Neal Freyman (2:16)

Well, that. That sounds very reasonable.

Toby Howell (2:18)

Yep. And so is using AT&T business for all your connectivity needs, because the Internet isn't just for email?

Neal Freyman (2:24)

Nope. It's also for playing Mapt. Whether you're powering payments, phones, customer Wi, Fi, or the apps you rely on every day, AT&T business helps support it all on a reliable network.

Toby Howell (2:34)

Explore connectivity solutions that can transform your business at att.com/small business Ted Turner, the loud talking, self described mouth of the south who built CNN from scratch, invented the 24 hour news cycle, won the America's cup, owned the Atlanta Braves, married Jane Fonda and became one of the largest private landowners in America. The has died at 87. Turner passed away yesterday at his home in Florida, seven years after announcing he had been diagnosed with a progressive brain disorder. His signature creation was CNN, which launched in 1980 as the first 24 hour all news channel and revolutionized television by making news available the moment it happened, eventually anchoring a cable empire that grew to include tbs, tnt, Turner Classic Movies and the Cartoon Network. Turner was also famously unfiltered. He was a heavy drinker, a womanizer who called Christianity a religion for losers, who was thrown out of Brown University and regularly dispensed racial and ethnic slurs that drew public condemnation. His demeanor could be traced back to his father, an abusive, alcoholic billboard exec. After his father died, a then 24 year old Turner ignored advisers warnings and took over the heavily indebted family business, parlaying it into a small Atlanta TV station, ownership of the Atlanta Braves and eventually his sprawling cable empire. And in 1996 he sold the whole thing to Time Warner for seven and a half billion dollars, creating one of the largest media companies on earth, a deal that was then dwarfed five years later when AOL swallowed Time Warner for $156 billion and what became the most infamous merger in corporate history. If only I had a little humility, I'd be perfect, he once said. Neal, the guy lived a very full Life.

Neal Freyman (4:15)

In a Reader's Digest article in 1998, he said he told the journalist, I'm trying to set the all time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime, and that puts you in pretty big company. Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill. Not tried to lump him in with those folks, but he did put his fingerprints on pretty much everything in American life from the 70s to the 90s. And of all of his achievements, one stood above the rest, and that is the creation of Cartoon Network. In 1991 he acquired Hanna Barbera Productions for $320 million. Hanna Barbera owned Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Flintstones, and so he created this 24 hour all cartoon channel that I can't imagine life without as a kid. I mean, without Ted Turner, we wouldn't have the Powerpuff Girls or Ed Ed in any. So I have to put that one above everything else that he did.

Toby Howell (5:04)

I think the path from billboards to CNN is the most fascinating part of his journey. So when his father died, they had this billboard business that was not doing well, is heavily indebted. And so he's like, I'm going to parlay these billboards and into advertising this television station that I just bought. But once he bought this television station, again going into debt to do so. He was like, I have nothing to show on my television station. What do I do? Then he triples down and buys the Atlanta Braves at the time for around 10 to 12 million dollars, again moving further into debt. But now he has content that he can show on his TV station. So then those wheels start turning and then he goes from that one local station into the first superstation, which eventually became tbs. He again doubled, tripled. I don't even know how many quadrupled downs we are at this point. But he bought use of RCA satellites, became one of the first big stations that broadcasted the Braves all across the country, and then he was off to the races. But the amount of bets that he took just to get to that point is absurd and more risk than any right minded person would probably take.

Neal Freyman (6:10)

Yeah, let's talk about cnn, because I was maybe joking earlier that his crowning achievement was Cartoon Network. It was probably cnn because this changed news and television as we know it. I mean, the way we view television today would not have happened without Ted Turner and his vision for a 247 global news network like CNN. And it was unprofitable in its first few years. People derided it, they called it Chicken Noodle Network. But they really got their big break in the Persian Gulf War in the early 90s where people were glued to that war. And CNN, unlike every other network, had a couple of correspondents on the ground in Iraq. And that changed everything. People were getting their news from C, nowhere else. And just this concept of 24, 7, always on news. It seems crazy for us now because we have Twitter and all these types of. And there's even the meme of monitoring the situation. Well, CNN invented that because before CNN you get a newspaper on your porch or you tune in to Walter Cronkite on the evening every single time, who would deliver a very confined news report. But now, at any point during the day, you could flip on CNN and get your news.

