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Neal’s Numbers Mega Recap: Death of Partying, 2 Escalators in WY, and More
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This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
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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, the most fascinating facts and figures from the year.
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It's a super sized version of Neil's numbers. It's Wednesday, December 31st. Let's ride.
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B
Good morning and Happy New Year's Eve. One of everyone's favorite favorite segments on the podcast, and I'm not just saying this because it has my name on it, is Neil's Numbers. It's a segment we run on Thursdays where I share three stats from the week's news that will save you from the most awkward small talk encounters. For this special holiday week episode, we're going to pick out the best of Neil's numbers for 2025. Our team pored over every stat or figure I discussed in Neil's Numbers from the Year and picked a couple that stood out from the pack either for representing a broader theme from the year or just because they were so bizarre. The Toby, are you ready to go?
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Do I have a choice? Yes, I'm ready. Let's do this thing. But before we do this thing, a word from our sponsor, Public. Neil, remember when we said we'd start doing more adult things this year?
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Yeah. And I've been pretty good. I've been meal prepping, getting better sleep and hitting the gym.
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All right, brag. Well, I made progress with my investing portfolio by joining Public. Here is what is cool about Public they have generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
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That feature is pretty sick. Yes, you can literally type in any prompt such as from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year. And put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against The S&P.
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500 New Year's resolutions just got a whole lot easier. Get started at public.com/morning brew and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com Morning Brew paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in podcast Description. Now here's our episode about Neil's numbers.
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As I was reviewing all the Neil's numbers from the year, I found that many of them fit into distinct themes or buckets that speak to what the world was like in 2025. And Toby and I are going to run them down now. The first clear theme that emerged was the death of partying, especially among young people. The writer Derek Thompson has been beating this drum for a while and put together some jaw dropping stats to highlight what he describes as the antisocial century. Between 2003 and 2024, the amount of time Americans spent hosting or attending a social event plummeted by 50%. Among Americans aged 15 to 24, they spent 70% less time partying than they did just 20 years ago. And the list goes on. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every one hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face to face contact with human friends. And since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has dropped by more than a third. Toby we are becoming a nation of homebodies.
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And I don't think you can ignore the downstream effect that's happening in the alcohol industry as well. I mean, partying and alcohol inevitably go hand in hand. And only 54% of Americans said that they imbibed in adult beverages. That is the lowest number in Gallup's 90 years of polling. So people are drinking less, they're hanging out less, they're spending more time with their pets. A big issue too for kids is that their parents are actually watching them more. They're paying more attention to them. That was something that Derek Thompson highlighted in his piece about the lack of parting. Mother's time with child care increased by 200 minutes a week. Father's time spent on Childcare increased by 240 minutes a week. So you kind of are getting this combination of none of the youths are drinking anymore. Their parents are watching them more closely. Not necessarily a recipe for a great party.
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No. As Thompson right. Americans used to have more kids whom they watch less. Now they have fewer children whom they watched more. And he chalks up this quote unquote antisocial century to three main factors. And they're fairly obvious. It's not, it's not reinventing the wheel here. It's greater professional ambition. So people are delaying marriage and having kids in order to pursue their career prospects, more intensive parenting, as we talked about, and lavish entertainment abundance. You can't ignore the screen factor in all of this. As American socialization has declined over the last few decades, that's been. There's been an increase in not only television, but social media. And every study that you find finds that we are spending more times in front of our screens instead of interacting face to face with humans.
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It's just this culture of anxiety too, because if you spend more time alone when you do go hang out with people, it makes you a little bit more on edge. You feel like each interaction is more high stakes because they are less frequent, so you get fewer reps. And it's just like anything else you do in life. If you practice, if you don't practice it, you're not going to be good at it. Now that is the same thing that is happening with socializing right now. So then your avoidance increases in the cycle, deepen. So I hope people hear this and go, let's, you know, have a party, invite their friends out, because right now it's not happening too much anymore. And this next number meshes pretty well with the idea that people aren't partying anymore. And that is that America is very rich, but also very unhappy. The data comes from Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane who assembled 14 scholars from various political backgrounds to create a national report card for countries around the world. And the US's report card shows that our economy is performing better than any of our peers, pulling away from Europe and Japan. And yet the report also found that the US fares worse. And basically everything else during the US ranks below most peer countries in life expectancy, higher than most in depression, among the worst income inequality, and lags significantly behind in life satisfaction. Bradley Biser, a historian at Hillsdale College and committee member, put it best. We're so wealthy, but so unhappy, Neil. We are winning the money game and losing the meaning game.
