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Anduril Scores $22B US Army Contract & Inflation Sours Rate Cut Hopes
00:34:25
A shake up in the defense tech space & inflation gets hotter
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Toby Howell
Is anyone out there?
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LinkedIn Sales Navigator
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Toby Howell
Terms and conditions apply.
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Neal Freyman
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.
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Toby Howell
And I'm Toby Howell.
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Neal Freyman
Today a TikTok war has broken out between prebiotic soda brands and the only winner is Gut Health.
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Toby Howell
Then inflation heated up in January, which cooled off the Fed's future rate cut plans. It's Thursday, February 13th. Let's ride.
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Neal Freyman
Get ready for a whole lot more Lego lands in California in response to President Trump's efforts to buy Greenland from Denmark, a satirical petition has been set up to raise money for Denmark to buy California. And as of yesterday, it's gained over 230,000 signatures. The goal, according to the petition's Swiss French organizer, is to raise $1 trillion, give or take a few billion, to purchase California from Trump. And comment on the absurdity of the US Wanting to buy Greenland. Toby, are the people ready for Disneyland to become Hans Christian Andersen land?
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Toby Howell
I was just thinking California could use a little more Hygge in their life. But seriously, Neil, think of all the cross cultural combinations that could occur. A California burrito with traditional curried herrings in it instead of French fries. A California club on S'more broad instead of multigrain. The possibilities are endless and honestly, very hard to pronounce as well. Why stop there though? Let's toss in Florida while they're at it. Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Wise Business. Neal, you ever get overwhelmed by all the paperwork involved in modern life?
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Neal Freyman
I went to the dentist the other day. Five forms and don't even get me started on tax season.
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Toby Howell
Now imagine you're an international business owner. It's like a never ending game of Where's Waldo with all the fees and paperwork.
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Neal Freyman
Thankfully, Wise Business knows exactly where that little red and white striped whippersnapper is hiding.
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Toby Howell
They simplify everything. You can pay in 40 plus currencies with no surprise charges and no pointless paperwork.
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Neal Freyman
Save time, find Waldo and use Wise.
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Toby Howell
If you want a cleaner, simpler way to do business internationally, visit wise.com/business. That's wise.com/business. Like the fringe guy at a house party, inflation is sticking around a lot longer than anyone wants. Yesterday's CPI reading for January came in hotter than expected, with prices jumping 0.5% from December, pushing the annual inflation rate up to 3% from 2.9% last month. The Fed has been doing everything it can to try and guide that number closer to its 2% target. But inflation is ignoring all road signs and driving the wrong way down a one way road. It was the sectors most watched by consumers that led the charge with price rises from groceries to gasoline offsetting declines in clothing and furniture. Egg prices especially need to slow their ovular roll. The egg shortage caused by a bird flu outbreak has pushed prices up 15.2% over the past month and 53% since last year. That contributed two thirds of the total increase in grocery prices alone since December. Neil, that sound you're hearing is Jay Powell and the Fed doing absolutely nothing. And you'll probably hear it for a while longer. Due to stubborn prices, the market now expects the Fed to keep interest rates at their current levels until December, a huge shift from last year where traders penciled in four rate cuts in 2025. 30% believe there's a chance that there won't be any, any rate cut this year, up from 20% earlier this week. Needless to say, this was not a great inflation report.
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Neal Freyman
No, this is like the end of a Marvel movie where you think everything's going fine and then you see the next villain for the next movie and our heroes have to battle it out over the next installation in the franchise. And that's exactly what's happening here with inflation, the biggest monthly increase in one and a half years. You're right. Jerome Powell is like, well hell no, I'm not cutting rates into this environment. We have strong job growth, low unemployment and really hot, hotter than expected and hotter than comfortable inflation. So the Fed is absolutely going to stay put. And consumers are feeling the pinch right now with you said pretty much every category across the board, especially those consumer ones, groceries, gas, airfares, prescription drugs all went up significantly. And so this is what we're l with. There's no the disinflation that has occurred over the past year and a half has hit a wall.
