
Tech promises to pay for its own bills & Apple tries to tackle affordability problem
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Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.
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And I'm Toby Howell.
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Today, America's new Gilded age is in Wyoming.
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Then Apple just released its cheapest laptop ever. It's Thursday, March 5th. Let's ride.
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I think we're all in need for a feel good story and I think I found just the one. So each year in Paris a competition is held the Grand Prix de la Baguette de Tradition Francaise to determine the best classical baguette in the French capital. The winner receives €4,000 and the opportunity to supply bread to the French President's residence for the next year. Plus immense bragging rights. The blind tasting competition was held last weekend and the victor was Sitam Pariphi Jagathipan, a 43 year old Sri Lankan immigrant who taught himself to bake in 2008. He is the second immigrant from Sri Lanka to win the competition in the last three years and joins other baguette makers from West Africa, Algeria and Tunisia who are who've been crowned the best bread maker in Paris. Toby, I am submitting my candidacy as a judge for next year's Grand Prix.
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This is a serious operation. The judges grade the entries on five criteria. Appearance, cooking, inner texture, smell and taste. Esthetics are huge when it comes to brand. You need the crunch of the outer shell to pair well with the soft inner pockets of air. It should look like a beehive. Very uniform air pocket distribution and each group of judges gets five baguettes at a time. So both most of them say if you are a rookie to the judging aspect of this, you take too big of bites, you fill up too soon so you have to pace yourself throughout the the afternoon. Also as soon as the winner was announced people went to Google to check out this this bakery and someone screenshot at the Google reviews of this place. 88 reviews, 3.8 stars. So maybe take it with a grain of salt or a grain of yeast. Whenever you're shopping around for a baguette to try in Paris.
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When Trump was running for office, a core pledge of his was to cut electricity prices in half. But your bill has likely gone in the exact opposite direction. The cause is no secret. Power hungry data centers are popping up everywhere but pulling billions of dollars worth of electricity off the grid, contributing to an affordability crisis that is looming over midterm elections. So Trump told taxios to meet him in his office. Yesterday, leaders from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Metta, OpenAI and others made the trip to the White House to sign the ratepayer protection pledge. The promise is you build these data centers, you pay for your own power. No more plugging into the grid and sticking irregular old Americans with the bill. The companies also agreed to work on individual pricing deals with different power providers, put money into training local workers, and use their facilities to help power neighborhoods during power outages. Sounds good on paper, but many are criticizing the pledge for looking a lot like Neil at 5 months old. A little toothless. The federal government has limited control over the energy market since electrical grids are regulated state by state. So outside a new federal law, it will be difficult to make this pledge stick. Neil, great photo op, but critics are saying it's more of a political move ahead of the midterms than real policy at this point.
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Trump was very blunt at the ceremony. He said that data center developers have, quote, developed a little bit of bad publicity and that they need some PR help. And the tide has turned extremely quickly. Heat Map did a survey of registered voters across the country last year. 44% said they would support a data center coming in near where they lived and 42% said they would oppose it. So pretty even there. And they repeated the survey in February. A few months later, the Contrast was huge. 52% were opposed and only 28% were supportive, which is a net Approval of data center dropping of 24 points in the matter of a few months. So there is a huge PR crisis here. Trump was absolutely right. And data center developers have every incentive to not drive up residential home prices because they are in a race against each other and against China and against the world to build out these data centers, fund their AI ambitions. They're pouring $750 billion into this. So whether this is a political ploy or not, they need to ensure that electricity prices don't go up because local places can stop the data center buildout.
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And the administration is trying to kind of split the middle between these two factors because Trump definitely wants to maintain a pro business and innovation stance when it comes to the AI buildout. But also he is completely aware of the backlash going towards these data centers as well as his pledge was to cut energy prices. That was one of these big things that he talked about when he was entering office. But if you look at the data, national residential electricity costs rose 6% in February. It's even worse in places where data centers are extremely concentrated. New Jersey prices up 16%. Pennsylvania up 19%. And a lot of the energy market watchers are saying, we are entering the summer period right now where you need to get rates under control because demand on the grid is going to go up exponentially. So it could be really record cost when it comes to summer cooling.
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And this is going to be extremely salient for the upcoming midterm elections because politicians across the aisle, across different parties are targeting data centers. Democrat, Democratic, Illinois Governor J.B. pritzker proposed a two year moratorium on tax incentives for data centers. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants a total data center moratorium. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has proposed legislation to regulate data centers and protect people from price hikes. AI companies are looking at this and saying, this is our business now. We need to, we need to build data centers. Zuck is spending over $100 billion a year on data centers. That's why some like Elon Musk are saying with all this opposition, maybe it'd just be easier if we put these things in space.
