Bud Light Out as Top US Beer? & How The Debt Ceiling Deal Impacts You

0:00Stocks? ETFs? Or what about mutual funds? Choosing your investments is easier with Fidelity. Our step-by-step experience can help you pick out the right investments for you. Plus, with recurring investments, you can decide how much and how often to invest. Lastly, there's 24-7 help if and when you need it. To find your next investment, head to fidelity.com slash trading. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC. Member NYSC SIPC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I am Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's show, we will discuss the four key things you need to know about the debt ceiling deal that was passed by the house last night.

0:39And New Zealand's National Airline wants to know how much you weigh before boarding a flight. Then we will dive into a story about a nonprofit that tried to replace all its workers with an AI chatbot before finishing up by talking about the Scripps National Spelling Bee Finals that are taking place tonight. This section might even include a little spelling quiz for my good friend Neil over here. Hope you've been studying. Neil, it's Thursday, June 1st. Let's ride.

1:13All right. I just want to give a huge shout out to everyone who listened to the podcast yesterday. We were kind of hoping that this new 7 a.m. start time would lead to a better listening experience for all of you guys. And holy moly, did you guys come through. Welcome to all the new people. We had our biggest download days ever, and we actually jumped up to number two on the business podcasting charts. Dave Ramsey, we're coming for it. I know. Gosh, maybe we should go to 6 a.m. We can take down Dave Ramsey. But, yeah, big thank you to everyone. Thanks to everyone who listened, and welcome to all the new people.

1:46Apparently, my five alarms set up generated a lot of debate, and I'm genuinely curious how else you would wake up at 4 a.m. I know. I'm a two-alarm guy. Oh, just fewer alarms? Yeah, I just get a little nervous when I see five all in a row. So I'm a two guy. Five gives me like this calming feeling. So anyway, people were talking about that. I know. Thank you to everyone. All right, Neil, let's get into our top story. It's June 1st, which is officially the first day of Pride Month. And boy, is there a lot of controversy surrounding the LGBTQ space and how businesses align themselves with it. So to start off with Bud Light is on the verge of losing its status as the number one beer in America.

2:29Sales ending the week of May 20th declined 26 % compared to the same week in 2022. And overall, since the controversy, Bud Light has seen sales declines of 17 % and 24 % in April and May, respectively. So what controversy am I referring to? Well, ever since Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on April 1st, the brand has been the target of boycotts from its core kind of conservative-leaning customers. And, Neil, I remember we talked about this when it first kind of started getting steam. And, you know, we saw Kid Rock kind of shooting cases of Bud Light with a rifle. And we didn't really give it too much time a day because we've seen these boycotts kind of gain a ton of publicity and get a bunch of airtime and then fizzle out before they can leave kind of a lasting business impact.

3:18But that doesn't seem to be the case with Bud Light. No, it feels like a broader push against woke corporations or what is considered woke corporations. But usually this Pride Month feels a little different because usually corporations are criticized by the left for doing what's known as rainbow capitalism. You know, they put a rainbow branding on everything. They sponsor these. It's like Pride Parade sponsored by Citigroup. And everyone's like, OK. But the point is that they were criticized on the left for saying this is like surface level solidarity with the LGBTQ community. But now there's been a ton of pushback on the right this year because they think corporations have sold out to, you know, what they call the woke mob.

4:01And companies response to that has been criticized by the left because they're acquiescing to conservative pushback. So now they're in this very delicate situation where they're getting hate from both. Yeah. Rocking a hard place for sure. I also want to take a moment to compare what is happening with Bud Light to what is happening with Chick-fil-A and Target. So both of these companies have also been kind of at the center of this conservative mail storm that we're talking about. They've received backlash from a small set of shoppers. Target, actually after receiving backlash from a small set of shoppers, Target started removing Pride-themed item from its shelves just before Pride Month kicked off.

4:38And Chick-fil-A, which is one of the more conservative— They're literally not open on Sunday. I know, leaning institutions in America and who has for years donated against LGBTQ charities also started receiving backlash because they hired a VP of diversity, equity and inclusion. So obviously there's a lot going on in this kind of conservatives applying pressure to brands using their wallets. But I think the difference between those three companies that I just mentioned is that Bud Light is the only one seeing just a true impact of sales. I mean, Target's stock price has taken a pretty substantial hit over the last few weeks.

