← Morning Brew Daily
Morning Brew Daily
OpenAI Levels Up to GPT-5 & ‘Buffett Premium’ Gone for Berkshire?
00:33:40
GPT-5 is here & the decline of Berkshire Hathaway?
Loading summary
Transcript73 lines
- [00:01]
Toby Howell
This ad is brought to you by U.S. bancorp Investments, an affiliate of U.S.
- [00:04]
Neal Freyman
Bank, which brings personalized investment strategies to.
- [00:07]
Toby Howell
You with as little as $25,000 in investable assets. If you think financial advisors are out.
- [00:12]
Neal Freyman
Of your price range, think again.
- [00:14]
Toby Howell
You don't need a superyacht, helipad or.
- [00:16]
Neal Freyman
Mansion to work with a financial advisor. If you're looking to supplement the investments.
- [00:20]
Toby Howell
You already have, rollover a 401k or.
- [00:22]
Neal Freyman
Figure out what to do with an.
- [00:23]
Toby Howell
Inheritance, a virtual financial advisor is here to help.
- [00:26]
Neal Freyman
Go to usbank.com invest to get started.
- [00:28]
Toby Howell
Investments are not FDIC insured, may lose.
- [00:31]
Neal Freyman
Value and are bank guaranteed Good Morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.
- [00:38]
Toby Howell
And I'm Toby Howell.
- [00:39]
Neal Freyman
Today you'll want a banana for breakfast after hearing these stats on ultra processed foods.
- [00:44]
Toby Howell
Then smarter, faster, more human like OpenAI launched GPT5 yesterday. It's Friday, August 8th. Let's ride.
- [01:00]
Neal Freyman
Good morning. Happy Friday. Just a bizarre cornucopia of movies in theaters this weekend. Weapons starring Josh Brolin arrives as one of the most hyped horror movies in a minute, notching a 97% rating on rotten tomatoes. Ice Cube's War of the Worlds is the complete opposite, with a 4% rating on the Tomatometer. It's in its second week. And then there's Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis reprising their roles in the Freaky Friday sequel, Freakier Friday. I love this take from Jeopardy. Champ Amy Schneider. On X she goes Freakier Friday. Terrible title. The same thing happened to them once before, which makes this Friday inherently less freaky than the first one.
- [01:39]
Toby Howell
That's the most Jeopardy. Champion review of a movie I've ever seen. But it got me thinking. Neil, what's the proper order to watch these in? I think you got to do a triple feature. The question is, where do you put War of the Worlds? And I think you sandwich it. Start with Freakier Friday, some good nostalgia. I loved the first one. Then toss on War of the Worlds. And then when your stamina is waning, bring in weapons to get the blood pumping again. Quite the assortment though. Quite the cornucopia of movies.
- [02:06]
Neal Freyman
Yeah, like putting where the world's in the middle because that's probably when I have to go to the bathroom. So I probably won't miss seeing any minute of that movie.
- [02:13]
Toby Howell
And the film's tagline, and I don't know if this is self aware or not is it's worse than you think in in relation to the actual content the movie. But I do think they either played themselves or someone had a little bit of fun poking fun at the fact that this is the worst movie of all time.
- [02:30]
Neal Freyman
Now a word from our sponsor LinkedIn ads. I have a note prepared from our HR manager.
- [02:35]
Toby Howell
Hi again Kate.
- [02:36]
Neal Freyman
Toby did not start it nor do I care who started it. I am done with it. Stop wasting my time with this man.
- [02:43]
Toby Howell
Kate is so wise. She knows how harmful wasting time is. Just just like LinkedIn ads.
- [02:47]
Neal Freyman
LinkedIn ads can help you stop wasting time too. Plus stop wasting money, resources and effort like 71% of B2B ads and find the right audience for your brand.
- [02:57]
Toby Howell
They've got over 130 million decision makers and more than 10 million C suite execs aka the people you need for your business on their platform, target by job title, industry company and more.
- [03:07]
Neal Freyman
So try LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn will even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it for yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com/MBD. That's LinkedIn.com/MBD. Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads.