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Yeah. Because right now a lot of people are relying on gas turbines to power these things. And if they can't, you know, connect to the grid, like Trump is saying, don't do that, then what are you supposed to do? And Big Tech is trying. They're literally bringing other demoth balling nuclear power plants and they're trying to invest in a nuclear energy, but that obviously takes a long time to come online. They are Buying these gas turbines, these natural gas powered solutions, but they are only temporary solutions. They can't be online all the time. So everyone is agreed that this is a problem and everyone is aligned on they don't want to drive up electricity costs. But right now it does look like space might be the easiest option. All right, moving on. In a world where everything is getting more expensive, Apple just cut the price for a MacBook nearly in half, introducing the Neo, a $599 budget device that is $400 less than any new gen laptop Apple has sold before. This release is Apple's first real foray into the entry level market that has long been dominated by Google, Chromebooks and Windows devices that tend to pop up in classrooms and amongst first time buyers. The reason Apple was able to cut the price so much was because the Neo is basically an iPhone in computer form. It runs on an A18 Pro chip, which is the same chip family that powers the iPhone. The first time ever a smartphone processor has been put in a Mac. Using this chip gives Apple room to cut costs significantly. But it also means that the Neo specs are on par with something like an iPhone 16 with base storage of 256 gigs and 8 gigabytes of RAM. It also strips away things like Touch ID and keyboard backlighting. The Neo caps off a week of rapid fire product launches from Apple that had a through line aimed at affordability that the iPhone 17 which came out on Monday clocks in at $599 as well. Sort of an interesting approach, Neil. While everyone and their mother is stuffing AI into every nook and cranny of their business, Apple is moving down a market.
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Well, even Apple needs a McValue menu now. This is like the Volkswagen Jetta of MacBooks. And there was a raging debate yesterday online about who this particular laptop was for. It is very colorful too. It comes in citrus, silver, indigo and blush. Color options reminded me of my first imac that I, you know, maybe 20 years ago with those particular pastel colors. So who is this for? Well, I was thinking this is maybe what Apple was thinking is that when you show up to your dorm the first day of freshman year at college and you say, oh, and you're pulling out your laptop, you're meeting in your new roommate for the first time, you pull out your MacBook Neo and you say, oh, I got this particular color, what's yours? And maybe that is the sort of target audience. At least one slice of it that they're going after is students. It's entry Level people who have never had a laptop before.
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Yeah. And education pricing is part of their launch Strategy. You get $100 discount if you are a student. So then the entry price is dropping to $499. That is a very cheap machine because you still do have a pretty powerful laptop. It's not great for video editing or, you know, deep projects that require a lot of compute. But most people are just surfing the web. Most people are just using, you know, their browser most of the time on their laptop. Like I think we could easily do our jobs with the MacBook Neo. We're not really in Premiere Pro or anything. That takes a lot of ram. So I think you are right that students are going to be a main target. Also, you mentioned the McValue menu. Zach Bowden on X did the math. You can acquire an entire Apple ecosystem for $1,925. Now the 17e599 MacBook Neo599 or 499 if you're a student. IPad is 349. Apple Watch 249. AirPods 129. Again, some people do acquire the entire ecosystem and that is relatively cheap. When can. When you compare it to the rest of the tech world.
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But if you want the super, the souped up stuff, the souped up MacBooks, those are going to cost you even more because this is three days of announcements. Well, Apple also released a new MacBook Air and they released a new 16 inch MacBook Pro. Those are going up by $100 to $400 each. So that memory is being squeezed right now. And we're seeing price hikes across Apple's laptop portfolio. Yes, they, they rolled out this Mick McValue menu laptop. But when you look at the other parts of the portfolio, they are going up. And we could see laptop prices increasing across the spectrum because of this memory shortage.
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Okay, so we've kind of alluded to McValue and McDonald's a little bit in this segment. So I have one final stat that I want to share with you. Ethan Anderson on X said he plotted the most expensive McDonald's burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. And the analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081. Because prices for laptops keep falling while prices for burgers keep going up. And if you extend the log scale out over a long enough time horizon, burgers are going to be more expensive than.
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Wait, do we know the year?
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Yeah, 2081. 2081, so mark your calendars.