Toby Howell (7:13)

Yeah. And CNN's legacy is up in the air once more because it's set to be acquired for $111 billion by part of its parent company's takeover by Paramount. It's part of Warner Brothers discovery at this point. So CNN is kind of in a wishy washy point in its history right now. But yeah, going back to see the origins of why it rose to prominence. I mean, at the time CNN was completely crowded out. They had a suit to even get access to the White House press room. So it was just this upstart news company. It feels weird to say about the modern iteration of cnn, but it really was. And Ted Turner just, you know, continually pushed the buck 40 in meetings with advertisers. He would fall to the ground sometimes and say, you're killing me. He was very dramatic person. He mellowed out a little bit later in his life. He sailed a lot of yachts. I mean, we haven't scratched the surface. I know.

Neal Freyman (8:06)

Let's go through some other big highlights, which is his ownership of the Braves. And one of the most famous episodes from his ownership of the Braves is that they were on a 16 game losing streak in 1977. He fired the manager and, and then he managed for one game. So he was the, he was the owner and he was literal manager until MLB came in and said, you can't do that. And he was also infamous for hosting wet T shirt contests on college nights at Atlanta Folding County Stadium. That practice is ended, but he was probably the last MLB owner to host a wet T shirt night.

Toby Howell (8:38)

Just a crazy life Ted Turner led. Moving on. Like a car with a check engine light that somehow keeps running, the US Consumer is ignoring every geopolitical warning light on the dashboard to just keep spending. That was a takeaway from a trio of earnings reports yesterday from Uber, Disney and Burger King parent company Restaurant Brands International. Uber's Delivery revenue jumped 34%. Disney's theme park and cruises division grew 7%. And Burger King posted same store sales growth of 6%, nearly double what Wall street was expecting. The consumers are spending, they're spending locally and we don't see any signs of that weakening at this point. Uber CEO Dar Khosrowshahi said on cnbc. Again, this is all happening against a very uncertain geopolitical backdrop. Gas is now averaging $4.54 a gallon nationally, up 52% since the war began. So everyone has been bracing for those jacked up energy costs to finally start to squeeze households. But Nope. People are still booking Disney Cruises, ordering $15 burritos on Uber Eats and chowing down on Whoppers. Neal Death taxes the Sixers losing in the second round. And the American consumer never bet against them.

Neal Freyman (9:46)

The series is far from over. Toby, let's start with Uber. This is not a ride hailing company anymore. I mean, they are well on their way to becoming a super app. Just look at delivery revenue is up 34% in the past year to $5 billion compared to ride hailing. Division revenue was up just 5% to 6.8 billion. So I'm just looking at this chart right here and it probably won't be that long until Uber Eats and Delivery eclipses the traditional ride hailing business. And meanwhile, Uber has committed more than $10 billion to Robo Taxis. Last week, it announced a partnership with Expedia to put hotels on its app. So it's putting its tentacles pretty much everywhere. And it's, it's become an extremely profitable company under Dara Kazroci.

Toby Howell (10:29)

And Disney is doing very well again. First quarter under new CEO Josh D', Amaro, they had revenue of nine and a half billion dollars. It was up 7% from a year earlier. Domestic park visitation did slip a little bit, so maybe that's one sign of a little bit of weight weakness there. But Disney said current demand out of domestic markets and resorts is healthy. Again, these are things that you expect to see some softening in, like if gas is that expensive, if the geopolitical environment is so uncertain, people should pull back on the spending, like going to a Disney theme park or going on a Disney cruise. But we just haven't quite seen that yet.

