Morning Brew Daily - Will SCOTUS Strike Down Trump’s Tariffs? & Paging Dr. ChatGPT

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Episode 754: Neal and Toby preview two major events from the federal government. First, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on Trump’s tariffs and what it will mean for the economy. Second, the December jobs report arrives that gives a health-check on the labor market. Then, ChatGPT launches a health tab that connects medical records and answers any health questions. Followed by Google launching its Gemini AI throughout Gmail. Meanwhile, Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week returns with Sandisk soaring 28% and a Saks bankruptcy seemed inevitable after an unsettling CEO call.  Check out https://www.rubrik.com for more  Join us for MBD’s Trivia Night! https://mbdtrivianight-jan2026.splashthat.com/  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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pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewAI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, why Gmail will never be the same. Then would you let chat GPT be your doctor? It's Friday, January 9th.

Let's ride. Good morning and happy Friday. So retail investors have a couple of running jokes, like pitting Nancy Pelosi's stock portfolio against the inverse Kramer, or betting on the opposite of whatever CNBC's Jim Kramer suggests you buy. And the 2025 results are in. It's a shocker. Last year, the inverse Kramer index trounce Pelosi with a gain of 60% compared to just 25%.

That means you would have crushed the S&P 500 by nearly four times if you had listened to Jim Kramer and just flip the script. Pelosi finally dethroned. Still, she was far from the worst trader in Congress this past year. The ex-account unusual whales put together a congressional stock. trading report to see how our elected officials fared in the market. Republicans beat Democrats. Republicans were up 17.3% on the year. Democrats up 14.4%. Pelosi was in kind of the bottom third of the pack, but I have to shout out Representative Chip Roy from Texas. He somehow managed a 59% loss, which is extremely hard to do in a year where the market gained nearly 17%. I want to see Kramer

versus Chip Roy next year. That will really tell us who is the best or the worst. stock picker. And now a word from our sponsor, Rubrik. Neal, every sci-fi movie has that moment when the alien decides to improvise and trust me, your real AI agents can do the same thing if you're not watching. They can move fast and create 10 times of damage before you even realize something's off. And that is why I don't watch a lot of sci-fi. But in that case, Rubric Agent Cloud fixes that. It's the only platform that lets you monitor, govern, and rewind every action your agents take. You get full visibility. You can set guard, quantify risk, and if something breaks, you rewind it in minutes like editing out a bad scene.

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Trump's tariffs this morning, potentially requiring the government to refund $150 billion to companies that have paid them. It'd be an unprecedented undertaking that throws a Barry Zito-level curveball into the U.S. economy. One caveat, we know that the Supreme Court scheduled today as an opinion day, meaning that they're going to release opinions on cases beginning at 10 a.m., but they don't reveal which cases they'll be disclosing. However, given the fast, track status of the tariff question and the remarkably high stakes for the economy, there's a good chance it'll drop today. Remember, this case concerns tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which last year Trump invoked to slap reciprocal

tariffs on dozens of countries and specific tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. Several small businesses sued the government, claiming that the IEPA does not grant a president tariff authority. And in November arguments at the Supreme Court, the justices seem to side with the businesses. Toby, was the best of the best. biggest refund you've ever gotten and was it $150 billion? Not quite the scale of that, but I once fought an Uber Eats ordering did get a refund and that felt pretty dang good. We could be on this merry-go-round for a while, even if we do get a decision today like expected because the Supreme Court likely will kick the refund question down to the lower core.

So even if they say, yeah, this was an illegal, you cannot do this, Trump. when it comes to actually giving the money back to all the people, all the businesses that, you know, were on the other end of the tariff side of things, that might be a question that the lower court you're going to have to deal with. So it's like me going through customer service of Uber Eats, you're going to have to go through the customer service of the lower courts. And I think the circus is just beginning because already more than 1,000 companies, including giants like Costco, have sued the government for their rights to potential refunds. They want to be at the front of the line in case the tariffs are struck down and, say, a lower court says, yeah, U.S. government, you have to now disperse $150 billion to all the companies that have paid the tariffs since beginning in February. So there's this secondary lawsuit situation that's going on with companies trying to get to the front of the line and making sure that they secure their tariffs because it is not a guarantee. And then the subplot to the subplot of this is that also yesterday we got news that the trade deficit that the U.S. runs,

we're still running a deficit. Shrank to its smallest, it's been since 2009. It was down 39% month over month. This kind of took economists by surprise because it shows that tariffs are kind of doing what they're intended. Trump wants to shrink the amount of goods that we are importing and increase the amount of goods we're exporting. That is generally kind of the thesis behind his tariff agenda. And the data that we got out of October is that U.S. exports were up 2.6% in October. and a lot of it came from the pharmaceutical industry. If you look at specifically pharma, that is, we saw importing as much pharmaceutical goods from Ireland.