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We are absolutely winning the money game. And here's a stat that illustrates that. In 1990, the per capita gross domestic product GDP in the United states was about 28% higher than in the euro area. Now that gap is more than 80%. But if you run down things like life satisfaction, happiness, crime, we are trailing in every single category among our peer nations. It dovetails with some other Neil's numbers that I had over the course of the year because this was a distinct theme, right? Americans are doing pretty well economically. They are not doing well in terms of the happiness. And there was the World Happiness Report that came out. The United States in 2012 was 11th, and now we've slid in the most recent report to to 24th in the global rankings. Finland for the a straight year was the number one most happy country. And then there was this Wall Street Journal Journal poll that asked about the American dream. And they found that the share of people who say that they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to just 25%, which was a record low in surveys dating back to 1987. Nearly 70% of people said they believe that the American dream, which is if you work hard, you will get ahead, no longer holds true or never did, which was the highest level in years of surveys. So reviewing Neal's numbers this year, it seemed like there was a distinct theme that Americans are reporting record low levels of satisfaction even as they're doing okay economically.
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Yeah. This also reminds me of a story we recently discussed about an essay from the substacker Michael Green, who said that the poverty line that the official government recognizes, which is $32,000 for a family four, is way too low. And actually it's closer to $140,000 a year for a family of four, by his calculations. He found that by just averaging what costs a traditional suburban family in Caldwell, New Jersey might face when considering things like health care, things like transportation, housing, just the normal stuff that everyday Americans have to pay for. And he found that whatever the official government number, it's vastly outdated, it's way too low, and it's probably closer to over well into six figures, which does reflect some of these anxieties and some of the pressures that a lot of Americans are facing, as reflected by all the data that we just mentioned.
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It also could be this K shaped recovery we're talking about and the fact that America is highly unequal. There's a stat that was thrown around a lot from Moody's analytics this year that showed that the top 10% of earners in the U.S. accounted for nearly 50% of spending in the second quarter. You heard it from a lot of retailers in the most recent earnings season, ahead of the holiday shopping season, was that the wealthy are doing okay. They are maybe trading down to cheaper goods, but the people on the lower income spectrum are doing worse and they're pulling back even more than the people on top who are powering ahead with spending. This is going to continue to be a theme going into the next year with the midterm elections. I was everywhere this year, and it's starting to change how we speak in our daily lives. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute found that since the release of Chat GPT, people have tweaked their vocabulary to favor words that are more frequently used by the chat bot. After analyzing 280,000 YouTube videos from academic channels, this study found that speakers use words like meticulous, delve, realm, and adept. All words that often show up in chatbots outputs 51% more frequently than they did in the three years prior. According to the lead author, using words like delve more is a sign that we've internalized this virtual vocabulary into daily communication. But not only is our vocab starting to mimic chat cbt, so is the way we talk making our speech longer, more structured, and with less emotional expression, similar to what we read when interacting with the chat bot? As one scientist at the Max Planck Institute put it, delve is only the tip of the iceberg.
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There is a, again, a conflict here because replies generated by. I actually found it actually facilitated feelings of closeness between participants. When you write more clearly, it makes you communicate better. That is a thing that is pretty obvious because. But if people believe that their partner on the other side of a conversation was using AI, it also fosters these feelings of suspicion. And so, yes, we are collaborating and we are connecting more efficiently and more effectively. But these words, these kind of red flags have been popping up in people's conversations, which just makes you think, are they using AI? Which kind of inhibits the entire communication process in general. So I think a lot of people know what these words are at this point. At this point, AI has been out for so long that people recognize sentence structures. It's not X, it's Y. M dash is are another one. Delve was the original one. It's kind of weaned off delve a little bit at this point, but there are just these markers that people have come to recognize and it's just infiltrated.