5:17But I think it's because Bud Light just serves the most replaceable product. Like beer, I hate to say it, but beers kind of taste relatively the same. And we're seeing this in the data because even as Bud Light sales have kind of fallen over the past weeks, Miller Lite is up 20 % over the same period. Coors Lite is up 22 % over the same period. So they're basically absorbing all those sales from Bud Light. Yeah. This whole thing started with Ron DeSantis' war on Disney last year, and it's only ramped up. And yeah, the bud I think it's bud light was the main lightning rod recently and now what's happening to target Chick-fil-a that might be a small thing, but also it's happening at Kohl's which is selling some pride items It's everyone's calling like bud lighting and now there's actually we read this yesterday, which was super interesting there's a anti woke SPAC called Columbia Acquisition Corp.

6:16And it's an online marketplace for companies and what it calls the Patriot Economy. That company includes a section called Ditch Target 2.0. Yeah, I think it's very funny that, first of all, SPACs are back in the news. It's been a minute since we talked about those. Now, I think it's more just a capitalizing on the current, I don't know, topic de jure and calling it an anti-woke SPAC. Who knows how good this company actually is. And we'll see what their financials actually are, but it's definitely making headlines right now. It feels like it's capitalizing on this particular political moment. Speaking of politics, let's move on to the debt ceiling, which the circus is on mile 25 of its marathon.

6:59So it's almost over. Despite some detractors from longmakers yesterday, the House passed the agreement last night that would suspend the debt ceiling through 2025. It'll head to the Senate next where it should pass and then Biden will sign it into law and we won't have to hear about this again. Thank goodness for a few years. There are a bunch of important measures included in this deal that are not specifically debt ceiling related. So Toby and I are just going to run through those really quickly. So you know what those are. First of all, this if you wanted to reduce the deficit by, you know, that this whole thing is about reducing, you know, limiting government spending and having us not breach the debt ceiling all the time.

7:38But this is not really going to do much to that regard. The agreement would cut spending by$1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the CBO. That sounds like a lot, but it's really just a drop in the bucket. It means the federal debt, which is now 97 % of GDP, will rise to around 115 % of GDP in a decade instead of 119%. And that's because the largest spending areas of the government are just off limits. We're Social Security, Medicare, the military that accounted for 77 percent of last year's budgets. So if you we only put the lawmakers only focused on cutting spending in less than 15 percent of the overall budget, which is called non-defense discretionary spending.

8:21Crumbs. Crumbs. Yeah. So, I mean, some people say, you know, many, many Democrats will say like, yeah, we're not touching Social Security or Medicare. We would never do that. But so anyone who's billing this as sort of like restraining government spending is not correct. Yeah. OK, the next thing that you guys should know about is student loan payments are starting back up. So student loan repayments have been on hold since March of 2020, which has been costing the government roughly five billion a month in lost revenue. and this new debt agreement would require some 43 million Americans to resume those payments starting in September, which is slightly earlier than expected.

9:00I say slightly because the education secretary was ready to restart loan payments around the same time anyways, but this is a real tough blow if you're a normal person who likes to, you know, have money in your bank account. Some economists are estimating that restarting these loan payments could result in a 40 billion reduction in disposable income for households. And I quote from a former Federal Reserve economist, these aren't trivial payments, so it cannot be good for demand. So brutal, brutal blow for people who just like spending money, basically. Well, it's going to, it was going to happen no matter what, but there is this Biden's plan to freeze or to cancel up to$20 ,000 in student debt per borrower.

9:42That is separate from this. And that is being hurt. That was heard by the Supreme Court and they're expected to issue a ruling this month. So that'll be something really closely to watch. The next thing that we want to tell you about is this controversial 6.6 billion pipeline that is getting expedited over the concerns of environmental advocates. It's called the Mountain Valley Pipeline and it's going to carry natural gas across a thousand streams and wetlands from West Virginia to Virginia. How did this pass? This is seen, this is like politics at its finest. This is seen as a gift to Joe Manchin who's the Democratic senator from West Virginia and who's a big supporter of the pipeline, in exchange for his crucial vote last year for the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act.