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I can't wait for that particular podcast episode. Okay, moving on. Here are some updates from the war in the Middle east, which is expanding as it's reached its sixth day. The conflict has encroached onto new territory, literally, after NATO defenses shot down a ballistic missile sent from Iran to Turkey. Over in the Indian Sea, a US Submarine sank an Iranian warship, the first time an American sub has taken down an enemy combat vessel since World War II. And a few hours ago, Iranian drones hit an airport in a region of Azerbaijan. This isn't just a Middle east war anymore. And yet, despite the war's widening scope, stocks absolutely popped off yesterday, with the S&P 500 closing 1.3% higher to put it in the green over the last five days, if that's surprising to you, it's also a surprise to the CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, who said at a finance conference in Australia, I think the market reaction has been more benign, given the magnitude of this, than you might think. Investors brushed off fears of an impending energy crisis and focused instead on positive economic data, which showed that the US Services sector grew more than expected last month and hiring was brisk at private sector companies. Back to Solomon, who explained that markets tend to look at these geopolitical events, and unless they're transmitting through directly in ways that affect economic growth, markets tend to react in a relatively benign way to these events. So while violence and potential economic threats abound, if they're not presenting a direct risk to the US Economy, then Wall street is going to keep calm and carry on.
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And we saw kind of a broadening rally across multiple markets as well. We talked about South Korea yesterday and how it had the worst day in their entire history and now their market had one of their best days ever. IT surged over 12% in a single day. It was triggering circuit breakers in the green this time instead of going down the red. Bitcoin is also quietly up around a 9% over the past few days, behaving more like the digital gold that a lot of people thought it would. It's still down 16% on the year, though. But I do want to talk about a different industry when we haven't really spoken about too much when it comes to the conflict in the Middle east, and that is fertilizer, because this is a supply chain that also goes through the Strait of Hormuz. There's three types of fertilizer, phosphates, potash, and nitrogen fertilizers. Nitrogen is probably the most at risk right now because they are made from natural gas. So when gas supply gets disrupted, nitrogen fertilizer supply follows as well. Phosphates also are at risk of disruption. Saudi Arabia supplies about 40% of all US phosphate imports. So just another industry to have in the back of your mind as this conflict kind of unfolds.
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Yeah, farmers are definitely watching that closely. One industry that we have talked about a lot that pertains to this conflict is AI. And the drama between the Pentagon, Anthropic and Open Air just continues to escalate. There were reports out yesterday that Anthropic CEO Dario Amade has resumed discussions with the Pentagon about the way its AI is used in the US military. Remember that at the last minute last Friday, OpenAI's Sam Altman swooped in with a deal with the Pentagon after the Pentagon essentially blacklisted Anthropic and treated it worse than they do Chinese or Russian companies because they didn't agree on the way that I would anthropic say I would be used in, in military warfare. Now, there was another report that came out. It was a memo from Dario Amade to his employees after that Open Air deal came. And he absolutely ripped into Sam Altman. Remember, these two guys do not like each other at all. He said that the Pentagon didn't want to work with Anthropic for not giving Trump dictator style praise. And he called that OpenAI Pentagon deal, quote, safety theater. So he absolutely went into OpenAI and who knows whether that will throw another wrench into the talks that appear to have resumed with the Pentagon between Pete Hegsett, the Secretary of Defense, and Anthropic.
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Numbers, the segment where I share three stats in the week's news that will make you wiser than Yoda and Gandalf combined. For my first number, I want to take you to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which, as the New York Times writes, is a symbol of America's new Gilded Age. A ski resort town in the shadow of the Tetons, Jackson has become a playground for the ultra wealthy and an affordability nightmare for everyone else along the county. With the highest wealth inequality in the United States, Teton County's ultra rich population has exploded since the pandemic as billionaires have flocked to sprawling Wyoming ranches. The county's top 1% of households now have an estimated average annual income of $35 million, which is 221 times what the bottom 99% makes per the times the average single family home price over 7 million. That means the regular folks who bus tables at Million Dollar Cowboy Bar teach in the schools, nurses in the hospital are being squeezed out. Many are forced to commute from Idaho across a mountain pass 45 minutes on a good weather day. Companies that rent out kayaks in the warmer months regularly employ people who live out of their cars. Maybe this stat sums up Jackson's crisis the best According to the county's housing director, they have added 4300 jobs in the last 10 years, but only 300 year round residents.
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Yeah, Jackson is emblematic of everything that is going on right now with when it comes to the ultra rich just expanding their wealth exponentially, kind of dating back to 2017. The tax cuts there, that was a big boondoggle for the 0.001% of Americans. Wyoming in general, too, has no state income tax, no real estate transfer tax. You only need to live there six months of year to qualify for those tax benefits. So there are a lot of macro factors that are contributing to Jackson being just this perfect case study and what you are literally calling the new gilded age of America.