- [03:22]
Toby Howell
Ricky Bobby's father once said, if he ain't first, you're last. Might be a slightly reductive worldview, but it's essentially the logic people were applying to Open Air. Latest model release GPT5 was this the moment and the model where OpenAI was going to distance itself from the pack and push us closer to artificial general intelligence? Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, certainly thinks they moved the needle. Telling journalists GPT5 is like having a team of PhD level experts in your pocket. He and his team thinks they created something smarter, faster and more human like across a variety of metrics. It's a unified AI model, which means it combines the reasoning abilities of OpenAI's previous series of models with the fast responses of its GPT series. Right now, testing benchmarks show that GPT5 goes toe to toe with Frontier models from XAI and Anthropic scored highest on a GitHub coding task and Ace health benchmarks with just a 1.6% hallucination rate, far lower than previous models. However, it's not best in class. Across the board it slightly trails Grok 4 on multi domain reasoning and underperforms Claude Opus in some web navigation tasks. But to get a feel for how good this new model actually is, Neil and I wanted to call in some backup. We brought in Brian McCullough, host of another morning brew show called Tech Brew Ride Home to break down GPT5. Brian, is this a dramatic leap for AI models, would it make Ricky Bobby's dad proud?
- [04:51]
Brian McCullough
Dramatic leap would probably be overselling it. What we know is that it's good that if you're an average user, you're going to be impressed with it being more accurate. They apparently made great strides in terms of the hallucinations and things like that. It's probably the state of the art right now overall. But if people were expecting sort of the step change that we saw from GPT 3 to 4, I don't think this is it.
- [05:20]
Toby Howell
I was reading this newsletter from Nathan Lambert and he said the people discussing this release on Twitter will be disappointed in a first reaction, but 99% of people using Chat CBT are going to be so happy about the upgrade. Why is there that dichotomy there?
- [05:35]
Brian McCullough
Well, like anything else, it's all about the hype of stuff versus there's people that desperately want it to be the best and people that are desperately angry. So like anything else, there's going to be a back and forth to it. But what I think we're going to see is that once all of the arguing and the hype dies down, it's probably going to be great for OpenAI in the sense that they are getting very aggressive about the pricing, like extremely aggressive. So it is a step change in terms of pricing. So tons of developers, tons of people that are making AI companies and AI tools are probably going to do more. So we might, six months from now look back on this and say, yes, it was important because it did lead to a new flowering of AI stuff, but it didn't give us God level intelligence.
- [06:25]
Neal Freyman
And OpenAI kind of needs that aggressive pricing because they need to start making money. They are, their sales are through the roof. I mean, they just hit $10 billion in annualized revenue. They're raising a secondary stock sale at a value of $500 billion, which, correct me if I'm wrong, but no US private startup has ever reached anything of that valuation. It would leapfrog Space X as the most valuable startup ever in the history of the United States. But they are losing a lot of money. We know that training and running an AI business is extremely expensive, from the talent to the data centers to the energy requirements. So OpenAI has to start making money to start putting some serious business heft behind its, you know, behind its technological achievements.
- [07:14]
Toby Howell
And one thing that we've talked about when it comes to these models is that whether the scaling loss still holds. Altman did say absolutely they do. But he did say that the path to scaling These models is more computing powder. It's going to take an eye watering amount of compute, he admitted, but we intend to continue doing it. So they're just going to keep plowing money into this thing?
- [07:33]
Brian McCullough
Yes. And this does open the debate even wider about have we reached sort of a ceiling with the current technology? Will it require some new sort of paradigm, some new advance in the technology to get us to a phase shift that people were expecting? It's possible that throwing money at it isn't going to work. I mean, they can keep scaling, but they're running out of data. They can do synthetic data, but even that might affect accuracy and things like that. One of the things that Sam said about true AGI yesterday also was that he believes that true AGI should learn on its own. And obviously this is not there yet, unless they're keeping something still under wraps.
- [08:15]
Toby Howell
And then one thing that you did mention is that maybe the strides in health care specifically was interesting in this model. What was it about kind of Health and GPT5 that piqued your interest?