10:27For some liberals, this is seen as another false promise by the Biden administration to rain in emissions. He already approved, remember, the Willow Oil Project last year in Alaska, which is one of the biggest oil projects on federal land ever. And this is just a little bit of politicking to get everyone on board. but environmental advocates are not happy about this pipeline. This is Biden scratching Manchin's back after Manchin scratched his. That's exactly right. Okay, the final thing that this deal addresses is that there's some changes to the food stamp program in the U.S. This program is known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, not to be confused with Snapchat.

11:08I love it. I know. It extends the work requirement from the top age of 49 currently to 54, But actually, in a strange turn of events, because Republicans actually wanted to pull back spending here, this deal results in more people being eligible to get food stamps because there's a ton of new exemptions for veterans or people experiencing homelessness. So in total, about 78 ,000 additional people would gain benefits per month on average rather than losing it. So just a crazy, again, that somehow we are increasing spending here on this program when a lot of people thought that there was going to be some cuts.

11:46Yeah. So some people say that Biden kind of steamrolled McCarthy, the House speaker, with this deal. But again, it doesn't seem like the needle has moved much with this debt ceiling deal. It's kind of what would have happened anyway during the normal budget process of the government. I'm just glad that they're voting on it and that hopefully we'll have more exciting things to talk about going forward. All right, let's move on to our next story. Neil, turns out that not every job is replaceable by AI and nor should they be. that's what the national eating disorders association found out when it tried to replace the scores of workers and volunteers who manned its help hotline with an ai bot named tessa this is a juicy story already neil and it gets juicier because after its workers decided to unionize in early may neda executives announced that by june 1st aka today it would be ending its help hotline after 20 years and using its new wellness chatbot, Tessa, as the main support system available on its platform going forward.

12:51Rollout did not exactly go to plan because turns out Tessa is not great at giving advice. It was recommending unhealthy eating habits, like cutting a thousand calories a day to some people who were coming to it for help. And this has created a ton of backlash, obviously, because it's probably just another instance of people thrusting too much responsibility and placing too much trust in an AI chatbot where it probably shouldn't. Yeah, I mean, this thing had been in development since 2022 and we should say that it is not ChatGPT related. Like this was before ChatGPT. It feels more of like a customer service bot, which sounds even worse when you're talking about like crisis counseling and the fact that people were calling in in a time of vulnerability and distress in their lives and you get a chatbot at the other end.

13:40It seems like a little bit of a mistake to just kind of apply the AI chap-op band-aid to a particularly sensitive profession that feels like you need actual human empathy. And we're realizing now from this episode that maybe robots yet cannot replace human empathy. I know. Just a big win for humans in general. But also, like, it's crazy that there's the union busting side of this, that they fired all their workers and said, you get, it is touching on all the hot button topics around AI. And, yeah, we're seeing that you can't just replace your entire workforce with a single AI bot. We have seen that in some industries.

14:20You know, IBM said it was, you know, freezing hiring and it was going to replace maybe a third of its future hires with automation. And there was an article the other day about hedge funds using ChatGPT to sort of comb through documents. So there may be particular use cases. Not AI help. Yeah, I feel like chat, you know, when you look on some of the industries that ChatGPT or AI could replace, you know, customer service is one of them. For sure. But this is nothing that this feels like the most akin to customer service because you're asking for help from another person. But this is not, it was not effective.

14:57Yeah, a little too sensitive. All right, before we jump into the next story, we're going to take a quick break. 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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16:06All right, Toby. New Zealand's national airline, Air New Zealand, is asking passengers to weigh not only their luggage, but also themselves when they board international flights. This is a program intended to determine the average weight of its planes before takeoff, which is something airlines need to know to fly a plane safely. Air New Zealand is complying with a requirement from the country's airline regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, to determine the weight of its passengers through this program. So just to calm your concerns when you're flying back home from New Zealand, first of all, this is completely voluntary.

