Morning Brew Daily - X’s Location Feature Stirs Uproar & Novo Nordisk Tanks After Failed Alzheimer’s Trial

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Episode 721: Neal and Toby chat about X’s new location transparency feature that has opened up a can of worms as some of the most divisive accounts on US politics aren’t actually from the US. Then, Novo Nordisk has taken a big hit after its trials to develop a drug to delay Alzheimer’s have failed. Plus, the Trump administration makes access to federal student loans stricter, particularly for nurses. Meanwhile, is cigarette smoking cool again?  Learn more at usbank.com/splitcard  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

Consider this comparison. PWC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PWC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tuck can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at

pwc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today X descends into chaos after exposing users' locations. Then why it suddenly feels like every celebrity is smoking cigarettes again. It's Tuesday, November 25th. Let's ride. So you're at trivia night and the host asks the question, What is the most populous city in the world? You quickly write down Tokyo, Japan, because that's been the correct answer for decades. No longer.

According to a new report from the UN, Tokyo has been dethroned as the world's number one city by Jakarta, Indonesia, a sprawling mega city with a population of nearly 42 million people. Tokyo isn't even second anymore. Its 33 million residents have been leapfrogged by Dhaka Bangladesh, which has 40 million. Dhaka is expected to continue its climb to become. the world's most populous city by the middle of the century, while Tokyo is projected to fall from third to seventh by 2050. Of the current top 10 megacities, nine are in Asia, and the only one that isn't is Cairo Egypt. Huge come up for Jakarta. This is the first revision to the UN's

report since 2018. Back then, Jakarta was ranked 33rd in general, though. Megacities are becoming more prevalent. The number quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025, and we are on track for 37 by 2050. If you're curious about the U.S., we have two megacities, New York, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Just kidding, it's Los Angeles. But if you're looking for some prospects to keep an eye on,

Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Dara Salam in Tanzania, Hajipur and India and Kuala, in Malaysia, Neil, have you been to any of those places? Well, I've been to Worcester. That's for sure. And just to clarify, a megacity is a city with a population of at least 10 million people.

I actually have been to Dar es Sala. Tanzania, so hoping it cracks the ranks of the mega cities in the near future. All right, and now a word from our sponsor, U.S. Bank. It's that time of the year again. Everyone is traveling for the holidays, which means finding new ways to entertain yourself and your closest loved ones while you avoid those awkward family functions. Whether you're snagging last-minute concert tickets or heading to the Nutcracker matinee, you can get out without breaking the bank.

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Elon Musk's social media platform X is hoping that sunlight is the best disinfectant for its bot problem. Over the weekend, the company unleashed chaos after it made every account's location public, sparking a Carmen San Diego-level manhunt to uncover just where folks, especially big influential accounts, were based. The goal of the change, according to X's head of product, Nikita Byer, was to, quote, secure the integrity of the global. Town Square. In other words, to empower users to learn where exactly their information is coming from. It's intended to shine a light on bots and foreign influence campaigns meddling in U.S. politics that were a huge problem before and after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. Whether or not it fulfills that goal remains to be seen, but at least in the short term,

X has gone nuts exposing accounts for claiming to be from a place they are not. For instance, many Trump critics found that major MAGA accounts posing as patriotic Americans were, in fact, from people living abroad. One account named Trump Army, which the president shared a screenshot from two days ago, is based in India. Other engagement-heavy MAGA accounts were discovered to be based in countries like Bangladesh, Nigeria, Thailand, and in Eastern Europe.

To be sure, the location feature rollout, has had plenty of hiccups. Buyer, the head of product, has been putting out fires left and right as misinformation has swirled. I think he summed it up for anyone who's been on the platform recently, when four hours after the feature launched, he posted, I Need a Drink. insanity. It still is insanity. It has added an entire new layer of being on X where every time either a political account post something, you see where they're based up, or I've seen a lot of, you know, people larping as girls and saying like, oh, actually, this is probably not who they say

they is. They're a larping as a European woman, but oftentimes they're based somewhere else in entirely. So it's become just the joke and also the fact-checking experiment of the decade because X has always had a bot problem. As you mentioned, Elon almost pulled out of buying Twitter in the first place because of the bot issue. And they went from trying to detect bots internally and removing millions and millions of accounts internally to now saying, hey, let's show the signals externally and let users be the ultimate deciders. Let users figure out if this account appears to be real or not. So it's an interesting approach to a problem that all social media sites are facing one,