So that is just an interesting subtext to this entire tariff Supreme Court case is that on the surface, it looks like the tariffs are doing what they are intended to do. The other event that should be on your radar released at 8.30 a.m. Eastern Time is the December Jobs Report, which will not only shed light on the employment situation last month, but also for the entire year of 2025. Economists expect it was another weak month for job growth with 55,000 positions added, but they also project the unemployment rate to tick down to 4.5% from 4.6%. A dower number would be a fitting cap to the weakest hiring year in decades outside of the pandemic.

So if your applications are falling into the abyss, you are certainly in good company. Total job gains for 2025 are on track to come in at 710,000, which with the exception of recession years would be the worst employment growth since 2003. Heck, even in 2010, when the U.S. was still mired in the great financial crisis, more jobs were added to the economy. Toby, all signs point to the labor market as being frozen over like a great lake in February. I know, and it's kind of alarming because we are now three straight rate cuts deep at this point. So policymakers are clearly trying to, you know, that's why you do a rate cut. You want to jumpstart the labor market. And if we'd have another.

kind of soft report. That being said, the caveat is a lot of economists say, hey, we're still getting some muddy data as hangover from the government shutdown. So there's been some overcounting of payroll growth. There's been some undercounting. There's just been a lot of muddiness. So some are saying that we're not going to get a truly clean report until February. Again, kind of kicking the can down the road a little bit. But as you said, the overall overarching theme of the labor market has been one that still feels a little stuck. Yeah, what we do know is that there's basically only two industries propping up the labor market and keeping it in that positive territory. And those two industries are healthcare and leisure and hospitality. Those two sectors account for about 22% of all

employment in the United States. But they made up 84% of the total job gains from January through November 2025. So if you're in those industries, then it's likely that your applications will be received and maybe you'll even get a response. But if you're in any other industry, then you are essentially in a hiring recession. Moving on, chat GPT isn't going to make you cough, cough, and say ah, but it's encroaching on your doctor's territory. OpenAI is launching chat GPT health, a more secure, personalized tab within chat GPT, specifically for health-related questions.

Chats will be separated from your other queries with their own history and memory system, keeping your questions about why your poop looks that way from your work email proofreading prompts. According to OpenAI, Chat ChpD Health came from following the data. 230 million people worldwide already asked ChatchipT health wellness questions each week. Interest is especially prominent in underserved rural communities where nearly 600,000 health care-related messages are sent per week. The company also thinks AI is particularly well-suited to the task of sorting through tons of health data in a way a time-crunched human clinician can't, because it's available 24-7 and can synthesize years of health records.

But there's also been some pushback from privacy advocates who recommend against turning your healthcare data over to an AI company. Neil, not surprising that Open AI is looking to establish itself in the healthcare space considering how many people are already treating it as their quasi-doctor. And it's the biggest industry in the United States. It accounts for like 20% of all GDP. So it's not just OpenAI, the tech company that's trying to get into the company. this space. There's Google, Apple, everybody is in the tech sector, is trying to get a slice

of the healthcare pie. Yes, there are huge questions here for chat, GPT, and whether it should be offering you medical advice. You mentioned the privacy questions, but there's also just the fact that these things still hallucinate, and they're not human doctors. They have been trained on the internet, and they haven't necessarily gone to medical school. In August, these doctors published a report about a man who was hospitalized for weeks with an 18th century medical condition after allegedly taking ChatGBT's advice to replace salt in his diet with sodium bromide. OpenAI has taken these criticisms to heart and said it worked with over 260 physicians, worked on more than 600,000 model outputs, over 30 areas of focus, and said that actually