Neal Freyman (11:03)

And then the final company mentioned is Burger King. Now, Burger King had this big relaunch of the Whopper and they had their president very visible, taking calls from customers and revamping their menu, understanding what was wrong. And it looks like that whole program, that whole campaign has been working really well. Burger King's same store sales growth was 5.8%. There are expectations for a 3.5% increase. And we have McDonald's earnings actually coming this morning. So it'll be interesting to look at The Burger King, McDonald's race moving on. High profile musicians are doing something that would have been unthinkable a few summers ago. They're shutting down their tours. In just the past few days, big names like Post Malone, Meghan Trainor, Zayn Malik and the Pussycat Dolls have either canceled some upcoming tour dates, shut them down altogether. Some have justified it by mentioning new music they're behind on or prioritizing work, life, balance. But the Pussycat Dolls, to their credit, were the most blunt. After taking an honest look at the North American run, they wrote, we've made the difficult and heartbreaking decision to cancel all but one of the North America dates. In other words, they weren't selling enough seats. Fans and concert promoters have come up with a name for the sweeping trend of cancellations. Blue Dot Fever. It's inspired by the seating chart graphic on Ticketmaster where a blue dot indicates an available seat. And despite the cornucopia of excuses these stars have given for scaling back their tours, industry sources say that the real reason is that they haven't sold enough tickets to make them profitable. Now a blame game has begun to identify the cause of Blue Dot fever. Some blame the musicians for thinking they're Taylor Swift when they're not, or Ticketmaster for running what a jury recently found to be a monopoly in the ticketing industry. Either way, whatever started the fever is sending chills across music.

Toby Howell (12:40)

Yeah, why aren't fans buying? That is the big question. Ticket prices have just gotten absurd recently. According to polestar data, from 2019 to 2024, they jumped 41%. That is far outpacing inflation. A WM data shows that the average ticket price in major market for a concert ticket is $144. And that's not even taking into account the full stack of costs, which includes travel, hotel, any merch you buy. So people are just saying we are tapped out at this point. It's almost the exact opposite of what we were saying in the earlier story. But at a certain point, enough is enough when it comes to ticket prices. The other point is maybe the market is just saturated. When we came out of the pandemic, a lot of people were cooped up. They wanted to go see these live acts. And it was the golden age of live entertainment. That's what a lot of people were calling it. But now in 2026, there are 25 major tours currently happening across the country. That is just too many for the market to support, or it's seeming like too many for the market to support. So if you're not Taylor Swift, if you're one of these secondary acts, you do get squeezed a little bit because there's so many options out there, right?

Neal Freyman (13:47)

Like Post Malone and Meghan Trainor are playing these arenas and people in the industry are saying, you guys are high on your own supply like you do. You cannot necessarily play a football stadium or an arena tour. As Meghan Trainor. So it's time to look inward. And I think Taylor Swift kind of really disrupted the market in 2023 and 2024 when she was charging these sky high prices and people were paying and there's millions of people who would be willing to pay that, but they just couldn't get access to tickets. So she kind of distorted everything and made people maybe feel, maybe made other musicians feel like they were at her level when they're not. And I don't think we're going to see a huge retrenchment in people going to concerts broadly. I mean, at the top of the batting order, they're still going to pull. And I'm thinking about Olivia Rodrigo, who just released presale tickets for her upcoming tour a few days ago, and I'm sure that was bedlam.

Toby Howell (14:37)

I'm surprised at Post Malone though. Post Malone is like one of the most streamed artists in the world year after year. So that is fascinating. And I do think that speaks to a softening of just the concert market in general because he is one of those top acts and he has been struggling to sell those tickets.

Neal Freyman (14:51)

Well, here's the thing. Maybe he should not maybe should better match supply and demand. A football stadium is huge to fill. Why don't you just play a theater? So I think it's just going big like that is not really understanding the dynamic.