- [08:27]
Brian McCullough
So they leaned heavily into people using GPT5 to answer health questions. And that says to me that they've been looking at how people have been using it and that apparently is what people are using it a lot for. So it's interesting to me that that is sort of in the same way that, remember when the Apple watch came out and Apple had to find what it was for? Oh, it's really for a health tracker. Right. So it's interesting that they chose that because that would be something that my mom would be like, okay, that's what I use it for. But it does also then open them up to potential trouble because you can imagine the headlines as soon as somebody gets bad advice or God forbid, gets hurt asking for advice and things like that. I think it's a play by them to provide a use case that normal people can understand. But also that is kind of a mundane thing. It's not going to make you a million dollars, beat the stock market or anything like that, but it maybe will tell you what that bump is on, on your hand.
- [09:24]
Neal Freyman
Let's talk about some other changes that people might see when they log into chatbots today after the GPT T5 update. One of them is that OpenAI is giving chat CBT different personalities. Now, if you're kind of bored with the old responses that you're getting, you can choose between four different personalities for between cynic, robot, listener and nerd. And then another interesting development is that they're doing this thing called safe completion. So if you asked GPT previously to chat CBT to do something that may be dangerous, like they gave the example how much energy is needed to ignite some specific material, who knows what you're asking that for? Maybe it's for some bomb plot or you're just a person in a lab doing a science experiment. ChatGPT previously was trained not to give you an answer to that question. Now with safe completions, it will give you an answer to that, but in a very broad, vague way. That is another, as another feature that Sam Altman touted yesterday.
- [10:26]
Toby Howell
And then they also just unified all the models that you used to have. You know, oh, three, the reasoning model used to have 4, 040 many. Like there was all these different models that you could toggle between to answer one question versus another, but now it just says GPT5 for most. How do you think that flattening is going to be received by customers?
- [10:44]
Brian McCullough
I actually wouldn't be surprised if people don't like it because it's sort of like you're picking the tool for the job that you want to do. Apparently behind the scenes it is still switching. There's just some sort of like a routing mechanism. So you can still say they pointed out that if you want to code, tell it you're coding and if you want health answers, tell it that. So you still can direct it in the way that you want, but taking away sort of like the knobs and dials. I feel like some people might, might not like that.
- [11:16]
Neal Freyman
Where are we broadly in the air race right now? We know Mark Zuckerberg is paying 24 year olds $250 million. We know that Elon Musk is investing a lot into his Project X. There's Anthropic, which is also worth something like $60 billion. And OpenAI is still maybe the leaderboard, the king in the clubhouse right now. But where do we stand after chachi or after GPT5 has been rolled out and the dust has settled?
- [11:44]
Brian McCullough
I think this takes off the table, the outside chance. You know, some people were concerned someone's going to make a model that can do everything and will be the only business because you won't need anything else. Right. I think this takes that off the table, at least for the foreseeable future. Again, unless there's some technological breakthrough. So then what we're facing is it's a commodity race because essentially, okay, maybe Claude's better at code, maybe Grok is better at images or something, but it's not. Again, Generationally different. So all of these companies are going to continue to spend money, but racing against the commoditization which brings everything to a lower level, especially the cost as OpenAI is currently doing. Now all this does is say that there's no clear winner. OpenAI's at the lead right now. They've been at the lead, but it's not like they're head and shoulders above everybody else.
- [12:36]
Toby Howell
Brian, thanks for stopping by and giving us the lowdown on GPT5. Where can our listeners find your show?
- [12:43]
Brian McCullough
Wherever you get your podcasts, Try Morning Brew daily in the morning and Tech Brew Ride home in the afternoons.
- [12:48]
Toby Howell
I like that. Thanks for the plug and thanks for stopping by.