by sandboxing Chatchipi Health away from broader ChatGBTGBT, we're going to deliver you more accurate answers because people are asking us. questions and that's a fact. So that's why we're leaning in. It's trying to thread the needle here and say that, hey, this is not clinical advice that we're giving you. Hopefully you see it as just a supportive thing that helps you understand your health a little bit better. So they say you can feed it your latest test results and maybe it can break it down in a way that's more palatable because medical test results are difficult to understand sometimes. They can help prepare you for doctors appointments. They can give you diet and workout guidance. Again, none of this is

supposed to be necessarily prescriptive or saying this is what you should be doing for your health. They are not trying to diagnose. They're not trying to offer treatment, but they are trying to help you along your medical journey. That is a slippery slope, though, because as we saw with a guy with the sodium bromide, it can very quickly lead to real-world health outcomes. Because why wouldn't you listen to your chat-baud? That's what, it's supposed to be something that you can trust.

It's supposed to be something that you can rely on. It gets murky when it comes to health. Yeah, but we're running a race in September. and what training plan are we following? Our friends sent us a big training plan that's very detailed. Who wrote the training plan? Chat GPT.

I mean, I'm not going to not listen to it when it says, well, maybe I won't listen to it because it says, go run 10 miles this weekend. I don't really want to do that. So I'm not listening to you, Chat Chabit. All right, moving on, Google's getting its AI all up in people's grills and some are not happy. Yesterday, Google announced the rollout

of a new Gemini-powered AI features inside your Gmail inbox that will be on by, default, meaning users must opt out if they don't want them. Given that Gmail has 3 billion users, this is ruffling some feathers. Some of the new features available to consumer users will be AI-generated thread summaries, which gives you the gist of what your uncle's 77 message meme email chain is trying to convey. It will also suggest replies if you're left speechless, learning your writing style in order to make real-time suggestions. But the biggest shift comes in the form of an AI inbox view, which replaces the traditional list style you're used to.

Google thinks it will add more contextual overview to your messages, where Gemini suggests to do items, services topics you should follow up on, and summarizes themes across your emails. The idea is to turn Gmail into a daily operating system for your life, but when you mess with people's inboxes, you're going to get some pushback mainly on the privacy front. A post that garnered 2,000 upvotes on the privacy subreddit complains about. about Gemini scanning and analyzing every email you receive, a feature that was once again automatically enabled for all users. Neil, all these features have the ability to be toggled off in your settings

under the Smart Feature section on your account. But still, this is a new frontier when it comes to enmeshing AI in people's daily workflows. I understand AI criticisms when it comes to things like the creative arts and movies and music. But when it comes to email, is anyone actually satisfied with how their inbox looks right now? I mean, it is an absolute mess. I know very few people that have good email hygiene. And no one would say that, yeah, I love the way my Gmail is set up. And yeah, I have everything under control in my email. It's out of control. So I, for one, am optimistic and hopeful that AI tools, I will use any

tool that can help me organize my email. There is 10 to 15 years of crap sitting in my inbox that it's very hard to access. The search feature isn't great now. So if I could type in something to a more AI overview type of interface, and it will help me actually get useful data from my, you know, from garbage collecting in my inbox. And I'm all for it. I take it. You're not an inbox zero guy from what you just said, or you've been looking over my shoulder because I'm an abject disaster. I'm an inbox 27,267. She just pulled that up on air. That was pretty good. I will say that your, your idea about having a more conversational approach to searching your inbox is something that Google is highlighting as a primary feature here because the example that they gave in their demo was

who was that plumber that gave me a quote last year. If you search that right now, you'd probably get some random plumber hit because it's just looking, it's just keyword indexing. Now it has a lot more context now. This happens to me all the time. Like if I'm searching for a restaurant reservation that you forward to me and I type in Neil Fryman in my inbox, I'm going to get seven years of morning brew emails because your name is on all of those. instead now it has a little bit more of that. It's just a better experience in general. So I do think when it comes to search, ironically, that is where Google had the biggest place

to improve and now it looks like they are improving. You're right. That execution matters, though. This could create even more work for people and could overwhelm people. So I would say execution really matters because it could also just lead to work slop, which is a big topic that we've talked about in the past, where people are relying on I'm just creating more work for others. All right, we're going to take a quick break

and come back with our stock of the week and dog of the week. We're the Hartford, with decades of experience ensuring millions of unique small businesses when it comes to your small business insurance. Thank you. One size absolutely does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash small business.