Toby Howell (15:02)

Yeah, play some coffee shops, you know, size it down a little bit. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers right after this. You ever sign up for a streaming service to watch one show, then just never cancel?

Neal Freyman (15:17)

Yep. Signed up to watch a movie a friend recommended. Forgot about the platform for months.

Toby Howell (15:22)

Same, but Rocket Money made it easy to fix. Canceled what I wasn't using. And now checking my spending takes like two minutes a week. Barely any effort. But I'm saving real money.

Neal Freyman (15:32)

Users who set a financial goal save over $70 on average within their first 30 days.

Toby Howell (15:37)

Morning Brew listeners can start building better money habits@rocket money.com MBD Toby, how's your

Neal Freyman (15:45)

bone density these days?

Toby Howell (15:46)

Well, according to my doctor, it's not very good.

Neal Freyman (15:49)

That's not how air quotes work. But maybe you should try Flav cities all in one protein smoothies. Not only do they have 10 grams of collagen for those bones, but they're also made with real whole food ingredients, 25 grams of protein, and functional mushrooms.

Toby Howell (16:02)

They've got delicious flavors like mint chocolate, banana bread, brownie batter and more that are as good as any dessert?

Neal Freyman (16:08)

Head to shop flavcity.com to get your protein fix. That's shop flav city.com Toby would you say you're authentic?

Toby Howell (16:17)

You know I'm the real deal.

Neal Freyman (16:18)

Neil well, you and Iherb have that in common. Iherb is a trusted wellness specialty store that sources 100 authentic vitamins, supplements, sports nutrition and so much more directly from brands with zero third party sellers on the site or app.

Toby Howell (16:32)

And iHerb stands behind every purchase. If something doesn't meet your expectations, they make it right with easy returns and simple refunds.

Neal Freyman (16:40)

Head to ihrb.com/mb daily and use code nb daily for 20% off your purchase. That's iherb.com/mb daily. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, where I share three stats from the week's news that will inspire you to be as productive as Ted Turner. For my first number, next month's World cup is turning out not to be the windfall many hotels expected. In fact, new numbers show it may be a total flop. In an American Hotel and Lodging association survey released Monday, almost 80% of US hotel managers in 11 World cup host cities say that bookings are coming in below original forecasts, and some have even described it as a quote non event. Kansas City presents one stark example. It was hoping for an influx of visitors to see the six World cup games it's hosting. But 85 to 90% of hotel managers say there say that bookings are softer than a typical June or July without any major events. On the flip side, just one quarter of respondents to the survey said their hotels are seeing meaningful incremental lift. This is not the prince that was promised by FIFA. Last year, President Gianni Infantino predicted 104 Super Bowls for the 104 games played in the tournament, with the World cup expected to drive $30.5 billion in economic output. But that was predicated on millions of international visitors coming to the States to watch the games, and they appear to be staying home. Despite a brief uptick in GDP this summer, Oxford Economics concluded that the World cup will not have a material impact on overall jobs and economic gains this year.

Toby Howell (18:05)

Yeah, you're supposed to get 5050 international visitors and domestic visitors, but if the international don't show up, then you're losing a massive amount of people are supposed to stay in your hotels. There are visa and geopolitical headwinds too, which is maybe some of the reasons why people aren't coming to the country. It's also just been very expensive as well. I mean It's a very similar argument to what we were saying in the Blue Dot Fever segment. At a certain point, enough is enough. You can't pay that much money to travel to this country. It's also one of the largest footprints when we're talking about just how many countries this is. And it's in three different countries, 16 host cities. If you did want to follow your team around, that is just a huge expense, huge burden on you. It's much, it's a much larger country than Qatar was, for instance. One thing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel is the later stages of the tournament. Some are saying that maybe demand will lift again in July as the knockout stages. And you know that World cup fever does grip a lot of nations. Maybe more people will travel and start filling up those hotels, but right now, not looking very good.