16:38You do not have to weigh yourself when you board this plane. And when you step on the scale, your weight won't flash before everyone like it is with luggage when you go over 50 pounds and you have to pay extra. It'll be sent to a secure database where it'll be anonymized according to the airline. Air New Zealand is hoping to get at least 10 ,000 volunteers before this program is over this month. It is a crazy headline to hear when you first read it because you're like, wait a second, they're going to make me weigh myself. And then, yeah, throughout doing research for this, we found that this is not the first time that weight in airlines have kind of been in the news.

17:12An airline called Samoa Air in 2013 actually launched a program where they were charging people by their weight. This is not that. This is just getting data. But it makes sense for Samoa Air. I mean, I'm not defending that decision. But I'm saying Samoa Air is in the Pacific Islands where smaller planes are extra sensitive to balancing weight. And so, you know, an extra couple more pounds will cause it to burn a lot more fuel. So no weight matters in weight matters airlines. But obviously, again, another sensitive topic. And you don't want to be I already get secondhand like embarrassment when I'm weighing my bag.

17:53I'm like, oh, I hope it's not over 50 pounds. It's like, please, please be nice to me. So I can see why people, when they saw this headline, were like, whoa, wait a second. Yeah, but then it's sort of like, then you dive in a little bit and you're like, oh, this is super interesting. It actually could help out the industry in general to know, like, someone's got to do it kind of thing. Right, exactly. Experts were like, yeah, well, thank you, Air New Zealand, because now many airlines around the world are about to get some valuable information about their past. Let's get more efficient, better fuel economy.

18:21I'm all for it. All right, Neil, let's move on to our Thursday. segment called Neil's Numbers, where I run you through three stats that I read in the week's news. Favorite segment of the week. All right, here we go. Ready? First is, you know how as a kid, you went to a beach and tried to dig a hole to China? Oh, many a time. Well, China is pulling a reverse. It's drilling a ridiculously deep hole 10 ,000 meters or almost 33 ,000 feet into the Earth's cross. This hole will go through 10 layers of rock and reach the literal Cretaceous era when it hits rock that is 145 million years old. So why dig a deep hole?

19:00Great question. President Xi Jinping wants to explore deep earth to find mineral and energy resources and also detect tectonic disasters like earthquakes and volcanoes. Surprisingly, this won't be the deepest hole ever made by humans. In 1989, for some reason, Russia drilled a hole more than 40 ,000 feet deep and it only took 20 years. This is honestly gets me excited. I don't know if it is because of the kid in me, but there's something so intoxicating about just digging as deep as you can. So let's hope they find, I don't know, something good or maybe we don't want them to find something good.

19:34They said it was going to be hard. They said it was going to be like the construction difficulty of the drilling project. It was compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables. It doesn't sound easy. I know. Like five feet down, I stop and get bored. Yeah. Let's move on. Thanks to a new CDC report, we know what is by far the leading cause of restaurant food poisoning in the U.S., and it is sick workers making the food. Forty percent of all restaurant food poisoning outbreaks with a known cause between 2017 and 2019 are linked to food workers who showed up while sick or contagious. Experts said this is what happens when you don't have paid sick leave.

20:09Employees feel the need to come into work, even if they're not feeling well because they need the paycheck. The U.S. is the only wealthy country in the world without federal paid sick leave. And only 44 % of restaurant managers told the CDC in their report that they offered paid sick leave. Yeah. I mean, I remember when the Chipotle outbreak happens. I remember when these things happened. And, I mean, it makes sense. Yeah. You don't want people who have the sniffles handling your food. No, but you need to pay them to stay home. Yeah. Our final one pertains to this Miami Heat versus the Denver Nuggets NBA Finals tonight.

20:41I caught a lot of hate for saying the jazz. Hey, that just means we have listeners who are listening closely. So thank you everyone who caught Neil saying the jazz. Anyway, the game is on tonight and I'll get to the numbers. So everyone on the court is being paid very handsomely, including the Nuggets mascot. So according to a new report by the Sports Business Journal, the performer who plays the Nuggets mascot, Rocky, makes$625 ,000 per year. which is 10 times the pay of the average NBA mascot. Who is this performer and how do we learn salary negotiation tips from them? The Fox affiliate in Denver did some investigative reporting and they think that the Rocky is played by this family of performers.