that sowed a lot of chaos and confusion. Right, because the problem is this is easily manipulated. It's very easy to post a screenshot or Photoshop or use AI or anything to make up stuff. So the biggest example of this was on Friday morning, right after this feature was launched, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security people were posting a picture of where they were based, and it said Israel, and that went viral, over two million engagements. And then DHS had to follow up and say, I can't believe we have to say this, but this account has only ever been run and operated from the United States. Screenshots are easy to forge videos are easy to manipulate.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. So that is kind of a big deal. And then in other instances, this feature has been inaccurate. NBC news journalists, it had three of them being in places that they were not based. The popular YouTuber Hank Green, it said his account was based in Japan, but Green is like, I've never been to Japan. So there seems to be a lot of hiccups with this rollout from misinformation to just incorrectly labeling where accounts are from. And the stakes are pretty high. It's very high, but let's dig into why someone would do this in the first place.

X recently moved to a revenue sharing model under Elon Musk where the amount of impressions you bring in on your posts. It works just like YouTube. You get a payout corresponding to how many eyeballs you attracted. So if you live in another country where, I don't know, the median wages are pretty low, if you are motivated to try to drum up impressions on X because you can supplement your income that way. And what is the easiest way to get engagement on X? It's usually to dive into the political sphere, which is, again, why we saw so many accounts with American flags and their bios and, you know, associated with the MAGA movement, particularly being revealed as not from America at all. So it's just it comes down to incentives.

And in this case, people abroad were incentivized to pretend that they were in America. To sum it up, I think a lot of people realize just how much of Twitter or X was fake. And Charles Worldso of The Atlantic, he wrote about this particular feature rollout. He said that Musk may have revealed that the platform he's long called the number one source of news on Earth is really just a worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors. And you can go back to the Cracker Barrel Chaos from a few months ago. That really exemplifies this. Recent examples, there have been studies that showed that 32 to 37 percent of the online activity around Cracker Barrel, logo change was driven by fake accounts. So total fake outrage. I think the best thing we can all do

is just log off. Novo Nordisk is tanking. The Danish pharma giant announced yesterday that its highly anticipated trial for an Alzheimer's drug failed to meet its main goal. The drug tested was semi-glutide, the active ingredient in its class of GLP1 miracle drugs, Wagovi, and a Zempic. The goal was to slow patients' cognitive decline by at least 20 percent and turned its cash cow weight loss drug into a two-hit wonder, but while semaglutide did improve Alzheimer's related biomarkers, the improvements did not translate into actually slowing the disease's progression. The market reaction was swift and intense. Shares fell 10% to a four-year low before closing down about 6%.

That comes after Novo stock has already halved year-to-date due to rising competition in the weight loss drug category. Now, some important context here, analysts had always considered this trial a long shot. Novo itself described it as a lottery ticket since Alzheimer's is notoriously very difficult to treat. But the company's chief scientific officer, Martin Long, said that they felt a responsibility to test the drug's potential given the huge upsides. Still, it is a disappointing result in what has turned into a make-or-break-it-time for the company in general. Whereas a successful trial could have given Novo a new story to tell beyond its flagging weight-loss business. The failure just reminds everyone of the narrative that it's fumbled its first-mover.

in the category that it helped create. Guest OZemPEC is not a miracle drug after all, but there was high hopes for this because OZemPEC has proven itself for a range of health problems, at least linked to obesity, including heart attack, stroke prevention, liver disease, sleep apnea, cardiovascular disease, all of these things. OZEMPIC has been found to treat and its class of semi-glutide GLP-1 drugs. And even it's being tested things like alcohol addiction and all these wide range of health issues. OZempeg was seen as a potential miracle drug that could work across domains. When it comes to