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All of our communication and it's infiltrated work. And maybe this was a Toby's Trends. I remember we definitely talked about it, the concept of work slop. A study in the Harvard Business Review found that more than 40% of US based employees reported receiving AI generated content that, quote, masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task, which they considered work slop. They're calling it destroying productivity. So AI, as we're seeing in our vocabulary, in the way we structure our sentences, and in the way we work, has infiltrated our daily lives here. Three, more than three years now after the release of ChatGPT and of course.
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It boomerangs in the other direction. Now, the marker of good communication is a little bit of sloppiness, is a little bit of humanity that is injected into things, especially on things like dating apps, where technically your AI bot, whatever you use, could craft the perfect prompt, could craft the perfect response to someone. And so by, you know, spelling a word wrong or just showing that, hey, there is a human on the other side of this phone, that is how people are separating themselves in the age of AI communication, AI slop, and just everybody's language kind of converging towards the same thing because all the AIs have been trained on the same things. Up next, as technology progresses, sometimes people don't like the direction it's heading, especially when it comes to their cars. Consumers are increasingly frustrated with how complicated modern car tech has become. With a survey from Strategic Vision showing the share of drivers who feel their car's controls are intuitive has collapsed from 79% in 2015 to to just 56% in 2024. Across the industry, drivers say they actually want their cars to be dumber or at least simpler, more reliable and more intuitive. NEIL Automakers spent much of the last few decades laying on the tech, stuffing things like night vision, ambient seasonal lighting, and augmented reality windshields. But drivers are saying it's just too much. Man, give me my knobs and dials back.
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And the number one thing is actually the door handle. So Tesla pioneered the concept of the electric door handle to, because of course, we had to reinvent the door handle. It wasn't just, it was too simple, just, you know, the traditional door handle. Complaints to the U.S. national Highway Traffic Safety Administration about doors across all car models, not just including Tesla, jumped 65% in 2024 from the year prior. And a separate report from J.D. power said that owners of battery electric vehicles, so electric vehicles reported that door handles being too difficult to use as a. At a rate of 3.1 problems per 100 vehicles, which was up from 0.2 in 2020. So it basically wasn't an issue in 2020. Now it is, is a serious issue and often the top issue for people. There have been numerous reports to safety regulators saying that I've been trying to get into my car, or more dangerously, I've been trying to get out of my car in certain situations and I can't because when the battery dies, that also renders the door handles dead as well. So I can't leave my car when I need to. That's something that regulators are starting to.
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To just Have a door handle that doesn't work like a door handle anymore. Why would you ever need a battery powered door handle? Doesn't make any sense. The other thing that probably goes hand in hand with 1A is door handles. 1B is probably headlights. A study commissioned by the UK's Department of Transportation found that 97% of people surveyed were distracted by headlights from oncoming vehicles and 96% thought that headlights were too bright. That is something that we have seen evolve over time as we've moved from halogen bulbs to LED bulbs, from warmer light to colder blue light. It, it hurts your retinas, it blinds retinas. We, in low light situations, the bluer the light, the wider the light, if you will. It causes issues with how you can, you know, see. And if the big headlights are coming down the other side of the highway at you, literally, transportation officials are saying, look down and to the left so you don't get blinded by it. They're a lot more energy efficient and yet they're a lot more annoying as a driver on the outside of the car.
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I think from knobs and buttons shifting to touch screens, from door handles going from manual to electrification, and from these, these headlights going from halogens to LEDs, which are much brighter, we're, we're going to start to see some pushback, I think in 20, 26 or the next few years after that to create a more manual sense of what a car used to be. Because consumers are going to balk at this, not only because they find it less intuitive, but also because it drives a car. Prices price higher. And already cars are, you know, upwards of averaging $47,000 for a new car.
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I'm going to go Flintstones and just, you know, manual power, just get rid of absolutely everything. No more electricity at all. Let's just go manpower. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with more Neil's numbers right after this.
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The world's 1.4 billion Catholics got a new leader this year after the death of Pope Francis in April. But everyone, no matter their religion, was captivated by the spectacle that led to the election of the first American pontiff, Pope Leo the 14th French from Chicago. More than $40 million was wagered on prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi as the secretive Conclave got underway. And he would have made a killing if you bet on Robert Prevost, who would soon become Pope Leo. His odds hovered between just 1% and 2% before his election. A real underdog story. People also turned to an Oscar winning movie from 2024 to learn more about the process by which a Pope is elected. Streaming viewership for conclave jumped 283% the day after Pope Francis died. Another Pope movie, the Two Popes from 2019 saw a 417% spike. Overall, the conclave did not last long with the Cardinals requiring just 33 hours and four ballots to send up the white smoke instantly making Prevost the most famous White Sox fan in the world.