- [12:51]
Neal Freyman
Brian let's shift from the tech world into food and if you are what you eat, then we Americans are hella Processed A new report from the CDC found that the majority of the calories Americans eat come from ultra processed foods. Foods like sandwiches, baked goods and sweet beverages associated with higher health risks. But there is a silver lining. That share is getting smaller over time. Let's dig into the numbers. The study conducted between August 2021 and August 2023 found that ultra processed foods account for 55% of the calories Americans aged one and up consume. And that may sound like a lot, but we've actually been eating healthier over time. For adults, total calories from ultra processed foods has declined from 56% over a decade ago to 53% in the most recent data. For kids, it fell from nearly 66% seven years ago to 62% now. The trend line could go even lower with processed foods critic RFK Jr. In charge of the nation's health system. The trend line could go even lower with processed foods critic RFK Jr. In charge of the United States health system. Earlier this year, he said, we are poisoning ourselves and it's coming principally from these ultra processed foods. Expect greater pressure on food companies to trim their ingredient lists because one of the reasons we buy so much processed food is it's often the only thing you can buy or at least afford to. A study published in 2023 found that 73% of the US food supply is ultra processed, often at lower prices than whole foods. Toby, help us process this study.
- [14:25]
Toby Howell
I'm still processing the fact that sandwiches are considered ultra processed because I eat a lot of those so that is tough for me to stomach. There isn't actually a set definition for ultra processed food. A good rule of thumb is it usually comes from ingredients that you don't normally find in your kitchen at Home stuff like high fructose corn syrup or emulsifiers. A couple of scientists in Brazil did try to determine a food's level of processing. They have a scale ranging from unprocessed to minimally processed to processed ingredients, then processed foods and ultra processed foods on the bottom. Unprocessed stuff, stuff like fruits and veggies. Then processed foods are a combination of whole foods. So fruits and vegetables with a processed ingredient. So stuff like if you had a bread that was made from wheat flour, water and salt and yeast, that is actually a processed food, which again, I thought bread was like relatively natural and healthy. Then if you bring in emulsifiers, you bring in preservatives to play. That's when you get into the ultra processed category. But yeah, I was kind of going through my own diet and looking at this chart about what qualifies as what, and I was like, I'm not really living in the unprocessed, minimally processed world, which I think a lot of people would probably be surprised about how much of these foods they're consuming.
- [15:38]
Neal Freyman
Well, it's hard to, don't, don't, you know, knock yourself. I mean, you go into a grocery store. I went into a grocery store last night after researching all of this, and I was like, well, can I buy anything outside of the produce aisle that is not considered ultra processed? And the answer is no. So that's why I do think after this study comes out, there will be increased pressure as there has been across the board on food companies to figure something out and get all of these emulsifiers, you know, or other ways of creating ultra processed foods out of their, out of their food.
- [16:09]
Toby Howell
I do think that income is a big part of the factor here because adults with higher family incomes consume a lower percentage of calories from ultra processed foods. That being said, even adults with incomes of 350% of a federal poverty level still consume more than half of their calories from ultra processed foods. Because consumers are looking for something that's cheap, something that's convenient and healthy. It's hard to get all three. So usually cheap convenient wins out because people are financially strained and also short for time.
- [16:39]
Neal Freyman
Researchers are still trying to figure out the exact ways that ultra processed foods interact with our bodies and what their associated health risks are. But there was new research out just this week that said you can lose more weight by avoiding ultra processed foods. It was the first type of study, first study of its kind. They did this trial where they had people go on different diets, one with a lot of ultra processed foods and others with minimally processed foods. And participants lost twice as much weight when they followed diets made up of minimally processed foods like pasta, chicken, fruits and veggies, as they did with ultra processed foods, which are like those ready to eat frozen meals, breakfast cereals, protein bars and shakes. And the reason they think this is the case is that ultra processed foods pack so many calories in a small bite, they're extremely calorie dense, whereas minimally processed foods are the opposite. So that's beginning. That's just a beginning of our understanding of how ultra processed foods interact with weight loss.
- [17:42]
Toby Howell
All I know is after this show I'm eating a full head of broccoli just to cleanse the system. I got to get on the whole foods grind. All right, let's take a quick break. And after that we got Stock of the Week Dog the Week.
- [17:55]
Neal Freyman
This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fixed the problem, so why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply.
- [18:25]
Toby Howell
Sometimes the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people.
- [18:29]
Neal Freyman
Tell me about it. I got targeted with ads for cross functional backend channelized SaaS architect when I only know what one of those words mean.