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Toby Howell
Absolutely. And the, you know, kind of underlying outlook for the economy is also very uncertain due to a lot of these, you know, Trump era policies. Tariffs, deportations, tax cuts, deregulation, all of those are expected to have some sort of economic impact, likely an inflationary impact. We already know that tariffs could increase the price of goods, but even stuff like deportations that may limit the labor supply at a Time of pretty low historically on US Unemployment, which could put upward pressure on wages. What could, could put upward pressure on prices. So that is kind of the fear alongside this inflation report is that we haven't even necessarily entered into these potentially inflationary policy period that it looks like we are heading towards, but just the.
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Neal Freyman
Expectation of inflation coming up could spur inflation itself. Is that self fulfill prophecy that economists warn about because say you're expecting inflation in the future, which we know us consumers are. There was that big consumer expectation reading last Friday that showed a huge jump in inflation predictions. Because you're going to start buying stuff now because it's only going to get more expensive, that drives more demand, that drives price increases. You're seeing this in the auto industry already. Trump has threatened tariffs, 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which would, according to the Ford CEO, caused chaos in the auto industry. People are going to buy that car now if they're thinking about it over a three to six month span. You're like, why would I wait until maybe these tariffs come in and the price of a car is going to go up $3,000 on average. So just the expectation of inflation creates inflation itself.
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Toby Howell
Yeah. And I do just want to talk about eggs one more. Yeah, we talk about, we talked a lot about eggs. But I saw a few people yesterday because the market when the inflation reading came out took a little bit of a red turn. Everyone's like basically, you know, billions of dollars in equities are being destroyed because egg prices are too high right now because 15% was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And this report. But the egg shock, whatever you want to call it, filters through to a lot of other items in the grocery store. Think stuff like baked goods that actually take eggs as an input. But there's also the substitution effect. So when you, when you see eggs going up in price, you might opt for another source of protein like beef or chicken, but then you see those prices going up as well. So even though it is just, you know, one little source of white or sometimes brown protein, it does filter through a lot of other parts of the economy and other parts of especially the grocery store.
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Neal Freyman
Yeah, that 15% increase was the biggest monthly increase since 2015. And you already see large grocers like Costco, Aldi's, Trader Joe's limiting the amount that people can buy. So we really are in an egg shock egg crisis right now. Startups things in the Lord of the Rings are upending the existing order in the US Defense industry. You already know that palantir the military focused data analytics company was the best performing stock in the S&P 500 last year. Now and a real named after the sword that was reforged from the shards of Narsil in Rivendell is making its move. The defense upstart is taking over Microsoft's $22 billion contract to make high tech goggles for the US Army. Known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System program, it was supposed to equip sold soldiers with mixed reality headsets for things like identifying drones quickly or night vision capabilities. But Microsoft fumbled the bag over the past few years and now, pending Pentagon approval, will take over the project. It's a breakthrough for AndReal and its CEO, Palmer Luckey, who you maybe remember from founding virtual reality headset company Oculus and selling it to Facebook for $2 billion. In a blog post, he wrote that everything in his life has led to this moment, saying that he first recognized the combat potential for high tech goggles when he was a teenager. If you think that sounds crazy, Lucky would agree with you. He wrote. Whatever you are imagining, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by 10 and then do it again. I am back and I'm only getting started. Gandalf's hair just went from gray to white.