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I think the funniest understory of all this is that the cardinals themselves were watching Conclave as well because they didn't wanted guidance on how to actually carry out a conclave in a real life. That's because the majority of them were appointed by Pope Francis and haven't been around long enough to know how it all works. So how funny is it that they're like thank goodness this movie just came out with a very, you know, intricate and pretty by all accounts a fairly accurate representation of what actually goes down. The Cardinals themselves were just sitting down, turned on the tv, going okay, so that's how I'm supposed to vote.
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And everything was coming up Vatican City this year in terms of Neil's numbers. There was this viral post on LinkedIn that talked about the country with the most CFA chart hold charter holders and Bloomberg terminals per capita CFA charterholder is someone who is a certified financial advisor is just considered more of an expert in all things portfolio management and investment management. Well, with four CFA charter holders, according to Bloomberg, the Vatican has the most CFA charter holders per capita in the entire world. Of course it is a very small country, but it is number one with four CFA charter holders the next largest is the Cayman Islands. And then it also is number one, the Vatican. In two other finance metrics, 12% of the total population Vatican City work in finance. That's more than Luxembourg's 10% in second place. And the Vatican also has the most Bloomberg terminals per capita of any country with 17 for 882 people, more than four times as many as Luxembourg, which comes in second place.
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It makes sense. The Vatican has a very sophisticated asset management operation. The Catholic Church brings in a lot of money, and so they have a lot of money to manage. But also banking and accounting as we know it emerged from Renaissance era people banking. The papacy needed financial networks to manage its revenue. So basically everything that we know about modern finance today had its origins a little bit in this neck of the woods. So there were so many memes around this too. I remember when this stat came out where people were generated images of, you know, cardinals sitting at terminals saying, this is who you're trading against. Like, good luck. They literally have God on their side. So a very interesting. I mean, just the Pope in general has been a very fertile news cycle, especially for Neil's numbers. The other thing that I'm remembering too is remember, Topps is selling Pope baseball cards because the Pope is a very big baseball fan. You know, I mean, you already mentioned that he is a Chicago White Sox fan. So his trading cards outperforming like LeBron James and Victor Wembanyama rookie cards at this point. Because he's the Pope. I mean, come on, how are you going to trade again?
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He's an American.
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He's an American Pope at that.
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Yeah, it was a lot of Pope mania this year. Okay, now let's relive some Neil's numbers from the year that are just plain fun facts. Perfect for breaking the awkward silence during a dinner party or a Zoom meeting. First up, I didn't believe this one at first, but it turned out to be true. There are only two escalators in the great state of Wyoming, both at banks in Casper. There used to be a third at the JCPenney Building in Cheyenne, but that building was renovated and the escalator was removed. And that speaks to why there are hardly any escalators in Wyoming at all. There are barely any malls. There are only three shopping malls in Wyoming. Frontier Mall in Cheyenne, East Ride Mall in Casper, and White Mountain Mall in Rock Springs. And none of them has an escalator. Another place you might find an escalator is a stately office building, but there aren't many of those. In Wyoming either. In fact, the tallest building in the state is the Wyoming Financial center, which towers 11 stories into the air.
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There's just not a lot of people in general in wyoming. I mean, 583,000 people for two escalators. It's kind of like the Pope or the Vatican stat that you just mentioned. Per capita rates go crazy when you don't have a lot of, you know, people. The function of escalators in architecture, though, also doesn't jive very well with what's going on with Wyoming. They're kind of middles of the road. Are considered that in architecture because installing and maintaining escalators is less expensive than an elevator, but obviously a lot more expensive than just stairs. So typically, you need a building with a very high occupancy rate. You need a lot of foot traffic to justify the cost. Wyoming has none of the above, Hence the crazy fact that there's only two escalators. Okay, hold on to your bellies for this next fun number. Do you know which restaurant chain that makes the most money per location in America? It's not Chick Fil A, a Steakhouse, or even Nobu. It's Din Thai Fung. Yes, the dumpling shop obliterates all challengers when it comes to an average unit volume, bringing in over $27 million per restaurant, nearly double its next closest competitor. For comparison, one Din Tai Fung makes as much as two Cheesecake Factories, almost as much as four Chick Fil A's, and about the same as seven Mc McDonald's. The average Din Typhoon location would rank as the 15th largest standalone restaurant in America. Neal, these things absolutely rip according to.