Alzheimer's, this is just a different beast entirely. There's very few ways to slow its progression. It's affecting 55 million people. So there should be a huge market, $5 billion in annual sales. It is projected, but very many drug makers have tried to crack this and very few have succeeded. Yeah, and they didn't just go down this pathway willy-nilly. There was earlier research that suggested people with type 2 diabetes who took semi-glut guide had, had lower rates of dementia. So there was some real world correlation data that suggested that Alzheimer's patients should at least explore this avenue. Again, correlation does not always mean causation, especially in clinical settings, which is why it eventually ended up in this dead end. But the reason

why everyone was kind of holding out hope that this lottery ticket would hit is because the broader corporate story going on with Novo Nordisk is just so, so bad right now. Again, share prices down 50% this year. It keeps cutting its guidance. It keeps saying that compounders, these cheaper copycat versions of semi-glutide, are popping up and cutting into their business and then feeling very intense competition from Eli Lilly, who we just talked about earlier this week. It just reached a trillion-dollar market cap. Meanwhile, Nova Nordisk is languishing at $150 billion, even though it created this entire category, and many people still call it Ozempic. It has just lost that first mover advantage. Moving on, nurses are IV dripping with rage after their industry was not included on a list of, quote, professional degrees, which they fear could escalate existing staffing shortages within the profession.

Not to mention, they're just plain insulted by it. Here's what's going on. The one big, beautiful bill act passed earlier this year significantly caps student loans for graduate degrees starting next July. But not all professions have the same cap. Graduate students pursuing so-called professional degrees are able to borrow up to $50,000 per year and up to $200,000 overall. But if you're a grad student not considering a professional degree, your loans are capped at around $20,000 a year and $100,000 overall. Earlier this month, the Education Department released an updated list of which degrees are considered professional and which ones aren't. And nurses were shocked to see their name not on the professional list.

Mensick Kennedy, the president of the American Nursing Association, said we are short tens of thousands of nurses and advanced practice nurses already. This is going to stop nurses from going to school to be teachers for other nurses. But it's not just nurses feeling snubbed. Other graduate degrees, including architects, physician assistants, physical therapists, and audiologists got left out of the professional umbrella. And so we'll experience a heavy cap on student loans come next summer. Toby, this reclassification proposal has caused quite an uproar. What was the reasoning behind it? Yeah, why would the government do something like this?

A lot of people looking at this said that it's probably financial risk management by the government because the list that is in existence now favors degrees that produce higher salaries. Higher salaries mean lower default risks on loan. So maybe it's just a purely financial play. But then some people said, wait a second, theology is included on this list. So there's clearly some political influence that is going on right now. But the upside is that it's preventing some. some students from taking out unsustainable debt relative to the expected income of fields,

even though that some of the fields that were left off do generate relatively high salary. So, again, if you wanted to look at it from financial perspective, that's the justification you would use, but people started poking holes in that theory. It also seems like the government wants to use this as a mechanism to lower tuition, because if colleges see that people aren't able to borrow as much to attend their schools, then the idea is in a perhaps free market is that you can't, you have to lower your tuition in order to court those people back. And the government is calling it right now a unlimited tuition ride on the taxpayer, on the taxpayer.

They said they want to reduce that by clarifying these rules around professional and non-professional degrees. Now, what the heck is like a professional versus a non-professional degree? We didn't even know this was a thing before this upward. where it all goes back to 1965, a federal law laid out which were professional degrees and which were non-professional degrees. And the idea is, I'll just quote the law, a professional degree signifies both completion of the academic requirements for a beginning practice in a given profession and a level of professional skill beyond that normally required for

a bachelor's degree. So the idea is for a professional degree is essentially a graduate degree. and at the time nurses didn't have that many advanced degrees. This was later clarified in 1999 to also not include nurses, but the Nurses Association and also architects because they were miffed as well, said, well, this is actually, this that requires a lot of education actually beyond the four-year bachelor's degree, especially if you want to be an advanced area of nursing or you want to be a teaching nurse and things like that.

So they say this doesn't reflect where our profession is at here in 2025. Now, I will say that the administration, clarify that this doesn't mean that they view nurses as not professional as like a value judgment. It's a purely administrative label. So when you heard, hear things like nursing is not considered professional anymore, that doesn't mean that they're saying like it's not an important job or it's not a job that requires a high level skill. It really does come down to the legal and licensure and workplace definitions, kind of the nitty gritty stuff that do affect the borrowing ceilings of these professions, but not necessarily what the

professions are actually doing themselves. Right, but here's the problem. This is why I think the nursing industry is freaking out. There is a current shortfall of almost 300,000 registered nurses in the United States right now, and that is projected to grow to 500,000 by 2030. So any threat to getting more people in the door to become a nurse is an existential risk for them, and that's why I think they're freaking out. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends. Dakota Johnson in The Materialist, a stressed out carmi from the bear,

Doolipa on Instagram. What do they all have in common other than being Neil's ideal dinner party? They're all instances of celebs who have recently embraced smoking again, and I want to talk about it on today's edition of Toby's trends. Cigarettes are in the midst of a revival.