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Toby Howell
That was a pretty good pronunciation of all those Lord of the Rings names, I have to say, Neal. But yes, this is kind of a relief for the army and honestly a relief for Microsoft because this project really went south for them. $22 billion deal for Microsoft to develop these things. So it was this pretty big outlay. I mean, defense contracts are big in general, but this was a pretty big outlay. And it just went so poorly for them because in 2022, there was this leak that reports were coming out of soldiers wearing these holo lenses that Microsoft developed, but they were affecting their mission. They were visual impairments. People were reporting headaches, eye strain, nausea. People are throwing up after wearing them. So army officials were already very skeptical that we needed to put $22 billion into, you know, these futuristic headsets. So that was just almost the nail in the coffin. But now the contract has transitioned into Andrew. And it's very, you know, emblematic of where we are seeing the new guard emerge when it comes to defense contractors Palantir Anduril, two of the largest, you know, tech forward US Technology companies, they've been trying to, you know, rally together and bid for more of those contracts that the US Government hands out. Usually they move to, you know, prime contractors like Lockheed Martin or, you know, Boeing, these legacy makers, they're trying to disrupt that and be this new wave of US tech forward defense startups.
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Neal Freyman
Yeah, I mean this, the rise of Andy Real has been pretty breathtaking. So Lucky founded it in 2017. That's three years after he sold Oculus VR to Facebook for $2 billion. That relationship did not go well, so he kind of got booted from, from Facebook and then he started this other company. They are about to raise another round of funding at $28 billion. They are pledging to build a factory in Ohio that will cost them $1 billion. And this factory will produce the things that Lucky and the other defense upstarts think that the prime contractors don't do well and represent the new wave of army tech and how we fight wars, which is drones, AI, everything, autonomous. They're looking at what's happening in the war in Ukraine, saying this is the future of, of warfare. And Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, these, Raytheon, these companies are not prepared. The government procurement system is completely shattered right now and we want to change what's going on. So they're banding with Palantir, Open Air, Space X. They're forming, you might want to call it a fellowship to bed to bid on new contracts. And this is a massive market because The Pentagon spends $850 billion each year. So look out for these new defense tech companies. They raised a record amount of funding last year, $3 billion. And they are coming for these legacy defense contractors.
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Toby Howell
Olipop is popping off. The prebiotic soda startup that's high in fiber and low in Sugar, raised $50 million at a $1.85 billion valuation yesterday, showing it is a force to be reckoned with in the soda space. Olipop has written ridden cute branding, viral marketing, and a legion of dedicated fans to just short of $500 million in sales last year. Elbowing its way into the legacy soda conversation in the process. Functional beverages, a category of non alcoholic drinks that come with specific health benefits beyond just hydration, are no longer something that just almond moms are pushing. Instead, they have become ubiquitous on grocery store shelves. Olipop is sold in nearly 50,000 retail locations across the U.S. including heavy hitters like Walmart and Whole Foods. But Olipop is hardly alone in this niche. Competitors like Culture Pop and Poppy both command their own cult followings, with Poppy reporting over half a billion dollars in sales last year alone. Neil Olipop is the top non alcoholic beverage brand in the US by both $ sales and unit growth, according to data from Circana. This company is profitable, it's growing and now it's got a lot of extra.
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Neal Freyman
Cash to play as a lot of cash. And it's now locked in a TikTok fight with one of its main competitors. And this all started at the super bowl when Poppy bought a 60 second ad. So that's probably $14 million right now during the Super Bowl. You may have seen that, you may have not. But the real beef started when Poppy sent and I might get Poppy and Ollie Pop confused. I don't know how.
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Toby Howell
They're doing great.
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Neal Freyman
So very similar names. But Poppy sent 32 vending machines full of their beverages to influencers and these were like pretty fancy vending machines and the idea was they would post on TikTok and Instagram and just blow up Poppy in in accordance with their super bowl commercial. But that received a lot of backlash online. You know, some TikTok users are saying why don't you do a more community focused event? This is just ostentatious things like that. And then alipop got in the comments for some reason, which we can talk about, and kind of hyp hyped up the backlash a little bit saying that these vending machines cost $25,000 and kind of added to the pig pile that was happening on alipop right now. So it was the prebiotic soda brands were fighting on TikTok over the past couple of days in a. In a spat that has really captured the minds of a lot of people in marketing industry, right?