21:24It's believed that this family is related to a guy named Ken Solomon who was Rocky in 1990 and may have passed the torch to, at the very least, his son. So in my mind, we've got the Soprano-style shakedown happening on the front range with the Solomon mascot mafia? I think he deserves every single penny because I've seen him do the trampoline dunks. Oh, so he's very, very athletic, very good. He comes down from the ceiling sometimes on cables. So I think he's underpaid. Who do you think should be the highest paid mascot in sports? Oh, man. What's the Phillies fanatic? Yeah, it's clearly the fanatic.

22:02That suit is so heavy. Yeah, I always think I'm like, thing that is carrying some weight he's also the cutest and he's got the dances and he's got his little atv yeah on it he should be paid i'm definitely million dollars i'm preaching to the choir because we got a lot of philly fans involved with this show all right neil thank you for those numbers as always i always just leave with a big smile on my face because i learned so much let's move on to our final story i am super pumped to finish the show with this story or should i say i find myself brimming with an elevated sense of enthusiasm as we approach the culmination of this performance.

22:36I said that with such pedantic rigor because that's because the Scripps National Spelling Bee Finals are today. So over the past two days, a field of 231 middle and high schoolers ranging from just nine years old up to 14 years old have been whittled down to a field of 11 finalists. This year's winners will go home with$50 ,000 in the cash prize, as well as the official championship trophy. Honestly, this is always such a fun time of year and especially for just kind of nerds i guess like us it's very fun i'm a i'm a geography but the guy personally but i do love watching the spelling bee uh it's been running since 1925 so i think this is the oldest national you know education promotion that the u.s has and just keeps trucking love the 25th annual sputnam county spelling bee musical everything about you know educational competitions we're all for akila and the bee great movie as well but in honor of the spelling bee i want to put you on the hot seat so i went through scripps national spelling bees study list and i snagged three words of varying difficulties they break it down into level one level two and level three so i took one from each one and i'm gonna i'm gonna give you the words and see how you do i'm gonna turn i can't use a scratch pattern no scratch but i'm gonna turn down my computer a man of honor okay your first word fuchsia fuchsia you can you can ask for the language of origin if i know i i don't care about the language of origin f u c h s i a oh my gosh absolutely nailed it that i gave that one to my roommate last night i'm not kidding it took him 23 tries to figure it out so well downhill from here well done okay level two connoisseur c o n Oh, no.

24:28N. E. I'm just going to say random letters now because I'm definitely not. Con. C-O-N-N-E-S-S-I-E-U-R. You had all the right letters, but not in the right order. It is C-O-N-N-O-I-S-S-E-U-R. Okay. I was just, I'm happy that I got the two N's and the two S's. Yeah. No. That's what I was. You were doing well. It's the con no. It's a C-O-N-N-O. That is a hard word to spell. All right. Level three is Whippoorwill. I don't even know what that means. It is a medium-sized bird within the Nightjar family, and the language of origin is itself. It is imitative of its call. So it's Whippoorwill. Yeah, exactly.

25:12Wait, say it again? Whippoorwill. All right. W. It's not W? No, it's W. Okay. Well, I don't know if there's going to be an H here. i we're gonna go no h uh w i p p whipper uh whipper i r w h i r l not quite again you got most of the letters w h i p p o o r w i l l so whip poor will there you go i you did really well I want to keep going. Great start. This is very fun. With Fuchsia and Connoisseur was close. And then Whippoorwill was, yeah, that's a level. Whippoorwill. Right there. Whippoorwill. Tune in tonight. I said W-H-I-R-L. Yeah, tune in tonight. I think it's on like a weird channel. Yeah.

26:04Probably stream it. I-O-N at 8 p.m. tonight. All right. That is our show. I am buzzing with energy after that spelling bee. If you have any other words you want us to spell or any other comments or questions about the episode, definitely write in to us or say hi at morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com huge shout out to our crew who makes our show happen, Emily Milliron is our editor and producer, Samantha Veles and Raymond Liu are the associate producers Yuchenna Waogu is our technical director Billy Menino is on audio hair and makeup went to go try out to become an NBA mascot unsurprisingly Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew Great show today Neil, let's run it back tomorrow

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