- [18:38]
Toby Howell
Yep, that's the problem with a lot of ad platforms. When you want to actually reach the right professionals though, go with LinkedIn ads.
- [18:45]
Neal Freyman
LinkedIn's got a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers all in one place.
- [18:51]
Toby Howell
And the targeting next level. You can get super specific on LinkedIn ads, down to job title, industry seniority, and even specific skills.
- [18:59]
Neal Freyman
Don't keep wasting your budget on the wrong audience. Reach the right people on LinkedIn.
- [19:03]
Toby Howell
LinkedIn will even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign, so you can try it yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com/MBD. That's LinkedIn.com B D. Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads.
- [19:17]
Neal Freyman
Welcome to Stock of the Week Dog of the Week, the segment where Toby and I pick one stock that's looking forward to a summer Friday and another that's preparing a deck for a 4pm meeting. I won the pre show Mahjong game, so I get to go first. And my Stock of the Week is the dating app company Match Group. Because while I'm not exactly crushing it on Hinge, Hinge is crushing it. That's an exact quote from CEO Spencer Raskoff, who noted Hinge's revenue grew 25% from the year before and paying users jumped 18%. Match Group stock was among the top performers on Wednesday, jumping more than 10% on the heels of the report. Hinge's success comes as the rest of the dating app industry is getting stood up by users and investors. Single people are frustrated and fatigued with swiping, ditching apps for this outlandish idea of trying to meet somebody in person. Just look at Bumble, which said this week that revenue fell 8% year over year, causing its stock to plunge more than 18% yesterday. But hinges growth shows that it may not be wise to write off dating apps just yet. Roskoff said that its success should put to rest any doubts about whether the online dating category is out of favor among users, and he wants to use Hinge as a blueprint for the other major app in Matches portfolio, Tinder. Tinder is still getting ghosted with its revenue dropping 4% last quarter compared to Hinge's 25% growth. But Roskoff said the team has learned a lot from Hinge's rebound that they'll apply to Tinder, which is now laser focused on the unique dating habits of Gen Z. Toby it's honestly shocking to see any dating app doing well in this environment.
- [20:48]
Toby Howell
Yeah, a little bit of a narrative violation here because all we've heard about is how young people are spurning dating apps. They don't like it, that's not how they want to meet people. And yet here Hinge comes along saying that they're focusing more on thoughtful, high quality responses, are trying to make people have better first impressions to lead to, you know, lasting love. And then they also, of course, introduce AI into their reasoning for why this is performing better. They say they have an AI powered core discovery algorithm that has driven a 15% increase in matches in contact exchanges since launching in March. So they're definitely crafting a narrative here. And it does seem like AI has found its place in the dating market because remember, a lot of these companies tried to roll out features that would help you craft your profile or write your bio or edit your photos. And a lot of young people have said, actually, we don't necessarily like that. It seems like AI is better off behind the scenes, you know, saying, hey, this person is going to be great for Neil, it's going to increase his chances of a match here versus doing.
- [21:48]
Neal Freyman
Something so upfront and match group, like I said, is taking what's working at Hinge and moving it to Tinder, which has been a laggard compared to Hinge and Tinder is right now the team behind Tinder is really focused on Gen Z and college. They introduced this double dating feature and they said it's been a huge hit. 90% of this double dating features users are under the age of 30. They're introducing a college mode for students looking to date within their schools. So they're transforming Tinder from this hookup app to be an app for that that really deals with the the very distinct preferences of dating when it comes to Gen Z. And that is, they say more casual, like the double date thing. They don't want to have this very formalized process around it. They just want to say, hey, maybe I can swipe in, why don't you come hang out with my friends and we'll just get to know each other that way.