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Toby Howell
It definitely has. And I think it shows that this is clearly, you know, they think it's a gold rush for this consumer because right now they are very popular. These sort of modern sodas are very Popular with Gen 1 in 4 Gen Z consumers drinks Olipop according to the company. But they're also, you know, they're what is up for grads right now is both non soda drinkers, people who have never really drank legacy brands in their life, but also legacy soda drinkers are making the transition over to these drinks. So it is this very fertile industry right now that a lot of people are trying to capitalize on. So of course you're going to see it, this knockdown, drag out fight over two very similarly positioned brands in the TikTok comments section in, you know, on X and social media. So it has been interesting to see how it's gotten almost a little nasty at this point. These two very Gen Z, very lighthearted brands are now duking it out in the TikTok.
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Neal Freyman
There's a lot of Money at stake. Do you think sending vending machines to influencers was a mistake? In hindsight, I mean, I think people.
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Toby Howell
Probably made too big a deal out of it, mainly because of what Alipop said. They started this rumor that they cost $25,000. They didn't cost $25,000. What sort of vending machine costs, you know, the same as a, as a Honda Accord. So they literally were essentially spreading misinformation and it just got taken up by this sort of sector of the online audience. Poppy CEO actually recorded this video, pretty exasperated saying like, no, these vending machines didn't cost that much. It was just a fun influencer package. So I think it got blown up bigger. And I was of the position that it would be super cool to have a vending machine in my house because. Because even after all the pop is done, you load that thing up with whatever you want, people coming in and vending their own drinks in your house. So I was team vending machine in this specific feud. Up next, prepare your mind for another edition of Neil's numbers.
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Neal Freyman
Listen to this fresh take on cruises.
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Toby Howell
Let's hear it.
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Neal Freyman
Virgin Voyages is not your average cruise line. Let's start with the food. You get access to more than 20 eateries on board with menus curated by Michelin star chefs.
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Toby Howell
Yeah, that does not sound like your average cruise experience. Plus, everything is catered to adults on these kid free cruises. Whether it's the entertainment, parties or relaxing spaces throughout the ship, it's all super luxe.
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Neal Freyman
Virgin Voyages also hits so many interesting destinations on top of exotic ports throughout the Caribbean. They're launching themed summer cruises to the British Isles, Iceland, North America and the Mediterranean.
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Toby Howell
They've got the accolades too. They were just voted the world world's best cruise line by Travel and Leisure and Conde Nast readers for the second year in a row.
- [17:13]
Neal Freyman
Book now@virgin voyages.com or contact your travel advisor.
- [17:18]
Toby Howell
Whether it's a Valentine's Day date night or a solo self care set, sometimes you just want to sip, savor and unwind with something that isn't alcohol.
- [17:26]
Neal Freyman
More and more people are looking for ways to chill out without the need for a corkscrew or a headache the next morning. And Delta Beverages is leading the charge as the first THC infused seltzer to go fully mainstream as an alcohol alternative.
- [17:38]
Toby Howell
You've got two options with Delta 5mg for a light social buzz or 20mg when you're ready to full on chill out. It's got a crisp, refreshing taste to complement whatever your evening entails.
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Neal Freyman
With over 7,000 positive reviews and counting from actual Delta drinkers, you can get 20% off your first order at drink delta.com/mbd that's drinkdelta.com/mbd welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will send you through the four stages of enlightenment before breakfast. My first number is a milestone for YouTube and its quest for world entertainment domination. People are now spending more time watching YouTube on their TVs than on their phones or desktop. That stat was revealed by YouTube CEO Neal Mohan in his annual letter on Tuesday, who pointed out, not incorrectly, that for more and more people, watching TV means watching YouTube. The platform has made tweaks that have nudged people to fire up YouTube on their big screens. Instead of another streaming service, or as the old would say it, cable, it added a season feature that makes it easier to flip through series of your favorite YouTube show. It also adjusted the layout of the TV app to let you pull up the comments and descriptions on one side of the screen while the video plays on the other. And then there's the content itself. It's really good and it's led by creators who are becoming the startups of Hollywood, according to Mohan. He mentioned the Trick Shot Posse. Dude, Perfect. Which is building a $5 million headquarters in Texas as well as Hot Ones, perhaps the most popular interview series around today. Toby Perhaps an inflection point for YouTube and its 20th birthday year.