Neal Freyman (19:08)

My next number is 95 bucks, which is how much money you could be eligible for thanks to a recent Apple settlement. On Tuesday, Apple reached a $250 million settlement in class action lawsuits that claimed the company exaggerated the AI features included in new iPhones. When Apple rolled out the iPhone 16 a few years back, it hyped up Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI tools, epitomized by a major upgrade to its Siri Voice Assistant. But that souped up Siri is still in the garage, and some litigious customers say they were deceived by Apple when they bought their iPhones, thinking a new feature was there when it was not. So about that potential cash hitting your wallet. If you bought an any iPhone 16 model, the iPhone 15 Pro, or the iPhone 15 Pro Max between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025, you'll be notified by either email or mail that you can file a claim on the settlement website. That is, once a judge officially approves the agreement. The total payout depends on how many people file a claim, but owners are eligible for at least $25 for each device and it could run up to $95 for Toby. This adds insult to injury for Apple. They still don't have a better Siri, and that failure cost them $250 million, one of their largest ever settlements.

Toby Howell (20:16)

It is crazy that this series is still not here. I feel like we've been talking about it for a year and it looked like Apple was advertising it for a year, which is why they are getting dinged on the risk. I think we have to inject a little bit more of Japan's sensibilities into American advertising. So Japan has this act against unjustifiable premiums and misleading representation that they pass all the way back in 1962. It's a consumer protection law that bars companies from exaggerating what's inside packaging. And it's mostly applies to the snack food industry. Whatever food you see on the outside of a packaging in Japan, that is what the food is going to look like inside. You cannot have these giant Oreos on the outside of the packaging if the Oreos are smaller inside. Same should go for what Apple is saying. Whatever cereal you are advertising needs to be the cereal that's inside the your iPhone. Figure your stuff out Apple.

Neal Freyman (21:09)

For my final number. This is one of my favorites. A new study has confirmed what we all kind of knew to be true. Food tastes better when you steal it off someone else's plate. A new study from Russian researchers found that stolen french fries are almost 40% more enjoyable to eat than those handed to you without any struggle. Here's how they designed the study. 120 participants were given french fries, but how they were delivered varied in four ways. One, the participants were given french fries directly on their plate to the french fries were gifted from another person. Three, the participants were told to steal fries from another person's plate while they were distracted. And for the highest risk scenario, they had to steal fries off the plate of an angry looking stranger. The conclusion? The higher the level of perceived danger, the better the french fries tasted. As the lead researcher Valentin Scriven put it, our data reveal a social risk gradient. Fries taken covertly from stern confederates were rated markedly superior to those obtained legitimately or through generosity. The insight builds on a corpus of psychology and economics research that's found that essentially the more you can't have something, the more you want it. The forbidden fruit.

Toby Howell (22:14)

I did not need a corpus of research to know this because all you have to do is go culture by culture. And every single culture seemingly has an idiom or an expression that observes this. In Italy, it is stolen food has more flavor. In Japan there's this concept called nusagumi, which refers to the act of eating without permission, something one ought not to do. And then a South American saying goes, what is forbidden is the tastiest. So whenever you see, you know, the similar themes appearing across different geographies, different cultures, you know there's something there.

Neal Freyman (22:46)

It's not just food. Humans find small acts of transgression exciting across a bunch of different domains. And this is found in the corpus of scientific literature. There's a study in 1996 that found that warning labels on violent television content, increased viewer interest because obviously you want to see what's going on there. And then in terms of humor and comedy, whenever think something's only funny when the comedian crosses a little bit of a social line where you're not really expecting them to say that, that's, you know, if they don't cross that line, then something's not funny because it's not. It's not transgressive enough. So once they cross the line, that's when you start to laugh.