- [22:39]
Toby Howell
Our dog of the week might be a first time entrant because Berkshire Hathaway doesn't end up on these lists very often. But sure enough, Berkshire Hathaway's Class A shares have fallen 14% since the beginning of May, way underperforming the broader market's 11% gain. Now, the beginning of May is a significant date because that was the last trading day before a 94 year old Warren Buffett said he was handing over the reins of his conglomerate to his lieutenant Greg Abel. Suddenly good old boring Berkshire, which has outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 5 million percent under Bucke Buffett's six decade tenure, has some question marks around it. Berkshire has often traded with a so called Buffett premium attached to it. Its price to book ratio, which compares its market cap to the actual underlying business assets, rose to nearly 1.8 earlier this year, the highest since October 2008. However, investors are not so sure that the Buffett premium will seamlessly transfer over into the able premium. Still, Neil, it's weird to see this company with a hangover. This is one of the biggest deltas between Berkshire Hathaway and the S&P 500 over a three month period since 1990, beaten only during the pandemic. An odd time to be a stockholder in a company that does not often underperform.
- [23:52]
Neal Freyman
Right now the stock market is in risk on Mode. Tech companies like Palantir and Crypto is surging. Everyone is kind of throwing their bets into the tech industry and what Does Berkshire Hathaway not do well? Is tech? I mean, Apple is really its only holding in the tech industry. Warren Buffett has shied away from tech for the most of her most of his career because he says he just doesn't understand it. So when you see the stock market doing well in the NASDAQ 100, doing well, which has a lot of tech companies, that's usually a signal that Berkshire Hathaway is not doing well. And this happened back during another boom time in tech, which was 1999 and early 2000 during the dot com bubble. During 1999, NASDAQ 100 more than doubled. At the same time, Berkshire Hathaway stock was down nearly 50%. So we're seeing something similar now. But guess what happened the next year? The situation reversed. The Nasdaq bubble burst and it fell more than 60% and then Berkshire surged 70%. So Berkshire Hathaway shareholders are probably hoping that some that's the same trend that happened more than 25 years ago will happen here in 2026.
- [25:02]
Toby Howell
And I do think maybe some investors got over their skis when it comes to buying Berkshire in the early months of this year because as worries around tariffs started to build, a lot of people were rotating into the safety of Berkshire Hathaway. And so it hit an all time high earlier this year. Buffett himself probably thinks his own company is overvalued. He oversees the company's share repurchasing program and he stopped buying Berkshire Hathaway shares back of May of last year. So he only purchases shares when he believes the price is below Berkshire's intrinsic value. So he, if he, the man himself thinks shares are overvalued, then shares probably are getting a little frothier. So taking a couple of chips off the table now, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Yesterday, President Trump demanded the CEO of Intel Lip Bhutan, resign immediately over his ties to China. Trump called Tan highly conflicted and said there is no other solution to this problem other than for him to resign. Trump's post on True Social follows calls from Senator Tom Cotton to investigate Tan's ties to China, specifically in reference to Cadence Design Systems, a company Tan that led for more than 10 years, who was recently found guilty of violating U.S. export controls by selling design info to a military university in China. Intel is on the receiving end of $8 billion under the 2022 Chips act to build new factories. But a leadership change now would pile on even more pressure on the company. Neil this marks another setback for the struggling chip maker who installed Tan in the top roll last year, hoping he could close the gap between intel and competitors like TSMC and Nvidia when it comes to designing and producing chips.
- [26:38]
Neal Freyman
Yeah, the company is standing behind Tan. They issued a statement saying that we are committed to national security. And then Tan himself wrote a memo to employees. He said, there's a lot of misinformation circulating about my past roles. I want to be absolutely clear. Over 40 plus years in the industry, I built relationships around the world and across our diverse ecosystem. And I've always operated with the highest legal and ethical standards. The Wall Street Journal also came out with a report yesterday saying that this trouble that Trump has zeroed in on is has been festering at intel ever since Tan came aboard. When his when he was announced to replace Pat Gelsinger, the shares shot up over 13%. So investors were hyped, but almost immediately there were disagreements between him and the board chair about whether they would divest from their manufacturing. I mean, there's so many problems with intel and it doesn't look like Tan and the board were completely on the same page here. And that's why its market cap is just down to $89 billion compared to a rival. It's not really a rival. It's like when we were at Maryland and we thought our rival was Duke. Nvidia is worth $4.4 trillion.