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Toby Howell
Yeah, it is definitely marking a shift from what old television was to what new television is. The YouTube CEO called out that it's not just people watching YouTube videos on their TV, they're also watching things like shorts. Yes. They're watching short form content on their TVs. They're watching podcasts like Morning Brew daily go on to YouTube. Watch us. Right now they're watching live streams alongside, you know, traditional things like sports and the TV shows that they like to watch. So it is really becoming this all in one TV watching experience. It reminds me of our conversation we had about Spotify last weekend about how they've become this all in one audio app. It looks like YouTube is becoming this all in one TV app, which you know what, people love it. It's got a great interface, got good content and it looks like this is where the winds are blowing.
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Neal Freyman
I can't imagine this. I think there's two kind of people in this world. One who for this, this seems very familiar. Just firing up the YouTube TV app and watching YouTube on TV. And then there's me. And the rest of the people are like, what? Like, I would never watch YouTube on my TV. I would watch it on my computer. So maybe there's this bifurcation and we're becoming an extinct species, apparently.
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Toby Howell
Neil, let's. When. When we get in front of a tv next, I'm going to fire up my old high school soccer highlights.
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Neal Freyman
God will sit down and watch that. We need to move on. We need to move on. Okay. My second number is from GoFundMe, which said that people donated more than $250 million on its platform to victims of the Los Angeles wildfire since they broke out in January. That is $20 million more than GoFundMe helped collect for all natural disasters globally. Last year. That 250 million was sent by more than 1 million donors across 160 countries. And it includes money for victims of the fires as well as charities that are helping on the ground, like World Central Kitchen and the Salvation Army. It is an astronomical number and makes you feel pretty good about humanity. But crowdfunded efforts will not remotely cover the full cost of the wildfires, which is projected to reach into the tens of billions of dollars. Still, proponents say GoFundMe campaigns can make a small but meaningful impact on people's lives and make up some of the gap not covered by insurers, the government, or the private sector. As one man who raised $12,000 after losing his home in the Eaton fire said, it's definitely helped. Every little bit counts.
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Toby Howell
It definitely does paper over some of the gaps that, you know, federal rebuilding costs and, you know, private insurers can't step in to meet. Although it does raise some questions about inequality as well, because people with wealthier social networks are definitely more apt to receive more support than people with not as wealthy social networks. So GoFundMe does know this, though, and so it tries to randomize which fundraisers appear on its website. They randomize which fundraisers pop up when you go to their California wildfire specific tab. So it has raised some questions around that. But in general, GoFundMe is just very well aware of this and said, we do not want it to be just the value of your social network. We just want it to be all of humanity can come and help and contribute to these wildfire funds.
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Neal Freyman
For my final number, I wrote a little Valentine's Day poem for you all. Roses are red, violets are blue. But where do they come from? Miami International Airport. Yes, odds are if you are giving or receiving flowers on Valentine's Day tomorrow. They are coming from Miami International which is the dominant hub for flower cargo in the United States. The AP reported around 90% of fresh cut flowers sold on the holiday pass through Miami while the other 10% arrive into Los Angeles. Flowers are MIA's top imported product by weight with nearly 360,000 tons coming into the airport every year. Why Miami? Because it is a quick flight from flower producing powerhouses Colombia and Ecuador which provide approximately 86% of all flowers imported to the US by air. And the air network is extensive. Twelve airlines provide cargo service from Columbia into Miami while nine airlines offer freighter service from Ecuador. From January 1st through Valentine's Day, it is pedal to the metal at MIA to offload flowers from planes and place them on trucks to send across the country for you to buy. In the run up to the holiday, officials expect that more than 1500 tons of cut flowers will will arrive each day at the cargo terminal which is a 3% increase from last year's record breaking year. Business is blooming down in the 305.