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A restaurant business journal, a restaurant needs to do three things to generate unit volumes of what Din Tai Fung is doing. It's got to be big. It's got to have a lot of real estate, so you can fit a lot of people in there. You have to have customers spending a decent amount of money. Their average check size has to be high, and it has to be busy. So it has to be packed from the time it opens till the time it closed. Dentai Fung checks all three of those boxes. Its check averages are about $45 per person, which is interesting because the individual dishes rarely go above $20. You just kind of order a lot of them because there's so much good stuff. You have to have this type of soup dumpling, this type of wonton, this type of salad. And so all of these things are conspiring to create this astronomical number where each. Where each restaurant brings in 27 million, which is kind of insane to think about. They're also very strategically paced. A lot of them are on west coast, which has a larger Asian American population. And they're in Disneyland in California. And then in New York City, where there's been a huge heralded opening over the past year, was in Times Square. When you're talking about foot traffic, there is no other.
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I remember when you found this number and you quiz me, you're like, all right, what do you think the largest restaurant chain is? And I just always thought it was Chick Fil A. Like, I thought it stood head and shoulders above everything, but, you know, didn't. Typhoon is lapping chick fil a 4 times as much as a normal Chick Fil A. So it is just fascinating how one Asian sit down chains are also having a little bit of a moment right now. Others on the list did include Nobu. Benihana was a little further behind at 6.4, $6 million. But you kind of see these Asian concepts gaining steam right now and you just have this unmatchable throughput, this unmatchable, you know, size and just an awesome menu.
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Well, we can put some respect on Chick Fil A's name though, because when you're looking just at American fast food chains, Chick Fil A does do the most sales. Average sales per location, 7.5 million. It's not 24, but it is 7.5. And then you get raising canes in and out. Burger at Whataburger and then McDonald's, Chipotle Cava, Zaxby's are all the way down the list, if you like those places. Finally, this was a number that seemed to scratch an itch. For the first time ever, mosquitoes were found on Iceland, which was one of the only places in the world they had not been discovered before. The other is Antarctica. An entomologist confirmed the sightings of three mosquitoes reported by a citizen scientist in October who wrote on Facebook, at dusk, I caught sight of a strange fly. I immediately suspected what was going on and quickly collected the fly. It was a female. And Iceland will never be the same again. However, people who study mosquitoes said it was only a matter of time until the biting bug showed up on Iceland, which, despite being cold, has plenty of marshes and ponds, perfect breeding habitats for mosquitoes. And while the Arctic region is heating up, up at four times the rate of the rest of the globe, scientists said it was still too early to link the mosquito sightings to global warming. After all, they're found on many of Iceland's frigid neighbors, like Norway and Greenland. So it was just a matter of time before they made the leap to Bjork's birthplace.
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This is one of those numbers that stick in your head like a mosquito. I remember talking to my mom, and she's like, for whatever reason, I will always remember the mosquito in Iceland story because it just feels so in organic. Like, it doesn't feel like a bug that I have in Florida should be in a place like Iceland. But a lot of scientists say, hey, we are entering the age of the mosquito right now. One of the few beneficiaries of a warming planet is a mosquito because they flourish in heat and humidity. So, yes, it was only a matter of time. If we see a mosquito on Antarctica, though, that's when you get.
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That's when we go up to the.
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Moon or Mars beckoning at that point. But yes, hall of fame. Neil's number right there. Okay.
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Okay. That is all the time we have. What a year for Neil's numbers. Thank you so much for listening. And, Toby, your commentary is also a key part of what makes Neil's numbers successful. So I want to thank you for that and thank you for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful rest of your day. If you want to get in touch, send a note to Morning Brew daily at Morning Broadcom or DM us on Instagram @me Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our executive producer. Raymond Lu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia La Lake. Hair makeup is riding the escalators in Wyoming. It's not taking them that long. Devin Emery is our president, and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
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Great show. Right, Neil? Let's run it back tomorrow.