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Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. Welcome to Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week, the segment where Toby and I pick one stock that always reads before bed, and another that mindlessly scrolls on TikTok. I won the pre-show Darts game with a nine dart finish, so I get to go first. My stock of the week is Sandisk. The company was the S&P 500's top performer in 2025, and it hasn't lost a step in the new year. Shares of Sandisk has shot up 36% this week as the hype continues to build around the makers

of memory and storage components for AI. If you think of Nvidia as selling the shovels for the AI Gold Rush, then call Sandisk and its cohort, the sellers of blades and handles. It's the hottest AI trade on Wall Street that just got a stamp of approval from the most important player. At CES on Monday, Nvidia's Jensen Huang emphasized the importance of memory for storing data, helping spark this week's rally. He said, for storage, this is a completely unserved market today. This is a market that never existed, and this market will likely be the largest storage market in the world, basically holding the working memory of the world's AIs. And it's not just one company that stands to benefit.

While Sandisk grows more than 500% in 2025, its peers Western Digital and Seagate both tripled and are up big to start the new year. Toby, with the biggest tech company seemingly picked over already, investors are going deeper down the AI supply chain for better returns, and they think digital storage is going to be huge. This was a confusing stock of the week for me and a lot of people, because when you hear Sandisk, what do you think of? Do you think of the little USB drive that goes into your computer?

you think of maybe the chips that go into your cameras, but storage goes a lot deeper than just the little micro USB, and it feeds into the AI trade in general. I was trying to figure out where does Sandus exactly fit into the AI stack, into the AI stack. And if you think of DRAM, which is dynamic RAM memory, as something that is very important but very short term. So it's kind of like your short term memory,

Sandisk helps provide some of the more long-term memory, the long-term context that these AI models need to fetch the answers that you're looking for. It's the rest of the brain, essentially. And as Jensen Huang said, which, by the way, Sandus needs to buy him a beer because it absolutely made his comments were what made the stock jump the last few days. He's saying that it's just right now there's a massive crunch for that. We need more of that.

So we need more brains of the entire operation. We need more long-term memory, than just see this DRAM that's been also a very buzzy trade. And you can't talk about memory. We're talking about one company, which is Samsung. Samsung is the world's largest memory chipmaker. It reported earnings on Thursday. Its profit more than tripled to a record high,

and its shares have been doubling in 2025, and they're up big again this month. My dog of the week is Sacks Global because it's spiraling towards bankruptcy faster than you can say Bergdorf-Goodman. Sacks problems stem back. to 2024 in a $2.7 billion deal that brought Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus together to form a luxury department store behemoth. Since then, nothing has gone right. Sales have been disappointing and bondholders have gone from nervous to downright distraught over Sacks's ability to pay back

the massive debt it took on to complete the deal. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Sacks Global missed a $100 million interest payment that was due at the end of the year, meaning a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing looks increasingly likely. At the core of the rotten onion that was this mega merger was a decision to not pay vendors on normal terms. Most brands send retailers merchandise and the retailer promises to pay them back in 60, 90, or even 120 days sometimes. But in 2023, Sacks decided instead to stretch vendor payments over 12 months to try and

buy themselves more financial flexibility to deal with their massive debt load. Retailer said, What the heck? I'm not sending you anything anymore on those terms, and many actually sued to take SACS to court. It's turned into a messier situation, then a dressing room after Neil tries to find some khakis that fit him, and it's left the iconic names on the brink of bankruptcy.

The name to know in the SACS global story is Richard Baker. Now, Richard Baker is a former real estate guy. Didn't have a lot of experience in retail, but he's a big real estate mogul, and he is the executive chairman of SACS Global. He was the mastermind behind this deal. He's been trying to do this for decades, trying to bring this luxury stores all together

with Sacks Fifth Avenue and Neiman, Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman. And he made it finally happen in 2024. And it's been one of the worst corporate marriages in recent history. It's an arranged marriage that absolutely did not work out. Sachs' second quarter revenue fell 13% year over year to $1.6 billion. And yes, departments, stores have had a tough go of it, but the Sachs' rivals are actually doing pretty good and taking

its market share. Look at Bloomingdale's. It's comparable sales were up almost 9% in the first half of 2025. And Nordstrom's has this comeback as well, up 4.1%. And those companies are investing in their stores and doing things that Baker at Sachs Global is not doing. He's relying on financial engineering and different things besides investing in these stores in order to make this this corporate arrangement work out, but it has not. Yeah, Baker is kind of engaged in some penny pinching, too, that just doesn't reflect well on a luxury brand in general. In 2024, Saks Fifth Avenue actually canceled their famous holiday light show on Fifth Ave

in order to save costs. That does not give the right message if you're saying we can't even afford to turn the lights on because we have so much debt and we're ladled with so much, you know, poor financial decisions and it just is a fact of retail that if your vendors say, I don't want to give you goods anymore, you have nothing to sell. So that decision to say, we're going to take a long time to pay you back, which is, by the way, a decision that was also reflected in how they started to handle customer returns. They started to draw out the amount of time it took to actually give you your money back because they wanted to have more cash on hand. So they've been doing

everything except for actually addressing the core problem, which is making their stores better, making them a better place to shop for luxury goods. Final note on this is if you have an American Express Platinum card, you're paying $895 for, well, you actually have a $50 credit at Sacks twice a year. So Bloomberg wrote about all of these platinum card holders that are scrambling to, you know, use this credit at Sacks before it potentially files for bankruptcy because you don't technically have to honor gift cards when you file for bankruptcy. So anyway, the bottom line here is that no one thinks that SACS is going away.

These companies are still going to exist, but a major financial restructuring, perhaps bankruptcy, is certainly in order. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Okay, I'm going to channel my inner Shams to announce a blockbuster trade, this one at the highest rungs of corporate America. J.B. Morgan will be taking over Apple's credit card program from Goldman Sachs, who had been running it, not well, since 2019. It's being hailed as a rare win-win-win-win situation for all three companies. For Goldman Sachs, it gets to wash its hands of an embarrassing, expensive, failed push into consumer lending that cost it $7 billion, allowing it to focus on its bread and butter corporate business. For JP Morgan, the Apple card brings a $20 billion book of card loans and a bunch of potential customers it can sell financial products to. And for Apple, it's getting into bed with the best managed biggest bank in the United States that can run a credit card biz with its eyes closed.

Niko Harrison should take notes. J.P. Morgan is happy here, mainly because they did extract a couple of concessions from Apple and Goldman, because remember, this was not a happy marriage between Goldman and Apple. So why is J.P. Morgan so eager to take on this book of loans? Probably because they got a pretty hefty discount. Apparently, according to sources, they got a discount of more than $1 billion when it comes to the Apple Card portfolio. That can make me do, that can sweeten a lot of deals, say, hey, we'll just cleave a billion off. Let's see if you like the book of loans a little bit better now.

Finally, on Sunday, it's Golden Globes time where Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothy Salome, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, Michael B. Jordan, and others will vie for big and small screen supremacy. But one entrant for best actress will not be attending. Cynthia Arrivo was nominated for her performance in Wicked for Good, but she has another performance on her mind that is causing a scheduling conflict. She is deep in development of a live rendition of Dracula that Arevo says will cause her to miss the award ceremony. Surely she can steal away for one night, you say, but consider Arrivo is set to play all 23 characters, including the vampire herself. Neil, if I had to play two characters on this podcast, I don't think I could do it, let alone 23.

I'm totally going to use this as an excuse going forward. Dogate my homework is so 20th century, 21st century is, yeah, I can't make it. I'm busy playing 23 characters in Dracula on the West End. It's so outlandish that people have no choice but to believe you. She's not the first woman, or actress, to have played a ton of characters recently. Sarah Snook of Succession was just on Broadway in the picture of Dorian Gray. She played all 26 characters. So 23, Cynthia Revo, come on.

I think you can do a little bit better. I was looking up, like, which stories or which, you know, renditions would have the most characters. and I just Googled the Odyssey to see how many were in that. There's 120 named characters in the Odyssey, which is a lot of characters. But if you start including, you know, the total amount of suitors, the entire amount of crew, it's 950 characters. So you can really start going up the ladder when it comes to the amount of characters you're playing. All right, that is all the time we have.

Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Friday. If you want to get in touch, send an email to Morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. It's okay if use AI to write it. or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lou is our producer, our associate producers, our Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake.

Hair and makeup, don't even think about using that Cynthia Arrivo excuse with us. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great, so do that, Neil. I wish you all well. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment

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