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Toby Howell
It certainly is. This is an all time Neil's number. And my mind immediately went to the agricultural specialists that have to check the bundles of flour for, you know, potentially harmful plant pests and foreign animal diseases that could be imported into the United States because invasive species are a big deal here. They can cause up to $120 billion in economic and environmental losses when you're factoring things like yield loss or loss of quality from certain harvests in the agricultural sector. So imagine being the flower inspector who has to come through and just it is people who are doing this look for invasive animals. So that was, I mean that might not be the most romantic interpretation of this stat, but that was where my mind went is who's checking all these things for, you know, invasive bugs.
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Neal Freyman
And that's probably why Miami has established itself as the flower cargo hub is because they have these inspectors who live there and they built the infrastructure around it. You really think that was an all time deals number?
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Toby Howell
That was a good one. I mean 90% if you ask me how much of the flour you know that gets imported into the US comes through one port. 90% would have been astronomically higher than I ever want to guess.
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Neal Freyman
I want your full list.
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Toby Howell
Put it in the Mount Rushmore.
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Neal Freyman
Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. President Trump announced a surprise phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin saying that they'll quote immediately begin talks to end the Ukraine war. The 90 minute chat broke years of silence between Washington and Moscow. It was the first official call between US And Russian presidents since Putin launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It's unclear where all this leaves Ukraine, which could be sidelined in talks about its future and with less leverage in negotiations. Trump called Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky after his talk with Putin perhaps symbolic, a chat he said went very well. Oil prices fell 2% on the news that there's been some significant movement in resolving the end of the war that shook up the global economy.
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Toby Howell
And that call also came on the heels of the US And Russia reaching a deal for the release of the wrongfully detained American teacher Mark Fogle. In return, the US Released a Russian crypto hacker by the name of Alexander Vinic. So it is just emblematic of the cozying up of Vladimir Putin and Trump that most people probably expected. So we're seeing potentially some progress being made on the war front, but also we are seeing, you know, more diplomatic agreements being struck between these, these two leaders as well. The New York Stock Exchange announced today that one of its electronic outposts, the NYSE Chicago, is reincorporating in Texas and will now go by NYSE Texas. It's a fit that makes a lot of sense. According to the nyse, Texas has the largest number of listings on the exchange, worth more than $3.7 trillion in market cap. Wooing. A NYSE outpost is all part of the state's plan to market itself as an alternative to Delaware as the legal home base for a lot of corporations. So far, it's been working. Elon Musk, Tesla and Space X have reincorporated in Texas last year and Metta is reportedly thinking about doing the same. Neil, my question is, do you think that cowboy hats will clash with Patagonia vests or. Well, it kind of just work, I.
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Neal Freyman
Don'T think, I don't think we're doing the vest on there. We're just straight cowboy hats down in Texas. But the funny part of this is there's already competition for stock exchanges in Texas because there's another upstart exchange called the Texas Stock Exchange that just applied with the SEC to register. So the finance, the finance sector is getting super hot in Dallas. Unlikely that it will challenge New York for supremacy any time soon. But you are seeing an exodus of companies from the Northeast from California into Texas, and you're starting to see some more of the capital flows there head there as well. So interesting times in Texas. I don't know whether we're going to see you know, Wall street in Dallas, but, you know, that sector is certainly growing. Down in the Lone Star state, a stunning scientific discovery was announced yesterday. Researchers said they discovered a neutrino in the Mediterrane. And see, that packs a real punch. It's carrying 220 million billion electron volts of energy, which sounds like something Derek Zoolander made up, but it is a real number and about 30,000 times the energy generated by the biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at cern. It is believed to be the most energetic neutrino ever recorded on Earth. Neutrinos, or cosmic messengers, are subatomic particles that are essentially weightless and devoid of electrical charge. They zoom around our universe like Dash from the Incredibles, slingshotted by what are known as cosmic accelerators. Maybe a super, super massive black hole consuming all the matter around it. Or a huge burst of gamma rays. So now the goal is to find just what astrophysical cataclysm sent this neutrino on its journey. Wow.