- [27:48]
Toby Howell
That's very good self awareness there. Let's move on. It's time to start using basis points more in casual conversation. Because an executive order signed by Trump yesterday has given Main street access to assets only Wall street previously got to play with. The order makes it easier for Americans to invest their retirement savings in assets that lie outside of public markets. Stuff only your roommate who wears a vest in the middle of summer talks about private equity deals, cryptocurrencies and private real estate. It's a big win for firms who have long sought access to the trillions of dollars sitting in for a 1k accounts. It is still early days in. The order directs federal agencies to just see what regulatory changes actually need to happen to expand private market access to 401ks. But Neal, it sets the stage for a big shift where mom and pop get access to the same deals as Apollo and Blackstone.
- [28:35]
Neal Freyman
A lot of supporters of this, a lot of critics of this. The supporters are the private equity companies, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, who get access now to about $8.7 trillion in 401 s alone. That is a lot, a lot of money and it is part of their broader shift of going from Wall street to Main Street. We've talked a lot about these private equity companies trying to give you access to private startups like OpenAI and Space X. They there's a huge customer base out there that they haven't tapped, and they're pitching it as a way to diversify your portfolio. There are a number of critics who say there's a reason that 401ks are pretty much in only in stocks and bonds, and that these private equity investments are riskier, they are more costly, and they're less liquid, and that the reason that this status quo has been in place is that it's been good for people stashing their money in retirement accounts because it provides stable returns. Maybe not eye popping, but stable. And that's kind of what you want for your retirement as you say goodbye to your job and move to a house near a golf course. Finally, theater kids everywhere are celebrating a special anniversary this week. It's been 10 years since Hamilton premiered on Broadway. On August 6, 2015, creator Lin Manuel Miranda and his diverse crew of rapping founding fathers hit the Broadway stage for the first time, spawning a commercial and cultural juggernaut that has few parallels in modern history. The show has sold more than 4 million tickets and earned more than $1 billion, not including tours, international productions or movie. On Disney plus in 2020, it won 11 Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and surely led to a boom in sales for the Ron Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton. It was based on another legacy Hamilton left behind, normalizing astronomical ticket prices for Broadway. At one point, Hamilton raised prices to $849, a record at the time, paving the way for $975 tickets for Bruce Springsteen in 2017 and $920 tickets for Othello this spring. Ten years down for Hamilton, Toby, and probably many, many more to go.
- [30:43]
Toby Howell
I mean, I was not quite in New York or old enough to go buy tickets to a Broadway show when Hamilton was at its absolute cultural zenith. That being said, I do remember sitting in my AP US History class, my teacher Bernie Andelli put on Hamilton rapping in front of Obama at the White House. He was actually working on a Hamilton play himself, so he felt like he got upstaged by Lin Manuel Miranda. But it did just turn into this absolute juggernaut. Change blew the ceiling off of ticket prices, turned, you know, a musical into a pop culture sensation for the first time, maybe ever. And it's led to a lot of legacies all the way down from politics to theater to, you know, ticket prices itself. It's been an interesting second act of Lin Manuel's Miranda's career. He really hasn't done much more on Broadway. He's kind of cozied up to Disney a little bit and just started pumping out hits for Encanto, for Moana, stuff like that. We haven't gotten another moment like that, really. But what a time to be a theater kid because you were on top of the world during Hamilton's rise.
- [31:49]
Neal Freyman
And I also want to call out one person. His name is Thane Jasperson. He has been in Hamilton for the last 10 years. Since the beginning. He's the only remaining cast member. He is a member of the ensemble. He pops up briefly as the British loyalist Samuel Seabury. But this dude has been in Hamilton every production for the last 10 years, and he says he's still having a great time.
- [32:13]
Toby Howell
Do you think he could just do the whole show himself at this point? I mean, that is a lot of shows committed to memory.
- [32:18]
Neal Freyman
All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Friday and an even better weekend.
- [32:24]
Toby Howell
Thank you.
- [32:24]
Neal Freyman
If you have any thoughts or feedback on today's show, send a note to Morning Brew daily at Morning Broadcom. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our executive producer. Raymond Lu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is never in the room where it happens. Sorry. Devin Emery is our president and our shows are production of Morning Brew.
- [32:44]
Toby Howell
Great show today, Neil. I wish you all well.