Half of all movies released last year featured tobacco imagery, a 10% year-over-year increase. Despite smoking rates for the overall population hovering around historic lows, celebrities off screen seem to be lighting up left and right. Addison Ray sings about needing a cigarette to feel better. Lord reminisces about the best cigarette of her life on her recent album, while Charlie XX is basically the patron saint of this entire aesthetic,

which is the main reason for this whole revival, I should add, aesthetics. Vaping isn't cool, but smoking as cigarette is, at least if you peruse the pictures, Sig Fluencers posts on Instagram, a thriving page dedicated to curating photos of famous people smoking. The page boasts an audience that is 70% female and concentrated in New York City in London, according to its admin. For a lot of young people, the mood and the ritual

are more alluring than the nicotine contained within. For celebs, smoking represents a rebellion against a sort of squeaky clean, airwant smoothie, wellness aesthetic. It's a callback to the early 2000s indie sleaze and a chance to embrace the sort of nihilistic hedonism that is in vogue right now. Of course, Neil, just because SIGs are cool again, doesn't mean the health consequences have disappeared.

Smoking is still responsible for one in three cancer deaths in the U.S., but the reality of their harm is being outweighed by a cultural wind blowing very hard in the other direction. Totally. The taboo is completely wearing off. This is very much alarming public health officials because there is a lot of evidence out there that smoking in movies contributes to increase smoking rates

among young people. It's not hard to see why you see Dakota Johnson smoking. You see Tim Robinson and Paul, Paul Rudd smoking in their new movie, and you as a young person are heavily influenced by them and what they're doing. And it comes at a time when a lot of government intervention has led to smoking rates near record lows. 11% of Americans report they smoked a cigarette in the prior week. That is at an eight decade low. And then when it comes to younger Americans, they don't smoke cigarettes, basically at all compared to what they had been. An average of 6% of adults under 30 reported recently smoking. That was 35% in surveys from 2001 to 2003.

So it's true that as pop culture goes, so goes smoking rates. That's why this is concerning for people who care about public health. And if you want to read between the lines a little bit, something we've talked about over and over again on the show is young people's desire for analog rituals. And so, again, the act of just stepping out. outside with your friends and the cold and, you know, sharing a cigarette. That has been the appeal of cigarettes forever right now. So maybe we're swinging back towards that culture of just

standing around, not looking at your phones anymore. But in addition to the aesthetics of it all, if you do see all the cool people, all the Charlie XXs of the world, of course, you're going to gravitate towards whatever they are doing. So you're absolutely right that it influences all the way down, even though we are right now at historically low smoking rates, this is swinging the pendulum in a different direction right now. You just can't escape it. I mean, the sheer amount of references that I could have given. I mean, I didn't even talk about Sabrina Carpenter. I didn't even talk about Beyonce. Yeah, Beyonce did it on her tour as well. It's especially prevalent in the music industry as well right now. So just a lot of people and a lot of famous people are smoking

SIGs. And what's interesting is I would think this would be product placement by tobacco companies, But actually, they have policies against this. Altria, which is a huge tobacco company, says that they regularly track instances of their products being used in movies and other media. And they say they send cease and desist letters because they don't want this to happen. And then Reynolds, which is another tobacco company, it produces Camel and Newport cigarettes, said it has a strict policy that bans the use of its products in movies or television shows. These companies are moving, have changed their business models completely over the past few years

to go tobacco-free at Philip Morris. Almost half of its revenue comes from Zinn and tobacco and nicotine pouches. So they are looking at this and saying, all right, do we just completely read the vibes wrong? Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Don't look now, but the stock market could be turning around its season even more than the Ravens. Stocks had their best day in months yesterday as the AI trade regained its footing and several Fed officials supported a rate cut at their upcoming meeting in December. The tech focus NASDAQ boomed 2.7 percent.