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For my next number. You know, I can't resist a stat that ties into a broader societal trend. Well, you know how people are increasingly eating out alone and going on vacation alone. They're also going to more theater. Han Solo. According to the Broadway League, almost 20% of Broadway theater tickets are now being purchased by single individuals, which is double the share from just a few years ago. Many of the same factors that are fueling solo travel and dining are at play here. More people are living alone. They're spending less time with friends and family. They're living longer. And the stigma of individual leisure activities is wearing off. Some theater people say that single ticket buyers present an enormous opportunity for the industry to grow its shrinking audience. And at least one company is taking advantage. As NPR writes, venue operator ATG Entertainment has launched a solo seats project that aims to make individual theater going less intimidating. At their inaugural event, a showing of the Notebook In San Francisco, 60 people signed up for a $75 ticket that included a discounted orchestra Street, a pre show mixer with other solo cedars, and a free drink. Toby, we all want to know, would you see a Broadway show by yourself?
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This I have thought about because we were having a discussion earlier yesterday. Is it different than going to a movie alone? And I do think it is different. One, because of the lighting. It's just a little bit brighter in Broadway theater than in a movie theater. So you feel more perceived. And then two, intermission. So intermission you have to get up. You're probably looking left and right. You're like, who are you talking to? So it's definitely a harder experience to go to Broadway theater alone. But I do believe you have done this before.
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Yeah, I go to Broadway shows alone. Not all the time, but I have no, I'm not intimidated by it. There's no stigma for it for me. I go to movies alone, so I am all for this. I think it is a really big opportunity for, for the theater industry to grab people like me. I don't know If I would go to this place, particular mixer event, I don't, I don't know if that's necessary because I'm happy to go alone, but for certain events like theater or movies, you're not talking to anybody anyway, so I don't see what the big deal is.
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Yeah, but the intermission, you got to make small talk with.
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Heard of your phone, Toby.
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No, no, no, we're not going.
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Flipping through the playbill, there's so many good things in there.
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This is like the, the peak of solo travel right now. So Google searches for solo travel, not just solo theater going doubled from 2018 to 2023. So right now, this is the time to be, you know, solo meal out there in the world.
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All right, for my final number, snail mail is back and side hustlers are cashing in. According to the Wall Street Journal, a crossing guard in Burlington, Vermont, who sends out mailers featuring her daily Observations makes about $14,000 a month from the business. Another woman in Austin, Texas, who sends out letters and recipes to thousands of subscribers did about $45,000 in revenue in January alone. These entrepreneurs are part of a growing group of artists who found a lucrative niche in analog mail clubs. They send stickers to letters, to art prints on all kinds of topics to a list of subscribers who can't get enough. Christine Tyler Hill, the crossing guard in Vermont, began her mailer mogul journey in 2023 when she started uploading a cloud report to social media in which she noted the seemingly mundane but charming things she'd see on her shift every morning. A dog on a walk, falling snow, etc. Once that began to gain traction, the Journal writes, she decided to dip a toe in the actual business. In a video uploaded to TikTok, she announced she was selling an eight page magazine with illustrations and anecdotes from her intersection for $8 a month. 1,000 people signed up within a few days, and a snail male tycoon was born. Toby, A, are you surprised these types of male clubs are catching on? And B, if you were to start one of these, what would it be about?
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Oh, man, my mind immediately went to golf or running or something like that. But to go back to your earlier question, no, I'm not surprised at all. We've talked about this trend a lot, how in a increasingly digital world, people are looking for physical things, physical manifestations of their interest. So not surprised at all. That was just delaying time so I could think about what I would do. I would lean into the concept of snail mail, I think, and Just start documenting snails that you find around really literally. I feel like people would actually get on board with that, especially in a place like New York City where you have to go hunt for them. I'm probably not the right person to do this. I don't even know if there are snails in New York City. But that is where my mind went. Snail mail. Literally delivering pictures of snails to you.
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Here's my idea. So my apartment sits right under the flight path of LaGuardia. So I'm watching planes go by pretty much every 40 seconds over the course of the day. I would maybe do a picture of those planes or illustrate them in some way and then make up stories about the people on them and oh, I like that. I think that would be kind of quaint. And it's just what I do in my head every day. There's a spirit coming in from Fort Lauderdale, like, who are these people coming to New York and why are they there? And I thought, I'm not going to actually launch this because it's way too much work.
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But it's not too much work. Also in the like, the through line of this story is like, wow, snail mail is in, analog is in right now. But we kind of gloss over the fact that a seven second clip posted to Tik Tok was the thing that blew up her business. So there is, you know, we keep talking about binaries, like you're either all digital or you got to go into the physical. Combine both and, you know, start a business like this. Like, you love to see people starting their entrepreneurial journeys using the tools available to them of the day. So I don't think we should sleep on Tik Tok and sleep on the digital because it can still enhance the analog.