Toby Howell (23:21)

I thought you were going to say, like laughing in church or something, because that would happen with me and my siblings, where you start laughing a little bit sometimes. It happens in this show, honestly. Right. No, I'm supposed to lock in and not laugh. And you just cannot help yourself. So that definitely makes sense. The other thing, other than just the fact that this idea appears in many cultures, is it appears in many families as well. I call it the little brother tax, where it's every single time you get a. A plate of fries at the restaurant, your brother's grubby little hands are coming over there or your significant other's grubby little hands are going over there. So stealing a French fries. Universal concept. You don't even need scientific research to back it up. All right, let's spin to the finish with some final headlines. The enemy of my enemy is my friend is an adage that rings true even in the cutthroat world of AI. Anthropic is teaming up with SpaceX on a deal that will make use of Elon Musk giant data center facility in Memphis called Colossus 1. Anthropic gets more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, hopefully helping Cloud actually work more consistently instead of being down all the time. Musk's X AI, which was recently subsumed into Space X, gets to show investors that it's working with top AI labs, which could bolster its credibility, that data center operations, maybe even in space, will be a lucrative income stream. It certainly is an about face for Elon, though, who posted on X in February that Anthropic quote hates Western civilization, asking if there is a more hypocritical company out there. But he's singing a different tune now, saying, everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector.

Neal Freyman (24:56)

Yeah, Anthropic has had a major compute supply crunch. I mean, Cloud has gone down a lot over the past few weeks because they just don't have the Computing power to power it. Daria Amadei said that we, who's the CEO of Anthropic, said that we plan for a world of 10x growth per year, but this year they're seeing 80x annualized growth per year in revenue and usage. So they had to look a field to find more computers to power cloud. And there was Elon Musk in Memphis with his supercomputer and he had extra capacity. And so Anthropic and SpaceX Slash X I decided to link up because Elon Musk had a lot of extra capacity. Now what this means for Space X or XAI or Elon Musk is pretty interesting. You know, that's. That was the debate about whether this was a bullish signal or a bearish signal for xai, because on the one hand, yes, it's great that they built these supercomputers that they can now lease out to other companies for Nvidia chips, but on the other hand, I mean, they have Grok, they have their own chat bot, they're trying to build artificial general intelligence to compete with anthropic and OpenAI. And the fact is they were only using 11% of the capacity that they had online. So maybe no one's using Grok and they're just becoming a cloud company just like Oracle or anything else. That's not exactly what SpaceX investors signed up for.

Toby Howell (26:10)

Although if I am a SpaceX investor, the thing that you have an unfair advantage in is the idea that you could put a data center in space. So getting data center customers on Earth first is probably a good sign. It probably is a bullish signal because then eventually you can transition them to like our shiny new again, that's the biggest question mark. And you actually transition to space data center. So maybe you are excited to see some terrestrial ambitions first before you go upwards.

Neal Freyman (26:41)

Finally, if you've ever been frustrated by a call with customer service, just know that it happens to the Pope too. A close friend of Pope Leo, Reverend Tom McCarthy, was filmed telling the story of how Leo, two months after he became Pope, was hung up on by a customer service employee. What happened was that Leo wanted to change the phone number and address from his local bank in Chicago because he moved into a new place, the Vatican. Identifying himself as Robert Prevost, he provided security information, but was told that he had to come into the bank branch in person to make the switch. Then he pulled the ultimate card. Would it matter to you if I told you I'm Pope Leo? The bank employee clearly didn't believe him and hung up abruptly. Can't imagine what she's thinking now. She hung up on the Pope.

Toby Howell (27:25)

Not going to lie. Rookie mistake from Pope Leo. You cannot invoke your Holiness that early into being Pope. You need half the world to know who you are first. You need to be in the position for a little bit. Then you can invoke being Pope to, you know, get some little perks here and there. You have no idea how much I say, Would it help that I'm the co host of Morning Brew Daily? It's never worked, but I do say it. I get hung up on all the time.

Neal Freyman (27:49)

All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful, wonderful Thursday. If you'd like to reach us, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at Morning Broadcom or DM us on Instagram at me 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. Ed Lewis is our technical director. The hair and makeup tour goes on. Devin Emery is our president and our shows a production of Morning Brew.

Toby Howell (28:15)

Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.

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