of this can be described by an idea that goes by the Marchetti constant, which is everything about urban life, has always been dictated by whatever technology enables a 30-minute commute. Go back to 800 BC all the way to the 1700s. Most people were walking around, so cities were capped at about two miles in diameter because you could walk about a mile in 30 minutes. Then when railroads came, a steam train could cover 10 miles in 30 minutes, which led to railroad suburbs,

add in street cars and bicycles. You can cover four miles in 30 minutes, which led to suburban expansion, bring in subways. That's eight miles into 30 minutes. It allowed the working class to finally live further out from the cities, but it also led to very dense downtowns. And then, of course, as expressways and freeways came in, now you see these mega cities that are 1,000 square miles

because you can go 20 plus miles in 30 minutes. So it almost explains every single thing about urban expansion over the course of humanity, where it kind of reaches a point, though, is that we can't really innovate. There's no more new transportation at tech. We've hit a technology ceiling, so we might not be widening freeways doesn't solve anything. So we might have reached peak urban expansion at this point unless, you know, like flying cars becomes a thing. And then we can expand once more.

Or Mars becomes a thing. And we expand solarly. We can commute 30 minutes to space and back. Then the Marchetti constant holds true. All right. Thank you for that urban, urban economic. lesson, Toby. I learned more just in yours field than I did for my entire master's degree in in economic development and urban planning. Okay, let's run to the finish with our final

headlines. The search is on again to resolve one of the greatest mysteries of the 21st century. Later this month, Marine Robotics Company Ocean Infinity will scan the depths of the Indian Ocean hoping to locate Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that inexplicably disappeared more than a decade ago in 2014. There have been signs of the plane in the year since, with small pieces of debris washing up on the shores of eastern Africa, but the full wreckage of the aircraft of Boeing 777 has eluded both government and private investigators adding to the riddle. The contract between the Malaysian government and Ocean Infinity

is a no-find, no-fee structure. If they don't find MH370, they get paid zilch. If they do locate it, they'll be cut a check for $70 million. Some things that have people relatively optimistic about this search is that Ocean Infinity had earlier scanned a much bigger area, 3,000 square miles. This time they're only searching 6,000 square miles. So maybe in the haystack that is the ocean, they have found a better area to search for the actual needle. The way that they're going to do it, they deploy three autonomous underwater vehicles. The vehicles are capable of

covering 42 square miles in a day. So with that rate of coverage, they should be able to cover the remaining miles in about a month. So it should be soon that we'll figure out if they discover anything. This is a company that has searched before, so they kind of know these waters. So maybe this is the month where we actually find out what happened to this great mystery of the disappearing flight. Finally, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And by that I mean, it's about to be a really freaking cold out there. A historic cold snap is about to hit the US where we could see temperatures not touch since the 1800s. The reason, a sudden stratospheric warming triggered a polar vortex disruption, obviously.

In other words, a lot of polar air above the Arctic was rerouted down towards the U.S. And what that means for you, the first blast is hitting the northeast this Thursday and Friday, while an even colder reservoir near the North Pole is dropping by the central and eastern U.S. over the weekend into next week. Now, the forecast in Des Moines, Iowa today is a high of 14 degrees Fahrenheit, which is approaching an 1886 record. In total, we're on low temperature record watch in 14 states. Bundle up, please.

Don't they know we don't accept visitors from the North Pole until the night of December 24th? Stay up there cold weather. And I am thinking of Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift because the forecasted low in Kansas City today is just five degrees. That could break a record from 1898. So those two are probably going to stay cozied up inside their massive home. And then on Friday morning, here are some places that are going to be similarly freezing, Manchester, New Hampshire, four degrees. Springfield, Illinois, one degree in South Bend, Indiana. just five degrees. Those that could break or tie records from back in the 1800s. It's just unfalimal.

When are you not thinking about Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift though? Let's be honest, Neil. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. Last call, last call. If you want to come to our live holiday show tonight in Brooklyn, head to the show notes or our Instagram to snag your tickets. You won't want to miss it. It's also a celebration because December 4th is my sister's birthday. So either come to the show and sing her happy birthday or, you know, wish her happy birthday from afar. Thank you, Toby. If you want to get in touch about this episode,

you can send a note 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 executive producer. Raymond Lute is our producer, our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is shipping up to Boston. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

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