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Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. If someone around you was wearing smart glasses, would you want to know? Well, now you can, thanks to a new app called Nearby Glasses. The brainchild of hobbyist Eve Jean Renault, the Android app taps into Bluetooth tech to alert you when aware of meta Ray Bans or Snap Spectacles is in your midst, potentially recording your activities. Jean Renault framed the project more as a political statement than the next startup unicorn. The app's product page calls smart glasses a quote, intolerable intrusion, consent neglecting, horrible piece of tech. And he's particularly motivated by reports that Metta was including facial recognition as a default feature. He said that a floodgate is now pushed open for all kinds of privacy invasive behavior, something his Nearby Glasses app wants to correct for Toby. I don't know if this app is going to be that popular, but it does represent the brewing backlash to these sorts of always on recording devices.
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Yeah, we're seeing this everywhere. Literally just yesterday, a Y combinator startup Valence with the handle be inaudible announced a device called the Spectre 1, which stops unwanted audio recordings. So in a world of always on listening devices, of course you're going to see people try to protect themselves, try to protect their privacy. Whether it is, you know, with this app and dodging, weaving, people wearing smart glasses, or it's this, like, sound dampener device. I think a growing wave of backlash and a growing wave of new devices are going to combat sort of the always on listening and viewing devices that people don't really want to be on without their consent. Finally, in a bid to figure out why humans have been obsessed with crystals for thousands of years, scientists gave crystals to chimpanzees. Quartz and other crystals have been discovered at archeological sites, suggesting that predecessors of early humans were gathering these stones as early as 700,000 years ago. They weren't being used as tools. So what were they for? A study led by Juan Manuel Garcia Ruiz, a crystallographer at Doneista International Physics center in Spain, sought to find out. They placed chimps in two yards. One held a multifaceted cork critical about a foot tall. One held a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. And wouldn't you know it, Chimps repeatedly approached the crystal monolith until the alpha female snatched it off its pedestal. And after that, the crystal rarely left the troop site. Getting the crystal back required prolonged negotiations. The researchers ended up trading large amounts of bananas and a yogurt, which suggested the animals value the crystal. According to Dr. Garcia Ruiz, Neal, a fascinating study. Maybe there's something to the woo woo energy around crystals that even monkeys are tapping into.
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I give you bananas and yogurt, you give me crystals. Okay, that's an interesting trade. Now, Dr. Garcia Ruiz probably just came back from a trip to Sedona because he's got some, some out there ideas in his most speculative theory. He believes that crystals, as the only Euclidean object in nature, may have helped humans invent geometry and unlock abstract thought. Now, a lot of independent researchers looking at this study said, sure, this is very interesting. I think we can't go far enough yet to ascribe certain motivations behind why chimpanzees do love crystals. But there is no denying that they were absolutely fascinated by them. Why they are, I think it's still an open question.
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I think we know someone who, you know, has crystals in their bedroom or something like that. And I think you should call them up and owe him an apology because clearly there's something to it if it is a primal urge to gravitate towards these things.
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All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. Toby, you're off to another far flung wedding. Why are you so popular? So Kyle is coming to fill in tomorrow. Have a great trip. And if you'd like to reach us, send an email to Morning Brew daily@morning brewing.com or DM us on Instagram @MB. Daily Show let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our supervising producer. Raymond Lu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is starting a male club. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew Rage show today.
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Neil, let's run it back tomorrow.
Hosts: Neal Freyman & Toby Howell
Episode Title: Big Tech Picks Up Data Center Bills? & Apple Intros Low-Cost Laptop
This episode dives into the latest headlines at the intersection of tech, business, and culture. Neal and Toby discuss Big Tech’s response to data center backlash, Apple’s bold move into low-cost laptops, the market’s reaction to Middle East conflict, the return of snail mail as a side hustle, and more, all wrapped in their signature witty, informative style.
[03:15 - 07:44]
[07:44 - 11:37]
[12:14 - 14:28]
[14:45 - 16:04]
[18:17 - 24:26]
[25:28 - 26:20]
[27:00 - 28:44]
The episode delivers sharp, insightful business analysis with plenty of banter and quick pivots to lighter cultural commentary. Neal and Toby balance in-depth reporting with conversational humor, making complex topics accessible and entertaining for business-minded listeners looking to stay current.
For more details or to listen, check out Morning Brew Daily on your favorite platform.