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Toby Howell
Talking neutrinos at 6 in the morning. The way that scientists found this is extremely interesting. They have, they set up this thing called the Kilometer Cube Neutrino Telescope. It's under the water in the Mediterranean Sea. And basically it has detectors that are actually just strings of light catching orbs spaced out throughout the under the seabed. And it was only 10% set up when these sensors started lighting up, saying that they found something. So scientists were initially pretty skeptical. They're like, we haven't even finished building this thing and we're already picking this up. So they said they got pretty lucky. They actually didn't pick up the neutrino itself. They picked up a different subatomic particle known as a muon. Muons are created when neutrinos bump into things like, you know, seawater or the rock bed. So this muon went through moving really fast. It left this trail of photons, you know, these light packets in the dark sea. And scientists, like, clasped their hands over their face and said, holy moly, we found something here. So it took them. This was actually found in 2023. It took them a while to verify that they actually did see what they saw. But neutrinos, man, they are packing a punch and they're moving quick. Down under, down under the ocean. For our final headline, I'd like to report a murder. Duolingo, the app that your linguistically inclined friends are more attached to than their partners, killed off Duo, its iconic owl mascot. This week, it is with heavy hearts that we inform you that duo formerly known as the Duolingo owl is dead, the app wrote in a statement. To be honest, he probably died waiting for you to do your lesson. But what do we know? The post went insanely viral on social media. As of yesterday, the statement announcing his death has 106 million views on X and has been shared over half a million times on Instagram. Even Dua Lipa, whose similar sounding name to the language learning platform has made her a target of desire for the owl in the past, reshared the post saying till death duo part. As of yesterday, we do have an update. The brand posted a follow up video with the owl getting hit by a cybertruck asking for any leads as to who the driver is. So Neil, I asked you, have you been driving a cybertruck recently?
- [30:38]
Neal Freyman
No comment. The fascination with this owl is like a foreign language to me. I don't quite understand. But you're right. This post went insanely viral, racking up tens of millions of views. And then every other brand you can think of hopped in and had to chime in on the fate of the owl. From Netflix Pizza Hut, the World Health Organization decided that it was fair game to play in this sandbox with the owl. But again, another marketing masterclass from Duolingo which has established this owl as one of the most beloved mascots logos in the game right now.
- [31:13]
Toby Howell
You know what I think what's the smartest thing they did is they dropped this statement after the Super Bowl. If you drop it before the super bowl it gets lost in all the other advertising attention. I think waiting for that period when you know that marketing talk starts to calm down to be the only talk of the town was a very smart interest is absolutely spiked. Go to their Google trend or the Google search trends over time. Searches for Duolingo are skyrocketing right now.
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Neal Freyman
And that's what I mean. That's what Planters did. They called they killed off Mr. Peanut before the super bowl. Brought him brought him back in baby form.
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Toby Howell
Luckily we don't have a mascot or else they'd be on the chopping block right now.
- [31:49]
Neal Freyman
Neil okay, let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. For any questions, comments or feedback, send an email to Morning Brew daily at Morning Broadcom. And if you're enjoying the show, share it with a friend, family member or coworker, Toby who should everyone listening share it with Today.
- [32:05]
Toby Howell
I want you to use this podcast episode to shoot your shot. It is one day till the day so throw that Hail Mary DM your crush a link to mvd and say something like inflation has me thinking about how our love also deserves a chance to grow. Something like that. Good luck out there.
- [32:20]
Neal Freyman
Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our executive producer. Raymond Lu is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Lonnie Fiskus is our technical director. Scoop Star Darius is on audio. Hair and makeup can buy themselves flowers. Thank you very much. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our shows of production of Morning Brew.
- [32:38]
Toby Howell
Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.