It's a best day since May, while the S&P 500 posted its biggest gain in six weeks. AI names like Alphabet, Broadcom, Palantier, Micron, and AMD led the charge as the short trading week got off to a strong start. I mean, snip, snap, snip, snap, you know, every day is the biggest red day of all time. Now we're back in the biggest green day of all time. It is a roller coaster right now. But one of the big news driving stocks this morning is the great and powerful gog is just on a roll right now.

Invidia shares are actually down 3% pre-market because of a report that meta will use Google's AI chips going forward. Google has gained $800 billion in market cap over the last 30 days. The headlines just keep coming after it's great Gemini 3 rollout. Now you have

a major void of support potentially if meta does go through on this AI chip deal, so everything is coming up, Google. For our next headline, who needs Google when you have goodwill? The thrifting store is undergoing a bit of a mini renaissance as it tries to remake some

of its aesthetic. Long known for being a little old, a little dusty, and a little dark, new stores aim to be bigger and brighter with signature sense to neutralize that famous dusty odor, according to the Wall Street Journal. It seems to be working. Last year, shoppers spent over $5.5

billion at Goodwill stores a record high and up 37% fueled by an expansion of 42 net news stores. Foot traffic to locations also increased by nearly 10% in the first 10 months of this year, more than double other clothing stores. Neil, I love rummaging around these places looking for a fun find. I call that Goodwill hunting.

Hey, location, location. That seems to be the key to Goodwill's Renaissance here. They are putting stores not near where their customers are, but where rich people live. So they drop off cool stuff that you can find when you go rummaging. How do you like them apples? So last year, someone's, dropped off some Tiffany jewelry at its West Virginia store in Parkersburg, and it's seen other donations like Gucci and Chanel. It's also found in terms of real estate that it can put

Goodwill's closer together than it previously thought in Indiana. Goodwill used to have its stores nine to ten miles of distance between them, and that's understandable because any store other than Starbucks, Duncan, McDonald's, you say, we got to separate them because they're going to cannibalize each other. But Goodwill found that a lot of its shoppers actually go to multiple locations in a single day. So now they're opening locations within three miles of each other in heavily populated areas. So you can go from one to the next and do your Goodwill hunting there. Yeah, it's part of the hunting process.

It's part of the rummaging. I mean, it's the whole point of going to Goodwill. So that does make a lot of sense. And finally, the movie nerds at Variety knew we needed more things to fight about this Thanksgiving. So they released a list of the top 100 comedy movies of all time. Without further ado, in fifth place, they put Waiting for Guffman, a theater mockumentary from 1996. The Great Dictator at number four, a Charlie Chaplin needling of European fascism.

Number three is Annie Hall, Woody Allen's magnum opus with the late great Diane Keaton. In second place, some like it hot, a prohibition set classic from 1959. And number one, the original Naked Gun, which Variety Rights is staged with a bombs away joy, a sense of exaggeration so clever, it's nearly diabolical. Some other personal favorites I want to call out. Groundhog Day at number 10, Sideways, and number 14, Super Bowl. bed at 20 and Austin Powers number 30 agree or disagree at the very least you have some movie wrecks for the holiday every time I consider becoming a cinephile I see one of these lists and just want to

give up what do you mean I've never even remotely heard of half of the greatest comedies of all time I feel so inadequate I was like where is stepbrothers where is the hangover they don't appear on this list which I feel like are legitimate gripes by the way like those were you know category defining movies at the time. No John Hughes on this list at all either. So there are definitely some bones to pick with this list as just a normal everyday person like me. I'm sure people who know more about movies will come into the comments and say, well, you're

just not watching the right things. Try and open your mind a little bit. But anytime one of these lists come out, obviously this is what they're hoping for. The fact that we're discussing it at all, they've done their job, but I have some work to do. I guess those movies are good that you're talking about, hangover, stepbrothers, et cetera, but they just have to go up against 80, 80, 100 years of more than that of cinema history. They're going up against Charlie Chaplin. No Talladega nights, though. Come on.

Al-Degan nights is pretty funny. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Tuesday. If you want to get in touch about this episode, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at morning brew.com or DM us on Instagram at Envy 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 based anywhere, but here. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow.